Today’s greatest spy of Cuba comes from the country with one of the biggest Intelligence Community (IC), the United States of America (USA). She became one of America’s espionage stories that no one ever heard of. Before entering the IC, she was a Cuban recruit and had the potential to do even greater harm. Failure from the insider threat has led to many spies leaking sensitive US information, one being Ana Montes.
Montes’ Education and Recruitment
Ana Montes comes from a family that has always worked for the US. She was an Army brat of a psychologist. Growing up she received a foreign affairs degree from the University of Virginia initially with an emphasis in Latin America. She started her first real job in Washington, D.C. for the Department of Justice (DOJ) as a paralegal. She specialized in the Freedom of Information and Privacy Act (FOIA). While working in this field the Cuban government contacted her to become a spy when she was originally studying for her degrees (Popkin, 2013). With access to that information, she continued to work hard and eventually worked her way to a TOP SECRET with SENSITIVE COMPARTMENTED INFORMATION clearance (TS//SCI) which she then allowed her to move into another agency. She originally applied to many agencies. The first agency to accept her was the Defense Intelligence Agency …show more content…
This would not have to be an active information gathering effort. She openly communicated via email which would have allowed access to her computer remotely. However, CNO did physically help by manually copying her network at home during the investigation. Following the Cuban information, through proper intelligence gathering techniques, agents would have found that the Cuban government was spying in the US. Finding such information would have possibly led to a sooner investigation and possible narrowing down of potential