The Story of America’s Most Dangerous Female Spy
BOOK REVIEW: Code Name Blue Wren: The True Story of America’s Most Dangerous Female Spy – and the Sister She Betrayed
By Jim Popkin / Hanover Square Press
Reviewed by Bill Harlow, The Cipher Brief’s Senior Book Editor and co-host of the Cover Stories Podcast
The Reviewer — Bill Harlow served as chief spokesman for the CIA from 1997 to 2004 and was Assistant White House Press Secretary for National Security from 1988 to 1992. A retired Navy captain, Harlow is the co-author of four New York Times bestsellers on intelligence and is the author of Circle William: A Novel.
REVIEW — Ana Belén Montes has been called the most important spy you’ve never heard of. Those immersed in American betrayals, like Michelle Van Cleave, who ran counterintelligence in the Bush ’43 administration, of course have heard of her. In Congressional testimony, Van Cleave called Montes “one of the most damaging spies in US history.”
The main reason that Montes has largely flown under the public radar is because she was arrested on September 21, 2001, just ten days after 9/11, when the world was quite understandably, focused on other things.
In this remarkable and exquisitely timed new book, author Jim Popkin helps bring into sharp focus, the former senior Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who the FBI gave the code name “Blue Wren.” I mention timing, because although Popkin has been working on this story in various forms for more than 15 years, Montes is scheduled to be released from the Federal Medical Center, Carswell Texas on January 8, 2023, after spending more than 21 years behind bars.
Setting aside Montes’ monumental disloyalty to her country – the picture that emerges of her in this exceptionally well-documented book, is of someone you would not want to have as a co-worker, friend or family member.
Long after she was arrested, a CIA profile described her as “Egocentric, manipulative, aggressive, dominant, arrogant, lacking in empathy, hard-headed, skeptical, competitive, cynical and dishonest.” (The Agency needs to open up and tell us what they really think about her.)
It’s easy to identify negative traits of a traitor after they get caught but one of the things that set Montes apart, is that although that while she shared the “narcissistic and anti-social personality traits” often found in spies – her motivation for betrayal was largely not one of the typical “MICE” (Money, Ideology, Coercion, or Ego) that is often cited as an impetus to spy.
So, what set Montes off on a path to prison? Popkin describes the unhappy upbringing that she and her siblings endured at the hands of her father, Alberto Montes. Amazingly enough, a trained Freudian psychiatrist, and former US Army colonel, allegedly inflicted beatings and other harsh treatment on his children and wife. Abuse may be an explanation for some behaviors, but it is not an excuse for how Montes’ choices. Montes’ sister, Lucy, who figures prominently in the book (and is referred to in the subtitle,) endured the same harsh treatment from their dad but overcame it to loyally serve a full career with the FBI. Montes’ younger brother (and sister-in-law) also became FBI agents. Ana, on the other hand, appeared motivated by a harsh hand, to retaliate against authoritarian figures – including and especially – Uncle Sam.
As the author details, signs of Montes’ lack of affinity to U.S. government policies were clear from her days in college and graduate school which make it surprising that American officials who recruited her and later gave her security clearances and promotions appear to have been blind to her disposition. Not so of Cuban intelligence operatives, who used another American student and turncoat, Marta Velázquez, to pitch Montes about going to work for the Castro government while she was still finishing graduate studies at Johns Hopkin’s School of Advance International Studies in Washington.
Despite her personality quirks (or in some cases perhaps because of them) Montes’ U.S. government career blossomed. Perversely, she became the top Cuban analyst for DIA and for almost 17 years, she carefully fed sensitive information to her Cuban masters. The book describes the mechanisms she used to communicate with her handlers to relay highly classified information.
Even with her cautious tradecraft, some of her DIA colleagues picked up signs of security concerns about Montes (who they had dubbed “the Queen of Cuba”) long before her arrest. And that leads to an additional intriguing aspect of the book – the bureaucratic infighting among officials at DIA, the FBI, and NSA, that made uncovering Montes’ perfidy harder than it should have been.
The FBI does not come away looking good in this story. For example, slow rolling (at best) entreaties to get them to pursue a possible mole in the DIA, Popkin reveals that at one point, the FBI elected to provide a classified briefing to a Bureau liaison to the State Department about a possible “UNSUB” (Unidentified Subject) working for Cuba inside senior levels of the US government. The recipient of that briefing was Robert Hanssen – who later turned out to himself, be working for the Russians.
While Montes is clearly the villain of her own story, one person stands out as the hero – Elena Valdez, an NSA official, who first helped uncover the fact that someone in the US government was spying for Cuba. Valdez brought her concerns to the FBI and when the Bureau was slow to react, Valdez risked her own career by sharing the information with the DIA, which eventually, helped spark a resolution.
While there have been other books about Montes in the past, Code Name Blue Wren is enriched by the fact that Popkin had access not only to government after action reports and court documents but also to a wealth of material from various members of the Montes family (including unpublished autobiographies of her parents), letters and interviews with a variety of former Montes colleagues and dating partners, and even letters Ana sent from jail to her then 17-year-old nephew.
It all paints a picture of a woman who does not appear to have much (if any) remorse for her actions which led to her residing in what some call the world’s worst sorority house, the federal prison in Texas.
Among her one-time fellow inmates were a who’s who of bad girls. For instance, former Manson family member Lynette Squeaky Fromme was jailed for her attempt to kill President Gerald Ford. And there was a female Al Qa’ida member accused of plotting to kill US servicemen, a serial killer veteran’s hospital nurse, the wife of drug kingpin “El Chapo,” and someone Popkin calls Montes’ only friend in prison, Lisa Montgomery, who strangled a pregnant woman, cut the fetus from her womb and attempted the pass the child off as her own. Montgomery was executed on January 13, 2021 – “the first federal execution of a woman in nearly seventy years.”
Precisely how damaging Montes’ espionage was, is hard to gauge but Popkin quotes Van Cleave as saying that information she passed may have led to the death of an American Green Beret who was killed in El Salvador.
There is no doubt that Montes provided Cuba with the true names of several undercover CIA officers who were operating in that country and that she compromised highly sensitive intelligence collection capabilities that were likely exposed not just to the Cubans but thereafter, to the Russians and other US foes as well.
Throughout the book, there are many twists and turns. For example, Marta Velázquez, the grad school classmate who helped recruit Montes, was herself indicted by the US government, which tracked her down living openly in Sweden – a country which does not extradite accused spies to the United States (maybe they will start to do so when they join NATO?) Unsurprisingly, Velázquez was not among those interviewed for the book. Popkin had slightly better luck with Roberto Álvarez Gil, an older, wealthy fellow SAIS student who Montes fell in love with. Popkin got some details out of Álvarez a few years ago, about his old flame but Roberto clammed up more recently – understandable since he is now the Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Dominican Republic.
As I was reading Code Name Blue Wren, the thought kept recurring that this story had everything that Hollywood often looks for in a movie: espionage, family drama, bureaucratic infighting and bungling. There are even hints of sex, like when Cuban intelligence provided a “hunk-for-hire” to escort Montes on a clandestine trip around the island. All the book lacked was a couple of car chases and a gun battle or two. It could have had mini-series written all over it.
At the end, I got to my favorite part of books like this one – the “Author’s Note” section. In these final thoughts, expressing thanks and offering closing comments, authors often give away insights into their sources and methods. There it was – Popkin expresses his appreciation to Lucy Montes, who he first interviewed in 2007, and is obviously someone who has come to trust him – sharing so much family communication. Popkin thanks Lucy for her many interviews and for indulging his “Sisyphean quest to develop this story into a dramatic television series…” Maybe if he just added a couple car chases, he could make the sale.
Code Name Blue Wren earns a prestigious four out of four trench coats.
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