Ana Belen Montes

Ana Belen Montes is born on a US Army base in West Germany, the daughter of a US Army officer of Puerto Rican descent. She grows up to become one of the most damaging spies in US history.

Montes begins spying for Cuban intelligence around 1985, shortly before joining the Defense Intelligence Agency. For sixteen years she memorises secrets by day and receives her instructions by night, as shortwave number groups.

Montes is arrested days after the 11 September attacks. Investigators find the tools of the trade: a shortwave radio, a laptop and the software that turned Havana's number groups into orders. She pleads guilty and is sentenced to 25 years.

Ana Montes pleads guilty and is sentenced to twenty-five years. Prosecutors describe how she memorised classified material and received her orders from Havana as shortwave number groups, decoded with software on a laptop, the whole apparatus of a numbers station made concrete.

After some twenty years in prison Montes is released, an unrepentant symbol of how a Cold War method, one-way voice links and one-time pads, survived intact into the twenty-first century.