An ex-American defence intelligence analyst who was a double agent during the Cold War era and spied on Cuba has been released from prison.

According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons website, Ana Montes, 65 years old was released from prison after serving twenty-years of a quarter century sentence.

She was an analyst and admitted to revealing the identities four American undercover agents to Cuban authorities.

According to court records, she also provided documents that showed details about US surveillance of Cuban arms.

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Now 65 years old, he spent nearly two decades spying on Cuba.

In September 2001, she was taken into custody and pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit spying a year later.

Chris Simmons, a former DIA investigator who assisted in investigating Montes, said that she was prolifically and effectively able to give the Cubans damaging information. They are accused of selling this information on to other adversaries.

According to NBC, Simmons said that while a lot of spy organizations have lost information in the past, she tried repeatedly to get Americans killed during combat.

“A very dangerous woman, a very deadly woman.”

Officials said that Montes was likely to have been recruited from Cuban intelligence while she was working in the Freedom of Information Office at the Justice Department (1979-1985) and was then asked to apply for work at an agency that could provide more useful information to Cuba.

Secret coded messages

In 1985, she moved to the Defense Intelligence Agency and became a top analyst for the Cuban military. She was even rewarded for her efforts.

Prosecutors claimed that Montes was sent coded messages by Havana during this period. These messages were transmitted over short-wave radio and included strings of numbers. She would then type the string onto a laptop with decryption to convert it to text.

Montes claimed that she had followed her conscience at her sentencing and that the US’s policy towards Cuba was cruel.

unfair. “I felt morally obliged to assist the island defend itself against our attempts to impose our values, and our political.

system on it,” she stated.

The US has relaxed some sanctions against Cuba under President Joe Biden but kept its Cold War-era embargo. It also increased restrictions on illegal migrants arriving at record levels in the face of rising inflation and shortages of medicine.