Jim Popkin - Code Name Blue Wren: The True Story of Americas Most Dangerous Female Spy—and the Sister She Betrayed

Code Name Blue Wren might be the most mesmerizing spy story Ive ever read. It shows how a brilliant manipulator secretly working for the Cubans finagled her way deep into the US militaryand the anguish of the friends and family she so easily conned. Jim Popkin captures the brutal realities of modern espionage. I couldnt stop reading this.

Mark Leibovich, author of This Town and Thank You for Your Servitude

For espionage devotees, Jim Popkins Code Name Blue Wren is a critical read. In great detail, Popkin explores the case of Ana Montes, who became a mole in the Defense Intelligence Agency for Cuban intelligence. A mole who was almost never caught thanks to years of incompetence by the FBIs counterspies. But thanks to the dogged persistence of a dedicated NSA analyst, who bypassed the FBI at great risk to her career, Montes was arrested shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Left in her wake was the likely death of an American Green Beret killed in action in El Salvador and the pro-American troops fighting alongside him.

James Bamford, bestselling author of The Puzzle Palace and Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of Americas Counterintelligence

Jim Popkin uncovers riveting details about one of the most damaging spy cases in US history, revealing new insights into the highly sensitive secrets that Ana Montes gave to her Cuban handlers. Through remarkably extensive interviews with her relatives and coworkers, he exposes not only what she did but why. This is the definitive history of how one of Americas most highly regarded intelligence analysts betrayed her country, and how she almost got away with it.

Pete Williams, former NBC News justice correspondent

This spy tale reads like a new season of Homeland except this Ice Queens traitorous double life was entirely real. Jim Popkin takes us deep into a long-ignored story of an intel officer who went rogue, spilling US secrets to Cuba, endangering US operatives, and tricking presidents and her own sister at the FBI in the process.

Carol Leonnig, Pulitzer Prizewinning reporter at the Washington Post and author of Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service

JIM POPKIN is a writer and investigative journalist whose work has appeared in the Washington Post Magazine, WIRED, Newsweek, Slate, The Guardian, and on National Public Radio. He was a senior investigative producer at NBC News as well as an on-air correspondent, and his stories have appeared on NBCs Today, NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, and CNBC. Popkin has won four national Emmy Awards for outstanding journalism, two Edward R. Murrow Awards, the George Polk Award, and was a finalist for the National Magazine Award. The American Journalism Review profiled him as one of Washingtons most enterprising journalists. He received a BA from Northwestern University and a masters of studies in law from Yale Law School, and he currently resides in Washington, DC.

Twitter: @JimPopkin

Code Name Blue Wren

The True Story of Americas Most Dangerous Female Spyand the Sister She Betrayed

Jim Popkin

To Zach, Phoebe, and Ben

Contents

On a foggy Friday morning in Washington, DC, Ana Montes began her morning routine with precision. She washed, neatly made her bed, and slipped on a sensible sleeveless top in cornflower blue. The single forty-four-year-old government employee had carefully saved to buy her two-bedroom co-op apartment in DCs well-to-do Cleveland Park neighborhood, thanks in part to a last-minute cash gift from her father, and her tidy home was decorated with mementos from her extensive travels abroad. The bookshelves were crammed with hundreds of booksgrad-school classics on Che Guevara and Karl Marx, paperback travel guides on the Caribbean, and nonfiction titles including Spy Versus Spy: Stalking Soviet Spies in America and Your Memory: How It Works and How to Improve It. Ana took one last look in the mirror at her no-fuss hair, short with bangs and a part, and locked the door behind her.

As she eased her red Toyota Echo into traffic, Ana had no idea it would be her last day of freedom for more than two decades. And no clue that she was being followed. On the half-hour drive to the headquarters of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), where she worked as a top analyst for the intelligence arm of the US Department of Defense, unmarked cars tracked her every turn. Drivers operating in undercover teams from an FBI surveillance unit were keeping a close eye on Ana this momentous day, but always from a respectable distance.

DIA headquarters at Bolling Air Force Base was alive with activity. Privately, Ana had always called her employer the war machine, and the moniker never fit more aptly. In the ten days since Bin Ladens terrorists had taken down the World Trade Center and dive-bombed the Pentagon with commercial planes, the entire US military was girding for battle. The DIA was in overdrive, getting set to help launch Operation Enduring Freedom to destroy Al Qaeda training camps and hammer the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. For DIAs war planners, the task couldnt be more personal. Saudi-born terrorist Hani Hanjour had deliberately piloted American Airlines Flight 77 into the west wall of the Pentagon on September 11, slamming into offices occupied by DIA staffers going about their morning routines. The resulting explosion killed seven DIA employees, all of whom worked for the agencys Office of the Comptroller. They were husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, all working as military accountants and budget managers. The 9/11 attacks marked the first time that DIA employees were killed in the line of duty in the United States, and was the largest single loss of life in the history of the DIA.

Amid the bustle that Friday morning, September 21, 2001, Ana eased through security and past the armed military officers in the lobby. She settled into her sixth-floor cubicle, #C6-146A. But she wouldnt be there long. A veritable squadron of FBI agents and twitchy DIA officers was hiding in nearby offices. They had even prepositioned a nurse, with an oxygen tank and CPR equipment, as a precaution. For this was the day that Ana Montesthe Pentagons superstar analyst who had just won a prestigious fellowship at the CIAwas to be arrested and publicly exposed as a secret agent for Cuba.

The FBI had worried for years that the Cubans had placed a mole deep inside the upper echelons of the US Intelligence Community. But the special agent leading the case didnt have a name or even a government agency where the spy worked. The Bureau had, at first, clumsily hunted for an Unknown Subject, or UNSUB. Now, after years of digging on a case that the FBI had code-named Blue Wren, the evidence was irrefutable that the Blue Wren UNSUB was, in fact, Ana Montes. In court-authorized break-ins of her apartment, the FBI had found secret communications with the Cubans on Anas laptop, making it clear that Montes had revealed the true names of at least four covert US intelligence officers who had been operating in the shadows in Cuba. The Cubans had thanked Ana, noting ominously of one American spy she had outed, We were waiting here for him with open arms.

Ana Montes briefed generals and a president, won national intelligence awards, and helped craft US government policy on Cuba. An acerbic personality known somewhat derisively in the halls of Washington as the Queen of Cuba for her mastery of Cuban military and political affairs, she led a dangerous double life. Montes leaked information that likely led to the death of an American Green Beret killed in action in El Salvador and the pro-American troops fighting alongside him. She freely shared the identities of hundreds of Americans working on Cuban intelligence matters around the globe. She revealed the existence of a stealth satellite so costly and highly classified that US government officials still wont utter its name more than two decades later. Montess betrayal was considered so grave that Defense Department hard-liners wanted her to pay with her life.