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The Justice Department announced on Thursday that they’ve unsealed a 2004 indictment against a spy for Cuba. The woman was a Puerto Rican, Marta Rita Velazquez, who came to the states to study at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington D.C., and graduated from Georgetown Law. Velazquez recruited Ana Belen Montes to the Cuban intelligence service at the time, and Montes went on to spy for Cuba for the United States. Ana Belen Montes worked as a distinguished career as a DIA and a top Cuban analyst, she won awards, briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff and softened U.S. policy towards Cuba, the entire time giving classified information to Cuba. She was arrested and is in prison, and her debriefer called her “one of the most damaging spies in U.S. history.” She received 25 years for spying.
Velazquez, meanwhile, worked for the Transportation Department for 13 years as a legal officer and with the U.S. Agency for International Development. She too has spied, has received coded instructions from Havana on shortwave radio, and learned to cheat government-administered polygraph tests. The main reason we can’t extradite her is because she lives in Sweden, a country that does not extradite citizens accused of espionage. She had resigned from USAID in 2002 and stayed clear of the U.S. since about the time Montes went down.
