America accuses Cuba expert of spying for Castro

America's most senior intelligence expert on Cuba appeared in court yesterday charged with spying against the US on behalf of the very country about which she was meant to be providing information. If found guilty, she could be sentenced to death.

Ana Belen Montes, 44, an analyst with the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), is said to have revealed the identity of undercover agents and the details of military exercises. She has pleaded not guilty.

The case of Ms Montes is just the latest of several spy scandals that have rocked Washington in recent months. The intelligence community is still reeling from the arrest and subsequent conviction of Robert Hanssen. Hanssen – at the time of his arrest a senior officer with the FBI – pleaded guilty in July to charges of spying for Moscow.

Yesterday an FBI spokesman said Ms Montes was facing charges of espionage and conspiracy. A court affidavit says she passed details "about a particular special-access programme related to the national defence of the US". An intelligence source said that probably referred to a top secret intelligence collection system using either satellites or other technical means, or agents.

The affidavit also says she passed on the identity of a US intelligence officer "who was present, in an undercover capacity, in Cuba". Ms Montes was arrested two weeks ago at her office at Bolling air force base in Washington. The FBI is said to have been tailing her for several months.

"This is a clandestine agent for the Cuban intelligence service," said an assistant US attorney, Ronald Walutes. "This has been going on for quite some time."

The affidavit said that agents had been following her since May, watching her as she made brief telephone calls outside the National Zoo, petrol stations and other locations in Washington and Maryland – allegedly sending encrypted messages to pagers. It made no mention of any meetings with suspected accomplices.

The authorities have refused to say what led them to focus on Ms Montes. They said she communicated with her Cuban handlers using shortwave radios, computer disks and pagers – methods employed by a Cuban spy ring based in Florida, the Wasp Network, which attempted to infiltrate Cuban exile organisations and US military installations.

Ms Montes has consulted one of Washington's top criminal defence lawyers, Plato Cacheris, who with his co-counsel Preston Burton represented Hanssen and the CIA officer Aldrich Ames, who was sentenced to life in jail in 1994, also for spying for Moscow. They also represented Monica Lewinsky.

Established 40 years ago, the DIA produces military intelligence about foreign countries to support US planning and operations. One of the DIA's first successes was its role in the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

* Cuban exiles, invoking Belgium's far-reaching war crimes law, filed a lawsuit against President Fidel Castro yesterday for crimes against humanity. The complaint, which covers alleged false imprisonment, murder and torture, was handed to an investigating judge at the Brussels criminal court, who will decide if the case is admissible.