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The ‘Queen of Cuba'
Jim
Popkin • Washington Post Magazine
Ana Montes was a highly decorated U.S. intelligence analyst. She was also a Cuban spy.
Like Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen before her, Ana Montes blindsided the intelligence community with brazen acts of treason. By day, she was a buttoned-down GS-14 in a Defense Intelligence Agency cubicle. By night, she was on the clock for Fidel Castro, listening to coded messages over shortwave radio, passing encrypted files to handlers in crowded restaurants and slipping undetected into Cuba wearing a wig and clutching a phony passport.
Montes spied for 17 years, patiently, methodically. She passed along so many secrets about her colleagues - and the advanced eavesdropping platforms that American spooks had covertly installed in Cuba - that intelligence experts consider her among the most harmful spies in recent memory. But Montes, now 56, did not deceive just her nation and her colleagues. She also betrayed her brother Tito, an FBI special agent; her former boyfriend Roger Corneretto, a Cuban-intelligence officer for the Pentagon; and her sister, Lucy, a 28-year veteran of the FBI who has won awards for helping to unmask Cuban spies.
Wikimedia Commons
Resort of Last Resort
Aubrey
Belford • The Global Mail
An Indonesian town that's both a stopping point to Australia by boat and a hotspot for Saudi vice.
Across the bowl-shaped valley, dozens of mosques begin booming the call to prayer, all merging together into an asynchronous whine. In hillside villas, groups of men from Saudi Arabia - some in traditional white thawb robes, some in baggy track pants - load up on the evening's stock of alcohol, which is banned in their home country. On motorbikes and in cars, pimps begin ferrying in the men's other vice - Arabic-speaking Indonesian women.
In other rented houses, hundreds of asylum seekers sit with little to do. Many have become near-nocturnal out of sheer boredom, and are just starting their day. Over the past decade, the town has become the unofficial haven for asylum seekers heading to Australia. For some, it is a brief stopover before they jump on a smuggler's boat. For others, it is a limbo that can last for years.
Flickr/ Danumurthi Mahendra
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