Code Name Blue Wren
The True Story of America’s Most Dangerous Female Spy—and the Sister She Betrayed
Jim Popkin
Hanover Square Press, Toronto, 2023, 352 pages
Book Review published on: November 10, 2023
“There were translator positions opening at the FBI and the NSA. I thought, ‘Oh, maybe I could be a translator. I think my Spanish is pretty good.’ And so, I applied to both of them.” To her delight, the FBI accepted … She was excited to share the surprise news with her big sister … Lucy called Ana from her mother's condo and was floored by Ana's reaction. “She just had a fit,” Lucy recalls. “I told her I had accepted a job with the FBI, and she got all upset. I couldn't understand why my sister would get upset because I took a job with the FBI” (96-97). … Lucy knew the rules and never thought about telling Ana that she was working on an exciting new Cuban case. If she had shared any investigative details, the Cubans likely would have rolled up the Wasp Network immediately. They would have temporarily shut down Ana, too, ensuring the future safety of their prize recruit (142).
For any readers who work for the government, the name Ana Belén Montes appears annually when taking required training on insider threats. Montes is the poster child for whom government employees must be ever vigilant. The above passage from the book Code Name Blue Wren: The True Story of America’s Most Dangerous Female Spy—and the Sister She Betrayed illustrates why this is so important. A younger sister, Lucy, tells her big sister what was expected to be received as happy news—a promising job as a translator for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and receives a surprising reaction. Little did Lucy know that her big sister was spying for the Cuban government. In fact, she was spying for the very government that Lucy would be directly involved in capturing their spies. While Lucy worked to capture spies, her big sister was one of Cuba’s most effective spies. In this gripping cloak and dagger account, Jim Popkin provides a detailed account of Montes’s recruitment by the Cubans, seventeen years of spying, and the capture and prosecution of America’s most dangerous female spy. The intensity of the story is only matched by the unlikely nature of the story. Montes seems like a very improbable spy on the surface, especially when looking at her family history and her siblings.
Montes grew up in a family not unfamiliar with public service. Her father was a medical service officer and a retired as a colonel. Her siblings both joined the government working for the FBI. Readers may wonder how Montes was able to deceive not only her colleagues at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) but also everyone in her family. Unbeknownst to her family, they were sitting across the table at Thanksgiving dinner with an active spy for Cuba, an enemy of the United States for whom they worked. The sense of betrayal when the truth came out must have been devastating for her family. It was also devastating for her coworkers at the DIA.
Montes had racked up several successes at the DIA as the DIA Cuban expert. She received several promotions and ultimately achieved the rank of GS-14. She earned several accolades and citations from her supervisors who had absolute confidence in her work. For example, in 1997, CIA Director George Tenet awarded her a certificate of distinction for her “strong sense of intelligence community responsibility.” In fact, she received over ten awards or special recognitions during her much-celebrated career. Throughout this career of special recognition, during the day she would collect intelligence and memorize it. At night, she would transmit what she had memorized in coded messages over a shortwave radio to her Cuban masters. She even had several clandestine trips to Cuba during her spy career that went undetected. She had several meetings in the DC area with her handlers until the mid-1990s when the FBI task force in Florida, for which her younger sister Lucy worked, began breaking up a Cuban spy ring. This made direct contact with handlers too dangerous. Therefore, for the remainder of Montes’s spy career, she had less and less direct contact with her handlers. All of this had interesting ramifications for the investigation that ultimately uncovered her.
Ironically, it was an American Cuban immigrant working at the National Security Agency who noticed irregularities in Montes’s on-the-surface perfect DIA career. She would invite herself to meetings that she had no “need to know” to justify her presence. In fact, she did it so often that it became something she was known for except nobody noticed that it was a problem. Most of it was excused because she was considered “the DIA Cuban Expert” so when she showed up to meetings one might think she should not attend, it tended to go unnoticed. At several junctures, this investigation could have been ended due to lack of evidence or lack of will. It ultimately was made more urgent by the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that put Montes’s case on the front burner ultimately resulting in her arrest on 21 September 2001.
Code Name Blue Wren is an excellent read for military and civilian readers alike. This book would serve as an excellent reading for classes on intelligence threats, insider threats, and operations security. Popkin has provided a fast-paced and gripping real life spy tale. Code Name Blue Wren is well researched as the author conducted over three hundred interviews with 125 people. Additionally, autobiographies, letters, photographs, and other pieces of evidence are foundational to this book. For those of us who end up reading about Ana Montes each year as part of our required training for the government, this book provides interesting depth and breadth to what is a complicated real life spy story. It is also a cautionary tale for those of us who work for our national security. This is why the required training is important. Popkin chose an important moment for this book to be published as Ana Montes was released on 6 January 2023, paroled early for good behavior, after just over two decades in prison. Her release provides us a poignant moment as Americans to reflect on the importance that we place on national security and how vital it is to protect it vigilantly. This is also a story of a family. “Ana’s decision in 1985 to work for a hospital nation continues to reverberate today, dividing and devastating a uniquely American family in ways she could have never imagined” (305).
Book Review written by: Richard A. McConnell, DM, Leavenworth, Kansas