WASHINGTON ¨C Ana Montes has been locked up for a decade with some of the most frightening women in America. Once a highly decorated U.S. intelligence analyst with a two-bedroom co-op in Washington, Montes today lives in a two-bunk cell in the highest-security women¡¯s prison in the nation.
Her neighbors have included a former homemaker who strangled a pregnant woman to get her baby, a longtime nurse who killed four patients with massive injections of adrenaline, and Lynette ¡°Squeaky¡± Fromme, the Charles Manson groupie who tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford.
But hard time in the Lizzie Borden ward of a Texas prison hasn¡¯t softened the former Defense Department wunderkind. Years after she was caught spying for Cuba, Montes remains defiant. ¡°Prison is one of the last places I would have ever chosen to be in, but some things in life are worth going to prison for,¡± Montes writes in a 14-page handwritten letter to a relative. ¡°Or worth doing and then killing yourself before you have to spend too much time in prison.¡±
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