CODE NAME
BLUE WREN

The True Story of America’s Most Dangerous Female Spy - and the Sister She Betrayed

By Jim Popkin

The paperback version of Code Name Blue Wren is out now. Shortly after the hardcover release, Montes was freed from prison. A new afterword looks at her move to Puerto Rico, where many locals consider her a martyr.

The incredible true story of Ana Montes, the most damaging female spy in US history, drawing upon never-before-seen material. Code Name Blue Wren is a thrilling detective tale, an insider’s look at the clandestine world of espionage, and an intimate exploration of the dark side of betrayal.

Code Name Blue Wren was released on January 3, 2023 – days before Montes was freed from prison on January 6, 2023 after more than two decades behind bars.

Photo Credit: Montes Family
Photo Credit: FBI
Photo Credit: DIA

Code Name
Blue Wren

Just days after the 9/11 attacks, a senior Pentagon analyst eased her red Toyota Echo into traffic and headed to work. She never saw the undercover cars tracking her every turn. As she settled into her cubicle on the sixth floor of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in Washington, FBI agents and twitchy DIA officers were hiding in nearby offices. For this was the day that Ana Montes - the US Intelligence Community superstar who had just won a prestigious fellowship at the CIA - was to be arrested and publicly exposed as a secret agent for Cuba.

Like spies Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen before her, Ana blindsided her colleagues with brazen acts of treason. For nearly 17 years, she succeeded in two high-stress jobs. By day, she was one of the government’s top Cuba experts, a buttoned-down GS-14 with shockingly easy access to classified documents. By night, she was on the clock for Fidel Castro, listening to coded messages over shortwave radio, passing US secrets to handlers in local restaurants, and slipping into Havana wearing a wig.

Ana didn’t just deceive her country. Her betrayal was intensely personal. Her mercurial father was a former US Army colonel. Her brother and sister-in-law were FBI special agents. And her only sister, Lucy, also worked her entire career for the Bureau. The highlight of Lucy’s distinguished 31 years as a Miami-based language specialist: helping the FBI flush Cuban spies out of the United States. But little did Lucy know that the greatest Cuban spy of all was sitting right next to them at Thanksgivings, baptisms, and weddings.

Investigative journalist Jim Popkin weaves the tale of two sisters who chose two very different paths, plus the unsung heroes who had to fight to bring Ana to justice. With exclusive access to a “secret” CIA behavioral profile of Ana, family memoirs, and Ana’s incriminating letters from prison, Popkin reveals the making of a traitor - a woman labeled “one of the most damaging spies in US history” by America’s top counterintelligence official and the subject of a massive FBI investigation code-named “Blue Wren.”

About the Author

Jim Popkin is an investigative journalist whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, WIRED, Newsweek, Slate, The Guardian, Washingtonian, and on National Public Radio. He started and ran the NBC News Investigative Unit, where he was a Senior Producer as well as an on-air correspondent. Popkin reported for NBC News for nearly 14 years, and his stories have appeared on NBC’s TODAY Show, the NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, and CNBC. Popkin has won four national Emmy Awards for outstanding journalism, two Edward R. Murrow Awards, the George Polk Award, and was a finalist for the National Magazine Award. The American Journalism Review profiled him as one of Washington’s “most enterprising journalists.” He received a BA from Northwestern University and a Master’s in Law from Yale Law School, and lives in Washington, DC.

What Readers are Saying

“I was blown away by the accuracy and efficiency in which Jim Popkin delivers the most well-crafted story…I highly recommend this book for anyone. It is a fantastic read that will keep you turning the pages until the very end!”
eMissourian

“An entertaining story of cunning espionage.”
Kirkus Reviews

“Code Name Blue Wren might be the most mesmerizing spy story I’ve ever read. It shows how a brilliant manipulator secretly working for the Cubans finagled her way deep into the US military - and the anguish of the friends and family she so easily conned. Jim Popkin captures the brutal realities of modern espionage. I couldn’t stop reading this.”
Mark Leibovich
Author of This Town and Thank You for Your Servitude

“This spy tale reads like a new season of Homeland – except this Ice Queen’s traitorous double-life was entirely real. Jim Popkin takes us deep into a long-ignored story of an intel officer who went rogue, spilling US secrets to Cuba, endangering US operatives, and tricking presidents and her own sister at the FBI in the process.”
Carol Leonnig
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the Washington Post and author of Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service

“Jim Popkin uncovers riveting details about one of the most damaging spy cases in US history, revealing new insights into the highly sensitive secrets that Ana Montes gave to her Cuban handlers. Through remarkably extensive interviews with her relatives and coworkers, he exposes not only what she did but why. This is the definitive history of how one of America’s most highly regarded intelligence analysts betrayed her country, and how she almost got away with it.”
Pete Williams
Former NBC News Justice Correspondent

“For espionage devotees, Jim Popkin’s Code Name Blue Wren is a critical read. In great detail, Popkin explores the case of Ana Montes, who became a mole in the Defense Intelligence Agency for Cuban intelligence. A mole who was almost never caught thanks to years of incompetence by the FBI’s counterspies. But thanks to the dogged persistence of a dedicated NSA analyst, who bypassed the FBI at great risk to her career, Montes was arrested shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Left in her wake was the likely death of an American Green Beret killed in action in El Salvador and the pro-American troops fighting alongside him.”
James Bamford
Best-selling author of The Puzzle Palace and Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence

“Engrossing…a must read for espionage fans.”
Publishers Weekly

Washington Post Magazine Cover featuring Cuban Spy Ana Montes

The Story That Started It All

Author Jim Popkin has been investigating the Ana Montes spy scandal for more than a decade. In April 2013, he wrote a cover story for the Washington Post Magazine, “A Most Dangerous Spy,” that provided fresh details of Ana’s treachery and for the first time revealed the impact of Ana’s duplicitous life on her family. The article was selected as a “Page-Turner” by the New Yorker. Code Name Blue Wren expands greatly on the Montes case, uncovering the secrets behind one of the most fascinating - and least known - spies in American history.

An FBI squad leader sat Lucy down…Your sister, Ana, is a Cuban spy. Lucy didn’t scream, didn’t storm out in disbelief. Instead, she found the news strangely reassuring. “I believed it right away,” she recalled in a recent interview. “It explained a lot of things.”

“I hadn’t thought about actually doing anything until I was propositioned,” [Ana] Montes would later admit to investigators. The Cubans, she revealed, “tried to appeal to my conviction that what I was doing was right.”

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.