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."