Not on private property - no need to leave the sidewalk. Please be aware that there is a school to the south of this location.
Inside an apartment on the second floor of the building in front of you (3039 Macomb St. NW), Ana Belen Montes would tune into a shortwave radio, copying down numbers read out by a woman speaking Spanish. These numbers were coded messages with instructions from Cuban intelligence operatives. Montes was a high-ranking intelligence analyst within the Americas section at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the U.S. government agency in charge of military intelligence. Her nickname there: “The Queen of Cuba.” For a decade and a half, Montes memorized information found in highly sensitive documents, typed it up on a laptop at home, and saved it onto diskettes that she would pass to her Cuban handlers. She communicated with them by placing phone calls from pay phones in the area to pagers controlled by Cuban officials at their United Nations mission in New York. Some of the information she gave Cuba came from a top secret Special Access Program - some of America’s most closely-guarded secrets.
The apartment in front of you was covertly searched by the FBI on May 25, 2001. FBI agents found a lengthy file containing instructions from the Cubans that she had failed to erase from her laptop’s hard drive, along with other evidence. Montes had been under suspicion for years from colleagues and DIA counterintelligence officers. She was arrested at her office on September 21, 2001 - ten days after the 9/11 attacks. She had been assigned to a DIA team that would have worked closely with U.S. war plans in Afghanistan - information that could have gotten American troops killed if passed on by the Cubans. She appears to have been motivated by sympathy for the Cuban government. Montes, now 64 (as of 2021), is held at Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, inmate number 25037-016.
To learn more about the Montes case, feel free to look through the following links. This cache also owes much to Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton’s excellent book Spy Sites of Washington, DC.
https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/ana-montes-cuba-spy
https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/06/us/declassified-ana-montes-american-spy-profile/index.html
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2016/images/06/22/dia-37.pdf
http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/espionage/montes-chronicle.htm
FTF: 1: RDip; 2: bejs; 3: Trevelyan77