By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

              WASHINGTON (AP) -- A U.S. intelligence analyst who revealed the
              identities of four undercover agents to Cuban officials pleaded guilty Tuesday to
              espionage. She could spend 25 years in federal prison.

              Ana Belen Montes, 45, was spying for Cuba from the time she started work
              at the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1985 until her arrest on Sept. 21,
              prosecutors say.

              By that time, she was a senior intelligence analyst and had used short-wave
              radio and coded pager messages to give Cuba U.S. secrets so sensitive they
              could not be fully described in court documents.

              ``Yes, those statements are true and accurate,'' Montes told U.S. District
              Court Judge Ricardo Urbina after the charges were read.

              When Urbina asked whether one reason she had agreed to plead guilty was
              ``the fact that you committed the crime,'' Montes replied, ``Yes.''

              Roscoe Howard Jr., U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said law
              enforcement officials did not know whether any of the information Montes
              transmitted to Cuba was shared with other countries. However, the Sept. 11
              attacks on New York and Washington heightened the need to ``get her off
              the streets,'' and influenced the timing of her arrest, he said.

              Howard added that, to the government's knowledge, Montes received only
              nominal payments for expenses. He would not speculate on her motivation.

              A U.S. official familiar with the case, speaking on condition of anonymity,
              said Montes was believed to have been recruited by Cuban intelligence when
              she worked in the Freedom of Information office at the Justice Department,
              between 1979 and 1985, and was asked to seek work at an agency that
              would provide more useful information to Cuba.

              The four undercover agents whose identities she revealed, Howard said, are
              safe.

              Under the plea agreement, Montes would accept a sentence of 25 years in
              prison with no possibility of parole, followed by five years of supervised
              release. In exchange, Howard said, the government would get her full
              cooperation in disclosing all information she may have about criminal activity
              regarding herself or others with whom she may worked. Urbina set a
              sentencing date for Sept. 24.

              According to court papers, Montes communicated with the Cuban
              Intelligence Agency through encrypted messages and received her
              instructions over short-wave radio. The instructions were issued in numerical
              code, which she translated into Spanish text with a computer program
              provided by Cuba.

              From public pay phones, she then used a prepaid calling card to send coded
              numeric messages to a pager owned by Cuban intelligence. Those messages,
              prosecutors said, typically were codes for ``I received message'' or
              ``danger.''

              The FBI secretly searched Montes' residence under a court order on May
              25 and uncovered information about several Defense Department issues,
              including a 1996 war games exercise conducted by the U.S. Atlantic
              Command, authorities said.

              One of the messages the agents found suggested that Montes disclosed the
              upcoming arrival of a U.S. military intelligence officer in Cuba.

              ``We were waiting here for him with open arms,'' Cuban intelligence replied.

              Another message from her Cuban contact said of the 1996 war games
              exercise: ``Practically everything that takes place there will be of intelligence
              value. Let's see if it deals with contingency plans and specific targets in
              Cuba.''

              The DIA, based at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, provides analyses
              of foreign countries' military capabilities and troop strengths for Pentagon
              planners.