You can't always fool everyone, but there are those who almost succeed. Facing the world was Víctor Manuel Rocha, 73, a former U.S. ambassador who retired after a distinguished career in positions in Latin America, the White House and after retiring as an adviser to the U.S. Southern Command in Miami. US Armed Forces. Lately, after a lifetime of conservative leanings, he had become an ardent supporter of Donald Trump. Bare facade: Rocha led a double life. During his 40 years as a diplomat and advisor, according to the ministry, he worked…
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You can't always fool everyone, but there are those who almost succeed. Facing the world was Víctor Manuel Rocha, 73, a former U.S. ambassador who retired after a distinguished career in positions in Latin America, the White House and after retiring as an adviser to the U.S. Southern Command in Miami. US Armed Forces. Lately, after a lifetime of conservative leanings, he had become an ardent supporter of Donald Trump. Bare facade: Rocha led a double life. During his 40 years as a diplomat and adviser, according to the Justice Department, he served as an agent of the Cuban intelligence services, to which he may have passed a flood of sensitive information about U.S. activities and plans in Latin America. until his arrest a week ago.
The case could have serious implications for U.S. national security and diplomatic relations, given Rocha's long career and the important positions he held, many of them at key moments in their fortunes: from deputy director of the U.S. Interests Office in Cuba 1990s to prosecutor d'affaires in an Argentina in economic upheaval (1997-2000). He traveled through Mexico and Bill Clinton's White House National Security Council (1994-1995) in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis, eventually serving as ambassador (2000-2002) in a Bolivia where a Coca leader named Evo Morales stood out.
The revelations also reveal the ability of Cuban intelligence services to capture agents in relevant U.S. government positions. This case, Attorney General Merrick Garland acknowledged at the indictment, “represents one of the most extensive and longest-running infiltrations by a foreign agent within the U.S. government.”
The former diplomat will appear in a Miami court this Tuesday to answer 15 charges of being an agent of Cuba since 1981, including “access to information.” [clasificada] to use Cuba and distribute “this information without authorization.” He faces up to 60 years in prison after he admitted to working for the island's General Directorate of Intelligence (DGI) in conversations with an undercover FBI agent he knew as Miguel and who he believed was a Cuban spy contact have.
Rocha, born in Colombia in 1950, emigrated to New York with his widowed mother in the 1960s. His talent allowed him to win a scholarship to one of the best private schools in the United States and to work with children from the most privileged backgrounds. From there he attended renowned universities: Yale, Harvard, Georgetown. He became an American citizen in 1978 and began his diplomatic career in 1981. According to the indictment, he had already been arrested by the DGI at this point: it happened while he was in Chile during the attempted coup against Salvador Allende.
It is not clear from the charging documents how Rocha was captured or what motivated him to work with the DGI. But Miguel's statement, contained in the statement of objections, points to ideological reasons. He describes him as a staunch supporter of the regime of the “Commander” (Fidel Castro), who refers to the Cuban spies as his “comrades.”
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“The Cuban intelligence services have to be very good at what they do because they don't have a lot of resources and their main target is the United States. Unlike the Russians who are motivated by money, they find people who have deep compassion for what Cuba wants to do and therefore won't do it [traicionan] for money… I suspect that Rocha would have been outraged if they had offered to pay him,” he explains. Peter Lapp, retired FBI agent, in a telephone conversation. Lapp is the author of the book “Queen of Cuba” about Puerto Rican spy Ana Montes, a Pentagon analyst who worked for the DGI for 17 years and whose arrest the former agent helped in 2000.
There have been other cases: in 2007, two professors at Florida International University were arrested in Miami for spying against anti-Castro Cuban exile groups. In 2009, analyst Kendall Myers, an official with the U.S. State Department's Office of Intelligence and Research, was arrested along with his wife for passing classified information to Cuba.
The indictment states that in November 2022, the FBI received a complaint alleging that Rocha was working as an undercover agent for Cuba. Miguel contacted the former diplomat via WhatsApp: “I have a message for you from your friends in Havana.” The suspect replied: “I don’t understand, but you can call me.”
They both agreed to meet in front of a church in Miami's affluent Brickell neighborhood. To get there, Rocha used classic counterintelligence techniques, from taking a long detour to stationing nearby to investigate whether the meeting point was being monitored. They met in this way up to three times, with the former diplomat being proud of the cooperation with the DGI and reaffirming his willingness to continue. His fake right-wing leanings – he donated $750, almost 700 euros, to an anti-Castro representative in the US Congress, which the parliamentarian returned – were nothing more than part of his “facade”, he told his contact.
He boasted that he had worked to “strengthen the revolution,” a task of “tremendous” importance for Cuba and a great triumph for the island's interests and against “the enemy,” the United States. “She [Washington] They underestimated what we could do to them. “We did more than they thought,” he explained to his supposed contact. When asked if he continued to support the DGI, he responded indignantly a little later: “It's like he's questioning my masculinity… Like he wants me to pull down my pants and show him that I still have balls have.”
On December 1, agents from the State Department Security Service met with him. Rocha initially denied meeting anyone matching Miguel's description. When confronted with a photo of both of them, he assured that he had only seen him once and that Miguel had approached him. He was arrested on the same day.
Part of the job for prosecutors and the FBI now is to determine the extent of the “greater than expected” damage that Rocha may have left behind, as he described it. What data might someone who had access to top secret information have shared with their contacts? Or the extent to which his actions and reports influenced the United States to make decisions that were contrary to its national interests.
No clues
Miguel's sworn testimony provides little evidence. In it, however, Rocha remembers that he was in Havana when Cuba shot down two small planes belonging to the Cuban exile organization Brothers to the Rescue near the island in 1996, killing four people.
In Bolivia, the then ambassador came to the fore because of his public interference in the 2002 election campaign. Rocha warned that if the electorate “voted for those who want Bolivia to become a cocaine exporter again, this result will jeopardize the future.” You said.” This statement outraged the population, brought Evo Morales into second place and withdrew votes from the previously favorite, the moderate Manfred Reyes Villa. In the end, the neoliberal Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada triumphed. Therefore, the ambassador's words were interpreted as a wrong step; The current accusation raises the question of whether this was not the case conscious initiative in favor of the Coca leader. Afterwards, Morales ironically referred to Rocha as his “campaign manager” several times.
“As an ambassador and a member of the National Security Council, he had the ability to influence foreign policy in the high positions he held. Not only did he have the opportunity to pass secret information to Cuba, he was also able to influence foreign policy, and that is very damaging,” says Lapp. “Montes was very damaging because she had access to a lot of confidential defense information. But this case is at least as serious as that because of its potential to influence politics.”
The fact that Rocha was able to function as a Cuban agent for so long “is a failure of counterintelligence, and there is a lot of responsibility for that,” says the former FBI agent. But “it is better to have identified Rocha at age 73,” while he is still alive and agents have a chance to question him and find out exactly what he did and who he was in contact with.
Although he is accused of being an agent on behalf of Cuba, Rocha is not specifically accused of espionage. Experts at least currently attribute this to a possible lack of evidence. “But the statement of objections paints a very damning picture,” explains Lapp. “The government does not believe that what happened to Cuba was cooking recipes.”
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