MIAMI (AP) — A former career American diplomat has been accused of serving for decades as a secret agent for communist Cuba in what prosecutors portrayed as one of the brazen and longest-running betrayals in the history of the U.S. foreign service.
Manuel Rocha wept as he sat handcuffed in a federal court in Miami, accused of engaging in “clandestine activities” on behalf of Cuba, including through meetings with, since at least 1981 – the year he joined the U.S. Foreign Service Cuban intelligence officials and providing false information to U.S. government officials about his contacts.
The complaint, unsealed Monday, provides few details about how Rocha may have supported Cuba. But it offers a vivid case study of what American officials say are long-standing efforts by Cuba and its notoriously sophisticated intelligence community to target U.S. government officials who can be replaced.
“This action exposes one of the broadest and longest-running infiltrations of the U.S. government by a foreign agent,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “Abusing that trust by falsely pledging loyalty to the United States while serving a foreign power is a crime that will be punished with the utmost severity by the Department of Justice.”
Rocha, 73, whose two-decade career as a U.S. diplomat included top positions in Bolivia, Argentina and the U.S. Interests Office in Havana, was arrested by the FBI at his home in Miami on Friday. Following his brief court appearance on Monday, he was ordered held pending a bail hearing on Wednesday. His lawyer declined to comment.
The Justice Department did not reveal how Rocha came to the attention of Cuban intelligence officials or describe what sensitive information, if any, he disclosed while working for the State Department and in a lucrative post-government career that included a stint as an agent had special advisor to the commander of the US Southern Command.
This image, provided by the Department of Justice and included in the affidavit in support of a criminal complaint, shows Manuel Rocha. The Justice Department says Rocha, a former American diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, has been charged since at least 1981 for his work as an undercover agent for the Cuban intelligence services. Recently unsealed court documents show that Manuel Rocha was involved in “clandestine activities.” for decades on behalf of Cuba, including through meetings with Cuban intelligence officials. (Department of Justice via AP)
Instead, the case relies largely on Rocha’s own confessions, which Rocha made last year to an undercover FBI agent posing as a Cuban intelligence agent named “Miguel.”
Rocha praised the late Cuban leader Fidel Castro as a “Comandante,” branded the U.S. an “enemy” and boasted of his more than 40 years of service as a Cuban mole at the heart of U.S. foreign policy circles, the lawsuit says.
“What we have done… it is enormous… more than a Grand Slam,” he was quoted as saying in one of several secretly recorded conversations.
In order to cover his tracks, Rocha referred to Cuba as “the island” and led a “normal life” disguised as a “right-wing person,” he said in one of the recordings. Former colleagues and friends described Rocha as a vocal admirer of former President Donald Trump, who took a hard line on Cuba.
Defense attorney Jacqueline Arango (center right) and Karla Wittkop Rocha (center left), wife of Manuel Rocha, are followed by journalists as they leave the James Lawrence King Federal Justice Building on Monday, December 4, 2023 in Miami. Manuel Rocha, 73, a former American diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, has been accused of serving as an intelligence agent for the Cuban intelligence services for decades, the Justice Department said Monday. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
John Feeley, who ended a long diplomatic career as U.S. ambassador to Panama, said he was surprised at how his mentor, who had served in administrations of both parties, had so fully embraced Trump’s policies.
“It’s beyond ironic that he cultivated this cartoon persona,” he said, “and that everyone seems to have bought it.”
Washington and Havana restored diplomatic ties in late 2014 after a half-century of Cold War acrimony, although the Trump administration reimposed sanctions on Cuba and re-designated it a state sponsor of terrorism in 2021. The Biden administration has moved more cautiously to restore some Obama-era concessions.
The charging document traces Rocha’s illicit ties to Cuba to well after he left the federal government, when he took lucrative jobs in the private sector – most recently as a senior adviser to an international public relations firm and a prominent U.S. law firm.
The FBI learned of the relationship last year and arranged a series of undercover encounters at discreet locations – a church and an outdoor food court – in downtown Miami. Rocha deliberately deviated from the most direct path to these encounters, pausing along the way in what prosecutors call a classic “countersurveillance craft” taught by Cuba’s spymasters.
“That’s what I was always told,” Rocha told the undercover agent at one of those meetings.
At another meeting, Rocha referred to Cuba’s shooting down of two unarmed planes belonging to the Miami-based exile group Brothers to the Rescue in 1996, which killed four opponents of Castro’s government.
There is no suggestion in the complaint that Rocha assisted the Cubans in the military operation – a major flashpoint in more than half a century of conflict between the communist-ruled island and its right-wing opponents in Miami. At the time, however, he was serving as a senior political official in the U.S. Special Interests Division in Havana.
“I witnessed it because I was in charge,” Rocha was quoted as saying. “It was a time of great tension.”
When Rocha was interviewed by two Diplomatic Security Service agents last Friday, he repeatedly lied, including by denying that he had ever met anyone matching the undercover agent’s description, the indictment says.
Rocha’s service in Cuba may have predated the beginning of his U.S. diplomatic career.
The complaint quotes Rocha telling the undercover agent that he first demonstrated his loyalty in Chile in 1973 – the year General Augusto Pinochet, with U.S. support, overthrew the socialist government of Salvador Allende.
“They must have told you something because you mentioned Chile,” Rocha told the undercover agent, who claimed to have contacted him at the request of superiors in Cuba’s National Intelligence Service. “That instilled confidence in me.”
Rocha was born in Colombia, grew up in a working-class home in New York City, and earned a series of liberal arts degrees from Yale, Harvard, and Georgetown before entering the foreign service.
He was the top U.S. diplomat in Argentina between 1997 and 2000, when a decades-long Washington-backed currency stabilization program faltered under the weight of enormous foreign debt and triggered a political crisis that would lead to the South American country losing five of two presidents had weeks.
In his next posting as ambassador to Bolivia, he intervened directly in the 2002 presidential campaign, warning weeks before the vote that the U.S. would cut off aid to the poor South American country if it elected former coca grower Evo Morales.
“I would like to remind the Bolivian electorate that if they vote for those who want Bolivia to return to cocaine exports, this will seriously jeopardize any future assistance from the United States to Bolivia,” Rocha said in a speech widely seen as an attempt was interpreted to maintain US dominance in the region.
The comments backfired, angering Bolivians and boosting support for Morales, who joked that Rocha was his “best campaign manager.” When Morales was finally elected three years later, the leftist leader expelled Rocha’s successor as head of the diplomatic mission for inciting “civil war.”
Rocha also served in Italy, Honduras, Mexico and the Dominican Republic and worked as a Latin America expert for the National Security Council.
Criminal cases against American officials accused of pandering to Cuba’s wishes are rare but not unprecedented. A former State Department official, Walter Kendall Myers, was sentenced to life in prison in 2010 for passing classified information to Cuba, and Ana Belen Montes, a former U.S. defense intelligence analyst who was convicted of spying for Cuba, was sentenced in January released from prison after a long sentence.
But of all the espionage scandals in the last 40 years, Rocha is believed to be the first member of America’s elite foreign service to be accused of betraying his oath, said Kevin Whitaker, a former U.S. ambassador to Colombia.
“If this is true, Rocha has tainted the institution of the Foreign Service,” he said. “It’s annoying.”
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Tucker reported from Washington.
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