You can’t fool everyone all the time, but there are those who almost succeed. Facing the world, Víctor Manuel Rocha, 73, was a former US ambassador who retired in Miami after a distinguished career in positions in Latin America, the White House and, after his retirement, as an advisor to the US Southern Command. US Armed Forces. In recent times, after a life of conservative leanings, he had become an ardent supporter of Donald Trump. Mere facade: Rocha lived a double life. During his 40 years as a diplomat and consultant, he had acted, according to the Department of Justice, as an agent of the Cuban intelligence services, to which it is feared that he could have passed a river of sensitive information about US activities and plans in Latin America. until his arrest a week ago.
The case could have serious repercussions for US national security and diplomatic relations, given Rocha’s long career and the important positions he held, many at key moments in their destinies: from deputy director of the US interests office in the Cuba of the nineties, to chargé d’affaires in an Argentina in full economic upheaval (1997-2000). Passing through Mexico and the National Security Council of the White House (1994-1995) of Bill Clinton in the midst of the Cuban rafters crisis, to conclude as ambassador (2000-2002) in a Bolivia where a coca leader stood out called Evo Morales.
The revelations also reveal the ability of the Cuban secret services to capture agents in relevant positions in the US Administration. This case, acknowledged Attorney General Merrick Garland, when announcing the indictment, “exposes one of the most far-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations by a foreign agent within the US Government.”
The former diplomat will appear before a Miami court this Tuesday to answer for 15 charges as an agent of Cuba since 1981which include “access to information [clasificada] to benefit” Cuba and distribute “that information without authorization.” He faces up to 60 years in prison after acknowledging his work for the island’s General Directorate of Intelligence (DGI) in conversations with an undercover FBI agent whom he knew as Miguel. and believed he was a Cuban espionage contact.
Rocha, born in Colombia in 1950, had emigrated to New York in the sixties with his widowed mother. His talent allowed him to win a scholarship to one of the best private schools in the United States and rub shoulders with children from the most privileged classes. From there he continued to prestigious universities: Yale, Harvard, Georgetown. He became an American citizen in 1978 and entered the diplomatic career in 1981. According to the statement of charges, by then he had already been captured by the DGI: it was during a stay in Chile during the coup against Salvador Allende.
The charging documents do not specify how Rocha was captured, nor what motivated him to collaborate with the DGI. But Miguel’s statement, included in the statement of objections, points to ideological reasons. He describes him as a convinced supporter of the regime of the “comandante” (Fidel Castro), who refers to the Cuban spies as “compañeros.”
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“The Cuban secret services have to be very good at what they do because they do not have many resources, and their main objective is the United States. Unlike the Russians, who motivate by money, they find people with a visceral empathy for what Cuba wants to do, and who, therefore, do not [traicionan] for money… I suspect that, if they had offered to pay him, Rocha would have been outraged,” he explains. Peter Lapp, retired FBI agent, in a telephone conversation. Lapp is the author of the book Queen of Cuba (“Queen of Cuba”), about the Puerto Rican spy Ana Montes, a Pentagon analyst who worked with the DGI for 17 years and in whose arrest, in 2000, the former agent collaborated.
There have been other cases: in 2007, two professors at Florida International University were arrested for spying against anti-Castro Cuban exile groups in Miami. In 2009, analyst Kendall Myers, an official with the State Department’s Office of Intelligence and Research, was arrested along with his wife for passing confidential information to Cuba.
The charge sheet notes that the FBI received a complaint in November 2022 alleging that Rocha had worked as an undercover agent for Cuba. Miguel contacted the former diplomat by WhatsApp: “I have a message for you from your friends in Havana.” The suspect responded: “I don’t understand, but you can call me.”
They both agreed to meet in front of a church in the wealthy Brickell area of Miami. To get there, Rocha adopted classic counterespionage techniques, from taking a long detour to stationing himself nearby to study whether the meeting place was under surveillance. They met like this up to three times, in which the former diplomat was proud of having collaborated with the DGI and reiterated his willingness to continue. His feigned right-wing leanings—he donated $750, almost 700 euros, to an anti-Castro legislator in the US Congress, which the parliamentarian has returned—were nothing more than part of her “facade,” he told the contact. she.
He boasted of having worked to “strengthen the Revolution”, in a task of “enormous” importance for Cuba and a great triumph for the interests of the island and against “the enemy”, the United States. “They [Washington] They underestimated what we could do to them. “We did more than they thought,” he declared to his alleged contact. When asked if he continues to support the DGI, he responded a little later, indignantly: “It’s as if he questioned my manhood… As if he wanted me to pull down my pants and show him that I still have balls.”
On December 1, agents from the State Department’s security service met with him. Rocha initially denied having met anyone who matched Miguel’s description. Confronted with a photo of both of them, he assured that he had only seen him once, and because Miguel had approached him. That same day he was detained.
Part of the job now for prosecutors and the FBI is to determine the extent of the damage “greater than they thought” that Rocha may have left, as he himself described. What data could someone who had access to top-level classified information have passed on to his contacts? Or to what extent his actions and reports influenced the United States to make decisions contrary to its national interests.
No clues
Miguel’s sworn statement provides hardly any clues. But in it, Rocha remembers that he was in Havana when in 1996 Cuba shot down two small planes belonging to the Cuban exile organization Brothers to the Rescue near the island, in an incident in which four people died.
In Bolivia, the then ambassador came to the fore for publicly meddling in the 2002 electoral campaign. Rocha warned that if the electorate voted “for those who want Bolivia to return to being an exporter of cocaine, that result will endanger the future.” of US aid.” That statement outraged the population, boosted Evo Morales to second place and subtracted votes from the until then favorite, the moderate Manfred Reyes Villa. The neoliberal Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada ended up triumphing. So, the ambassador’s words were interpreted as a false step; The current accusation makes one wonder if it was not a deliberate initiative to favor the coca leader. On several occasions after that, Morales had ironically described Rocha as his “campaign manager.”
“As an ambassador and as a member of the National Security Council, in the high positions he held, he had the ability to influence foreign policy. Not only did he have the opportunity to provide classified information to Cuba, he was also able to influence foreign policy and that is very damaging,” Lapp points out. “Montes was very damaging because she had access to very high levels of confidential Defense information. But this case, due to his ability to influence politics, is at least as serious as that one.”
That Rocha could act as a Cuban agent for so long “is a counterintelligence failure, and there is a lot of responsibility to distribute 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 the option 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 charged with espionage. It is something that experts attribute to a possible lack of evidence, at least for now. “But the statement of objections paints a very damning picture,” explains Lapp. “The Government does not think that what was happening to Cuba were cooking recipes.”
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