Former US diplomat charged with secretly spying for Cuba for decades

MIAMI (AP):

A former career American diplomat was charged on Monday with serving as a secret agent for communist Cuba, going back decades, in what prosecutors portrayed as one of the most brazen and long-running betrayals in the history of the US foreign service.

Court papers alleged that Manuel Rocha engaged in “clandestine activity” on Cuba’s behalf since at least 1981, including by meeting with Cuban intelligence operatives and providing false information to US government officials about his travels and contacts.

The complaint, filed in federal court in Miami, charges Rocha with crimes including acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government and provides a vivid case study of what American officials say are long-standing efforts by Cuba and its notoriously sophisticated intelligence services to target government officials who can be flipped.

“This action exposes one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “To betray that trust by falsely pledging loyalty to the United States while serving a foreign power is a crime that will be met with the full force of the Justice Department.”

Wept in court

The 73-year-old Rocha, whose two-decade career as a US diplomat included top posts in Bolivia, Argentina and the US Interests Section in Havana, was arrested at his Miami home on Friday. He wept as he sat handcuffed during his first court appearance on Monday and was ordered held, pending a bond hearing on Wednesday. His attorney declined to comment.

The Justice Department did not reveal how Rocha attracted the attention of Cuba’s intelligence operatives, nor did it describe what, if any, sensitive information he may have provided while in government.

Instead, the case relies largely on what prosecutors say were Rocha’s own admissions, made over the past year to an undercover FBI agent posing as a Cuban intelligence operative.

Rocha praised the late Cuban leader Fidel Castro as “Comandante,” branded the US the “enemy”, and bragged about his service for more than 40 years as a Cuban mole in the heart of the State Department and elite US foreign policy circles, the complaint says.

“What we have done … it’s enormous … more than a Grand Slam,” he was quoted as saying at one of several secretly recorded conversations starting last year at discrete locations – a church and outdoor food court – in downtown Miami.

“They underestimated what we could do to them. We did more than they thought,” the document quotes Rocha as saying, referring to the United States.

To cover his tracks, he referred to Cuba as “the island” and led a “normal life” disguised as a “right-wing person”, he said in one of the recordings. He also arrived at the meetings with the undercover agent in Miami deliberately straying from the most-direct route and pausing along the way in what prosecutors allege was classic, counter-surveillance “tradecraft” as taught by Cuba’s spymasters.

“It’s what I’ve always been told to do,” Rocha told his handler about his movements.

The case is part of a historically tense relationship between the US and Cuba. Washington and Havana restored diplomatic relations in late 2014 after a half-century of Cold War acrimony, though the Trump administration reimposed sanctions on Cuba and, in 2021, redesignated it a state sponsor of terrorism.