Ex-US ambassador jailed for 15 years for spying

WASHINGTON (CMC)

A former United States ambassador who admitted to secretly acting for decades as an agent of the government of Cuba has been jailed for 15 years.

Victor Manuel Rocha, 73, a former US Department of State employee who served on the National Security Council from 1994 to 1995 and as US ambassador to Bolivia from 2000 to 2002, was sentenced on Friday by a US federal judge to the statutory maximum penalty of 15 years in prison.

“Today’s plea and sentencing brings to an end more than four decades of betrayal and deceit by the defendant,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division.

“Rocha admitted to acting as an agent of the Cuban government at the same time he held numerous positions of trust in the US government, a staggering betrayal of the American people and an acknowledgement that every oath he took to the United States was a lie,” he added.

US Attorney Markenzy Lapointe for the Southern District of Florida said that “Rocha secretly acted for decades as an agent of a hostile foreign power”

“He thought the story of his covert mission for Cuba would never be told because he had the intelligence, knowledge and discipline to never to be detected,” he said. “Rocha underestimated those same skills in the prosecutors and law enforcement agents who worked tirelessly to bring him to justice for betraying his oath to this country.

“I am mindful that Rocha’s decades-long criminal activity on behalf of the Cuban government is especially painful for many in South Florida,” Lapointe added. “Rocha’s willingness to cooperate, as required by his plea agreement, is important, but does not change the seriousness of his misconduct or his clandestine breach of the trust placed in him.

“Rocha’s 15-year prison sentence, the maximum punishment for his crimes of conviction, sends a powerful message to those who are acting or seek to act unlawfully in the United States for a foreign government; we will seek you out anywhere, at any time, and prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law,” he continued.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) said that said US District Court Judge Beth Bloom accepted Rocha’s guilty plea to counts 1 and 2 of the indictment, which charged him with conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government and conspiring to defraud the United States and acting as an agent of a foreign government without notice as required by law.

The DOJ said the court then sentenced Rocha to the statutory maximum penalty on his counts of conviction: 15 years in prison, a US$500,000 fine, three years of supervised release and a special assessment.

The court also imposed “significant restrictions” on Rocha, the DOJ said.

In pleading guilty, the DOJ said Rocha admitted that, beginning in 1973, and continuing to the time of his arrest, “he secretly supported the Republic of Cuba and its clandestine intelligence-gathering mission against the United States by serving as a covert agent of Cuba’s General Directorate of Intelligence.”