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The Justice Department unsealed charges Monday against Manuel Rocha a retired ambassador, accusing him of being a “clandestine agent” for decades — allegedly betraying his country by acting covertly on behalf of Cuba’s spy agency.
Attorney General Merrick Garland called the Rocha case “one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent,” adding that in those secretly-recorded conversations, Rocha repeatedly referred to the U.S. as “the enemy.”
Court papers filed in Miami describe a series of meetings in which Rocha discussed his secret work for Cuba, including one where he said that the “Direccion” — a reference to that country’s General Directorate of Intelligence — “asked me … to lead a normal life.”
Rocha allegedly said he followed that instruction by creating a public reputation as “a right wing person,” when he in fact was committed to the cause of communist Cuba.
At one secretly recorded meeting between Rocha and the undercover agent, the suspect allegedly described how he became a State Department employee: “I went little by little. … It was a very meticulous process. … I knew exactly how to do it and obviously the Direccion accompanied me. … They knew that I knew how to do it.”
Rocha was born in Colombia and became a U.S. citizen in 1978. He joined the State Department in 1981. The criminal complaint against him says that at least as early as that year,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 intelligence services.”
Rocha pushed false and misleading information within the U.S. government, authorities say, and met with Cuban intelligence operatives.
In the secretly recorded conversations with the undercover FBI agent, Rocha allegedly insisted he was still committed to the revolutionary cause of communist Cuba, according to the court papers unsealed Monday. Rocha’s arrest late last week was first reported by the Associated Press.
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