A former US ambassador to Bolivia has been arrested and charged with spying for Cuba over a 40-year span, the US Department of Justice announced on Monday, detailing a shock betrayal by a suspect who called the US “the enemy.”
US Attorney General Merrick Garland laid out the allegations against Victor Manuel Rocha, a onetime member of the White House’s National Security Council now accused of using his positions within the government to support Cuba’s “clandestine intelligence-gathering mission” against the US.
The charges against Rocha, 73, expose “one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent,” Garland said in a statement.
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Rocha, a naturalized US citizen originally from Colombia, allegedly began aiding Havana as a covert agent of the Cuban General Directorate of Intelligence (DGI) in 1981, and his espionage activities continued to the present, the statement said.
Garland delivered remarks about the arrest of Rocha on Friday in Miami and elaborated on details learned when Rocha spoke at length with someone he believed to be a Cuban operative, but who was actually an undercover FBI agent.
“As detailed in the complaint, Rocha repeatedly referred to the United States as ‘the enemy’” and spoke of his own “meticulous” efforts to infiltrate Washington’s power center and influence US foreign policy, Garland said.
“He repeatedly bragged about the significance of his efforts, saying that ‘what has been done has strengthened the revolution immensely,’” he said.
Rocha served on the National Security Council from 1994 to 1995 in the administration of Bill Clinton and was the ambassador to Bolivia from 2000 to 2002 under Clinton and then-US president George W. Bush. He has also served as adviser to the US military command responsible for Cuba.
During an initial appearance in federal court on Monday in Florida, Rocha broke down into tears and did not enter a plea, the New York Times reported.
The criminal complaint details how, over multiple meetings with the undercover FBI agent beginning in November last year, Rocha “behaved as a Cuban agent,” praising the communist-ruled island’s late leader Fidel Castro and “using the term ‘we’ to describe himself and Cuba.”
He admitted to traveling to Havana in 2016 or 2017 to meet with his DGI handlers and asked the undercover agent to send “my warmest regards to the Direccion,” referring to the DGI.
On Friday, in a voluntary interview with US Department of State security agents, Rocha “lied repeatedly” including denying meeting the undercover agent, and was subsequently arrested.
“Those who have the privilege of serving in the government of the United States are given an enormous amount of trust by the public we serve,” Garland said. “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.”
The State Department said it was not yet clear how damaging Rocha’s decades of espionage has been, but a spokesman said it is working with the intelligence community “to assess any long-term national security implications for this matter.”
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