Cuban Spy Service Dazzles Again
Manuel Rochas was a US diplomat—and Cuban spy—for decades, the FBI says
UPDATED
They are good—very good—say former U.S. counterintelligence agents who spent years trying to catch Cuban spies here. The latest example, according to a criminal complaint unsealed Monday in Miami, is Manuel Rocha, 73, a retired U.S. diplomat who spent four decades working as a secret agent for Cuba while serving in several senior State Department posts in Latin America, including as U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, as an envoy to the U.S. mission in Havana, as an adviser to SOUTHCOM, the U.S. military command responsible for the region, and as a White House National Security Council expert on Latin America in the Clinton administration. He served in a half dozen countries in Latin America starting in 1981, putting him multiple positions to gather and spill diplomatic, military and intelligence secrets to Havana over four decades.
“This action exposes one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the U.S. government by a foreign agent,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland told reporters Monday. Rocha “sought out employment with the U.S. government that would provide him with access to nonpublic information and the ability to affect U.S. foreign policy.”
It’s quite possible that Rocha, who was born in Colombia but grew up in New York, joined the State Department in 1981 at the direction of Cuban intelligence after earning a Master’s Degree in International Relations at Georgetown University. His path to the top was no doubt greased by his elite education. In 1969 he graduated from the Taft prep school in Connecticut, followed by a cum laude degree at Yale and a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard.
Somewhere along the line, he embraced the Cuban revolution, according to U.S. charges.
"By his own admission,” the complaint says. “beginning no later than approximately 1981, and continuing to the present, Rocha secretly supported the Republic of Cuba and its clandestine intelligence gathering mission against the United States by serving as a covert agent of Cuba intelligence services.”
“As with all of its intelligence operatives, Cuba looks for and recruits people even at the high school level,” former FBI special agent Peter Lapp, a leader of the bureau’s investigation of Ana Montes, a longtime Cuban mole in the Defense Intelligence Agency, wrote in his recently published account of the case, Queen of Cuba: An FBI Agent's Insider Account of the Spy Who Evaded Detection for 17 Years.
Like Montes, and another U.S. diplomat and his wife caught spying for Cuba in 2009, Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers, Rocha was apparently motivated by ideology, not money.
“It sounds like he's a true believer,” Lapp told SpyTalk. “It sounds like he was very much behind the revolution. I mean, the language in the complaint is heavy on that— ‘I'm a comrade, you know, doing this for the right reasons and revolution.’”
Rocha is quoted in the complaint as telling an undercover FBI agent who posed as a Cuban spy handler that “what we have done” is “enormous” and “more than a grand slam.” Rocha did not specify what the alleged triumph was, according to the bureau’s affidavit.
One possible “grand slam” was helping Bolivian leftist Evo Morales get elected president in 2000. While serving as ambassador to Bolivia, Rocha declared publicly the U.S. would cut off aid if Morales won. At the time, it was considered a heavy-handed diplomatic blunder, but the threat helped drive outraged Bolivians to vote for Morales.
If that was one of his master strokes, Rocha didn’t brag about it to the FBI’s undercover agent. The criminal complaint is devoid of tradecraft details—how Rocha communicated with his Cuban handlers, how he met with them or what he did with their payments—if any. The failure to catch Rocha red-handed explains why the government has charged Rocha with the lesser crime of failing to register as a foreign agent, rather than committing espionage—although that could change with a superseding indictment.
Chris Simmons, a legendary former U.S. Army and Defense Intelligence Agency spy catcher who also led the investigation of Ana Montes, tells SpyTalk he’d “never read an indictment so devoid of operational details.…The ‘failing to register’ charge was actually designed for lobbyists,” he noted. “The intel world started using it about 30 years ago because it’s a very simple charge and a 10 year prison sentence.”
“But clearly there had to have been clandestine communications in both directions,” Lapp said. “whether it was a shortwave radio or some other type of covert communication system, there had to be a way that they were communicating with each other clandestinely.”
Former senior FBI official Harry B. “Skip” Brandon, who worked against Cuban intelligence for years before retiring in 1993 as deputy assistant director for counterterrorism and counterintelligence, said cracking its DGI spy agency was extremely difficult.
“Their tradecraft was very, very good,” Brandon told SpyTalk. “They were well trained.” One of the DGI’s major assets against penetration was that it was and remains a small service, where everyone knows everybody and secrets are tightly held. ”They sit down and have Friday night happy hour, just with each other,” Brandon said. “And there's nothing that goes outside.”
Discreet Duo
Lapp recalled today that Rocha and Montes “knew each other from their day jobs, her at DIA and him at the State Department…They had professional interaction with each other from time to time.” But neither would have known the other was also a Cuban spy, of course. “That would've been a major operational security faux pas.”
And they kept their respective secrets for decades.
According to an updated DoJ complaint released on Tuesday, Rocha allegedly rued Montes’s arrest to the undercover agent. "Unfortunately she was betrayed... a huge betrayal... sadly she would have done much more had she not been betrayed," he reportedly said. Prosecutors also allege he said he became “a great friend” of Cuban intelligence in “Chile and elsewhere,” “in or around 1973,” the year the socialist government of Salvador Allende was overthrown in a U.S.-backed military coup. The new indictment was first reported on X, formally Twitter, by Jim Popkin, author of another book on the Montes case, Code Name Blue Wren.
Brandon said the Cubans are first-rate recruiters, which he attributes to their natural talents for gregarious socializing and talk, particularly with marks they met posing as diplomats, journalists or businessmen.
“In my professional opinion, they were very good with dealing with people. They knew how to talk to 'em. They knew how to stroke 'em, how to keep 'em going,” Brandon said. “They'd spend hours with them just talking, not arguing ideology or anything else, just talking. Particularly inside the U.S., they’d buy drinks and take people to dinner and that sort of thing. They were very good at it. They're, you know, Cubans. They're very personable.”
A 2014 FBI report said Cuban spies particularly targeted academics in foreign policy circles or universities who opposed U.S. policies designed to isolate or overthrow the Castro regime.
But that’s a cliché, Brandon said, “a too easy characterization, because they did not limit themselves to people like that. They recruited other people.”
But “they don't look for people who are motivated by money,” Lapp said.
Closing the Gaps
Chris Simmons said U.S. investigators will have a hard time compiling a complete damage assessment without Rocha’s cooperation.
“It will be challenging at best [because], given the passage of decades, little to no evidence will be left,” Simons said via email. “This means the bureau really needs a good plea agreement and his full cooperation during the interrogation. They know that without [that], he can lie and mislead as desired. [G]iven that reality, they’ve got to at least try to build a list of what he compromised over the years”— to hold over his head.
“Currently, their ‘stick’ is to use the various administrative laws to threaten to let him die in prison if he doesn’t cooperate,” he added.
“It’s an interesting case. Regrettably, they didn’t catch him decades ago.”
This article has been updated with the new criminal complaint against Rochas.
Good reporting, Jeff, much better than the Washington Post. CNN and MSNBC have done. The Cubans have been outsmarting the CIA and FBI for decades. They even look good when compared to the Russian/Soviet services.
Jeff, in my experience dealing with the Cuban's (as Assistant Special Agent in Charge in Miami where I handled the defection of Cuban General Rafael del Pino, "conversations" with Colonel Antonio de la Guardia, etc., etc.) I always likened them to something akin to "the little engine that could." They are aggressive, they are risk takers, they can be simply audacious. And they are successful to say the least. My old friend, retired CIA analyst, Brian Latell and I spend time each summer when he's in the Virginia area, chatting about the Cubans and invariably, our respect for their ability is renewed.