By Joshua Goodman and Jim Mustian —
The Associated Press
Manuel Rocha was well known in Miami's elite circles for his aristocratic, almost monarchical bearing, which seemed appropriate for a long-career American diplomat educated at exclusive Ivy League universities and who held high positions in Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba and the White House.
Ambassador Rocha
,
as he preferred to be called, demanded and got respect.
That's why former CIA agent Félix Rodríguez had doubts in 2006 when a lieutenant colonel who had deserted the Cuban army showed up at his Miami home with a surprising clue: "Rocha," he quoted the man as saying, "
is spying for Cuba." .
Rodríguez, who participated in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the execution of revolutionary
Che
Guevara, believed at the time that Rocha's information was an attempt to discredit a fellow anti-communist crusader.
However, he said he relayed the defector's message to the CIA, where they were equally skeptical.
“No one believed him,” Rodríguez said in an interview with The Associated Press news agency.
“We all thought it was a smear,”
he added.
Rocha speaks to the press on July 11, 2001, when he was the United States ambassador to Bolivia. Gonzalo Espinoza / AFP via Getty Images file
That long-ago fact returned with devastating clarity in December, when Rocha, now 73, was arrested and charged with serving as Cuba's secret agent since the 1970s, in what prosecutors called one of the most brazen cases. and long-standing betrayals in the history of the State Department.
Rocha was secretly recorded by an undercover FBI agent praising Fidel Castro as "the commander" and boasting about his work for Cuba's communist government, calling it “more than a
grand slam
” against the “enemy” of the United States.
And to hide his true loyalties, prosecutors and his friends say, in recent years Rocha adopted the false persona of an avid supporter of Donald Trump who spoke harshly against Cuba.
“I really admired this son of a bitch,” Rodriguez said angrily.
“I want to look him in the eyes and ask him why he did it.
He had access to everything.”
While Rocha has pleaded not guilty to 15 federal charges, FBI and State Department investigators have been working to unravel the biggest missing piece in the case:
what the veteran diplomat may have given to Cuba
.
It is a confidential damage assessment, complicated by the usual murky world of intelligence, so it is expected to last for years.
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The Associated Press spoke with two dozen former top U.S. counterintelligence officials, Cuban intelligence defectors and Rocha's friends and colleagues to piece together what is known so far about his alleged betrayal, the missing clues and the red flags that might have helped him. to avoid what happened.
He was not only Rodríguez's informant, whom he refused to identify to The Associated Press but, as he assured, was recently interviewed by the FBI.
Officials said that in early 1987, the CIA knew that Fidel Castro had a “super mole” hidden deep within the U.S. government.
Some now suspect that he could have been Rocha and that at least since 2010 he could have been on a short list given to the FBI of possible Cuban spies in high foreign policy circles.
Rocha's attorney did not respond to repeated messages seeking comment.
The FBI and CIA also refused to do so, and the State Department did not respond to the same requests.
“This is a monumental mistake,” said Peter Romero, a former assistant secretary of state for Latin America who worked with Rocha.
“All of us are doing a lot of soul-searching and no one can think of anything.
“He did an incredible job covering his tracks
,” he explained.
humble beginnings
Before he was accused of being a Cuban agent, Rocha's life embodied the American dream.
He was born in Colombia and at the age of 10 he moved with his widowed mother and his two brothers to New York City.
They lived for a time in Harlem while his mother worked in a sweatshop and got by on food stamps.
A talented football player with a keen intellect, he won a minority scholarship in 1965 to attend The Taft School, an elite boarding school in Connecticut.
Overnight he was catapulted from what he called a “ghetto” mired in racial unrest into a refined world of American wealth.
“Taft was the best thing that ever happened to me,” he told the school's alumni magazine in 2004.
But being one of the few minorities at the school, Rocha added that he suffered discrimination, such as the time when a classmate refused to share a room with him, something that fueled a grudge that his friends suspect may have led him to to admire Castro's revolution.
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“I felt devastated and thought about suicide,” he told the alumni magazine.
From Taft, he went to Yale, where he graduated with honors in Latin American studies, and then did graduate work at Harvard and Georgetown.
It's unclear exactly how Rocha may have been recruited by Cuba, but prosecutors say it occurred sometime in the 1970s, when he was still accumulating degrees and American college campuses were filled with students sympathetic to leftist causes.
In 1973, the year he graduated from Yale, Rocha traveled to Chile, where he became a “great friend” of Cuba's intelligence agency, the General Directorate of Intelligence (DGI), according to recordings of the covert operation. FBI.
That same year, the CIA helped overthrow the Castro-backed socialist government of Salvador Allende, replacing it with a brutal military dictatorship.
Around the same time, Rocha entered into the first of his three marriages, to an older Colombian woman he barely talked about with his friends and who is now under scrutiny for possible ties to Cuba, according to those who have been questioned by the FBI.
The Associated Press was unable to locate the woman or locate any records of her marriage.
“It was all part of a plan”
After joining the foreign service in 1981, one of Rocha's first assignments abroad was after being appointed political-military affairs officer in Honduras, where he advised the Contras in their fight against Cuban-backed leftist rebels in the neighboring Nicaragua.
In 1994 he arrived at the White House to work as director of Inter-American Affairs at the National Security Council, with responsibility for Cuba.
That same year, he wrote a memo,
A Calibrated Response to Cuban Reforms
, urging Bill Clinton's Administration
to begin dismantling trade restrictions
, according to Peter Kornbluh, a national security expert who interviewed Rocha for a 2014 book.
Kornbluh added that the secretary of state planned to announce the political reform after the US midterm elections.
But that speech was never delivered.
Hardline Republicans who took control of Congress enacted legislation in 1996 that tightened the embargo and blocked any attempts to improve relations with Cuba.
From Washington, Rocha was sent to Havana, where he served for two years as the top official of the United States Interests Section.
It was a dangerous time (after the 1996 aerial downing of a
Brothers to the Rescue
propaganda plane over Cuba that killed four Castro opponents) and the DGI would have had almost unlimited access to the diplomat.
Rocha's greatest known favor to Cuba, intentional or not, came during his last and most important diplomatic post, as US ambassador to Bolivia, when he intervened in the presidential election to help a Castro protégé.
At an embassy event in 2002, Rocha inserted into his carefully scripted remarks a warning to Bolivians that voting for a drug trafficker — a not-so-veiled reference to coca grower-turned-
presidential candidate Evo Morales
— would lead the United States to cut all foreign assistance.
“I remember it vividly.
“I felt very uncomfortable,” said Liliana Ayalde, a foreign service colleague who later served as US ambassador to Paraguay and Brazil.
“I told him that it was not appropriate for the ambassador to mention those statements when the elections were around the corner,” she added.
The reaction was immediate.
Bolivians were very upset by the idea of the United States interfering in their elections, and Morales, until then a long shot, rose in the polls and almost won.
Three years later, when he prevailed, he credited Rocha as his “best campaign manager.”
Today, Ayalde questions whether Rocha's last episode as a foreign service officer was an act of self-sabotage, carried out at the direction of a foreign power to further damage the United States' position in Latin America, traditionally known as "the backyard." of Washington.”
“Now that I look at it,” he said, “it was all part of a plan.”
Super mole?
Already in 1987, when Rocha had been on the rise for a few years, the United States learned that a Cuban “super mole” had infiltrated the top leadership of Washington, according to Brian Latell, a former CIA analyst.
The information was provided by Florentino Aspillaga, who defected while heading the DGI office in Bratislava, now the capital of Slovakia.
Before Aspillaga died in 2018, he told the CIA that four dozen Cubans he recruited were actually double agents (or
dangles
in spy speak) carefully selected by the DGI to penetrate the US government.
Latell asserted that Aspillaga also spoke of two highly productive spies within the State Department.
While Aspillaga
did not know any of their names
, the revelation shocked the CIA.
“One of Aspillaga's main revelations was that Fidel Castro himself largely acted as Cuba's spy chief,” Latell mentioned.
Enrique García, who defected to the United States in the 1990s, also learned of the clandestine spy network while leading Cuban agents in Latin America.
He claimed that the documents he saw, which bore
Top Secret
and State Department markings, were so valuable that they were sent directly to Castro's residence, bypassing the Interior Minister who supervised the DGI.
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“I have no doubt that Rocha was part of that network,” said García, who spoke to the FBI years ago about the spy network.
Jim Popkin, author of
Code Name Blue Wren
, a book about Ana Montes, the highest-level U.S. official ever convicted of spying for Cuba, noted that his intelligence sources recently told him that Rocha's name was on a short list of at least four possible Cuban spies who had been in the hands of the FBI since at least 2010. The Associated Press could not independently confirm this.
“The FBI has known Rocha for twelve years,” Popkin mentioned.
“That was probably what sparked the interest that led to her arrest years later,” he added.
Peter Lapp, who oversaw FBI counterintelligence against Cuba between 1998 and 2005, and wrote a book about Montes,
Queen of Cuba
, said he did not know if Rocha had been on the agency's radar.
However, he acknowledged that in the national security hierarchy, Cuba tends not to have as much weight against Russia, China and more dangerous threats.
At the time Rodríguez gave the tip in 2006 about Rocha spying for Cuba, for example, American counterintelligence investigators were busy with the American war in Iraq, the airstrike that killed al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi, and the controversial detention and interrogation programs abroad.
“You don't get promoted to the top ranks of the FBI's counterintelligence division by focusing on Cuba,” Lapp explained, “but it is a country we ignore at our peril.
Not only are the Cubans really good at human intelligence, but they are also experts at brokering information for some of our biggest adversaries.”
"I have access"
Following his retirement from the foreign service in 2002, Rocha embarked on a lucrative career in business, racking up several high-level positions and consulting jobs at private equity firms, a public relations agency, a Chinese automaker and even a company in the cannabis industry.
“I have access to almost all the countries in the region or I know how to get it,” he boasted to the Miami Herald newspaper in 2006.
From 2012 to 2018, he served as president of Barrick Gold's Dominican Republic subsidiary, overseeing production at the world's sixth largest gold mine.
Rodriguez's memories of his former friendship with Rocha include a photo of the helmeted former diplomat carrying a freshly mined gold nugget.
John Feeley, who worked with Rocha when he joined the State Department and eventually became ambassador to Panama, remembers that his former mentor urged him to reject pro bono work in retirement and instead look for a paycheck.
“He was openly motivated to make money in his post-foreign service career,” Feeley mentioned, “which was not typical among former diplomats.”
One business that has received new scrutiny following Rocha's arrest is a company he led with a group of foreign investors to buy, at a deep discount of billions of dollars in claims against the Cuban government, agricultural land, factories and other properties confiscated during the time of the communist revolution.
[The Pentagon detects another “spy” balloon from China, this time over Latin America]
Rocha and his partner stated that there was no way the Cuban government would ever pay and that it was unlikely that the United States would help, recalled claim holder Carolyn Chester, whose father was a former journalist for The Associated Press and later close to the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.
Chester recalled how the couple met him in Omaha, Nebraska, in a limousine and gave him a polished introduction in which they acted “as a team.”
As his partner presented the facts of his bid to reclaim a farm and other confiscated property, “Rocha struck a chord with us,” recounting a supposed meeting they had with Chester's parents years earlier in Washington.
Chester, who ultimately decided not to sell, said the meeting left her with doubts about Rocha, in part because she was almost certain that her father's poor health would have prevented her parents from making that trip to Washington.
And she found it strange that Rocha and her partner spoke as if they “knew with certainty” the intentions of the Cuban officials.
The idea, according to Rocha's former business partner Tim Ashby, was to “kill communism with capitalism” by trading claims for land grants, leases and joint ventures in Cuba at a time when the communist island was desperate for foreign investment.
“For Cuba, there was much more at stake,” said Ashby, a lawyer and former senior official at the US Department of Commerce.
“This was crucial
to normalizing relations with the United States.”
The investment group would eventually spend about $5 million purchasing nine claims valued at more than $55 million, Ashby said.
However, the company collapsed after some rights holders complained to the George W. Bush Administration that they thought they were being deceived.
In 2009, the Treasury Department took steps to prohibit the transfer of any certified claims against Cuba.
That didn't stop Rocha from continuing to make money.
Records show that since 2016 alone, Rocha and his current wife spent more than $5.2 million to buy a half-dozen apartments in high-rise buildings in Miami's financial district.
This month, four of those properties were transferred entirely into his wife's name, a move that former law enforcement officials said could potentially protect them from government seizure.
In retrospect, Ashby acknowledged that he was captivated by the image his former partner wanted the world to see.
“He was fiercely anti-communist and from the beginning a firm supporter of Trump,” he said, “Rocha was the last person I would have suspected of being a Cuban spy.”