14ymedio, Madrid, February 16, 2024 — It’s been 17 years since the United States could have arrested former American diplomat Víctor Manuel Rocha, who was ultimately arrested in December 2023 for allegedly spying on Cuba. A Cuban soldier who defected from the Island sounded the alarm to Félix Rodríguez, a former CIA agent, saying that the official was a mole of Fidel Castro infiltrated at the highest level. But no one believed him.
“We all thought it was defamation,” Rodríguez, an agent who participated in the invasion of the Bay of Pigs in 1961, and in the capture in Bolivia of Ernesto Che Guevara that ended with his death, told Associated Press (AP). That lieutenant colonel, who was his informant and whose identity he has refused to reveal, went to his home in Miami in 2006 and told him clearly: “Rocha is spying for Cuba.”
Rocha’s credibility was such, Rodríguez claims, that although he transmitted the message to the CIA, everyone was skeptical about the information and believed that it was an attempt to discredit a fervent anti-communist.
“I really admired this son of a bitch. I want to look him in the eye and ask him why he did it. He had access to everything,” Rodríguez said
“I really admired this son of a bitch. I want to look him in the eye and ask him why he did it. He had access to everything,” Rodríguez told AP, which on Thursday published an extensive article for which it interviewed two dozen people linked to the case, including agents, former CIA agents, friends and partners of Rocha, to try to understand how the case of the greatest infiltration in the U.S. Government known so far could happen. The former diplomat, who this Wednesday pleaded not guilty to the 15 charges against him, will be tried on March 25.
But the great unknown, which according to AP may take years to uncover, is what the Cuban regime was able to have access to thanks to Rocha. The former officials interviewed agreed that the CIA had known since at least 1987, that Castro had a high-level infiltrator – “super mole” – in the U.S. Government and that the former diplomat, of Colombian origin, was probably on a list delivered to the FBI of alleged spies in high foreign policy positions.
Peter Romero, former Undersecretary of State for Latin America and Rocha’s colleague, does not hesitate to admit that the error was “monumental.” “We are all doing a huge examination of conscience, and no one can think of anything. He did an incredible job of covering his tracks.”
AP reconstructs Rocha’s biography, which he told to those who met him. His first years in the country, at the age of 10, were hard, they say, but his intelligence gave him access to a scholarship for minorities with which he could study in an elite school. “Taft was the best thing that happened to me in my life,” he said in an alumni magazine of that boarding school in Connecticut in 2004.
That life had a dark side. Rocha was discriminated against because of his origin – poor and immigrant – by the other students. Some say that in those episodes – which he himself defined as devastating and during which he even thought of committing suicide – is the germ that led him to sympathize with the Cuban Revolution.
As was already known, the former diplomat studied at Yale, Harvard and Georgetown. In those years some of his contacts with Cuba begin, the first in 1973 during a trip to Chile where he met agents of the General Directorate of Intelligence (DGI) deployed in that country in the time of Salvador Allende, according to recordings of the FBI’s covert operation. He married a Colombian woman, who is being investigated for possible links with Cuba and whom AP was unable to locate.
Rocha then worked at the United States Interests Section in Havana, where he was when the MiGs of the Cuban Air Forces shot down, in February 1996, the civilian planes of Brothers to the Rescue
In 1981 he entered the U.S. Foreign Service and was sent to Honduras where his task was to advise the contras fighting against the Sandinista Government of Nicaragua, supported by Cuba. His first relevant stop was in 1994, when he arrived at the White House as director of Inter-American Affairs in the National Security Council with responsibility for Cuba. From that position he wrote a memorandum urging Bill Clinton to dismantle the main sanctions against the Island, an idea that could not prosper since in 1996, the Republicans took control of Congress, and the policy towards Cuba hardened.
Rocha then worked at the United States Interests Section in Havana, where he was when the MiGs of the Cuban Air Force shot down, in February 1996, the civilian planes of Brothers to the Rescue.
The AP article reviews what is known as Rocha’s greatest favor to Cuba, when he was ambassador to Bolivia. He said during a conference that voting for a drug trafficker – alluding to the candidate and coca leader Evo Morales – would make the United States cut off foreign aid. Liliana Ayalde, also a diplomat, tells the agency that she felt very uncomfortable. “I told him that it was not appropriate for the ambassador to make those statements when the elections were just around the corner.”
“Now that I see it in retrospect, it was all part of a plan,” Ayalde considers. After those statements, which were considered an act of interference, Morales was catapulted into the presidential race. Although he didn’t win on that occasion, years later he did, calling Rocha his “best campaign manager.”
Cuban agent Florentino Aspillaga, who defected when he headed the DGI office in Bratislava (present-day Slovakia), was the first to speak to the CIA, in the mid-1980s, about the spies infiltrated into the United States. According to his statements, four dozen Cubans recruited by the CIA were double agents carefully selected by the DGI to penetrate the United States Government.
Brian Latell, a former CIA analyst, said that Aspillaga mentioned “two highly productive spies within the State Department” and that “Fidel Castro himself played a key role as the leader of Cuba’s spies.”
He claimed to have seen documents marked as secrets “so valuable that they were sent directly to Castro’s residence without going through the Minister of the Interior
Another deserter of the Cuban DGI consulted by AP, Enrique García, said he also had known about the Island’s espionage network since the 90s, and he claimed to have seen documents marked as secrets “so valuable that they were sent directly to Castro’s residence without going through the Minister of the Interior. “I have no doubt that [Rocha] was part of that network,” he says.
He has also talked about the case of Peter Lapp, an FBI agent who supervised, among others, the case of Ana Belén Montes, although he did not know if Rocha was at some point under suspicion, as Jim Popkin, author of a book about Montes, argues. He was forceful when evaluating the risk that Cuba poses to national security and said that it is usually underestimated, unlike Russia or China.
“It is a country that we ignore at our own risk. Cubans are not only really good at human intelligence, but they are also experts in brokering information to some of our greatest adversaries,” says Lapp.
Rocha, who in 2002 retired from public service and switched to private enterprise, dedicated himself to trying to influence the embargo by buying goods confiscated by the Revolution. He boasted about his contacts: “I have access to almost all the countries in the region or I know how to get it,” he told the Miami Herald in 2006.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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