An American diplomat and one-time U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia has admitted he was actually working as a Cuban spy the entire time.
Manuel Rocha, 73, agreed Thursday in Miami Federal Court to plead guilty to two counts of acting as an agent of a foreign government. He will be sentenced in April.
Rocha was arrested in December 2023, more than 40 years after he began his civil service career. His work was “one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said at the time.
The FBI didn’t even begin investigating Rocha until 2022, more than 15 years after a Cuban defector told the CIA that Rocha was a spy. American spooks didn’t believe it at the time.
“What we have done … it’s enormous,” Rocha told an undercover FBI agent, according to charging documents. “More than a grand slam.”
Born in Harlem, Rocha attended The Taft School, an elite Connecticut boarding school, and earned degrees from Yale, Harvard and Georgetown during his academic career.
U.S. authorities still aren’t sure exactly when he was recruited by Cuba, but they pointed to a 1973 trip to Chile as a turning point. That was the same year the CIA backed Augusto Pinochet’s military coup against the socialist government of Salvador Allende.
Rocha joined the foreign service in 1981 and from there he held various positions relating to Central and South America. From July 1994 to July 1995, he was director of Inter-American Affairs on the National Security Council, which gave him a direct hand in American policy on Cuba.
He was briefly stationed at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, and in 2000, Bill Clinton named him Ambassador to Bolivia. U.S. intelligence agencies believe it could take years to uncover all that Rocha did during his time as a spy.
Rocha’s highest profile moment as an ambassador was considered a screwup for years. Shortly before an election in 2002, he warned that the U.S. would cut off foreign assistance if accused narcotrafficker Evo Morales was elected president.
Morales was hardly known at the time, but Rocha’s speech inspired waves of populist support for the left-wing candidate. Though he didn’t win in 2002, Morales was elected president in 2006 and held the role until 2019. He was a crucial ally of the Cuban government during that time.
“Now that I look back,” Rocha’s former foreign service colleague Liliana Ayalde said, “it was all part of a plan.”
With News Wire Services
