Cuba Remains a Top-Tier Spy Threat

Victor Manuel Rocha || image source

A week ago, Victor Manuel Rocha, a United States Foreign Service Officer from 1981 to 2002, who served at the U.S. Embassies in several Latin American countries and played an important role in constructing and implementing Cuba policy in the 1990s, admitted he had been a spy for Communist Cuba during this entire period—and, indeed, beyond it, all the way down to his arrest in December.

CAREER IN ESPIONAGE

Rocha, born in Colombia in 1950, grew up in the U.S., attending all the elite education institutions: the Taft School, Yale University, and obtained master’s degrees at Harvard and Georgetown. Naturalised as an American in 1978, Rocha joined the State Department in November 1981. Rocha’s first posting, in December 1982, was a two-year stint at the Embassy in the Dominican Republic. Rocha spent some time at the Embassy in Italy and for the next decade was steadily promoted as he worked at the Embassies in various Latin American countries: Honduras (1987-89), Mexico (1989-91), and back to the Dominican Republic (1991-94).

In July 1994, Rocha became the Director of Inter-American Affairs on the U.S. National Security Council (NSC), “with special responsibility for, among other things, Cuba”. Rocha held this important post for almost exactly a year, before being moved to serve as the Deputy Principal Officer at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana—the U.S. diplomatic presence in Cuba, based in the Swiss Embassy. Rocha remained in Havana until July 1997. In these positions, Rocha had a substantial ability to steer U.S. foreign policy on Cuba and had access to the most sensitive information the U.S. government had relating to Cuba, all of which can be assumed to have been passed to Havana.

Rocha’s next appointment was as Deputy Chief of the U.S. Embassy in Argentina. Rocha left Buenos Aires in November 1999 and was nominated as U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia in June 2000, in the dying days of Bill Clinton’s Presidency.

Rocha took up his post in La Paz in August 2000,¹ and completed his tour of duty in August 2002, retiring from the State Department soon after. Had it not been for the discovery of Rocha’s treason, he might well have been remembered for an incautious public statement in the run-up to the June 2002 Bolivarian presidential election, to the effect that the U.S. would withdraw aid money to Bolivia if Evo Morales, the Cuba-aligned Chavista candidate, won. Morales narrowly lost the 2002 election, but remarked at one rally: “I thank Rocha. He is my best campaign manager.” The anti-American sentiments Rocha helped inflame were part of what Morales rode to power in 2006. It took some considerable luck to bring Morales’ Peronist autocracy to an end in 2019.

Rocha did not cease his influence over the U.S.’s policy after he left the State Department. Rocha joined the Council on Foreign Relations and, from 2006 to 2012, Rocha was an adviser to the commander of the United States Southern Command (SOUTHCOM). While SOUTHCOM has Cuba within its area of responsibilities, and Cuban intelligence was no doubt keen to know what the U.S. knew—and how it knew it, and what the U.S. did not know—this post gave Rocha access to a much broader array of defence secrets that were surely of interest to Havana. Rocha’s other post-diplomatic positions have included a “series of lucrative private-sector jobs”. At the time of his arrest, Rocha was employed as a as a “senior international business advisor” by LLYC USA, a corporate public-relations outfit.

DISCOVERY AND DOWNFALL

The Justice Department indictment says the FBI “received information” Rocha was a secret agent of Cuba’s KGB-model secret police, the DI (Dirección de Inteligencia),² around November 2022. This is very cryptic, but suggests a tip-off rather than a Bureau investigation led to this discovery. Soon enough, a sting was set up. An undercover (“UC”) FBI agent posing as a DI officer sent a WhatsApp message to Rocha on 15 November 2022, saying: “my name is Miguel and I have a message for you from your friends in Havana. It is in regards to a sensitive matter.” The UC/“Miguel” asked if Rocha could take a telephone call and Rocha obliged. The UC told Rocha he had been “ordered … to make contact” to pass on a message. The UC said Rocha was known to be “a great friend of ours” (i.e., Cuba’s Communist regime) and thus he could help resolve some “little problems”, but this was “very delicate” so it was best done in person.

The next day, 16 November 2022, at 10 AM, Rocha met the UC in front of the First Miami Presbyterian Church. This was to be the first of three meetings—all of them recorded by the FBI. The second meeting, on 17 February 2023, took place in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, which Rocha travelled to on his Dominican passport, acquired when he married his current wife in 2014. The third meeting was back in Miami on 23 June 2023. The upshot of the meetings was Rocha ensuring his defence team had absolutely nothing to work with.

Among other things:

• Rocha travelled to the meetings using a “surveillance detection route” (SDR): taking a circuitous route to the meet-up so he could check if he was being followed. Rocha arrived early and found a place to observe the meet-up site from a safe distance for a period of time. For the second meeting, Rocha agreed to the use of a Colombian Pesos bill as a “parole”, and knew without explanation this meant a security protocol, a password or (as in this case) an item, to signal between agent and handler. As the indictment notes, this is all consistent with DI counter-intelligence tradecraft training. There was no need for inference on this point, however. Rocha immediately told the UC that he had acted this way because “it’s what I’ve always been told to do” and then made clear that he had done as “the Dirección asked me”.

• The specific thing the DI had asked Rocha to do was “lead a normal life” after his last meeting with them “in 2016 or 2017”, in Havana, which he travelled to via Panama. (The date was confirmed by prosecutors as January 2017.) To that end, Rocha had “created the legend of a Right-wing person”.  A “legend” is the false background and biography an agent constructs to keep his cover: Rocha’s use of that word—as with referring to the DI as “the Dirección”, even in conversations conducted in Spanish, as they all were—are noted in the indictment as tell-tale signs of a trained Cuban spy. The same is true of his reference to “compañero” (comrades).

• On the same theme, Rocha reacted quite strongly when the UC mentioned “Havana”: “We never utilise ‘Havana’ … I tend to say ‘The Island’. … I never use C or H” (“Cuba” or “Havana”). Rocha was quick to spot the slip, but it did not induce any scepticism about his interlocuter. To the contrary, Rocha signed-off the first meeting by asking the UC to send “my warmest regards to the Dirección”.

• Rocha made plain throughout his loyalty was to the Havana government and he regarded the United States as “the enemy”. “My number one concern, my number one priority was … any action on the part of Washington that would endanger the life of the [Cuban] leadership or the Revolution itself”, Rocha says.

• Rocha confessed that he had worked for the DI for “decades” and when pressed on the point said “about 40 [years]”. Rocha said his service to Cuba’s Communist despotism had been a “huge sacrifice”, requiring a lot of “self-discipline” and the management of internal “tension”, but, “When you have conviction, you have self-discipline”. Rocha said he joined the State Department and made his way “little by little” through the system: “obviously the Dirección accompanied me”.

• Rocha boasted at the Santo Domingo meeting: “They [the U.S. government] underestimated what we could do to them. We did more than they thought. … What we have done … it’s enormous … More than a grand slam.” Rocha added, just to ensure it was as incriminating as possible, that “the Dirección knows” what Rocha did to serve the Cuban Revolution and, when this second meeting broke up, reassured “Miguel” he would be at the next one: “You can ask the Dirección … I was always there.”

• Asked if he would resume his duties, Rocha said: “You guys don’t even have to propose that … if I had access to something worthwhile, I would propose it [to you]”. The only heated exchange with the UC was on this theme, when “Miguel” told Rocha “the Dirección wants to ensure that you are still a Compañero of ours … Are you still with us?” Rocha responded: “I am angry. I am pissed off … because of the question”. Rocha felt it was “like questioning my manhood”, as he explained in colourful terms.

Before a proposed fourth meeting with the UC on 8 December 2023, Rocha was brought in by the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) at the State Department for a voluntary interview on 1 December 2023 in Miami. “During the DSS interview, Rocha lied repeatedly”, the Department of Justice indictment notes. Rocha denied meeting someone matching “Miguel’s” description; when shown a photograph of them meeting, he said “Miguel” approached him one time only; and when told of the evidence of multiple meetings, Rocha went silent.

The crux of the indictment is that Rocha acquired U.S. citizenship and got himself employed in the U.S. government at the behest of Fidel Castro, referred to by Rocha as “the Commandante”, the administrator of the Soviets’ Cuban colony from 1959 until 1991, and tyrant in his own right after that until formally ceding power to his brother, Raul Castro, in 2008. Rocha’s main aims were: (1) gaining access to classified information he could pass to Castro’s DI and thus to Moscow; and (2) influencing U.S. foreign policy in directions advantageous to the Communists. There is no doubt Rocha succeeded at (1), since he “had unique access to non-public United States government information”, and assessing the extent of (2) is an ongoing process. The laws Rocha broke along the way that will play into his sentencing include acquiring American citizenship under false pretences, and repeatedly lying on security clearances and FBI background checks.

A slight oddity that some attentive readers might have spotted is the way Rocha’s caution when it comes to operational security (OPSEC) combines with his complete credulity about “Miguel”. The explanation seems to lie in that first WhatsApp message, where “Miguel” said he knew Rocha had been a “great friend” of Cuba’s “since your time in Chile”, a detail Rocha seems to have believed was known only to the DI. The indictment lays out “independent evidence” that Rocha lived in Chile in 1973, the year the government of KGB asset Salvador Allende was overthrown in a military coup d’état. Allende’s downfall was, from the first hours after it happened and has remained over half-a-century, a cause célèbre on the Western Left, a pillar of their indictment of American “imperialism”. That the CIA had nothing to do with the Chilean coup is irrelevant: it is widely believed the Agency installed General Augusto Pinochet, and the Soviets made great use of the event to radicalise and recruit Westerners. It is unclear whether Rocha needed this “shock” to be seduced by the Soviets. At Yale—which Rocha graduated in 1973—he was already moving in radical Left circles, having been active in supporting the Black Panthers, a racialist Marxist domestic terrorist group in the U.S., and the protest movement demanding the U.S. allow the Soviets to colonise South Vietnam. Moreover, given the speed and ferocity of Pinochet’s crackdown, it is possible, if not probable, that Rocha was recruited in Chile before the coup by the Cubans, who were thick on the ground in the country as part of the Soviet-constructed and -directed security apparatus that upheld Allende’s repressive regime.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland described Rocha’s case as revealing “one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the U.S. government by a foreign agent”. It was very unlikely any other verdict would have been reached in court, hence Rocha decision to change his plea to guilty and accept a plea deal on 29 February. If Rocha agrees to help U.S. intelligence with its damage assessment, he might be able to get a reduced sentence, though at his age there is still every chance he will die in prison.

WHAT MAKES CUBA SUCH A MAJOR SPY THREAT?

James Olson, the CIA’s former head of counterintelligence, clearly hopes Rocha will never again know freedom: “He’s a traitor. He betrayed our country. I think that’s contemptible, and I don’t think he’s going to see the light of day again.” Olson’s rage was not just about Rocha, as he explained: “They owned us. They beat us. That’s one of the reasons I have this personal grudge against the Cuban intelligence service because they have been so successful in operating against us.”

Olson was on watch when Florentino Aspillaga Lombard, the DI station chief in Czechoslovakia, walked into the U.S. Embassy in Vienna in June 1987. In debriefing Aspillaga, Olson was brought to the devastating realisation that every asset the CIA thought it had in Cuba over the preceding three decades—nearly forty agents in all—had been dangles, spies under the control of Castro’s DI. The CIA’s attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro are literally legendary: the number of attempts and their exoticism is vastly exaggerated. But there were efforts and they all, self-evidently, failed, largely because the DI run counter-intelligence rings around the Agency.

Just one example. At the time of President John F. Kennedy’s murder in November 1963, the CIA believed it was on the eve of finally bringing down Castro through a “golden agent” in the Maximum Leader’s inner-circle, Rolando Cubela Secades. It was all a mirage, and after Castro had determined through Cubela that Lyndon Johnson did not share Kennedy’s enthusiasm for the Cuban issue, the operation was terminated: Cubela was “uncovered” and “arrested” in 1966, thereafter being “imprisoned” in a comfortable cell with regular access to his family.

The reason for Cuba’s status as a major security threat during the Cold War is obvious: it was an extension of the Soviet Revolution, Moscow’s dagger at the underbelly of the United States and the bridgehead for the spread of Communism, not only in Latin America. Cuban troops formed the tip of the spear for Soviet imperialism all over Africa from the 1970s onward, from underwriting the gruesome Derg regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia, to training the petting zoo of Communist terrorists (“national liberation movements”) in Angola after the Soviets replaced the Portuguese as colonial masters, and helping coordinate the external encirclement and internal subversion of the National Party government in South Africa.

Tiny, impoverished Cuba remaining among the “Big Four” counter-intelligence threats to the U.S. after the Cold War, alongside Russia, Red China, and Israel, is perhaps more perplexing. One reason is simple: the KGB did a good job—and the connection with Moscow was never broken. One of the things that makes Cuba such a menace, and will make the U.S. damage assessment over Rocha such a painful and difficult task, is that Havana shares information particularly with the Russians, knowing this information will be passed Russia’s Axis allies in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Clerical Iran. Havana does deal with these other powers independently, too. There has been a massive Chinese signals intelligence facility in Cuba since 2019, and Havana works hand-in-glove with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) to extend Axis influence in Western Hemisphere States that fall under Leftist governments. Venezuela is the most powerful such base of operations,³ with Nicaragua and Bolivia not far behind, and Colombia, Chile, Brazil, and until recently Argentina heading the same way.

Another advantage the DI has is the large Cuban exile population in America. This showed up in the Rocha case. One part of his legend-construction as a Right-winger was joining the Cuba Transition Project at the University of Miami. Many Cuban opposition groups are deeply infiltrated by Cuban intelligence, sometimes to the point of wholesale institutional capture by the DI, and a solid majority of the most unhinged anti-Havana public spokesmen are DI agents, meant to make the cause look crazy and contemptible. Rocha even managed to befriend Brian Latell, a most seasoned analyst of, and masterful writer about, Cuban intelligence.

Unlike China, however, Cuba is not limited to operating among émigrés. Perhaps the most potent ingredient Cuba has is ideology. After the repression of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 and particularly after the Soviets crushed Czechoslovakia in 1968, the KGB found it more and more difficult to recruit the high-quality, idealistic Western agents that had flocked to Stalin’s banner in the 1930s and 1940s. Though Castro only “distanced” himself from the Soviets when he rejected Mikhail Gorbachev’s “New Thinking” in the late 1980s, the Cuban Revolution retained its glamour on the “anti-imperialist” Western Left, where anti-Americanism takes precedence over all things.

The DI has had considerable success among Latino-Americans like Rocha. Possibly the most damaging Cuban spy before Rocha was Ana Belen Montes, a Puerto Rican of decidedly radical views on U.S. foreign policy, about which she was vocal, who had no trouble joining the Justice Department in 1984 or the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) the year after. Montes’ anti-yanqui noise-making had made it easy for her to be talent-spotted by a DI agent at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (JHU/SAIS): quickly recruited, Montes took the DIA job on DI orders. Montes would become the top DIA expert on Cuba in the 1990s, with an alarming degree of influence on Pentagon policy, not only through her pro-Havana slanted intelligence assessments. Montes was finally arrested ten days after 9/11, though the signs she was part of larger network got lost. In due course, Montes’ recruiter was identified as Marta Rita Velasquez, for a time an attorney with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), who bonded with Montes at JHU/SAIS over their shared hostility to President Ronald Reagan’s support for anti-Soviet forces in Latin America, principally the Nicaraguan resistance to the Soviets’ Sandinista regime and the government of El Salvador in its bitter struggle with Communist insurgents.

The DI has proven equally adept with WASPs. “The WASP Network” (La Red Avispa) that the U.S. rolled up in Miami in 1998 was decidedly un-WASP-ish in its composition, but a decade later there was the fascinating and slightly pathetic case of Kendall Myers (and his wife), a WASP par excellence, whose trajectory shows considerable similarities to Rocha’s. Known as AGENT 202, when Myers was arrested in June 2009, he had worked for twenty years at the Foreign Services Institute (FSI), the State Department’s training school, and for ten years after that at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), the State Department’s nominal “intelligence agency”, which is really an analysis shop, popular with academics and journalists for its decided liberal bent. Myers had also been a lecturer for twenty years at none other than JHU/SAIS. Like Rocha (and Montes), Myers had taken his government jobs at the FSI and INR at Havana’s instruction—the latter after failing to get into the CIA. Pure ideologues, the Myers couple worked diligently for the DI for thirty years, at great risk, but never took any money from Havana; they actually seem to have lost money spying for the DI. The four-hour meeting with Fidel in 1995 was more than enough payment. The FBI sting on Mr. and Mrs. Myers played out as Rocha’s did, with the happy couple confessing all, while gushing over Castro and damning the U.S., to a UC posing as a DI officer.

What is remarkable is that neither Montes nor Myers ever hid their views, and it actually seems that doing so would have made their covers more difficult. In the milieu they moved in, the more liberal-dominated parts of the U.S. bureaucracy and especially JHU/SAIS, they would have stood out more as anti-Communist critics of Castro’s regime. The Castrophilia at elite American universities shows up in Rocha’s case, too, of course. All this time later—with Castro gone and the Communist regime in Havana devolved into a decrepit military autocracy whose closest friends are Russia and Iran—the allure remains. For the Western intelligentsia, including those in government, even overt expressions of sympathy for the Cuban Revolution rarely raise the kind of red flags that might make the DI’s job just that little bit more difficult.

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NOTES

1. Bolivia’s formal capital is Sucre, but most diplomatic missions are based in La Paz, Santa Cruz, and Cochabamba.

2. Communist Cuba’s primary intelligence agency is the “Intelligence Directorate”, or Dirección de Inteligencia (DI) in Spanish. Older Cuban hands and Cold Warriors often refer to Castro’s secret police as the “DGI”, referring to the Dirección General de Inteligencia (General Intelligence Directorate), which was the DI’s name until 1989.

3. The attempt to topple the Venezuelan autocracy in May 2020 by elements of the opposition and American freebooters, which called itself Operation GIDEON and is more aptly remembered as “the Bay of Piglets”, was such a farcical disaster because the Cubans, who have virtually colonised the Caracas regime, had compromised the enterprise from the get-go.