USA, “Cuba’s agent for decades”. The scandal involves a former ambassador

A former ambassador, Manuel Rocha, was arrested in the United States on charges of having been a “clandestine agent” for Cuba for decades. According to what was announced by the US Department of Justice, the 73-year-old diplomat was discovered during a secret operation for more than a year, with an FBI agent posing as a Cuban spy to record Rocha confessing his espionage activity. Attorney General Merrick Garland released a statement calling the Rocha case “one of the highest-level and longest-running infiltrations of the American government by a foreign agent.”

Born in Colombia and naturalized as an American in 1978, Rocha entered diplomacy in 1981 and in that year began “secretly supporting the Republic of Cuba and the clandestine mission to collect intelligence information against the United States”. To create a disguise, Rocha developed a reputation as a “right-wing person”, when in fact he was committed to the cause of the Cuban communist regime. Over the years, Rocha held various positions both at the State Department and at US embassies in several Latin American countries.

Between mid-1994 and mid-1995 he was on the National Security Council, and among his dossiers was that of Cuba. His espionage activity consisted not only in collecting information, but also in disseminating false and misleading information within the government American. Between 1999 and 2002 he was ambassador to Bolivia, a position that gave him access to confidential information. Then, from 2006 to 2012, he was an advisor to the southern military command, whose responsibility includes Cuba. The indictment does not specify how the FBI began to suspect that Rocha was an undercover agent, but reference is made to a tip that arrived “before November 2022.”