The former United States Ambassador to Bolivia, Manual Rocha, has been arrested and charged with being a "clandestine agent" for Cuba since 1981.
The charges against the individual were unsealed by the Justice Department on Monday and accused Rocha of betraying his country by acting on behalf of Cuba's spy agency for decades. The development capped a year-long undercover sting operation against the 73-year-old.
Former Ambassador Charged of Being Double Agent
It involved a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent pretending to be a Cuban intelligence operative who secretly recorded Rocha making incriminating statements about his life of diplomatic deception.
In a statement, Attorney General Merrick Garland called Rocha's case "one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent." He added that in the recorded conversations, the individual allegedly referred to the U.S. as "the enemy."
The news of the former ambassador's alleged crimes has shocked his friends and colleagues in U.S. diplomatic and intelligence circles. A former senior CIA intelligence official, Brian Latell said that he never suspected or had the slightest suspicion that Rocha was living a double life as described by the charging documents, as per the Washington Post.
Latell, who met Rocha in the early 1980s, added that he believes he knew his friend as well as anyone else. However, he never stopped to think that such a thing was possible. He called Rocha a person with many talents and more facets than he ever imagined despite being so close for so many years.
Former FBI agent Peter Lapp also said that Rocha's case is "very disturbing and concerning" due to the amount and types of intelligence that the defendant could access during his tenure. He said that the court papers in the case suggest that the FBI used a different undercover agent to get the suspect talking, incriminating himself in the process.
Manuel Rocha's Decades-Long Deception
That technique was similar to the agency's successful work against another former State Department employee, Kendall Myers, who admitted his own crimes. If there are no such admissions, it is unlikely that prosecutors could bring charges over suspicious conduct that happened many years in the past.
On Monday, Garland said that the people who have the privilege of serving in the government of the U.S. are given an enormous amount of trust by the public that they serve. He noted that betraying that trust by falsely pledging loyalty to the country while serving another nation will be "met with the full force" of the DOJ, according to NBC News.
The defendant's 25-year diplomatic career was spent under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Much of his time in politics was spent during the Cold War in Latin America, which was a period of sometimes heavy-handed U.S. political and military policies.
Rocha's diplomatic postings included a stint at the U.S. Interests Section in Cuba at a time when the U.S. lacked full diplomatic relations with Fidel Castro's communist government. He was born in Colombia and raised in a working-class home in New York City, said the Associated Press.
