U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that Victor Manuel Rocha, the former U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, has been charged with acting illegally as a foreign agent for the government of Cuba.
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A retired American diplomat made his first court appearance Monday in Miami in a potentially explosive espionage case.
Prosecutors say Victor Manuel Rocha, 73, spent over 40 years spying for Cuba while he rose through the State Department, where he was U.S. ambassador to Bolivia during the Clinton administration.
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,” Monday at a press conference.
Rocha has been charged in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida with one count of Acting as an Illegal Agent of a Foreign Government, one count of conspiracy to do so and a third count, Use of a Passport Obtained by a False Statement. The Dec. 1 complaint was unsealed Monday.
But the sworn accounts by FBI agents paint a much bigger picture of Rocha’s alleged activities than the individual charges convey.
“Beginning no later than approximately 1981, and continuing to the present, Rocha secretly supported the Republic of Cuba and its clandestine intelligence-gathering mission against the United States by serving as a covert agent of Cuba’s intelligence services,” the indictment alleges.
“To further that role, Rocha obtained and maintained employment in the United States government in positions that provided him: (1) access to nonpublic information, including classified information; and (2) the ability to affect United States foreign policy,” wrote prosecutors.
Rocha was only apprehended as the result of a year long undercover FBI operation, according to the DOJ.
Undercover FBI agents posing as Cuban operatives met with Rocha several times in the past year, according to the complaint.
The life Rocha allegedly described to…
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