Ex-US ambassador accused of being Cuban agent Rose from humble origins
The indictment of Manuel Rocha, the former U.S. ambassador accused of working for decades for the Cuban spy agency, leaves longtime colleagues struggling to understand what was real and what was a hoax in a life that spanned poverty and privileges.
The journey that led Mr. Rocha, 73, to the top of the State Department began in Harlem in the 1960s after he and his mother, a widow who worked in a sweatshop and relied on food stamps and welfare, left Colombia emigrated. in an account he provided years later.
A life-changing breakthrough came in 1965, when Mr. Rocha won a scholarship to attend the Taft School, an elite boarding school in Connecticut that unlocked a range of academic and career opportunities, including an Ivy League education and influential government jobs abroad.
The transition sometimes made him feel like an outsider. For example, Mr. Rocha’s best friend refused to become his roommate because of his ethnicity, according to his report to the school’s alumni magazine.
“I was devastated and thought about suicide,” Mr. Rocha told the magazine in 2004, shortly after retiring from the State Department.
Since his arrest a week ago, friends and former colleagues have expressed shock at absorbing the allegations in a federal indictment that Attorney General Merrick Garland said describes one of the “largest and longest-lasting” breaches of national security in generations.
Federal prosecutors said Cuba’s aggressive intelligence agency recruited Mr. Rocha in Chile in the early 1970s, at the height of the Cold War, and relied on him as he rose through the ranks of the State Department and briefly served in a powerful role in the White House. House during the Cold War. Clinton administration.
Cuba, which has had hostile relations with the United States since the 1960s, has achieved remarkable success in infiltrating the U.S. national security establishment by seeking out ideologically oriented young individuals and steering them into sensitive government careers.
Investigators did not say whether they believed Mr. Rocha’s alleged betrayal was motivated by money, ideology or something else. The indictment does not specify the nature of Rocha’s dealings with the Cubans or accuse him of sharing specific secrets.
Mr. Rocha was accused of acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government, of wire fraud and of lying on passport application forms, but he is notably not accused of espionage. The government will likely file espionage charges if it finds sufficient evidence that Mr. Rocha disclosed classified information to the Cubans, it said Brandon VanGracka former federal prosecutor who worked on national security cases.
Trying to wrap your hands around what could have been compromised over 40 years will be “incredibly intimidating,” he said. In other espionage cases involving Cubahe noted, the government has offered plea deals in exchange for a complete accounting of how Cuba recruited and treated its American spies.
Mr. Rocha’s lawyer, Jacqueline Arango, did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Rocha has not yet entered a plea.
What is clear is that Rocha’s 21 years in government gave him the opportunity to shape foreign policy in an underhanded way, and gave him access to a wealth of classified information that would have been enormously valuable for Cuba and its allies. Experts say a comprehensive damage assessment could take years.
“I feel so betrayed that I can’t stand it,” said Liliana Ayalde, one of the women former American diplomat who worked under him in Bolivia when Mr. Rocha served as ambassador. “I’m exhausted thinking about all the unknowns.”
When he came to Taft, Mr. Rocha moved from Harlem, which was hit by the race riots of 1964, to a rural campus in Watertown, Conn., where he excelled as a student and athlete.
Glenn T. Tucker, 72, a classmate, remembered Mr. Rocha as a gifted football player who was friendly and remarkably disciplined and ambitious.
“He was focused on working hard and following the rules, perhaps because he knew that because of his background he could easily be thrown out of this world of privilege that he had worked himself into so effectively,” Mr Tucker said.
The 1969 Taft yearbook contains a joke about Mr. Rocha, saying, “He reminds us of a playboy on welfare,” and mentions his nickname, a racial slur against Latinos. At school, Mr. Rocha once proposed creating a system to immerse a single white student in groups of black peers, “a way for the majority to understand how the minority would feel,” he told the alumni magazine. The idea was scuttled.
After high school, Mr. Rocha about 30 miles away to Yale University, where the unrest of the 1960s and 1970s took place – especially the student protests against the Vietnam War and support for the Black Panther Party, a Marxist black power group. He graduated cum laude in 1973.
After college, Mr. Rocha traveled to Chile, which was in the midst of social and political unrest. The year he graduated, the military forcibly deposed Salvador Allende, the country’s socialist president, ushering in a brutal U.S.-backed dictatorship.
According to the indictment, Cuba’s spy agency, known as the Intelligence Directorate, recruited Mr. Rocha in Chile in the year of the coup. The document sheds little light on how that relationship began, other than to say that Mr. Rocha became a “great friend” of the agency.
Later that decade, Mr. Rocha graduated from Harvard and Georgetown and earned master’s degrees in public administration and foreign affairs. In 1978, Mr. Rocha became a U.S. citizen, a requirement for entering the Foreign Service and obtaining a security clearance.
About that time Mr. Rocha, who worked at a small government agency that financed development projects in Latin America, struck up a relationship with Brian Latell, a CIA analyst who focused on Cuba and Latin America. In an interview, Mr. Latell said he was teaching at Georgetown when Mr. Rocha visited his home in Virginia several times around 1980 and 1981, often bringing friends from Latin America. Mr Latell said there was nothing to worry about.
“It never seemed like it, but I’m sure he was pumping me,” Mr. Latell said. “He did it so discreetly.”
In 1981, Mr. Rocha joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The following year he was sent to the Dominican Republic, the first stop in a career that included assignments in Honduras, Italy, Mexico, Cuba, Argentina and a coveted post in the White House in 1994.
Former colleagues described Mr. Rocha as a careerist who had a knack for landing influential jobs in the foreign service. He was sociable and used his native command of Spanish to build relationships throughout Latin America. But some colleagues said they found him pompous, arrogant and a shameless womanizer.
“He was extremely charming,” said John Feeley, a former colleague who met Mr. Rocha as a mentor and friend for many years. “He was a bon vivant and a determined ladies’ man in a culture that looks down on that.”
Fulton Armstronga former senior CIA and White House official who worked closely with Mr. Rocha and remained close after both men retired, said Mr. Rocha always felt like an outsider.
“The feeling he gave me was that he resented the fact that throughout his life, despite his strong intellect and hard work, he always felt like he was a second-class citizen,” Mr. Armstrong said. That perception of himself, he added, may have made Mr. Rocha an easy target for the Cubans.
Early in his diplomatic career, while stationed in Honduras, Mr. Rocha appeared to trade in the liberal politics of his youth for a portrait of himself as an ardent conservative.
The capstone of his career was the ambassadorship to Bolivia in 2000. Early in his term of office, he startled colleagues in Washington and La Paz by brazenly interfering in the upcoming Bolivian elections. Mr. Rocha urged Bolivian voters not to vote for a leading candidate, Evo Morales, an indigenous politician who had risen to prominence as the leader of a coca farmers’ union. A Morales victory, he warned, could jeopardize Bolivia’s massive U.S. aid package.
Ms. Ayalde, the former colleague, who at the time oversaw U.S. aid to Bolivia, recalled being appalled.
“Sir, this is completely inappropriate,” she recalled telling him at the time. “We don’t want to politicize this because the elections are just around the corner.”
Mr. Rocha’s heavy-handed message also struck American officials as self-defeating because it appeared to embolden Mr. Morales, a socialist politician ideologically linked to the Cuban government. “Now I look back and think, maybe it was all part of a plan,” Ms Ayalde said. Mr Morales lost the 2000 elections but became president in 2006.
A few years later, Mr. Rocha again stunned his colleagues by resigning from the State Department, well before the end of the three-year term of ambassadors. His resignation letter, circulated by disapproving colleagues, conveyed a desire to make better money in the private sector to build a college fund for his children, Ms. Ayalde recalled.
After retiring, Mr. Rocha moved to Miami and pursued several business opportunities, including a gold mine in the Dominican Republic, a Chinese automaker trying to make headway in Latin America, a law firm and a public relations firm.
Throughout the period, he leaned on years of relationships he had built throughout Latin America.
“I have access to virtually every country in the region, or know how to get it,” he boasted to The Miami Herald in 2006.
More recently, Mr. Rocha surprised friends and former colleagues by voicing his fervent support for former President Donald J. Trump. The charging document quotes Mr. Rocha telling an undercover FBI official posing as a Cuban spy that his right-wing politics were part of a cover story.
Although the State Department has begun a comprehensive internal damage assessment, decades have passed since Mr. Rocha entered government service.
The indictment does not say how the investigation began, nor does it suggest that Mr. Rocha has had recent contact with the island’s spy agency. But when the undercover FBI agent asked whether Mr. Rocha was still loyal to Cuba, he was unequivocal. The question stung, so Mr. Rocha was recorded.
“It’s like you’re questioning my masculinity,” he allegedly said.
Glenn Thrush contributed reporting. Julie Tate, Sheelagh McNeill and Susan Beachy contributed research.