OAN’s Abril Elfi
6:18 PM – Thursday, February 29, 2024
A former career U.S. diplomat and former U.S. ambassador to Bolivia who admitted to a judge that he spied for Cuba for decades will plead guilty to his charges.
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On Thursday, Victor Manuel Rocha, 73, admitted to spying for Cuba and told the judge that he “intends to plead guilty to federal charges.”
Rocha was first indicted in December of last year on charges accusing him of being a spy for Cuba’s intelligence agency for decades. During the hearing, Rocha said that he would agree to plead guilty to two charges of conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government.
Regarding his guilty plea, prosecutors agreed to drop over a dozen additional charges, according to AP News.
The maximum sentence for the two counts is five to ten years in prison. When the judge asked Rocha if he wanted to change his plea, he said, “I am in agreement.” Following the hearing, his intention to modify his plea was noted on the case docket. Rocha’s next court date is April 12th.
Investigators said that in 1973, Rocha was enlisted in Chile by the Directorate of Intelligence, the spy organization of Cuba. Prosecutors claim that the intelligence service told him to fabricate a story in order to hide his “double life.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland described the case as “one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the U.S. government by a foreign agent.” He also stated that Rocha pursued U.S. government jobs that “would provide him with access to non-public information and the ability to affect U.S. foreign policy.”
The kind of information Rocha might have divulged to Cuba or how he could have influenced U.S. policy has not been publicly released.
The retired diplomat had believed that the undercover FBI agent who set up meetings with him was a representative of Cuba’s spy agency, and Rocha had at least three separate meetings with the disguised agent. He referred to the U.S. as “the enemy” and said “what we have done” was “enormous” and “more than a grand slam,” according to the criminal complaint.
“My number one concern; my number one priority was … any action on the part of Washington that would endanger the life of the leadership, or the revolution itself,” Rocha allegedly told the undercover agent.
Being born in Colombia, Rocha obtained U.S. citizenship through naturalization in 1978. He began working for the State Department in 1981 and held a number of positions in Latin America for more than 20 years, including ambassador to Bolivia from 2000 to 2002. He had jurisdiction over Cuba while working as the National Security Council’s director for inter-American affairs and as the deputy principal officer of the American embassy in Havana. Following his departure from the State Department, he served as an advisor to the commander of the U.S. Southern Command, which surrounds Cuba.
Rocha’s employment with the U.S. government overlapped with that of Ana Montes, a former Defense Intelligence Agency Analyst who spent 20 years in prison for spying for Cuba before she was released in 2023. Montes was recruited by Cuban intelligence in 1984 before she was hired by the Defense Intelligence Agency.
In one of his meetings with the undercover FBI agent, prosecutors said Rocha praised a U.S. government employee who had spied for Cuba, saying she “was betrayed.”
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