Former American diplomat Victor Manuel Rocha was arrested for years of espionage for Cuba.
This is reported by the Associated Press.
Earlier, the United States accused the US ambassador to Bolivia of secretly working for the Cuban government. Prosecutors called the case one of the most egregious betrayals at the State Department.
73-year-old Victor Manuel Rocha headed the US diplomatic service in various countries for decades. His 25-year career was mostly spent in Latin American countries. He worked, inter alia, in Mexico, Argentina and the Dominican Republic, and from 1981 he acted as a "secret agent of the Cuban government". This is stated in the documents made public in the Federal Court in Miami, as the Financial Times reports.
The US Department of Justice said that Rocha used positions in various embassies and the National Security Council to gain access to classified information and "influence US foreign policy." He is also accused of providing false information to the US authorities in order to "perform his secret mission".
"This case exposes one of the largest and longest infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent," said Attorney General Merrick Garland.
For the past two years, Manuel Rocha has had a close relationship with an undercover FBI agent posing as a Cuban spy. During meetings with a law enforcement officer, Rocha said that he had cooperated with Cuban intelligence for 40 years, and also called the United States an "enemy" and the late Cuban leader Fidel Castro a "commander".
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said they will work with U.S. intelligence in the near future to assess the long-term national security implications of Rochaʼs activities.
What is known about Manuel Rocha
Rocha was born in Columbia, grew up in New York, and was educated at Yale, Harvard and Georgetown universities. He entered the diplomatic service in 1981, during the last decade of the Cold War, and began his work for Cuba.
In those days, the communist government of the island was a close ally of the Soviet Union. In 1991, the USSR collapsed, and a deep economic crisis began in Cuba.
From 1997 to 2000, Rocha headed the US diplomatic service in Argentina. Later, he was appointed ambassador to Bolivia. Then he directly intervened in the 2002 presidential race, warning weeks before the vote that the US would end aid to the impoverished American country if it elected former coca grower Evo Morales as president. Rochaʼs actions were interpreted as an attempt to maintain US dominance in the region. According to many commentators, this gave Morales additional voter support.
After leaving the State Department in 2002, Rocha continued to work for Cuban intelligence, holding advisory positions in the United States. In particular, from 2006 to 2012, he advised the head of the US Southern Command, which oversaw military operations in Latin America and the Caribbean.