US charges former ambassador to Bolivia with spying for Cuba

The US has charged a former ambassador to Bolivia with spying for Cuba in a case that prosecutors are calling one of the most egregious betrayals to have ever taken place at the state department.

Victor Manuel Rocha, 73, who was also posted to Mexico, Argentina and the Dominican Republic during a decades-long career, had been acting as “a clandestine agent of the Cuban government” since 1981, according to documents unsealed on Monday in federal court in Miami.

Rocha is alleged to have sought out and leveraged positions at various embassies and on the National Security Council in order to access classified information and “affect US foreign policy”, according to a statement from the Department of Justice.

He is also accused of providing false information to US authorities in order to “maintain his secret mission”.

Rocha was formally charged on Monday with conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government without prior notification to the attorney-general, acting as an agent of a foreign government and using a passport obtained by false statement.

“This action exposes one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent,” attorney-general Merrick Garland said on Monday.

Matthew Olsen, the assistant attorney-general of the justice department’s national security division, said: “For decades, Rocha allegedly worked as a covert agent for Cuba and abused his position of trust in the US government to advance the interests of a foreign power.”

Rocha was born in Colombia and became a naturalised US citizen. His alleged work for Cuba began in 1981, during the final decade of the cold war, when the island’s Communist government was a close ally of the Soviet Union.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Cuba, without its principal benefactor, entered its so-called special period of economic crisis, Rocha continued serving the interest of Havana’s intelligence agencies, prosecutors said.

Rocha worked in the US foreign service for two decades, rising up to serve as ambassador to Bolivia from 2002. During that time he also served in Honduras and from 1995-1997 at the US Interests Section in Havana, which represented Washington in the country as it did not have formal diplomatic relations.

After leaving the state department in 2002, Rocha is accused of continuing to aid Cuba’s intelligence agency until the present day while working in a number of advisory roles, including a stint from 2006 to 2012 advising the head of the US Southern Command, which oversees military operations across Latin America and the Caribbean.

Rocha — who appeared in a Miami courtroom on Monday wearing a tan jumpsuit — is alleged to have taken meetings over the past two years with an undercover FBI agent posing as a Cuban spy, during which he agreed to continue “40 years” of working with Cuba’s intelligence authorities.

In those meetings, Rocha described the US as “the enemy” and referred to Fidel Castro, Cuba’s late leader, as “comandante”, according to court documents.

Matthew Miller, a state department spokesperson, told reporters on Monday that his office “will in the coming days, weeks, months, work with our partners in the intelligence community to assess any long-term national security implications for this matter”.

Lawyers for Rocha were not immediately reachable for comment.