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Manuel Rocha was well known in Miami\u2019s elite circles for an aristocratic, almost regal, bearing that seemed fitting for an Ivy League-educated career U.S. diplomat who held top posts in Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba and the White House. \u201cAmbassador Rocha,\u201d as he preferred to be called, demanded and got respect.<\/p>\n
So former CIA operative F\u00e9lix Rodr\u00edguez was dubious in 2006 when a defected Cuban Army lieutenant colonel showed up at his Miami home with a startling tip: \u201cRocha,\u201d he quoted the man as saying, \u201cis spying for Cuba.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rodriguez, who participated in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba and the execution of revolutionary \u201cChe\u201d Guevara, believed at the time that the Rocha tip was an attempt to discredit a fellow anti-communist crusader. He said he nonetheless passed the defector\u2019s message along to the CIA, which was similarly skeptical.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo one believed him,\u201d Rodriguez said in an interview with The Associated Press. \u201cWe all thought it was a smear.\u201d<\/p>\n
That long-ago tip came rushing back in devastating clarity in December when the now-73-year-old Rocha was arrested and\u00a0charged with serving as a secret agent of Cuba<\/a>\u00a0stretching back to the 1970s \u2014 what prosecutors called one of the most brazen and long-running betrayals in the history of the U.S. State Department.<\/p>\n Rocha was secretly recorded by an undercover FBI agent praising Fidel Castro as \u201cEl Comandante\u201d and bragging about his work for Cuba\u2019s communist government, calling it \u201cmore than a grand slam\u201d against the U.S. \u201cenemy.\u201d And to hide his true allegiances, prosecutors and friends say, Rocha in recent years adopted the fake persona of an avid Donald Trump supporter who talked tough against the island nation.<\/p>\n \u201cI really admired this son of a bitch,\u201d an angry Rodr\u00edguez said. \u201cI want to look him in the eye and ask him why he did it. He had access to everything.\u201d<\/p>\n As Rocha pleaded not guilty from jail this week to\u00a015 federal counts<\/a>, FBI and State Department investigators have been working to decipher the case\u2019s biggest missing piece: exactly what the longtime diplomat may have given up to Cuba. It\u2019s a confidential damage assessment, complicated by the often-murky intelligence world, that\u2019s expected to take years.<\/p>\n The AP spoke with two dozen former senior U.S. counterintelligence officials, Cuban intelligence defectors, and friends and colleagues of Rocha to piece together what is known so far of his alleged betrayal, and the missed clues and red flags that could have helped him avoid scrutiny for decades.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t just Rodr\u00edguez\u2019s tipster \u2014 whom he refused to identify to the AP but says was recently interviewed by the FBI. Officials told the AP that as early 1987, the CIA was aware Castro had a \u201csuper mole\u201d burrowed deep inside the U.S. government. Some now suspect it could have been Rocha and that since at least 2010 he may have been on a short list given to the FBI of possible Cuban spies high up in foreign policy circles.<\/p>\n Rocha\u2019s attorney did not respond to repeated messages seeking comment. The FBI and CIA declined to comment, and the State Department didn\u2019t respond to requests.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a monumental screw-up,\u201d said Peter Romero, a former assistant secretary of state for Latin America who worked with Rocha. \u201cAll of us are doing a lot of soul searching and nobody can come up with anything. He did an amazing job covering his tracks.\u201dHUMBLE BEGINNINGS<\/p>\n Before he was charged with being a Cuban agent, Rocha\u2019s life embodied the American dream.<\/p>\n He was born in Colombia and at age 10 moved with his widowed mother and two siblings to New York City. They lived for a while in Harlem while his mother worked in a sweatshop and got by with the help of food stamps.<\/p>\n A talented soccer player with a sharp intellect, he won a scholarship for minorities in 1965 to attend The Taft School, an elite boarding school in Connecticut. Overnight he was catapulted from what he called a \u201cghetto\u201d engulfed in race riots to a refined world of American wealth.<\/p>\n \u201cTaft was the best thing that happened to my life,\u201d he told the school\u2019s alumni magazine in 2004.<\/p>\n But as one of only a few minorities at the school, Rocha says he suffered discrimination \u2014 including a classmate who refused to room with him \u2014 something that fueled a grudge that friends suspect may have led him to admire Castro\u2019s revolution.<\/p>\n \u201cI was devastated and considered suicide,\u201d he told the alumni magazine.<\/p>\n From Taft, he went to Yale, where he graduated with honors with a degree in Latin American studies, and then on to graduate work at Harvard and Georgetown.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not clear exactly how Rocha may have been recruited by Cuba but prosecutors say it happened sometime in the 1970s when he was still racking up degrees and American college campuses were teeming with students sympathetic to leftist causes.<\/p>\n In 1973, the year he graduated from Yale, Rocha traveled to Chile, where prosecutors say he became a \u201cgreat friend\u201d of Cuba\u2019s intelligence agency, the General Directorate of Intelligence, or DGI. That same year, the CIA helped topple the Castro-backed socialist government of Salvador Allende, replacing it with a brutal military dictatorship.<\/p>\n Around the same time, Rocha entered the first of his three marriages, to an older Colombian woman he barely spoke about to friends, and who is now under scrutiny for possible ties to Cuba, according to those who have been questioned by the FBI. The AP was unable to reach the woman or locate any record of their marriage.\u2018ALL PART OF A PLAN\u2019<\/p>\n After joining the foreign service in 1981, one of Rocha\u2019s first overseas postings was as a political-military affairs officer in Honduras, where he advised the Contras in their fight against Cuba-backed leftist rebels in neighboring Nicaragua.<\/p>\n In 1994, he went to the White House to work as director of Inter-American Affairs on the National Security Council, with responsibility for Cuba. That same year, he wrote a memo, \u201cA Calibrated Response to Cuban Reforms,\u201d urging the Clinton administration to begin dismantling U.S. trade restrictions, according to Peter Kornbluh, a national security expert who interviewed Rocha for a 2014 book.<\/p>\n The secretary of state planned to announce the policy overhaul following the U.S. midterm elections, according to Kornbluh. But that speech was never delivered. Republican hardliners who took control of Congress enacted legislation in 1996 hardening the embargo and blocking any effort to improve relations with Havana.<\/p>\n From Washington, Rocha was dispatched to Havana, where he served for two years as the principal deputy of the U.S. Interests Section. It was a perilous time \u2014 in the wake of the 1996 aerial shootdown of a\u00a0\u201cBrothers to the Rescue\u201d propaganda plane<\/a>\u00a0over Cuba that killed four Castro opponents \u2014 and the DGI would have had almost unfettered access to the diplomat.<\/p>\n Rocha\u2019s biggest known favor to Cuba, intentional or not, came during his final and most important diplomatic post, as U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, when he intervened in the country\u2019s presidential election to help a Castro prot\u00e9g\u00e9.<\/p>\n At an embassy event in 2002, Rocha inserted into his carefully scripted remarks a warning to Bolivians that voting for a narcotrafficker \u2014 a not-so veiled reference to coca grower-turned-presidential candidate Evo Morales \u2014 would lead the U.S. to cut off all foreign assistance.<\/p>\n \u201cI remember it vividly. I was so uncomfortable,\u201d said Liliana Ayalde, a fellow foreign service officer who later served as U.S. ambassador to Paraguay and Brazil. \u201cI told him it wasn\u2019t appropriate for the ambassador to say these remarks with elections just around the corner.\u201d<\/p>\n The backlash was immediate. Bolivians deeply resented the idea of the U.S. interfering in their elections, and Morales, until then a long shot, surged in the polls and almost won. Three years later when he did prevail, he credited Rocha with being his \u201cbest campaign chief.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, Ayalde wonders whether Rocha\u2019s last hurrah as a foreign service officer was an act of self-sabotage, done at the direction of a foreign power to further damage the U.S.\u2019 standing in Latin America, traditionally referred to as \u201cWashington\u2019s backyard.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNow that I look back,\u201d she said, \u201cit was all part of a plan.\u201dSUPER MOLE?<\/p>\n As early as 1987, when Rocha was a few years into his ascendant career, the U.S. was made aware of a Cuban \u201csuper mole\u201d burrowed into the Washington establishment, according to Brian Latell, a former CIA analyst.<\/p>\n The information was provided by Florentino Aspillaga, who defected while heading the DGI\u2019s office in Bratislava, now the capital of Slovakia.<\/p>\n Before Aspillaga died in 2018, he told the CIA that four dozen Cubans it recruited were actually double agents \u2014 or \u201cdangles\u201d in spy parlance\u2014 carefully selected by the DGI to penetrate the U.S. government. Latell said Aspillaga also spoke of two highly productive spies inside the State Department.<\/p>\n While Aspillaga didn\u2019t know any of their names, the revelation sent shockwaves through the CIA.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of Aspillaga\u2019s major revelations was that Fidel Castro himself was serving to a large degree as Cuba\u2019s spymaster,\u201d Latell said.<\/p>\n Enrique Garcia, who defected to the U.S. in the 1990s, also caught wind of the clandestine spy ring while running Cuban agents in Latin America. He said the documents he saw, which carried \u201cTop Secret\u201d and State Department markings, were so valuable that they were sent directly to Castro\u2019s residence, bypassing the interior minister who oversaw the DGI.<\/p>\n \u201cI have no doubt Rocha was part of that ring,\u201d said Garcia, who told the FBI about the spy ring years ago.<\/p>\n Jim Popkin, author of \u201cCode Name Blue Wren,\u201d a book about Ana Montes, the highest-level U.S. official ever\u00a0convicted of spying for Cuba<\/a>, said his intelligence sources recently told him that Rocha\u2019s name was on a short list of at least four possible Cuban spies that had been in the FBI\u2019s hands since at least 2010. AP was not able to independently confirm that.<\/p>\n \u201cThe FBI has been aware of Rocha for a dozen years,\u201d Popkin said. \u201cThat\u2019s likely what stirred interest that led to his arrest years later.\u201d<\/p>\n Peter Lapp, who oversaw FBI counterintelligence against Cuba between 1998 and 2005, and wrote a book on Montes, \u201cQueen of Cuba,\u201d said he was unaware whether Rocha had been on the bureau\u2019s radar. But he acknowledged that in the national security hierarchy, Cuba is often an afterthought to Russia, China and more dangerous threats.<\/p>\n At the time of Rodr\u00edguez\u2019s 2006 tip about Rocha spying for Cuba, for instance, U.S. counterintelligence investigators were occupied with the U.S. war in Iraq, the airstrike that killed al-Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and controversial detention and interrogation programs overseas.<\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t get promoted to the senior ranks of the FBI counterintelligence division by focusing on Cuba,\u201d Lapp said. \u201cBut it\u2019s a country we ignore at our peril. Not only are the Cubans really good at human intelligence but they are experts at brokering information to some of our biggest adversaries.\u201d Following his retirement from the foreign service in 2002, Rocha embarked on a lucrative career in business, racking up a number of senior positions and consulting jobs at private equity firms, a public relations agency, a Chinese automaker and even a company in the cannabis industry.<\/p>\n \u201cI have access to just about every country in the region or know how to get it,\u201d he\u00a0bragged<\/a>\u00a0to the Miami Herald in 2006.<\/p>\n From 2012 to 2018, he served as president of Barrick Gold\u2019s subsidiary in the Dominican Republic, overseeing production at the world\u2019s sixth-largest gold mine. Rodr\u00edguez\u2019s mementos of his one-time friendship with Rocha include a photo of the former diplomat in a hard hat lugging around a freshly extracted chunk of gold.<\/p>\n John Feeley, who worked under Rocha when he joined the State Department and eventually became ambassador to Panama, remembers his former mentor urging him to reject pro bono work in retirement and instead chase a paycheck.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was openly and vocally motivated by making money in his post-foreign service career,\u201d Feeley said, \u201cwhich wasn\u2019t typical among former diplomats.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018I HAVE ACCESS\u2019<\/p>\n