Manuel Rocha, former U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, for almost 40 years has supported Cuban intelligence services in secret. The seventy-three-year-old’s services were against the United States. His charges include “conspiracy, acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government, and unlawful use of a passport obtained by a false statement.”
For 25 years, Rocha worked for both Republican and Democratic administrations. He worked primarily in Latin America during the Cold War. He was born in Columbia in the year 1950, and later, in the 1960s, he made his way to New York with his mother. He graduated from Yale, Harvard, and Georgetown with three liberal arts degrees. In 1981, he joined the foreign service. Between 1997 and 2000, Rocha was the top diplomat in Argentina. President Bill Clinton, in the year 2000, appointed Rocha as the ambassador to Bolivia. A month later, he was sworn in. Rocha has not only served Bolivia and Argentina but as well as Italy, Honduras, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. Also, he worked as a Latin American expert for the National Security Council.
In reality, his diplomatic career was all part of a plan by “the Direccion.” Recordings of Rocha imply that he knew exactly what he was doing when trying to uncover the secrets of the United States to share with Cuba. The recordings disclose that “I [Rocha] went little by little. It was a very meticulous process, very disciplined — but very disciplined. I knew exactly how to do it, and obviously, the Dirrecion accompanied me.” He also claimed that he “received sufficient training.”
The FBI first received information about Rocha being an undercover agent in November of last year. Using WhatsApp, the bureau sent Rocha a message claiming they had a message from his friends in Havana. Rocha took the bait and unknowingly agreed to meet with an undercover agent of the bureau in Miami the following day. Rocha told the agent while on his way that he was taking an extended and divergent route, noting that he “received sufficient training to know that you must be on the alert.” This suggests that Rocha has everything to hide if he must take precautionary measures when meeting certain people.
In an interview with two Diplomatic Security Service agents on December 1 this year, Rocha decidedly died and lying. When asked if he had ever met with the undercover agent from the year before, Rocha’s response was no, even when shown a clear picture of him and the agent meeting up.
Rocha will most likely not be getting away with this since an agent of the Diplomatic Security Service expressed that “Those who have the privilege of serving the government of the United States are given an enormous amount of trust by the public we serve, to betray that trust by falsely pledging loyalty to the United States, while serving a foreign power, is a crime that will be met with the full force of the Justice Department.”
