Former US ambassador charged with spying for Cuba
MIAMI—A former US ambassador to Bolivia has been arrested and charged with spying for Cuba over a 40-year span, the Justice Department announced Monday, detailing a shock betrayal by a suspect who called the United States “the enemy.”
US attorney general Merrick Garland laid out the allegations against Victor Manuel Rocha, a onetime member of the White House’s National Security Council now accused of using his positions to support Cuba’s “clandestine intelligence-gathering mission” against the United States.
The charges against the 73-year-old retired diplomat expose “one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent,” Garland said in a statement.
Rocha, a naturalized US citizen originally from Colombia, allegedly began aiding Havana as a covert agent of Cuba’s General Directorate of Intelligence (DGI) in 1981, and his espionage activities continued to the present, the statement said.
‘The enemy’Garland said Rocha spoke at length with someone he believed to be a Cuban operative but who was in fact an undercover FBI agent.
“Rocha repeatedly referred to the United States as ‘the enemy’” and spoke of his own “meticulous” efforts to infiltrate Washington’s power center and influence American foreign policy, Garland said. —AFP
