Cuban spies still a threat to US national security

When the FBI broke the stunning news late last year that it had arrested a former U.S. ambassador on charges of conspiring with the Cuban government for four decades, one member of the U.S. diplomatic community was not surprised. State Department counterintelligence expert Robert Booth had identified Ambassador Manuel Rocha as a possible Cuban agent more than a dozen years ago — and immediately shared his findings with the FBI.

This month, in his first public comments on the case, Booth told me that the FBI approached him around 2009. The Bureau believed that Cuba’s intelligence service, the

DGI, had been communicating with a U.S. government employee. “They suspected there was enough evidence that the Cubans had an asset” inside a U.S. embassy in Latin America, Booth said.

Booth reviewed microfilm records, conducted interviews and tried to match State workers with the FBI’s random clues. In 2010, he succeeded. Rocha, the debonair former ambassador to Bolivia, was on Booth’s short list of four possible Cuban spies. “He met the profile, the matrix. He was at those embassies at that time frame,” he said. Booth turned the names over to the FBI, retired and rarely thought about Rocha again.

Rocha is back in the news. The FBI has only said that, before November 2022, it “received information” that Rocha was a DGI covert agent. But we now know the FBI had reason to suspect Rocha 13 years ago.

Why did it take investigators so long? And did Rocha continue to share damaging national security information with the Cubans during that 13year gap? We are only now beginning to understand the depths of Rocha’s alleged treachery, and the intelligence community’s seemingly feckless response to the possibility that a U.S. ambassador with top security clearances might have been compromised.

Again and again, the DGI has successfully infiltrated top American agencies with ideological recruits. Their patience is legendary.

In 1979, the Cubas recruited Kendall Myers, great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell, as a spy at the State Department. He would share secrets with Cuba for decades before his arrest and conviction.

Next, it was Rocha’s turn. According to his criminal complaint, the Cubans began working with the young would-be diplomat in 1981. Then, in 1984, the Cubans targeted Ana Montes, a politically outspoken Justice Department clerk in Washington. They helped her apply to the Defense Intelligence Agency and championed her meteoric rise as an analyst.

Montes would turn over so many secrets in her 17-year spy career that America’s top counterintelligence executive called her “one of the most damaging spies in U.S. history.” Montes spent 21 years behind bars until her release last year.

But the Cuba threat doesn’t end with Reaganera recruitments. During the 2022 US midterms, Cuba “attempted to undermine the electoral prospects” of US politicians that “it perceived as hostile,” the National Intelligence Council wrote in a recent report.

In this presidential election year, the DGI will likely be at battle stations again. They will remain busy, spotting vulnerable and sympathetic Americans—recruiting the newest generation of Rochas to the cause.

Jim Popkin is an investigative journalist and author of the book about Cuban spy Ana Montes “Code Name Blue Wren: The True Story of America’s Most Dangerous Female Spy—and the Sister She Betrayed,” out in paperback in April.