Diplomat-turned-spy avoided detection for decades

Manuel Rocha was well known in Miami’s 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. “Ambassador Rocha,” as he preferred to be called, demanded and got respect.

So former CIA operative Félix Rodríguez was dubious in 2006 when a defected Cuban Army lieutenant colonel showed up at his Miami home with a startling tip: “Rocha,” he quoted the man as saying, “is spying for Cuba.”

Rodriguez, who participated in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba and the execution of revolutionary “Che” 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’s message along to the CIA, which was similarly skeptical.

“No one believed him,” Rodriguez said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We all thought it was a smear.”

That long-ago tip came rushing back in devastating clarity in December when the now-73-year-old Rocha was arrested and charged with serving as a secret agent of Cuba stretching back to the 1970s — what prosecutors called one of the most brazen and long-running betrayals in the history of the U.S. State Department.

Rocha was secretly recorded by an undercover FBI agent praising Fidel Castro as “El Comandante” and bragging about his work for Cuba’s communist government, calling it “more than a grand slam” against the U.S. “enemy.” 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.

“I really admired this son of a bitch,” an angry Rodríguez said. “I want to look him in the eye and ask him why he did it. He had access to everything.”

As Rocha pleaded not guilty from jail this week to 15 federal counts, FBI and State Department investigators have been working to decipher the case’s biggest missing piece: exactly what the longtime diplomat may have given up to Cuba. It’s a confidential damage assessment, complicated by the often-murky intelligence world, that’s expected to take years.

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.

It wasn’t just Rodríguez’s tipster — whom he refused to identify to the AP but says was recently interviewed by the FBI. Officials told the AP that as early as 1987, the CIA was aware Castro had a “super mole” 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.

Rocha’s attorney did not respond to messages seeking comment. The FBI and CIA declined to comment. The State Department said in a statement it will continue to work with relevant agencies to “fully assess the foreign policy and national security implications of these charges.”

“This is a monumental screw-up,” said Peter Romero, a former assistant secretary of state for Latin America who worked with Rocha. “All of us are doing a lot of soul searching and nobody can come up with anything. He did an amazing job covering his tracks.”

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.

“I have access to just about every country in the region or know how to get it,” he bragged to the Miami Herald in 2006.

From 2012 to 2018, he served as president of Barrick Gold’s subsidiary in the Dominican Republic, overseeing production at the world’s sixth-largest gold mine. Rodríguez’s 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.

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.

“He was openly and vocally motivated by making money in his post-foreign service career,” Feeley said, “which wasn’t typical among former diplomats.”

One business that has received new scrutiny in the wake of Rocha’s arrest was a venture he headed with a group of offshore investors to buy up at a steep discount billions of dollars in claims against Cuba’s government for farmland, factories and other properties confiscated during the communist revolution.

Rocha and his partner said that there was no way the Cuban government would ever pay up and that the U.S. government was unlikely to help, recalled claim holder Carolyn Chester, whose father was a former AP journalist and later close to deposed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.

Chester, who ultimately decided not to sell, said the meeting left her with doubts about Rocha, in part because she was all but certain her father’s poor health would have kept her parents from making such a trip to Washington. And she found it strange that Rocha and his partner spoke as if “they knew for sure” of the intentions of Cuban officials.

The idea, according to Rocha’s former business partner, Tim Ashby, was to “kill communism with capitalism” by swapping the claims for land concessions, leases and joint ventures in Cuba at a time when the communist island was desperate for foreign investment.

The investment group would eventually spend around $5 million buying up nine claims valued at over $55 million, Ashby said. But the venture collapsed after some claim holders complained to the George W. Bush administration that they thought they were being bamboozled. In 2009, the Treasury Department moved to bar the transfer of any certified claims against Cuba.

“He was fiercely anti-communist and a staunch, early, Trump supporter,” Ashby said. “Rocha was the last person I would have suspected of being a Cuban spy.”