The United States government charged Victor Manuel Rocha with secretly serving as an agent of the Cuban government for more than 40 years. Rocha, a former diplomat who served on the National Security Council in the 1990s, was arrested last Friday following a long-running FBI counterintelligence investigation.
He had also served as the U.S. ambassador to Bolivia from 2000 to 2002. Rocha, 73, was born in Colombia but grew up in New York. He was arrested in Miami, and has been charged with committing multiple federal crimes.
“This action exposes one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent,” said Attorney General, Merrick Garland.
“We allege that for over 40 years, Victor Manuel Rocha served as an agent of the Cuban government and sought out and obtained positions within the United States government that would provide him with access to non-public information and the ability to affect US foreign policy,” the AG added.
Rocha is just the latest U.S. national to be charged with spying for Havana, and this is a reminder that Cuba remains a significant player in the world of espionage, and one that has been overlooked.
The State Department Official And His Wife
In July 2010, Walter Kendall Myers, a former State Department official, and his wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole and 81 months in prison, respectively, for their roles in a nearly 30-year conspiracy to provide highly-classified U.S. national defense information to the Republic of Cuba.
Myers began working at the State Department in 1977 as a contract instructor at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute (FSI) in Arlington, VA, and from 1988 to 1999, in addition to his FSI duties, he performed work for the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR).
He later worked full-time in INR and, from July 2001 until his retirement in October 2007, Myers was an intelligence analyst for Europe in INR where he specialized on European matters and had daily access to classified information through computer databases and otherwise. He received his “Top Secret” security clearance in 1985 and, in 1999, received access to “Sensitive Compartmental Information.”
According to the United States Department of Justice (DoJ), in December 1978, while an employee of the State Department’s FSI, Myers traveled to Cuba after being invited by a Cuban government official who had made a presentation at FSI. That Cuban official was an intelligence officer for the Cuban Intelligence Service (CuIS).
The trip was to provide the CuIS with the opportunity to assess or develop Myers as a Cuban agent. The FBI claimed that in his diary, Myers professed an admiration for Fidel Castro and the Cuban regime.
The Cuban intelligence officer recruited both Myers and his wife during a visit when they lived in South Dakota in the late 1970s. They became clandestine agents for Cuba, a role in which they served for the next 30 years. Their recruitment by CuIS as “paired” agents has been described as consistent with CuIS’s past practice in the United States.
In what might sound like something out of a movie, Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers communicated with the CuIS via encrypted radio messages on shortwave radio frequencies, while they also used code names and passed on information to handlers via “dead drops,” “hand-to-hand” passes, and in at least one case, the exchange of shopping carts in a grocery store. The couple also traveled to meet Cuban agents in Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, Argentina and other locations.
In April 2009, the FBI launched an undercover operation against the pair, and Myers met four times with an undercover FBI source. As the DoJ noted, the couple were brought to justice not because they were careless, but because of an extremely well-planned and executed counterintelligence investigation that required the unprecedented cooperation of multiple agencies of the U.S. government tasked with protecting our national security.
The DIA Analyst
It was almost a year ago that Ana Belén Montes was released from prison after serving 20 years for conspiracy to commit espionage for the government of Cuba. Born in Nuremberg, West Germany, where her father, Alberto Montes, was posted as a United States Army doctor, Montes joined the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in September 1985 after working for the Justice Department.
In 1992, she was selected for the DIA’s Exceptional Analyst Program and later traveled to Cuba to study the Cuban military. She rose through the ranks at the DIA and became the agency’s most senior Cuban analyst – noted for being responsible and having a “no-nonsense attitude.”
According to the prosecutors, she had been recruited by Cuban intelligence while she was a university student at Johns Hopkins University in the 1980s. She became known to other students for her strong opinions in support of left-wing Latin American movements like the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua.
When she was arrested on September 21, 2001, U.S. intelligence officials had been searching for a Cuban mole inside the government for almost a decade. That effort was made all the more challenging as the Cubans masked her gender by suggesting the spy was a man with high-level clearance.
Much like Myers, Montes was apparently motivated not by money but by ideology – as she disagreed with the U.S. government’s interventionist policies in Central America and Cuba.
She was reported to have provided the true identities of American operatives working in Cuba, and revealed the existence of a multi-billion-dollar stealth satellite. After intelligence officials began to suspect she was the possible spy, the team continued to track her movements and eventually discovered more than a decade’s worth of classified intel on a laptop hidden under her bed.
The Cuban Five
Also known as the Miami Five, the Cuban intelligence officers didn’t actually work in the U.S. government. Instead, Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, and René González, were part of “La Red Avispa,” or Wasp Network.
They were initially sent to the United States to observe and infiltrate Cuban-American groups including Alpha 66, the F4 Commandos, the Cuban American National Foundation, and Brothers to the Rescue.
All five were arrested in September 1998 and later convicted in Miami of conspiracy to commit espionage, conspiracy to commit murder, acting as an agent of a foreign government, and other illegal activities in the United States.
The men have all been released from prison, with the final three returning home on December 17, 2014 – the same day the United States and Cuba announced they would restore diplomatic ties and seek to end more than half a century of confrontation.
In February 2015, they received medals from Cuban President Raul Castro, who declared them national heroes for infiltrating right-wing exile groups that plotted against Havana and for then enduring long prison terms in the United States.
