MIAMI (news agencies) — 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 media. “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 news agencies 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 news agencies but says was recently interviewed by the FBI. Officials told the news agencies that as early 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 repeated messages seeking comment. The FBI and CIA declined to comment, and the State Department didn’t respond to requests.
“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.”
Before he was charged with being a Cuban agent, Rocha’s life embodied the American dream.
He was born in Colombia and at age 10 moved with his widowed mother and two siblings to New York City. They lived for a while in Harlem while his mother worked in a sweatshop and got by with the help of food stamps.
A talented soccer player with a sharp intellect, he won a scholarship for minorities in 1965 to attend The Taft School, an elite boarding school in Connecticut. Overnight he was catapulted from what he called a “ghetto” engulfed in race riots to a refined world of American wealth.
“Taft was the best thing that happened to my life,” he told the school’s alumni magazine in 2004.
But as one of only a few minorities at the school, Rocha says he suffered discrimination — including a classmate who refused to room with him — something that fueled a grudge that friends suspect may have led him to admire Castro’s revolution.
“I was devastated and considered suicide,” he told the alumni magazine.
From Taft, he went to Yale, where he graduated with honors with a degree in Latin American studies, and then on to graduate work at Harvard and Georgetown.
It’s not clear exactly how Rocha may have been recruited by Cuba but prosecutors say it happened sometime in the 1970s when he was still racking up degrees and American college campuses were teeming with students sympathetic to leftist causes.
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