The US government charged a former diplomat who served on the national security council in the 1990s with secretly serving as an agent of Cuba’s government for more than 40 years.
Victor Manuel Rocha was arrested on Friday, following a long-running FBI counterintelligence investigation. The US ambassador to Bolivia from 2000 to 2002, Rocha also worked on the national security council from 1994 to 1995. He is 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 the 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.”
Rocha, 73, was arrested in Miami on Friday.
Federal law requires people doing the political bidding of a foreign government or entity inside the US to register with the justice department, which in recent years has stepped up its criminal enforcement of illicit foreign lobbying.
Rocha’s 25-year diplomatic career was spent under both Democratic and Republican administrations, much of it in Latin America during the cold war, a period of sometimes heavy-handed US political and military policies.
His diplomatic postings included a stint at the US interests section in Cuba during a time when the US lacked full diplomatic relations with Fidel Castro’s communist government.
Born in Colombia, Rocha was raised in a working-class home in New York City and went on to obtain liberal arts degrees from Yale, Harvard and Georgetown.
The government alleged that Rocha landed pos