14ymedio, Madrid, February 16, 2024 — It’s been 17 years since the United States could have arrested former American diplomat Víctor Manuel Rocha, who was ultimately arrested in December 2023 for allegedly spying on Cuba. A Cuban soldier who defected from the Island sounded the alarm to Félix Rodríguez, a former CIA agent, saying that the official was a mole of Fidel Castro infiltrated at the highest level. But no one believed him.
“We all thought it was defamation,” Rodríguez, an agent who participated in the invasion of the Bay of Pigs in 1961, and in the capture in Bolivia of Ernesto Che Guevara that ended with his death, told Associated Press (AP). That lieutenant colonel, who was his informant and whose identity he has refused to reveal, went to his home in Miami in 2006 and told him clearly: “Rocha is spying for Cuba.”
Rocha’s credibility was such, Rodríguez claims, that although he transmitted the message to the CIA, everyone was skeptical about the information and believed that it was an attempt to discredit a fervent anti-communist.
“I really admired this son of a bitch. I want to look him in the eye and ask him why he did it. He had access to everything,” Rodríguez said
“I really admired this son of a bitch. I want to look him in the eye and ask him why he did it. He had access to everything,” Rodríguez told AP, which on Thursday published an extensive article for which it interviewed two dozen people linked to the case, including agents, former CIA agents, friends and partners of Rocha, to try to understand how the case of the greatest infiltration in the U.S. Government known so far could happen. The former diplomat, who this Wednesday pleaded not guilty to the 15 charges against him, will be tried on March 25.
But the great unknown, which according to AP may take years to uncover, is what the Cuban regime was able to have access to thanks to Rocha. The former officials interviewed agreed that the CIA had known since at least 1987, that Castro had a high-level infiltrator – “super mole” – in the U.S. Government and that the former diplomat, of Colombian origin, was probably on a list delivered to the FBI of alleged spies in high foreign policy positions.
Peter Romero, former Undersecretary of State for Latin America and Rocha’s colleague, does not hesitate to admit that the error was “monumental.” “We are all doing a huge examination of conscience, and no one can think of anything. He did an incredible job of covering his tracks.”
AP reconstructs Rocha’s biography, which he told to those who met him. His first years in the country, at the age of 10, were hard, they say, but his intelligence gave him access to a scholarship for minorities with which
