MIAMI – A retired U.S. intelligence officer said on Sunday during “This Week In South Florida” that the “most consequential” espionage case in the history of the United States was still unfolding.
Emilio T. Gonzalez, also a retired colonel in the U.S. Army, said he knew Victor Manuel Rocha, who was at Federal Detention Center Miami on Sunday serving time in prison for secretly acting as a Cuban intelligence agent.
Gonzalez, a Cuban American who was a key advisor to former President George W. Bush, said Rocha, a Colombian-American former U.S. diplomat, was spying for Cuba for ideological reasons.
“The Cuban government is a voracious collector and seller of intelligence, so we don’t know whether any of the things he gave them caused harm until we do a damage assessment,” Gonzalez told TWISF Anchor Glenna Milberg adding that there was an ongoing federal “damage assessment.”
On Friday, at the Wilkie D. Ferguson, Jr. U.S. Courthouse in Miami, U.S. District Court Judge Beth Bloom announced he had decided that Rocha, 73, did not have to pay restitution to anyone else after paying a fine. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jonathan D. Stratton and John C. Shipley argued that the U.S. government was the only victim of Rocha’s crimes so “there are no other victims entitled to restitution.”
“The federal government says, ‘The only person that was harmed was the federal government therefore nobody else is entitled to restitution.’ Then they go back and say, ‘And oh! By the way, we fined him $500,000.’ Well, he owns $4 million worth of real estate alone, so a $500,000 fine is nothing,” Gonzalez said about Rocha’s assets in the U.S.
Bloom sentenced Rocha to 15 years in prison in April after he accepted his guilty plea to conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government without prior notification to the Attorney General, and acting as an agent of a foreign government without prior notification to the Attorney General.
“Ana Belén Montes spied for 17 years and she got 25 years; Manuel Rocha spied for 42 years and he is getting 12,” Gonzalez said referring to Rocha’s public Federal Bureau of Prisons profile listing his release as Sept. 10, 2036. Montes was released from prison on Jan. 6, 2023.
Gonzales said that although the federal legal case is over the federal investigations into what Rocha revealed to Cuban officials and its repercussions continue. As part of the U.S. damage assessment, Gonzalez said federal agents will continue to debrief Rocha for months while he serves his prison sentence in downtown Miami.
“This isn’t over. I think that as he is debriefed more and more — and the debriefing could very well last for months — I think there are other shoes to drop,” Gonzalez said. “I think you may see other news articles of people being picked up ... when you are debriefing somebody, he didn’t spend 40 years by himself in a closet somewhere. He actually had to talk to people. He visited people. He went to places. There may be businesses involved.”
Rocha was born on Oct. 23, 1950, in Bogotá, Colombia. He was 8 years old when Fidel Castro took power. He was 9 when the U.S. placed a partial trade embargo on Cuba. He was 10 when the U.S. ended diplomatic relations with Cuba. Rocha told a writer of a 2004 bulletin at the Taft School where he graduated in 1969 that he moved to New York City after his father died.
“My mother, sister, brother, and I moved in with my uncle who lived in Harlem. Hence, my first exposure to the States was ghetto life. My mother worked in a sweatshop sewing factory, while we attended public school and made do with welfare and food stamps assistance. I was a Hispanic living in a predominantly Black cultural environment,” Rocha said, according to the boarding school’s bulletin.
There were fiery race riots in 1964 in Harlem. Rocha said he won A Better Chance scholarship to attend the elite prep school in 1965, in Connecticut. Although he was Colombian American, Rocha was the head of the Taft School’s Black Student Association. He also revealed that after his closest friend refused to be his roommate he was “devastated and considered suicide.”
Rocha credited his Latin track coach for helping him deal with his difficulties at the school as a migrant who was interested in racial justice. The specific source of Rocha’s Marxist-Leninist influence remains uncertain. He provided some clues while wearing a beige prison jumpsuit to appear before Bloom in April in her courtroom in Miami.
“During my formative years in college, I was heavily influenced by the radical politics of the day. Today I no longer see the world through the radical eyes of my youth,” Rocha said in court.
Rocha’s U.S. State Department biography: He graduated cum laude from Yale in 1973, when he reported Cuban spies recruited him. He earned his graduate degrees from Harvard in 1976 and Georgetown in 1978 when he became a U.S. Citizen.
“Napoleon once said, ‘If you want to judge the measure of a man, know what the world was like when that person was 20.’ When Manuel Rocha was 20, Latin America was in convulsion. We had guerrilla wars. We had leftist governments. He was recruited for ideological reasons,” Gonzalez said.
The U.S. State Department hired him in 1981. Here is Rocha’s career as described by federal prosecutors:
Rocha signed a security agreement on Nov. 25, 1981; signed a classified information nondisclosure agreement on Jan. 12, 1989; later passed an FBI background investigation that included an interview on May 8, 1994; and completed national security review that included a questionnaire that he completed on Aug. 25, 1999.
Rocha served as a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic from December 1982 to January 1985. He was a political-military affairs officer at the U.S. Embassy in Honduras from February 1987 to February 1989. He served as the first secretary at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico from February 1989 to November 1991.
Rocha returned to the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic as the deputy chief of mission from November 1991 to July 1994. He served as the director of Inter-American Affairs on the U.S. National Security Council from July 1994 to July 1995 and as the deputy principal officer at the U.S. Interest Section in Havana, Cuba, from July 1995 to July 1997.
Rocha left Havana for Buenos Aires, Argentina, to serve as deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy from July 1997 to November 1999. He was U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia in La Paz from November 1999 to August 2002. He was an advisor to the commander of the U.S. Southern Command from 2006 to 2012.
Félix Rodríguez, a CIA operative who participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion and the execution of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, told The Associated Press that a defected Cuban Army lieutenant colonel told him in 2006 that Rocha was spying for Cuba but no one believed him. While living in Miami-Dade, Rocha later purported to support Donald Trump.
According to the U.S. Justice Department, an FBI undercover agent met with Rocha in 2022 and last year. A meeting point was the First Miami Presbyterian Church in Miami’s Brickell neighborhood. The agent recorded Rocha saying that the U.S. was “the enemy,” Cuban intelligence officers were his “comrades” and described his work for the Cuban government as “more than a grand slam.”
Rocha also told the FBI undercover agent that he had “created a legend of a right-wing person.” He held private-sector jobs and was working as the senior international business advisor for LLYC USA. Two U.S. Diplomatic Security Service agents interviewed Rocha on Dec. 1 and he was arrested in Miami-Dade County.
“There is just something about the way this case was handled that brings up more questions than there are answers to,” Gonzalez said.
Francisco Chaviano Gonzalez, a human rights activist in Cuba who was arrested at his home on May 7, 1994, in Havana and was in prison for over 13 years, blames Rocha. A Cuban military court tried and sentenced him to 15 years in prison accusing him of revealing state security secrets. In 2007, the IACHR reported he had “suffered injuries to his face and head as a result of beatings meted out by prison guards.”
Cuban-American activists blame him for The Brothers To The Rescue shootdown on Feb. 24, 1996. Both, the Chaviano Gonzalez trial and the shootdown happened while Rocha served as the director of Inter-American Affairs on the U.S. National Security Council and as deputy principal officer of the U.S. Interest Section in Havana, Cuba.
Rosa Maria Payá blames Rocha for the death of her father Oswaldo Payá Sardinas, a democracy activist in Cuba who died with Harold Cepero during what Cuban authorities described as a car crash on July 22, 2012, near Bayamo, around the time Rocha was advising the commander of the U.S. Southern Command.
Last year, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights “identified sufficient serious evidence to conclude that State agents had been involved in the deaths” of Payá Sardinas and Cepero.
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