A US ambassador working for Cuba? Expenses towards former diplomat Victor Manuel Rocha highlight Havana's significance on this planet of spying

The U.S. Division of Justice introduced on Dec. 4, 2023, that Victor Manuel Rocha, a former U.S. authorities worker, had been arrested and confronted federal fees for secretly appearing for many years as an agent of the Cuban authorities. Rocha joined the State Division in 1981 and served for over 20 years, rising to the extent of ambassador. After leaving the State Division, he served from 2006-2012 as an adviser to the U.S. Southern Command, a joint U.S. navy command that handles operations in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Harvard Kennedy College intelligence and nationwide safety scholar Calder Walton, creator of “Spies: The Epic Intelligence Battle Between East and West,” supplies perspective on what U.S. Legal professional Common Merrick Garland described as “one of many highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of america authorities by a international agent.”

How widespread is it for spies to embed in international governments?

Each state seeks to position spies on this means. That’s the enterprise of human intelligence: offering insights right into a international authorities’s secret intentions and capabilities.

What makes Rocha’s case uncommon is the size of his alleged espionage on behalf of Cuba: 4 a long time. It’s essential to emphasise the phrase alleged right here – the case is underway, and Rocha has not but provided a protection, not to mention been convicted.

If proved, nevertheless, Rocha’s espionage would place him among the many longest-serving spies in trendy occasions. Permitting him to function as a spy within the senior echelons of the U.S. authorities for therefore lengthy would signify a staggering U.S. safety failure.

What can a spy in this type of place do?

Sometimes, an embedded spy can be tasked by his or her recruiting intelligence service to take actions like stealing briefing papers, secret memorandums and different supplies that present what decision-makers are pondering. Such work shortly resembles film scenes – photographing secret paperwork, swapping info in public locations or depositing it underneath lampposts and bridges.

Having an agent attain ambassador stage can be a prize for any international intelligence service. Rocha held senior diplomatic postings in South America, together with Bolivia, Argentina, Honduras, Mexico and the Dominican Republic. This is able to have given him, and thus his Cuban handlers, entry to helpful intelligence about U.S. coverage towards South America — and anything that crossed his desk.

An embedded spy can even act as an “agent of affect” who works secretly to form insurance policies of the goal authorities from inside. This will probably be one thing to search for because the federal authorities discloses extra info to assist its fees towards Rocha.

Presumably the U.S. intelligence group both already has carried out a damange evaluation, or is urgently now conducting one, reviewing what secrets and techniques Rocha had entry to throughout his diplomatic service – and whether or not, as ambassador to Bolivia, he could have formed U.S. coverage on the behest of Cuban intelligence.

Has Cuban intelligence partnered with Russia, previously or now?

Cuban intelligence labored intently with the Soviets in the course of the Chilly Battle. After Fidel Castro took energy in Cuba in 1959, Soviet intelligence maintained shut private liaisons with him. Cuba’s intelligence service, the DGI, later generally known as the DI, acquired early coaching and assist from the KGB, Russia’s former secret police and intelligence company.

From the Sixties by the Eighties, Cuban intelligence operatives acted as helpful proxies for the KGB in Latin America and numerous African international locations, significantly Angola and Mozambique. However they didn’t simply observe Moscow’s course.

As Brian Latell, a former U.S. intelligence knowledgeable on Latin America, has proven, Castro’s intelligence service was typically much more aggressive than the Soviet Union in supporting communist revolutionary actions in creating international locations. Certainly, at occasions, the KGB needed to attempt to rein in Cuban “adventurism.”

One in all Cuba’s biggest identified espionage feats was recruiting and working a high-flying officer on the U.S. Protection Intelligence Company, Ana Montes, who spied for Cuba for 17 years earlier than she was detected and convicted. To the very best of my information, there is no such thing as a publicly avilable U.S. injury evaluation of her espionage, however one senior CIA officer advised me it was “breathtaking.”

Cuban intelligence recruited Montes whereas she was a college scholar and inspired her to affix the Protection Intelligence Company. There, utilizing a short-wave radio to move coded messages and encrypted recordsdata to handlers, Montes betrayed an enormous haul of U.S. secrets and techniques, together with identities of U.S. intelligence officers and descriptions of U.S. eavesdropping services directed towards Cuba.

Cuban and Russian intelligence companies maintained their ties after the Chilly Battle ended and the Soviet Union collapsed. That relationship has solely strengthened since Vladimir Putin, an outdated KGB hand, took energy within the Kremlin in 1999.

Putin’s authorities reopened a large outdated Soviet alerts intelligence facility in Cuba, close to Havana. This facility had been the Soviet Union’s largest international alerts intelligence station on this planet, with aerials and antennae pointed at Florida shores simply 100 miles away.

Soviet data reveal that Moscow obtained helpful info from U.S. navy bases in Florida. Russia could nicely nonetheless be attempting to attempt to listen in on U.S. targets at present from Cuba, though the U.S. authorities is likely alert to such efforts and is probably going endeavor countermeasures.

Cuban intelligence at present can also be collaborating with China, which reportedly plans to open its personal eavesdropping station in Cuba. Beijing has vital affect over Cuba as its largest creditor and, following in Soviet footsteps, views the island as a helpful intelligence assortment base and a “bridgehead” — the KGB’s outdated code identify for Cuba — for affect in Latin America.

If Rocha is proved responsible, how would he rank traditionally amongst different spies?

It stays to be seen what injury Rocha could have carried out whereas allegedly working as a Cuban spy. His tenure within the U.S. authorities, nevertheless, would place him proper up there with probably the most profitable, and thus damaging, spies in trendy historical past.

The longest-running Soviet international intelligence agent in Britain, Melita Norwood, spied for the KGB for 4 a long time. When she was uncovered in 1999, the unrepentant 87-year-old great-grandmother was shortly dubbed “the good granny spy” within the British tabloid press.

In america, the best Soviet penetration of the chief department was in all probability Lauchlin Currie, who was President Franklin Roosevelt’s White Home assistant throughout World Battle II. Data obtained after the Soviet Union’s collapse reveal that Currie acted as a Soviet agent.

The best injury to U.S. nationwide safety, nevertheless, was carried out within the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties by Aldrich Ames on the CIA and Robert Hanssen on the FBI. Every man betrayed a wealth of secrets and techniques, together with U.S. intelligence operations. The knowledge that Ames stole for the Soviets led to the arrest and execution of Soviet brokers working for U.S. intelligence behind the Iron Curtain.

In the end, we are going to discover out whether or not Rocha occupies a spot of comparable ignominy in U.S. historical past.