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Narrator: With hopes of recruiting spies, hostile foreign governments are known to target individuals with access to closely guarded government secrets or in proximity to policymakers.
But in the 1970s, the Cuban government reverse-engineered that formula. It recruited an eager young international student from Yale University to apply for U.S. citizenship and infiltrate our government to steal secrets on its behalf.
That man—Victor Manuel Rocha—went on to penetrate and ascend the State Department’s ranks until he was named our nation’s ambassador to Bolivia, a member of the U.S. National Security Council, and a deputy principal secretary of the State Department’s U.S. Interests section in the Cuban capital of Havana. He even kept spying after retirement.
But neither time, nor complexity, deter the FBI.
A lengthy investigation driven by the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division and run by the Bureau’s Miami and Washington field offices worked in partnership with the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service resulted in Rocha's 2023 arrest and 2024 conviction on charges related to his more than 40 years of clandestine activity.
On episode of our podcast, two special agents who worked case will provide unparalleled insights into Victor Manuel Rocha and how his decades-long deceit triggered one of the most challenging counterintelligence cases in U.S. history.
This is Inside the FBI.
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Narrator: Victor Manuel Rocha didn’t always want to serve the U.S. government.
During his undergraduate days at Yale, he was a Colombian national preoccupied with communism and seeking to actively support its cause.
Special Agent Matt: Rocha would say he was radicalized during college. He was very much inspired by the times—the kind of turmoil of the 70s—and was exposed to various Marxist ideologies and individuals across Latin America.
Narrator: That’s Matt, one of the many FBI special agents and intelligence analysts who helped build the case against Rocha.
Matt: He was particularly influenced by the Cuban example, by the way that they were kind of navigating the societal landscape of the time. And he actually sought out an academic opportunity in Chile so that he could walk in and volunteer to the Cubans.
Special Agent Elisa: He says he didn't really have a plan necessarily.
Narrator: That’s Elisa, another agent who worked the case alongside Matt.
Elisa: He kind of thought he was just volunteering to help the Cuban Revolution, maybe he would go to Cuba and teach English.
You know, he was taken with some of the guerrilla movements at the time, but he had enough foresight to see that he wasn't cut out to be in the jungles of Central America.
Matt: And so, in February of 1973, he walked into the Cuban embassy in Santiago, Chile, and actually handed over various documents that he took from Yale University.
These weren’t government documents, but they were related to the Cuban Revolution, and it was one of the ways that he wanted to present himself to the Cubans as someone who’s capable of providing, you know, this sort of stuff.
And he eventually met with an intelligence officer from the Cuban General Directorate of Intelligence, or the DGI, and was recruited while he was in Chile.
Narrator: His first assignment? Obtain U.S. citizenship.
Matt: He never even really considered becoming a U.S. citizen prior to that, and it’s not something that he really wanted to do.
He was not necessarily on “Team America,” as we say sometimes, and the Cubans are very good and very perceptive, and they were able to pick up and play on his beliefs, his ideology.
Matt: They really understood him better than he understood himself, and they were able to kind of really manipulate him into the spy that he became.
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Elisa: After volunteering, he spent about a week in a hotel with an intelligence officer training and learning tradecraft and spycraft.
Narrator: Rocha came to idolize his trainer, a DGI talent spotter known as Achilles, who'd just returned from fighting the wars in Angola...
Elisa: ...and was reading Lenin and was everything Rocha wanted to be.
Narrator: At the time, she notes, Rocha believed that armed struggle was the key to affecting change in Latin America. But despite his admiration for Achilles, he didn’t share his appreciation for the technical aspects of espionage.
Elisa: Even though Rocha was trained in classic espionage tradecraft—you know, using radios and photographs—he actually didn't like any of that stuff. He didn't understand why he needed to learn to use radios and concealment devices and hide things in rocks and how to use cameras to take photos of documents.
Narrator: Instead, Rocha’s strengths proved to be communication and flexibility.
Elisa: He preferred face-to-face meetings. He would hand over the documents, but he liked to talk. He’s got the gift for gab, but he also has keen awareness and an insight for detail.
Matt: He was very much like a chameleon and a charmer—and just very good with talking to people, a very likeable personality in many ways, and I think that helped a lot.
Elisa: He came to the U.S. around the age of 10 and moved into Black Harlem in New York, and he was able to fit into that neighborhood.
And then, he won a scholarship to a boarding school in Connecticut and was able to fit in there.
And then [he] found his way in Ivy League universities and managed to adapt into that world.
So, he's constantly shifting and adapting to fit the group.
Matt: The Cubans were smooth. He was also smooth and was able to navigate those kind of interpersonal landscapes very well, to include when he was getting through his background investigations.
Elisa: And then, what made him so successful is he didn't have to live a legend or live a double life or hide from the USG [United States Government] because he didn't start government service until eight years later.
Narrator: At that point, Matt explains...
Matt: ... he selected the State Department because they didn’t have a polygraph, and he had mentioned a couple times that he didn't feel like he was a very good liar, although I think we would disagree.
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Narrator: Once Rocha was on the inside, his goal became to gather as much information of potential interest to the Cuban government as possible.
Matt: Rocha described, at one point, essentially, that he passed anything and everything that he thought was of value to the DGI and to the Cubans.
Narrator: And his knack for climbing the agency’s career ladder made him privy to secrets whose disclosure could potentially cause grave harm to U.S. national security.
Matt: He had a tremendous level of access—everything from the Contra project in Latin America to the National Security Council, White House, U.S.-Cuba policy, migration accords, U.S. government operations and officials’ identities, technical information. He had 20 years of direct access to all of that information. It's just a tremendous level of information that that he potentially passed.
Elisa: We'll never really know how things might have turned out had he not been there. It's just really hard to sort of wrap our minds around that.
It's hard to quantify and calculate.
Narrator: One example of Rocha’s malicious impact was his role in helping Cuba act on intelligence collected by convicted Cuban spy Ana Montes.
Elisa: One thing that always bothered us was, you know, Anna Montes was recruited at the end of ’84, and by ’85, she's providing some damning information about what's going on in Central America, and the Cubans acted on it. People died.
How are the Cubans acting so quickly on this newly recruited agent’s information?
And now, it makes sense to us because they had Rocha—first at the Honduras desk and then later as the political military officer in Honduras. So this ability for them to have sort of both sides and the full, complete picture is just astounding when you think about it.
We had messages between Montes and her handlers and between Kendall Myers—
Narrator: —another convicted Cuban spy—
Elisa: —and his handlers. But when it came to BUHO—
Narrator: a secret DGI nickname for Rocha—
Elisa: —we only had messages between the Cuban handlers. And that's not something that we clearly understood at the time.
They were receiving pretty much anything and everything that Rocha was giving them, and it was a lot. But they couldn't act on all of it because it would lead to him.
Narrator: The team believes that the Cubans’ decision not to act on all of Rocha’s incoming intelligence, so as not to tip off the Americans to their source, is why they came close to identifying Rocha as their unidentified subject but didn’t settle on him as their sought-after spy.
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But Rocha’s way with words would eventually lead to his downfall.
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Narrator: While the FBI had been searching for BUHO for years, its investigation into Rocha didn’t start until much later.
Elisa: This case began actually in the ’90s and culminated with his arrest in 2023. And it’s basically just a case of teamwork and perseverance.
Narrator: At first, the Bureau didn’t know who, specifically, it was searching for. Rather, it was searching for BUHO, a government employee who fit a relatively vague description.
Elisa: The information we had at the time was very broad and very generic. We were basically looking for a male who spoke Spanish, who worked for the U.S. government, who had been in Central America in the ’80's. That's a very long list of people, and it's a lot of work to try to refine that. And it usually takes some kind of hard work, a little bit of luck, and a tip to narrow those down.
And there were successes that led us to identifying Montes, then Kendall Myers. And, eventually, we were able to kind of narrow that scope to Rocha. But it took a long time.
Narrator: The FBI received information indicating that Victor Manuel Rocha was a penetration agent of the Cuban General Directorate of Intelligence.
Matt: We can say in hindsight that it seemed obvious, but at the time, it didn't make a whole lot of sense.
There were concerns that this wasn't true. There were several people that the FBI looked at who fit the profile. And several investigations launched, and Rocha wasn't investigated, but he came close.
Narrator: An undercover Bureau operation finally confirmed the validity of that information and of Rocha’s deception. According to the Department of Justice, from 2022 to 2023, an FBI agent went undercover to pose as a DGI representative who’d been instructed to connect and create a communication plan with Rocha.
Once Rocha believed he was safely speaking with a fellow comrade, he began bragging about this decades of espionage-related exploits, expressed solidarity with Cuba, condemned the United States, “praised Fidel Castro,” and said his actions had bolstered what he described as “the Revolution.”
Matt: At the first meeting, he looked into the camera and said that he had been spying for the Cubans for 40 years, and that was kind of the moment where like, oh, OK, “We've got something here.”
We all got to see that video clip and were all pretty shocked. It was quite a moment.
He was being video-recorded by the undercover, and so, those conversations, his statements, etc., were all captured on video, and that was a lot of the evidence that we were then able to use against him.
One of the really significant obstacles to overcome was Rocha had more time with the Cuban DGI than that all of us put together, right? He spent approximately 43 years with them, and they trained him well. And so, he knew exactly what it was like to be handled by the Cubans.
But I think, at the same time, our undercover knew what he was doing. And as good as the DGI is, you know, frankly, the FBI's better.
Narrator: But, as Elisa explains...
Elisa: Knowing someone's a spy and proving it are two very different things, and it's a very difficult endeavor. So, we had a guy admitting on camera that he had been working with the Cubans for 40 years, and you would think, “Ope, that's it. That's enough. Let's go to court, take him to trial. Let's charge him as a spy.” And it's not quite that simple.
And we were running into a statute of limitations—it had been way over 10 years—and getting enough specific detail that we could charge him with espionage proved to be the most significant challenge of this case, and it required us to shift and to pivot midway through.
Narrator: In a nutshell, the team came up with an alternative strategy. Since Rocha was still working at the direction of the DGI, they’d try to charge him as an agent of a foreign power.
Elisa: This is an oversimplification of a legal strategy that's much better told by our AUSA [assistant U.S. attorney].
Matt: The AUSAs assigned to our case were just phenomenal, and they were willing to take those risks and be aggressive.
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Matt: [I] think the conviction was so significant, in part because it was so unlikely. This is a man who had gotten away with, essentially, what is espionage for 40 years. And espionage investigations themselves are already difficult, but when you add the time factor on it, it becomes tremendously more so. And I think, among other things, overcoming some of the evidentiary and statute of limitations problems and obstacles was very difficult.
I think one of the continuing themes over the decades of this case is that the team didn't take no for an answer.
Elisa: His conviction sends a message to anybody out there that the FBI doesn't stop looking. He thought he got away with it, that he was going into retirement, that he could stop looking over his shoulder, and that's not the case. And so, it sends a message that if you've committed espionage, if you've done bad things, FBI will keep looking.
Narrator: And though Matt and Elisa helped close the case, they’re representative of a vast investigative team that identified Rocha and enabled his prosecution and eventual federal prison sentence.
Elisa: Matt and I are here as just a small sample of the team that worked on this over many decades. We represent a huge group of analysts and agents who, over the years, worked tirelessly to find Rocha.
Matt: There was a division of labor of sorts, where, you know, Headquarters [and] WFO—
Narrator: That’s the FBI’s Washington Field Office—
Matt: —really handled a lot of the historical evidentiary matters, a lot of the unsubs [unidentified subjects] investigation stuff that that came into this, and then Miami handled a lot of the operational matters, the logistics and such.
But really, it was truly a team effort.
Everybody had their hands in everything kind of at all times. And I think that is also one of the reasons that we did finally achieve success. We weren’t necessarily siloed, and it was kind of one team the whole time.
Narrator: And, Elisa adds, the FBI’s partnership with the Diplomatic Security Service was critical to closing this case. While the Bureau had support from individuals in the U.S. Intelligence Community, she said the DSS was...
Elisa: ... integral from the very beginning because he was a State Department employee and we needed their help. And when we called them and asked, “Hey, can you quietly help us put together a case on, you know, a former ambassador who we think is a spy?” That's a big ask. That was a tall order, and that partnership is phenomenal. And hopefully, we’ll get to tell that story one day.
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Narrator: When Rocha was finally convicted and sentenced for his crimes, the penalties were steep: 15 years in prison, a half-million dollar fine, three years of supervised released, and a special assessment.
Rocha also had to surrender all future retirement benefits that he earned as a State Department employee. He’s also required to hand over any profits he might receive from any publication related to his crimes or his time as a U.S. government employee to the U.S. government.
But potentially most importantly, his plea agreement requires him to cooperate with the U.S. government, to include helping it assess the damage his espionage efforts may have wreaked.
Elisa: The work isn't over after the arrest. The value in what espionage actors can provide us is immeasurable.
There's information we needed from Rocha that can assist us with our current investigations, those current penetrations out there. And that's why we can talk about some of the old stuff, but we're not going [in]to a lot of detail because it’ll affect and impact current investigations.
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Narrator: At his sentencing, Rocha asserted that he was a changed man and repented for his misdeeds. But, Matt suggested, that could’ve been a calculated move designed to contrast with the lack of apologies extended by convicted Cuban spies Kendall Myers and Ana Montes during their time in court.
Matt: Rocha's a true chameleon, and he adapts to a situation. He adapts to his audience. And he spent his whole life surviving and adapting, and that's what made him such a good spy for 40 years. He had spent his whole life basically putting on new lives.
We assess he's most upset about getting caught, right? And the consequences of getting caught.
Narrator: But while Rocha might not have aspired to become a husband or father back when he was a fresh DGI recruit, those unforeseen bonds may have influenced his decision to make a plea deal with the U.S. government.
Elisa: He wanted to settle this quietly and out of court to avoid putting his family through trial. We believe his one true regret is what the impact of the arrest and the revelation of his espionage activity had on his family. He made these decisions long before he even met his wife; they didn't exist. It wasn't a calculation in his mind. And so, he was motivated for them to cooperate quietly.
Narrator: According to Elisa, striking a plea deal with Rocha was also the best option for operational security.
Elisa: We wanted to limit the damage to national security by avoiding court—as simple as that.
We don't want to expose our sources and methods. A trial would have meant all of that.
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Matt: I think one of the things that's important for us to recognize about the Cubans is they view the United States as their number-one existential threat and that most—if not all—of their activities, in one way or another, center around trying to counter what they perceive as that threat: trying to put themselves in a better position against the United States.
USG penetrations like Rocha are their number-one priority because it gives them the most access, the most opportunities to fight this sort of existential fight that they believe they're in.
Elisa: We're not in the business of wishful thinking. We need to learn from our mistakes. We need to be able to prevent future penetrations. And we've learned quite a bit. There's a lot that we can learn about hiring practices, security procedures, and missed opportunities.
Narrator: And Cuba is always on the hunt for more spies.
Elisa: They're thinking ahead and they're looking for people who are sympathetic or open-minded.
Narrator: This approach makes college students prime targets, but, Elisa cautioned...
Elisa: ...it can be at any age and any time, and they take advantage of that. So just be smart and be thinking. Sometimes people don't even realize they're talking to Cuban intelligence, and that's the tricky part. You think you're talking to a professor or a member of the media or an artist, and that information is getting back there, and you're being assessed.
So, just be cautious and think about what you're doing and what you're saying. And know that if you find yourself in a situation where you think maybe you've bumped into Cuban intel or said too much—or find yourself in a sticky situation—that's not the end of the world. Come out to your friendly FBI agent. We’ll help you.
Narrator: You can contact the Bureau by calling 1-800-CALL-FBI (that’s 1-800-225-5324) or by visiting tips.fbi.gov. You can also visit fbi.gov/fieldoffices to find contact information for your nearest FBI field office.
Narrator: And if you’ve knowingly engaged in espionage or related activities against the U.S. government, it’s important to know that it’s never too late to come clean.
Matt: One thing that Rocha had mentioned several times during the debriefs was a desire to have some sort of off-ramp, right?
There were points in his life where he said, “I don't want to do this anymore,” but he felt compelled to keep doing it because he had been breaking the law and betraying the United States for a very long time, and, essentially, he didn't know that there were other opportunities available to him.
There are opportunities, if you're in a similar situation, to come talk to the FBI. It doesn't have to end in handcuffs and in prison for the rest of your life.
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Narrator: You can visit fbi.gov/counterintelligence for more information about the Bureau’s efforts to combat hostile foreign intelligence activity and to learn how your agency or organization can partner with the FBI in the fight against these kinds of threats.
You can also check out our last podcast episode to learn what counterintelligence means to the Bureau.
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Narrator: This has been another production of Inside the FBI.
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On behalf of the FBI's Office of Public Affairs, thanks for tuning in.
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