"MIAMI -- Manuel Rocha was on alert, zigzagging through Miami's Brickell district, en route to a clandestine meeting -- at a church.
The retired U.S. ambassador was fearful of being tailed. But "a message for you from your friends in Havana" was waiting, promised a text from the man who had requested the covert encounter, according to a federal criminal complaint.
The urbane and self-assured Rocha failed to detect counterintelligence agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation who were watching and following.
The FBI arrested Rocha in December, and U.S. prosecutors allege he secretly pushed Cuba's agenda for more than 40 years as he advanced through top posts at the State Department, National Security Council and the U.S. military's Southern Command. Rocha told a federal judge last month that he intends to plead guilty to being an agent of Cuba.
The Rocha affair points to a larger problem, former U.S. and Cuban intelligence officers say. Cuba and its intelligence service are in the world's top ranks when it comes to recruiting spies, while American teams responsible for stopping them are understaffed and outmatched, according to former U.S. counterintelligence officials.
Cuba has "the best damn intelligence service in the world" for cultivating agents, said Brian Latell, a former CIA analyst who led the agency's Latin America division.
And the implications of that espionage extend beyond Cuba. Former U.S. officials say Washington has repeatedly underestimated the danger from Havana, which often distributes the fruits of its spying to more potent adversaries such as Russia and China.
The Justice Department said that Cuba "has long posed a significant counterintelligence threat to the United States," citing its relationship with U.S. rivals.
The Cuban Embassy in Washington didn't respond to a request for comment.
Modeled on the Soviet KGB and its Eastern bloc cousins, Cuba's spy service relies on Cold War spy tradecraft, such as high-frequency shortwave radio transmissions to communicate with agents, and one-time cipher pads to encode and decode messages. What it lacked in high tech it made up for in human capital.
"One of the reasons they were so good is they had a sinister genius running their service, the president of Cuba," Latell said, referring to Fidel Castro.
The office of Raul Castro, Fidel's brother and Cuba's former longtime military chief, would get stacks of original U.S. government documents from moles at the State Department, Pentagon and elsewhere, Alcibiades Hidalgo, Raul Castro's longtime chief of staff, told The Wall Street Journal. "We didn't have the capacity to go through them all," he said.
Cuba recruited Americans, in part, by looking for potential sympathizers. Cuban intelligence officers routinely target young people, often in academia, with an ideological pitch about Cuba suffering under the U.S. economic embargo and other policies, current and former officials say.
"The Cubans didn't pay big and didn't need to pay big," said Stuart Hoyt Jr., a former FBI agent who worked Cuban counterintelligence cases. "Because they could find people that sympathize."
Ana Belen Montes, a senior Defense Intelligence Agency analyst considered Havana's most damaging spy in the U.S. government, was recruited by Cuban intelligence while a student. She rose through the ranks to become one of U.S. intelligence's top Cuba specialists. She pleaded guilty in 2002 to spying and served two decades in prison.
Montes, who spied undetected for Cuba for 17 years, told Havana about a stealth spy satellite program code-named Misty, information of more utility to Russia and China than Cuba, according to Jim Popkin, author of a book on the Montes case.
When it came to recruiting agents, Cuba's spies always had one major advantage over their American counterparts. Havana's spy priority has always been the U.S., while Cuba is often an afterthought for Washington.
The FBI's New York field office recently had 12 counterintelligence squads dedicated to Russia, but just one for Cuba, said Chris Simmons, who worked Cuban counterintelligence cases at the DIA.
"There was a revolving door at Cuban counterintelligence; everybody wanted to get out," said Peter Lapp, a former FBI agent who investigated Montes and wrote a book about the case.
If the FBI failed to identify agents spying on the U.S., the CIA had its own problems penetrating Cuba. In 1987, a Cuban military officer -- code-named "Touchdown" by the CIA -- defected while serving in Eastern Europe. Cuban Maj. Florentino Aspillaga Lombard told his stunned American handlers that all but one of the four dozen agents the CIA was running in Cuba was a "double," secretly under the Castro regime's control. The revelation chilled CIA recruiting efforts in Cuba for years, officials said.
The government believes that Cuba recruited Rocha, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Colombia, during his stay as a student in Chile in 1973.
Rocha joined the State Department in 1981 and worked at U.S. embassies in Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Honduras and Mexico. "You just cringe when you think of the amount of high-level information that he had," said Evan Ellis, a Latin America expert at the U.S. Army War College.
After retiring from the State Department in 2002, Rocha joined several boards and businesses. He advised the U.S. military's Southern Command, where he continued to access sensitive information and maintain contact with Cuban intelligence, the Justice Department alleges.
Rocha was almost certainly identified by either a Cuban defector or in coded communications the U.S. intercepted, according to former American officials." [1]
1. U.S. News: Spy Case Points to Cuba's Vast U.S. Reach Arrest of a former ambassador shows Havana's talent at nurturing moles. Forrest, Brett; Strobel, Warren P. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 18 Mar 2024: A.7.
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