Another U.S. Official Arrested for Spying for Cuba
Misguided True Believers spying for Cuba have damaged the U.S., but in the long run have made little difference for that failed state.
When I served in Cuba as a diplomat in 1995-1996, at least four treasonous U.S. officials were passing troves of our government’s secrets to Havana’s spymasters, presumably including the classified reports I was sending to Washington. Two of the four were arrested before I left the State Department. One fled the country. The fourth, whom I’d met, was nabbed last week. Every time a Cuban spy op is busted, I feel elation — but also pain.
Based in Washington, I traveled to Guantanamo Naval Base (GTMO) to attend monthly meetings, as the State Department’s representative, between U.S. and Cuban military officers. The meetings took place on “The Line” (boundary) separating our naval base from Castro’s Cuba. Think of the movie, “A Few Good Men” minus the melodrama. Our talks were always constructive and convivial. Upon return to Washington, I participated in meetings at the White House organized by the National Security Council staff. My other duties involved flying to Havana and traveling the length and breadth of the island with another diplomat from our then Interests Section to monitor the human rights conditions of Cubans who had been repatriated after unsuccessfully attempting to flee to the United States by sea. We were followed at all times by the secret police who at one point slashed the tires of our car as a message of intimidation.
I had met spy #4, Victor Manuel Rocha in the Interests Section offices once. A genial fellow, he wanted to touch base with me regarding my activities at GTMO as well as human rights monitoring. I recall our short encounter as routine and pleasant. As deputy chief of our small diplomatic mission, he was, in retrospect, an ideally placed mole for the Castro regime. Prior to being posted to Havana, he had worked for a year at the White House as director for Latin American affairs on the NSC. Capping off his career, Rocha served for three years as U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, followed by six years as an advisor to the Commander of the U.S. Southern Command, whose area of responsibility includes Cuba.
The FBI reports that Rocha began working for the Cubans since at least 1981 when he entered the Foreign Service. Chances are, however, that he was spotted and recruited earlier. Cuban intelligence officers are long-term planners. Their specialty is to identify smart, promising young people, often, as with Colombia-born Rocha, of Latin American heritage, and pitch them to work on behalf of “the Revolution.” They most likely approached him when he was in college. The Cubans then carefully groom and train their agent recruits in spy tradecraft, from how to comport themselves to avoid suspicion to dead drops and encrypted communications. And they steer them to apply for sensitive positions in national security where their minions can rob us blind.
“This action exposes one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the U.S. government by a foreign agent,” Attorney General Merrick Garland told reporters in Washington on Monday, adding that Rocha had “sought out employment with the U.S. government that would provide him with access to nonpublic information and the ability to affect U.S. foreign policy.”
Rocha’s friends and co-workers expressed shock when news of his arrest broke.
“I never suspected, never had the slightest suspicion that he might be living a double life like the charging document describes,” former CIA senior Cuba analyst Brian Latell told the Washington Post. “I think I knew him as well as anyone else, and I never thought it was possible,” he added. Judith Bryan, who worked with Rocha in Havana, told the Post that she “never would have imagined in my wildest dreams this was going on.”
A former State Department colleague of Rocha’s told the New York Times, “Manuel literally had the keys to the kingdom. If it had to do with Cuba, he got to see it.”
Another turncoat with keys to the kingdom was spy #3: Ana Montes. The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency’s senior analyst for Cuba, Montes had access to virtually all of our classified intelligence and policy planning on that country. Daughter of a U.S. Army colonel, for seventeen years she passed to Castro’s intelligence service a veritable torrent of official secrets. Her treason led to the killing of a Green Beret. In contrast with many spies, Montes, like Rocha, betrayed her country for ideological rather than monetary reasons. In late 2001, she was arrested for espionage and convicted shortly thereafter. Sentenced to 25 years, Ana Montes was released early this year after serving 20 years.
A friend of mine who knew her at DIA described Montes as “highly competent, but cool and detached.” I have little doubt that the many classified cables I sent from GTMO and Havana, and my debriefs at the State Department and the White House were fed by Montes to the Cuban spy service — Dirección General de Inteligencia (DGI) .
Spy #2 on my personal List of Shame is Montes’s spotter for the DGI, Marta Rita Velazquez. Both of Puerto Rican heritage, they had been friends while in grad school at Johns Hopkins in the 1980s. In 1984, Velazquez, already a Cuban asset, introduced Montes to a New York-based Cuban intelligence officer who then recruited her. Velazquez later accompanied Montes on a clandestine trip to Cuba for spycraft training. A USAID employee for thirteen years, Velazquez fled to Sweden right after Montes’s arrest where she still resides, married to a former Swedish diplomat. Stockholm refuses to extradite her.
#1 on my fecal roster is the husband-wife team, Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers. A respected State Department analyst specializing in Europe and an instructor, Kendall and his wife spied for Cuba for nearly thirty years. Arrested in 2009, he is serving life without parole at a Federal supermax prison in Colorado. He is 86. His wife, sentenced to eighty-one-months, died a few years ago.
Shortly after they were sentenced, a colleague of mine who had known Kendall Myers told me, “For what it’s worth, aside from his detestable spying, he’s someone I was happy to know.” A professor who had known Myers said he was surprised at the charges. “He’s been a fantastic colleague, a great guy,” adding, Myers was “a smart person who we thought had done a good job at the State Department. The students loved him.” But in his personal journal which the FBI had seized, Myers praised Fidel Castro as a “brilliant and charismatic leader” who is “one of the great political leaders of our time.” And he called the United States government “exploiters” who “regularly murdered Cuban revolutionary leaders.”
The gauge of success for spies lies in their ability to live double lives. As the quotes above show, even close friends and colleagues of these traitors had no inkling of their treachery. Rocha, in fact, cultivated the image of an ardent Trump supporter, which irritated some of his friends.
What do these four spies have in common? First, all are Ivy Leaguers: Rocha graduated with a B.A. from Yale, and received master’s degrees from Harvard and Georgetown. Velazquez, Montes and Kendall Myers are graduates of Brown. Myers, in fact, is a true American blueblood, being a grandson of National Geographic founder Gilbert Grosvenor, great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell and a relation of President William Howard Taft. For her part, Montes is the daughter of an Army doctor and sister of an FBI special agent and an FBI analyst.
So, what gives? Why do otherwise smart people from good families spy for Cuba? Do we have American counterparts to the Cambridge Five — the notorious high caste British intelligence officers who spied for Moscow before, during and after WWII? Perhaps. Like their earlier British counterparts, the American spies were recruited young, disillusioned with U.S. foreign policy and naively enamored with a regime that styled itself as a liberator of the oppressed and an opponent of “imperialism.” They were taken in by Fidel’s carefully crafted charisma. All refused payment. They were True Believers, or, as their spymasters called them, “tipos duros” — hard-liners.
U.S. counterintelligence generally does superb work, but is not without its shortcomings (see my article in the Washington Monthly: “Is U.S. Counterintelligence Up to the Task of Protecting America’s Secrets?”). In the cases of Rocha and the Myers’s, CI officials were masterful in arranging for FBI undercover special agents posing as Cuban intel officers to get their quarries to spill the beans on their treason. Rocha, for example, told his undercover FBI contact, “I have to protect what we did because what we did…the cement that has strengthened the last 40 years. What we have done…it’s enormous. More than a grand slam.” With that, he sealed his fate. At 73, he’s facing decades in prison (Rocha has yet to be charged with espionage, which likely will be coming soon).
Yes, these Cuban spies weren’t uncovered until decades after they began spying for Havana — yet they were eventually caught. In a democratic society, there are limits on what spycatchers can do to root out citizens suspected of betraying their country.
My elation, of course, centers on these bad actors being caught and imprisoned. My pain stems from the damage they’ve done to our country, their passing my classified reports to our enemy being just a minuscule part. The damage assessment the intelligence community must now carry out on Rocha’s four long decades of allegedly spying for Havana will be daunting, to say the least. The bottom line, however, is this: for all its spying against us Cuba is essentially a failed state, afflicted with a chronically stagnant economy, deep social malaise and depopulation. What good have all of their nefarious deeds gotten them in the long run?
The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.
There are others, I'm sure. They're that good, the bastards.
The next question: how many more are there?