MIAMI — U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones described Victor Manuel Rocha on Friday as “one of the most prolific Cuban spies ever uncovered in the United States.”
The Colombian-American New Yorker, who served in both the U.S. Department of State and Department of Defense, lived in Key Biscayne when FBI agents arrested him in 2023.
Rocha, 75, who moved to the U.S. when he was 10 and became a U.S. citizen at 28, is serving 15 years in prison in central Florida. On Thursday, federal prosecutors moved to revoke his U.S. citizenship.
“The complaint alleges that Rocha obtained American citizenship through lies, concealment, and betrayal,” Reding Quiñones said in a statement about the new civil denaturalization complaint. “A person who secretly serves communist Cuba should not keep the privilege of United States citizenship, even while in prison.”
Federal Bureau of Prisons records on Friday showed Rocha was at a low-security correctional institution in Sumter County, and his release date wasn’t until March 29, 2036.
FBI Miami special agents profiled Rocha and zeroed in on him in 2022. Rocha was a studious migrant boy who took an unlikely path out of the inner city to access an elite education.
Rocha was born in Bogotá during the Liberal-Conservative warfare in Colombia. After his father died, he moved to New York City when he was 10 years old and grew up in Harlem with his single mother, who worked as a seamstress.
Rocha’s fate changed after the 1964 race riots in Harlem. He won a scholarship to the Taft School, a private boarding school in Connecticut, graduated cum laude in 1969, and earned his bachelor’s degree in Latin American studies from Yale in 1973.
“Rocha was attending a student program in Chile in 1973 when he was first approached by and started conspiring to spy for the Republic of Cuba,” prosecutors wrote in a 232-page civil denaturalization complaint filed on Thursday.
It was a year of change in Chile. Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected Marxist leader in Latin America, was overthrown by a military coup, and Gen. Augusto Pinochet took power.
“Rocha completed a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard University in 1976 and a master’s degree in international relations from Georgetown University in 1978 to advance his service as a secret agent of Cuba,” prosecutors wrote in the complaint.
He was 28 when he received his certification of naturalization on Sept. 17, 1978, according to the federal prosecutors who are accusing him of lying during his application.
“Any individual who lied during the naturalization process to gain a foothold in this country will be met with the full weight of the Department of Justice,” Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate said in a statement released on Friday.
Rocha joined the U.S. foreign service after an internship at the Inter-American Foundation, a federal agency that funds projects in Latin America and the Caribbean.
After diplomatic assignments in Cuba, Honduras, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Argentina, President Bill Clinton appointed him as U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia on June 14, 2000.
Rocha went on to become an advisor to the Commander of the United States Southern Command in Doral.
An undercover agent contacted Rocha on Nov. 15, 2022, claiming to represent his “friends in Havana,” and there were three recorded meetings before questioning him on Dec. 1, 2023, records show.
During the recorded meetings, Rocha referred to the U.S. as the “enemy,” praised Fidel Castro as the “Comandante,” and his fellow communists as his “comrades,” according to court records.
Rocha admitted to his involvement with the 1996 killings of the Brothers to the Rescue volunteers Carlos Costa, Armando Alejandre, Jr., Mario de la Peña, and Pablo Morales as the “knock down of the small planes” in Havana, records show.
Rocha also said that during his espionage, he had used a Dominican Republic passport to travel to Panama and Havana, records show.
Rocha pleaded guilty to conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government and defrauding the U.S. In the new case, federal prosecutors accused him of seven independent counts seeking the revocation of his U.S. citizenship.
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