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U.S. charges ex-ambassador with spying for Cuba over decades
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This image provided by the Justice Department and contained in the affidavit in support of a criminal complaint, shows Victor Manuel Rocha during a meeting with an FBI undercover employee. /CFP
The U.S. on Monday charged a former ambassador to Bolivia with spying for Cuba for over 40 years, in what the Justice Department described as "one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations" of the U.S. government by a foreign agent.
Victor Manuel Rocha, who served as U.S. ambassador to Bolivia from 2000 to 2002, was charged with committing multiple federal crimes including acting as an illegal foreign agent and using a fraudulently obtained passport, the U.S. Justice Department said in a statement.
"We allege that for over 40 years, Victor Manuel Rocha served as an agent of the Cuban government and sought out and obtained positions within the United States government that would provide him with access to non-public information and the ability to affect U.S. foreign policy," Attorney General Merrick Garland said in the statement.
Rocha worked for the State Department from 1981 to 2002, the Justice Department said. He served on the White House's National Security Council from 1994 to 1995, and worked as an adviser to the Commander of the U.S. military's Southern Command from around 2006 to around 2012, the department added.
In a court document filed in the southern district of Florida, the U.S. accuses Rocha of having secretly supported Cuba and its clandestine intelligence-gathering mission against Washington since 1981.
Rocha, 73, admitted his decades of work for Cuba in a series of meetings in 2022 and 2023 with an undercover FBI agent who posed as a covert Cuban General Directorate of Intelligence representative, according to the court document.
(With input from Reuters)
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Copyright © 2023 CGTN. 京ICP备16065310号
Disinformation report hotline: 010-85061466