Victor Manuel Rocha (Credit: public domain)
A former top official in ex-President Bill Clinton’s administration has admitted to decades of spying on behalf of Cuba’s communist regime.
Victor Manuel Rocha, 73, a career diplomat who rose to prominence during Clinton’s tenure, was criminally indicted in December on charges that he secretly served as a spy for Cuba.
Rocha who served as the U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia during the latter part of Clinton’s presidency, informed a federal judge on Thursday that he intends to plead guilty.
He confessed to a charge of conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government, according to the Associated Press.
That plea, which will be finalized during an April 12 court hearing, came as part of a deal reached with prosecutors for his cooperation in exposing the extent of Cuba’s surreptitious intelligence-gathering inside the U.S. in exchange for the dismissal of more than a dozen other serious criminal charges Rocha faced.
In a Dec. 4 press release from the Justice Department, it was first revealed that former Ambassador Rocha had been a clandestine spy on behalf of the Cuban regime within the U.S. government for decades, and was only caught after he confessed his lengthy record of espionage to an undercover FBI agent that he believed was a member of the Cuban intelligence services.
“This action exposes one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement at that time. (Read more: Slay News, 3/03/2024) (Archive)