Manuel Rocha, the 71-year-old former US ambassador to Bolivia under Clinton and GW Bush, was sentenced to fifteen years in prison and fined $500,000 after pleading guilty to one count of conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government, Politico reports. Prosecutors dropped more than a dozen other charges, including financial fraud counts, in exchange for the guilty plea and Rocha’s cooperation in ongoing investigations.
Prosecutors said that when Rocha entered government service with the State Department during the Reagan Administration, he was already an agent for the Cuban government and as he rose through the ranks during his career, he fed the government in Havana information about US policies and planning.
An Associated Press report discovered that the CIA had been informed by a Cuban who defected that Rocha was a double agent in 2018, one of a number of red flags the US intelligence community either ignored or dismissed during Rocha’s career.