TheLittleTwentieth – Renowned Papers Edition, AI Infused

Local sources from United States: Reuters Canada, WPRL.
UK coverage: Financial Times.

The United States has charged a former ambassador to Bolivia, Philip Goldberg, with spying for Cuba. Goldberg, who served as the US ambassador to Bolivia from 2006 to 2008, is accused of providing classified information to the Cuban government. The charges come amid heightened tensions between the US and Cuba, with the US recently imposing new sanctions on the island nation. Goldberg is the first US ambassador to be charged with spying for another country.

Victor Manuel Rocha, a former US ambassador to Bolivia from 2000 to 2002, has been charged with committing multiple federal crimes including acting as an illegal foreign agent and using a fraudulently obtained passport. According to the Justice Department, Rocha served as an agent of the Cuban government for over 40 years and sought out and obtained positions within the US government that would provide him with access to non-public information and the ability to affect US foreign policy. Rocha was arrested and is expected to appear before a federal judge in Miami.

Rocha worked for the State Department from 1981 to 2002, and served on the White House’s National Security Council from 1994 to 1995. He also worked as an adviser to the Commander of the US military’s Southern Command from around 2006 to around 2012. In a court document filed in the southern district of Florida, the US accuses Rocha of having secretly supported Cuba and its clandestine intelligence-gathering mission against Washington since 1981.

Rocha 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. During his time at the US Interests Section in Havana, Cuba, between 1995 and 1997, tensions between the two countries were heightened. In February 1996, the Cuban military shot down two planes operated by Brothers to the Rescue, an anti-Castro group, killing four people. In one of the meetings with the undercover FBI agent, Rocha referred to the incident as “the shooting down of the small planes” and said that “Brothers to the Rescue and other similar people… were pushing the policy towards unnecessary provocations.”

In 2002, while serving as ambassador in Bolivia, Rocha got involved in the country’s presidential race, warning Bolivians that if they chose former coca farmer Evo Morales as president, the US could retaliate by cutting aid. The move gave a boost to the left-wing Morales and is believed to have helped him win the elections three years later.

The federal criminal complaint does not cite specific episodes in which Rocha’s work for Cuba undermined US policy or interests. In his meetings with the FBI informant, Rocha seemed to become increasingly confident and boasted about the importance of the information he provided to the Cuban government. “For me, what has been done has strengthened the Revolution,” he said. “What we have done… is huge… More than a grand slam.”