Manuel Rocha

Since Rocha's arrest, friends and former colleagues have expressed shock as they absorbed the allegations in a federal indictment that Attorney General Merrick Garland said details one of the “highest-reaching and longest-lasting” national security breaches in generations. Cuba’s aggressive intelligence agency recruited Mr. Rocha in Chile during the early 1970s at the height of the Cold War, and relied on him as he rose through the State Department’s ranks and briefly held a powerful role at the White House during the Clinton administration. Rocha was charged with acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government, with wire fraud and with lying on passport application forms, but, notably, he does not face espionage charges. Rocha’s 21 years in government gave him the ability to shape foreign policy underhandedly, as well as access to a trove of classified information that would have been enormously valuable to Cuba and its allies. He graduated from Yale in 1973 after earning a scholarship to the Taft School. He did graduate work at Harvard and Georgetown and received master’s degrees in public administration and foreign affairs. He joined the State Department in 1981 and earned coveted posting at the White House in 1994. The capstone of his career was becoming the ambassador in Bolivia in 2000. After retiring, Mr. Rocha moved to Miami and pursued several business opportunities, including with a gold mine in the Dominican Republic, a Chinese car maker trying to make headway in Latin America, a law firm and a public relations firm.