Numerous Spies in the United States Have Worked for Cuba and Other Enemy Nations
Victor Manuel Rocha (Wikipedia picture)
Victor Manuel Rocha was born on October 23, 1950, in Colombia. He served 40 years in the Department of State, the White House’s National Security Council, and as an Advisor to the Pentagon’s Southern Command in Doral, Florida. On December 4, 2023, Rocha was charged for spying for Communist Cuba. He faces at least three criminal counts: conspiracy to act as foreign agent to defraud the U.S., acting as an illegal agent for a foreign government, and use of passport obtained by false statement. Additional charges are expected to come later this week. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan D. Stratton said Rocha should be held without bail, saying he’s a flight risk with dual citizenship.
Rocha was raised in a middle-class home in New York City. He graduated from high school in 1969. He went to Yale University and graduated in 1973. Rocha received a Master’s degree in Public Administration from Harvard University in 1976 and a Master of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University in 1978. The same year Rocha became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
On December 4, 2023, the Office of Public Affairs of the Department of Justice wrote the following:
“Federal prosecutors have charged Victor Manuel Rocha, 73, of Miami, Florida, a former U.S. Department of State employee who served on the National Security Council from 1994 to 1995 and ultimately as U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia from 2000 to 2002, with committing multiple federal crimes by secretly acting for decades as an agent of the government of the Republic of Cuba.”
“This action exposes one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “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. Those who have the privilege of serving in the government of the United States are given an enormous amount of trust by the public we serve. To betray that trust by falsely pledging loyalty to the United States while serving a foreign power is a crime that will be met with the full force of the Justice Department.”
“Like all federal officials, U.S. diplomats swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. Acting as an agent for Cuba – a hostile foreign power – is a blatant violation of that oath and betrays the trust of the American people,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray. “The FBI will continue to rigorously defend against foreign governments targeting America, and we will find and hold accountable anyone who violates their oath to the United States, no matter how long it takes.” “For decades, Rocha allegedly worked as a covert agent for Cuba and abused his position of trust in the U.S. government to advance the interests of a foreign power,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. “However long it might take, we will deliver justice to those who betray their solemn oaths to the American people.”
“The Southern District and our law enforcement partners stand ready to protect the United States from individuals who act unlawfully as agents of foreign governments,” said U.S. Attorney Markenzy Lapointe for the Southern District of Florida. “Individuals who violate federal law by engaging in clandestine activity for hostile foreign states, and by providing false information about those activities to the U.S. government, endanger American democracy. That is especially so for past or present employees of the United States who took an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution, and for U.S. citizens who benefit from the freedoms and opportunities of this country. The U.S. Attorney’s Office and our law enforcement partners in South Florida, and elsewhere, will continue to vigorously enforce all federal laws.”
“According to the complaint, beginning no later than approximately 1981, and continuing to the present, Rocha, a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Colombia, secretly supported the Republic of Cuba and its clandestine intelligence-gathering mission against the United States by serving as a covert agent of Cuba’s General Directorate of Intelligence. To further that role, according to the complaint, Rocha obtained employment in the U.S. Department of State between 1981 and 2002, in positions that provided him access to nonpublic information, including classified information, and the ability to affect U.S. foreign policy. After his State Department employment ended, Rocha engaged in other acts intended to support Cuba’s intelligence services. From in or around 2006 until in or around 2012, Rocha was an advisor to the Commander of the U.S. Southern Command, a joint command of the United States military whose area of responsibility includes Cuba.”
According to the complaint, Rocha began his State Department career in 1981, rising through the ranks to serve in a variety of positions. These were as follows:
(1) From February 1989 to November 1991, as the First Secretary at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, Mexico.
(2) From November 1991 to July 1994, as the Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
(3) From July 1994 to July 1995, as the Director of Inter-American Affairs on the U.S. National Security Council, with special responsibility for, among other things, Cuba.
(4) From July 1995 to July 1997, as Deputy Principal Officer at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, Cuba.
(5) From July 1997 to November 1999, as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and
(6) From November 1999 to August 2002, as Ambassador to Bolivia at the U.S. Embassy in La Paz, Bolivia.
Directed by Cuba, Rocha gave a speech weeks before the 2002 general election in Bolivia threatening to cut American aid to Bolivia over Evo Morales’ support for the coca farmers that enraged Bolivians and helped Morales’s Movement for Socialism win.
Rocha is a member of the globalist of the New World Order Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. He serves on the Cuba Transition Project and International Advisory Board at the University of Miami. The Cuban Transition Project was created to move Cuba from communism to democracy and a Cuban spy was on its advisory board!
After ending his diplomatic career at the Department of State, Roche was hired to work with multinationals that did business in Latin America He was Director of Government Relations for Arcos Dorados Holding that owns and manages most of the McDonald’s restaurants in Latin America. He was hired as Senior Advisor on International Business for American law firm Foley & Lardner LLP in Miami. Rocha was hired as President of Barrick Gold Corporation in the Dominican Republic. During this time Roche continued to spy for Communist Cuba.
In November 2022, an undercover FBI agent contacted Rocha via WhatsApp. The agent told Rocha, “Good Afternoon ambassador, my name is Miguel and I have a message for you from your friends in Havana.” FBI special agent Michael Haley wrote in a criminal complaint, quoting the undercover agent, “It is in regard to a sensitive matter. Are you available for a telephone call?”
In subsequent meetings on November 16, 2022, February 17, 2023, and June 23 in 2023, Rocha boasted about his longtime support for Communist Cuba, according to the complaint. During the final meeting, Rocha was offended when the undercover FBI agent questioned whether he was still loyal Cuba. Rocha said, “Compañero I am angry. I’m pissed off, It’s like you want me to drop them … and show you if I still have testicles. Rocha repeatedly called the U.S. “the enemy.”
Rocha told the undercover agent that his efforts to infiltrate the United States government were “meticulous” and “very disciplined.” And he repeatedly bragged about the significance of his efforts saying, ‘What has been done has strengthened the revolution immensely.” Rocha may have been responsible for the death of many patriots. The damage done by this spy was much worse than Ana Belén Montes since Rocha also served in Havana. Any Cuban patriot that contacted Rocha was immediately referred to the Cuban regime intelligence services. Unlike America, American spies in Cuba are shot.
The complaint of the Department of Justice alleges the following: “In a series of meetings during 2022 and 2023, with an undercover agent from the FBI posing as a covert Cuban General Directorate of Intelligence representative, Rocha made repeated statements admitting his decades of work for Cuba, spanning 40 years. When the undercover told Rocha he was a covert representative here in Miami whose mission was to contact you, introduce myself as your new contact, and establish a new communication plan, Rocha answered Yes, and proceeded to engage in a lengthy conversation during which he described and celebrated his activity as a Cuban intelligence agent.”
“Throughout the meetings, Rocha behaved as a Cuban agent, consistently referring to the United States as the enemy, and using the term we to describe himself and Cuba. Rocha additionally praised Fidel Castro as the Comandante and referred to his contacts in Cuban intelligence as his Compañeros (comrades) and to the Cuban intelligence services as the Dirección. Rocha described his work as a Cuban agent as a grand slam.”
“Rocha is charged with conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government without prior notification to the Attorney General; acting as an agent of a foreign government without prior notification to the Attorney General; and with using a passport obtained by false statement. He is expected to make an initial appearance before a U.S. Magistrate Judge in Miami today, Dec. 4. The FBI Miami Field Office is investigating the case, with valuable contributions by the Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service and the FBI’s Washington. Field Office Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jonathan D. Stratton and John C. Shipley of the Southern District of Florida, along with Trial Attorneys Heather M. Schmidt and Christine A. Bonomo of the National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section are prosecuting the case. Anyone with tips can call 1-800-CALL-FBI (800-225-5324).
Seal of the Central Intelligence Service (Picture from Wikipedia)
Bill Gertz wrote an article entitled “CIA Fooled by Massive Cold War Double-Agent Failure” which was published in the Washington Free Beacon website on December 28, 2015. He explained how the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was fooled by almost a hundred double agents pretending to be working for the agency but secretly worked for communist spy agencies during the Cold War and beyond, according to Benjamin B. Fischer, a former CIA analyst, operations officer, and historian.
Cuba, East Germany, and the Soviet Union (and later Russia) successfully placed in the CIA nearly 100 fake CIA recruits who supplied false intelligence that was passed on to senior U.S. officials for decades. Benjamin B. Fischer wrote in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence the following: “During the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency bucked the law of averages by recruiting double agents on an industrial scale; it was hoodwinked not a few but many times. The result was a massive but largely ignored intelligence failure. The failure to recognize the double agents and their disinformation designed to influence U.S. policies wreaked havoc on the agency.”
Gertz pointed out that Fischer stated that the failure to prevent the double agent deception was dismissed by the CIA as “insignificant,” and that congressional oversight committees did not press the agency to reform its recruiting of foreign agents. Fischer was a career CIA officer who joined the CIA in 1973 and worked in the Soviet affairs division during the Cold War. He later sued the agency in 1996, charging that he was mistreated for criticizing the CIA for mishandling the 1994 case of CIA officer Aldrich Ames, a counterintelligence official, who was a long time KGB agent. .Former CIA agent Aldrich Ames was a counterintelligence official who was unmasked as a long time KGB plant. Ames was spying for Moscow since the 1980s.
Gertz explained that double agents are foreigners who are recruited by a spy agency but are secretly loyal to another spy agency. They are used to provide false disinformation and to extract secrets while pretending to be loyal agents. Double agents are different than foreign penetration agents, or moles, who spy from within agencies while posing as career intelligence officers.
The bloody Castro brothers in Cuba were very successful in placing double agents in the CIA. Former Cuban intelligence Major Florentino Aspillaga, who defected to the CIA in 1987, revealed that “some four-dozen CIA recruits over a 40-year period secretly had been working for the communist government in Havana and supplying disinformation to the CIA.” Later that year, Cuban state television reported in a documentary the existence of 27 phony CIA agents, along with their secret CIA communications and photographic gear. The catastrophic intelligence failure was covered up by the congressional intelligence oversight committees, according to Fischer.
Gertz wrote that in East Germany, all the recruited CIA agents working there were found to be double agents working secretly for the Ministry of State Security spy service, also known as the Stasi. Fischer said the controlled East German assets “rendered U.S. intelligence deaf, dumb, and blind.” The late East German spymaster Markus Wolf wrote in his memoir that by the late 1980s “we were in the enviable position of knowing that not a single CIA agent had worked in East Germany without having been turned into a double agent or working for us from the start.” He added that “On our orders they were all delivering carefully selected information and disinformation to the Americans.”
Fischer wrote that former U.S. intelligence officials confirmed the failure, including former CIA Director Robert Gates and Bobby Ray Inman, a former deputy CIA director, who said the double agent fiasco spanned over 20 years. Fischer stated that the East German failure was “wall-to-wall,” due to the lack of advance warning in 1961 regarding the plans to build the Berlin Wall, and in 1989, cable television provided CIA with the first word that the wall was coming down.
Gertz said that the last major double agent failure took place in the Soviet Union and, after its 1991 collapse, in Russia. It was revealed after the 1994 arrest of CIA counterintelligence officer Aldrich Ames for spying for Moscow since the 1980s. Ames helped the KGB expose all Soviet and East European intelligence operations, allowing Moscow to pass “feed material”—a combination of accurate information and false data—through controlled double-agents. The KGB operation involving Ames began in 1986 and continued through 1993 when he was handled by the post-Soviet SVR intelligence service.
Gertz stated the following: “In 1995, the CIA admitted that for eight years since 1986, it produced highly classified intelligence reports derived from bogus and tainted sources, including 35 reports that were based on data from double agents, and 60 reports compiled using sources that were suspected of being controlled by Moscow. The false information reached the highest levels of government, including three presidents—Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.” The CIA’s inspector general urged reprimands for several senior CIA officers and directors, William H. Webster, Robert M. Gates, and R. James Woolsey. The three former directors claimed they should not be blamed for the compromises because they were unaware of them.
A major problem for the CIA Soviet operations was the failure of agency officers to successfully conduct direct recruitments of foreign agents to work for the CIA. Instead, the CIA was reliant on “walk-ins,” or volunteers, a practice that increased the vulnerability to foreign double agent operations. Fischer blamed the bureaucratic culture and careerism at CIA for the failure to prevent the double agent disaster. He stated the following: “The case of the KGB-SVR double agents from 1986 to 1994 is egregious, not the least because it revealed that deceptive practices transcended the Cold War. The CIA continued to handle agents the CIA knew were fraudulent and allowed the division in charge of Soviet affairs to cover up the loss of all its bona fide agents. Yet none of these revelations resulted in a serious inquiry into the troubles that doubles cause. To paraphrase Lord Acton, secret power corrupts secretly.”
Angelo Codevilla, a former Senate Select Committee on Intelligence staff member and a senior fellow at the Claremont, said he was familiar with some of the details on the CIA double agents during his intelligence career but said some information in the article was new. He said that “Mitigating the dismay at the total corruption—moral, intellectual, and political—of the agency is my surprise that a man in Fischer’s position saw the reality so very clearly and so reports it.”
Kenneth E. deGraffenreid, a former senior White House intelligence official during the Reagan administration, stated the following: “What we thought was true from the Cold War spy wars was largely wrong, and that says that the counterintelligence model we had was wrong. And therefore, because we’ve not corrected that problem, we’re in bad shape to deal with the current challenges posed by terrorists and spies from Iran, Russia, China, and others.” David Sullivan, a former CIA analyst and retired Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff member, said Fischer correctly explained that “intelligence officers have a saying that the only thing worse than knowing there is a mole in your organization is finding the mole.”
Terresa Monroe-Hamilton wrote an article titled “In from the Cold and out Again… How the CIA was Duped and their Double Agent Failure” which was posted on her website NoisyRoom.net on December 28, 2015. She said regarding the Gertz article that she was appalled that these double agents were not thoroughly vetted.
Monroe-Hamilton wrote the following: “The double agents were hurriedly turned and because of sloppiness, we invited the enemy into the midst of our intelligence agencies. It’s mind boggling. How’s that for national security? Feeling warm and fuzzy yet? What’s worse is that the CIA dismissed the infiltration by communists and the disinformation as insignificant. No one, including congressional oversight committees, pushed for reform in the agency when this was uncovered either. Their vetting processes still suck, and they aren’t listening to the likes of Fischer… Lord only knows how many moles we have within our agencies.”
Monroe-Hamilton pointed out that the first major double agent failure was in Cuba. The Cubans are “notorious for using a variety of traps for agents from honey traps to straight up blackmail.” As explained earlier, no less than four dozen recruits over 40 years had been secretly working for communist Cuba while on the payroll of the CIA. These Cuban double agents supplied disinformation to the CIA, endangering agents and scuttling operations left and right.
Monroe-Hamilton stated the following: “This is the same government – Castro’s government – that Obama just reinstated relations with. Now, instead of being made fools by the communists, we just crawl into bed with them. It’s the other definition of coming in from the cold. You would think that would have set off alarms in the agency and caused them to adjust their vetting procedures. But you’d be wrong. Instead, the intelligence failure was covered up by congressional intelligence committees. You see the enemies within go way back. We willingly let the enemy in our doors and let them set up shop in our intelligence agencies and abroad. Is it any wonder we now have a Marxist in power who colludes with communist dictators and tyrants, as well as Islamists?”
Monroe-Hamilton concluded her article by stating the following: “How can we defend our country if we can’t even police our own intelligence agencies? And it goes far beyond them as well. All our government agencies and the federal government itself are infiltrated with communists and Islamists… from NASA to our universities, to our military, to the seats of power in Congress… the U.S. is facing an existential problematic threat from within. The CIA is not the only one that has been duped here. The whole nation has been by Barack Obama and his comrades.”
Cuba’s Effective Use of its Spies and Diplomats Worldwide
Cuba has worked very effectively with the corrupt and dictators club that is the United Nations (U.N.) for decades. The brutal communist regime has served in the U.N. Council of Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland.
Every year the U.N. General Assembly approves by an overwhelming margin a non-binding resolution introduced by Cuba against the U.S. commercial embargo imposed on the tyrannical Castro brothers’ regime since 1961. The U.S. embargo on Cuba came about after the Castro regime confiscated without compensation several billions of dollars in businesses and property belonging to Americans.
Cuba continues to support terrorism with its large Cuban Occupation Army and intelligence services in Venezuela. This South American nation engages in drug trafficking worldwide and uses part of that money to fund Hezbollah, the Iranian militia in Lebanon. Cuba continues to provide sanctuary to many United States criminals who have murdered police officers, planted bombs, and hijacked airplanes in the United States. Cuba has denied requests from the United States to return these criminals to face justice in this nation.
Carlos Alberto Montaner wrote an article titled “Gulliver against 12,000 dwarfs” which was published in the Miami Herald on November 2, 2015. He explained how communist Cuba uses its enormous intelligence network to back Cuba’s diplomatic goals. Montaner explained that the United States really did not defend itself at the United Nations since these U.N. resolutions are not binding. He wrote the following: “They are mere propaganda within an organization so discredited that it elected Venezuela and Ecuador to the committee that oversees human rights observance, effectively assigning the fox to watch over the chicken coop. What’s interesting is the way the Castro brothers manage to divert attention from the heart of the issue — the persistence of a Stalinist dictatorship derived from the Soviet model eradicated from the West a quarter of a century ago — and refocus it on a fabricated perception: an impoverished island besieged by the greatest power on earth. David against Goliath.”
Montaner pointed out that the Castro regime has about 12,000 people engaged in the task of promoting the causes selected by Fidel and Raúl Castro. These individuals are used to denounce the United States worldwide and in the United Nations.
Cuba has worked and continues to work with all the enemies of the United States. The Cuban regime collaborates with Iran, Syria, Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, and the rest of the Latin American countries that belong to the 21st century socialism under ALBA alliance. The Cuban General Directorate of Intelligence has 1,500 well-trained officers deployed worldwide and leads the effort to advance the Cuban agenda. Each intelligence officer recruits or handles a dozen local contacts.
Montaner said that the members of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) are another arm of the intelligence machine present in all countries and all international organizations. Cuba has 119 Cuban embassies in 140 sites, with 21 consulates general and all of them are controlled by General Directorate of Intelligence. Thus, all Cuban diplomatic posts serve the intelligence function. The General Directorate of Intelligence works effectively with academic, literary, or artistic institutions that have contacts abroad and travel overseas or host travelers.
Montaner explained that “Thousands of people directly or indirectly linked to the political life and communications of most of the world’s nations, most especially to those of the major countries in the West, which end up responding to the dictates from Havana.” In addition, Cuba has a very effective counterintelligence agency or secret police called Seguridad del Estado whose spies were trained by the East German Stasi, highly effective secret police.
Seguridad del Estado employs about 60,000 persons which amount to 0.5% of the population. Seguridad del Estado has infiltrated most of the opponent organizations and dissident groups inside the island and many anti-communist Cuban organizations in the United States. It has also penetrated Masons, all Christian churches, and other groups like the LGTB, and the “self-employed entrepreneurs” in Cuba.
This writer has explained that Pope Francis, who is a Marxist, worked with Obama to assist the United States in normalizing diplomatic relations with the Cuban regime. Cuba’s Cardinal, Jaime Ortega Alamino, shamefully collaborated with the tyrant Castro brothers until he died.
Montaner concluded his article by stating the following: “Washington, which has lost the reflexes it had during the Cold War, does not know how to fight against that enemy. Or it can’t or won’t. In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift describes how, after a shipwreck in Lilliput, Captain Lemuel Gulliver is tied down and captured by a legion of 6-inch-tall dwarfs. That’s what’s happening to the United States. It is not David against Goliath. It is Gulliver against 12,000 very efficient dwarfs.”
FBI report on how Cuba recruits spies in the United States
The FBI published a report in 2014 explaining how Cuba has effectively recruited hundreds of graduates and professors from our best universities to work as spies in the United States. It is well known that the universities in the United States are filled with socialist, Marxist, and radical professors who have influenced many students to adopt the same bankrupt ideology.
President Barack Obama is a perfect example of a Harvard Law School graduate who is a Marxist and a hidden radical Muslim. Harvard and other Ivy League universities have employed many liberal, socialist, radical, and Marxist professors for decades.
Bill Gertz wrote an article titled “FBI: Cuban intelligence aggressively recruiting leftist American academics as spies, influence agents” which was published by the Washington Free Beacon website on September 5, 2014. Gertz explained that the Cuban regime’s intelligence services are aggressively recruiting radical leftist American academics and university professors as spies and influence agents, according to an internal FBI report published on September 2, 2014.
We are currently seeing all the pro-Hamas demonstrations by Ivy League universities students and professors and asking for the destruction of Israel by chanting “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” which means the destruction of Israel. Sadly, the presidents of these Ivy League universities are tolerating the abuse of their Jewish students as we saw them testifying in Congress on December 6, 2023.
The five-page unclassified FBI report stated the following: “Cuban intelligence services have perfected the work of placing agents, that includes aggressively targeting U.S. universities under the assumption that a percentage of students will eventually move on to positions within the U.S. government that can provide access to information of use to the Cuban intelligence service. It notes that the Cubans devote a significant number of resources to targeting and exploiting U.S. academia…Academia has been and remains a key target of foreign intelligence services.”
The FBI report pointed out that one recruitment method used by the Cubans is to appeal to American leftists’ ideology. It gave as an example the following: “For instance, someone who is allied with communist or leftist ideology may assist the [Cuban intelligence service] because of his/her personal beliefs.
Others are offered lucrative business deals in Cuba in a future post-U.S. embargo environment, and are treated to extravagant, all-expense paid visits to the island.” This writer was invited to Cuba while he taught at FIU to an all-expense paid visit to the island by another Cuban American FIU professor that did not know that he was an anti-communist who has denounced the Cuban tyranny his entire life in radio and television and in articles and books.
Cuban Spies Infiltrate Cuban American Anticommunist Organizations
Brothers to the Rescue (Hermanos al Rescate) was founded by Bay of Pigs veteran José Basulto in 1991. Volunteer pilots flew many missions over the Florida Straits to assist and rescue refugees from Cuba that were coming to the United States in tiny rafts and small boats. These brave pilots would drop food and water and notify the Coast Guard so they would be picked up. Thousands of Cubans were drowning and being eaten by sharks by trying to escape the island.
(The picture is from the Babalu.com)
On 24 February 1996, two of the Brothers to the Rescue Cessna 337 Skymasters (twin-engine civilian light aircraft) were shot down by a Cuban Mig-29UB, while a second jet fighter, a Mig-23, flew nearby. Four brave Cuban Americans were brutally killed. They were Carlos Costa, Armando Alejandre, Jr., Mario de la Peña, and Pablo Morales. A third Cessna aircraft, flown by José Basulto and two of his passengers Silvia Iriondo and her husband, was able to escape.
Following the assassination of the four pilots, the United Nations Security Council passed Security Council Resolution 1067 (1996), a U.S.-sponsored resolution condemning Cuba. The reaction of Cuban Americans in the United States was explosive. Cuban American leader Jorge Mas Canosa and President of the Cuban American National Foundation condemned the brutal attack. He stated the following: “For two warplanes from the Castro government to shoot down two unarmed civilian aircraft with American flags on a humanitarian mission should be considered an act of war against the US”.
President Bill Clinton issued Proclamation 6867 on March 1, 1996, declaring a national emergency by reason of a disturbance, or threatened disturbance of international relations. Fidel Castro and Raúl Castro gave the order to shoot down these two unarmed civilian aircrafts in international airspace. It was indeed and act of war, but the Clinton administration did not respond with an attack against Cuba. After the attack, the Cuban pilots responsible were the twin brothers, Teniente Coronel (LTC) Lorenzo Alberto Perez Perez and Teniente Coronel (LTC) Francisco Perez Perez. Both were charged in the United States for their role in the murder.
Juan Pablo Roque (picture from Spyscap)
Cuban spy Juan Pablo Roque had infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue to provide the Cuban bloody regime information to shoot down the small aircrafts of the organization in international waters. Following the February 24, 1996, shooting of two aircrafts of Brothers to the Rescue, it became known that one of the group’s pilots who did not fly that day. He was Juan Pablo Roque.
Shortly after the two small planes were downed, Roque disappeared from his home in Miami and resurfaced in Havana. Roque married a Miami Cuban American woman and left her without any explanation. This traitor pretended to love his wife and even went to church with her.
Roque even wrote a fake book on how he defected from Cuba by swimming to Guantanamo Naval Base that was published by the Cuban National Foundation of Jorge Mas Canosa. I met this spy not knowing that he had infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue. He was selling his fake book, and I was selling my book on Cuban education at the Miami Book Fair a few years ago. We exchanged books.
It is interesting to note that Cuban spy Victor Manuel Rocha was Deputy of the U.S. Interest Section in Havana and Cuban spy Ana Belén Montes was Senior Cuban Analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in 1996. Did these two traitors had a role in the shooting of the two aircrafts from Brothers to the Rescue? Did Rocha advice the Clinton administration to stand down? Because shamefully Clinton stood down, and to this day this horrendous crime was committed with complete impunity. What recommendation was given by Montes to the Pentagon?
The Cuban Five Spies of the Wasp Network (Red Avispa)
Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, and René González (Picture from the National Committee to Free the Cuban Five)
The Cuban Five, also known as the Miami Five, are five Cuban intelligence officers Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, and René González who were arrested in September 1998 and later convicted in Miami of conspiracy to commit espionage murder and other illegal activities in the United States. The five spies came to America to infiltrate the Cuban American anticommunist organizations including the Cuban American National Foundation, Alpha 66. Brothers to the Rescue. One of them was hired at a naval base in Key West. They were part of La Red Avispa (the Wasp Network) composed of at least 27 Cuban spies.
The U.S. government also accused the spies of lying about their identities and sending 2,000 pages of unclassified information obtained from U.S. military bases to Cuba. The court found that they had infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue together with Juan Pablo Roque.
Gerardo Hernández was sentenced to two life sentences for his involvement in this horrible crime. Obama did not care about the suffering of the relatives of these four Cuban American pilots who were brutally assassinated and released the five spies as requested by the Cuban dictator Raúl Castro. The Cuban government acknowledged that the five were intelligence agents in 2001, after denying it for three years. René González was released from prison on October 7, 2011, having completed 13 years of his sentence. Fernando González was let go on February 27, 2014. The remaining members were released on December 17, 2014, in a prisoner exchange with Cuba for an American intelligence officer, identified by a senior American as Rolando Sarraff Trujillo. The exchange of prisoners coincided with Cuba’s release of American contractor Alan Phillip Gross who had been sent to jail unjustly for going to Havana to give free telephones to Cubans.
Other Cuban spies in America
Ana Belén Montes (Picture from Wikipedia)
Montes was born on February 28, 1957. Her parents were from Puerto Rico. In 1979 she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia and in 1988 she earned a Master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
Montes was hired by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in September 1985. Her first assignment was at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington where she worked as an intelligence research specialist. In 1992, Montes was selected for the DIA’s Exceptional Analyst Program and later traveled to Cuba to study the Cuban military.
Prior to her arrest, she lived in a two-bedroom co-op in Washington, D.C. Montes advanced rapidly through the ranks at DIA and became its most senior Cuban analyst. During all those years she provided disinformation on the Cuban regime and shared Pentagon classified information with the Cubans. Prosecutors would later say that Montes was already working for the Cubans when she joined the DIA in 1985.
In their charging documents, federal prosecutors stated: “Montes communicated with the Cuban Intelligence Service through encrypted messages and received her instructions through shortwave encrypted transmissions from Cuba. In addition, Montes communicated by coded numeric pager messages with the Cuban Intelligence Service by public telephones located in the District of Columbia and Maryland. The codes included ‘I received message’ or ‘danger.’” The prosecutors further stated that all the information was on water-soluble paper that could be rapidly destroyed.
During the investigation against her, it was determined that Montes had passed a considerable amount of classified information to the Cuban Intelligence Directorate, including the identities of four U.S. spies. In 2007, DIA counterintelligence official Scott W. Carmichael publicly alleged that it was Ana Montes who told Cuban intelligence officers about a clandestine U.S. Army camp in El Salvador. Carmichael said that Montes knew about the existence of the Special Forces camp because she visited it only a few weeks before the camp was attacked in 1987 by Cuban-supported guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front.
On September 21, 2001, Ana Belen Montes was arrested and subsequently charged with conspiracy to commit espionage for the government of Cuba. In October 2002, she pleaded guilty to spying for Communist Cuba for 17 years and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. She was released on January 6, 2023, after serving 20 years.
This spy was known as the “Queen of Cuba” at the DIA for her vast knowledge of Cuba. She was responsible for the death of many patriots and yet she was liberated from prison. Now she lives in her native Puerto Rico.
Walter Kendall Myers (Picture from Wikipedia)
Walter Kendall Myers was born on April 15, 1937. He worked for the Department of State and together with his wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, was arrested and indicted on June 4, 2009, on charges of spying for Cuba for 30 years. On July 16, 2010, Walter Kendall Myers was sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole. His wife Gwendolyn, who did not work for the Department of State, was sentenced to 81 months in prison. Myers is currently incarcerated at the federal ADX Florence Supermax prison in Colorado.
FIU professor in the College of Education and a founder of Florida International University (FIU), Carlos Alvarez and his wife Elsa Alvarez, an FIU counselor, were convicted of spying for Cuba. Carlos had been in custody at the Federal Detention Center in downtown Miami since his arrest in January 2006. In February 2007, Carlos Alvarez was sentenced by U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore with the maximum five-year prison sentence for conspiring to act as an unregistered Cuban agent and Elsa Alvarez with the maximum three years’ sentenced for harboring her husband’s illicit intelligence work and failing to report it to authorities.
While at FIU, Carlos took many students to Cuba. Many FIU Cuban American professors visited Cuba frequently and met with Communist professors at the University of Havana. I was invited to visit Cuba by another FIU professor for free for a week with many of other professors from the College of Education and to stay at the Hotel Nacional in Havana and later at the Melia Varadero. She was astounded when I told her that she would be arrested for taking me to Havana and I would be sent to prison again for invading Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Later these Cuban communists were invited to give conferences at FIU.
Currently Carlos and Elsa Alvarez live in Miami and people have seen them shopping in stores. Carlos pretended to be my friend while we both served in the College of Education at FIU knowing that I was a Bay of Pigs veteran. During his many years at FIU Carlos was given the assignment in Cuban intelligence to spy on Cuban Americans in Miami. He was also a leader in the Catholic Church spiritual retreats.
While the crimes of Carlos and Elsa Alvarez cannot be compared to those of Victor Manuel Rocha and Ana Belén Montes, the spying of the activities of influential American are serious crimes. The Miami Herald wrote an editorial on December 6, 2023. John Suarez, Executive Director of the Center for a Free Cuba, told the Editorial Board of the Miami Herald the following: “The role of Cuban spies with relation to the Cuban exiles is to smear this community as violent, anti-democratic and hostile to dialogue while at the same time seeking to divide through rumor and innuendo, generating ill feeling between groups and individuals.”
Conclusion
In Communist nations like Cuba, North Korea, Russia, Iran, and China spies are shot immediately when they are caught. Why is so easy for Communist Cuba and other enemy nations to spy on the United States? And after these spies are caught, charged, and convicted why are we so lenient with them? The only exception was Walter Kendall Myers who was sentenced to life in prison. But why was Ana Belén Montes released from prison after 20 years and the five members of the Wast Network released so soon?
The mass-murdering Cuban regime has been engaged in subversion, espionage, military interventions, and support for terror groups thought out the world for more than 64 years. As I wrote in one of my books, Fidel Castro working with Mafia and others in the Deep State assassinated President John F. Kennedy. It is inexplicable to this writer why the United States has tolerated communist Cuba long record of attacks on the United States and around the planet that have caused the death and injuries of tens of thousands of people and brought so much misery. The United States should have overthrown the communist regime in Cuba long time ago. Cuba is helping, as it has done for more than 64 years, the enemies of America and terrorist organizations.
Obama and now Biden’s Cuban policy is an absolute failure. Obama with the help of the Marxist Pope Francis recognized diplomatically the bloody regime and gave many concessions to the island without a Quid Pro Quo or nothing in return. Biden has followed Obama’s appeasement policy in Cuba. Currently, Cuba has allowed China and Russia to bring lethal weapons to the island such as nuclear submarines and spy stations that seriously threatens our national security.
