THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2025 35 Rocha’s decision to abandon Italy for Central America is just one piece of the puzzle confronting investigators as they assess the damage he caused to U.S. interests by betraying his country to work as a secret agent for communist Cuba. Rocha was sentenced to 15 years in jail in April 2024 after he pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the United States and acting as an agent of a foreign country for decades while serving in the State Department. A Career in Latin America Rocha spent almost his entire career in Latin America, rising to be ambassador in Bolivia after assignments in Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Cuba, and Honduras. While he had opportunities throughout his career to provide Cuba with valuable intelligence, the two years he spent in Honduras from early 1987 to early 1989 were potentially among the most rewarding to his spy-handlers in Havana. Rocha was still a junior diplomat with barely six years of service under his belt when he was handpicked by Ambassador Briggs as political-military officer during a crucial period in the covert, U.S.-funded “Contra” war against the Soviet-backed Sandinista government in Nicaragua. U.S. military and economic aid to Honduras to back its struggle against the Sandinistas saw the U.S. embassy in tiny Tegucigalpa mushroom into one of the largest in the world, packed with aid workers, military trainers, and CIA officers. In his memoir, Honor to State, Briggs recalls that he got to know Rocha while serving in the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs, later renamed the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs. “I got to know Manuel as a private citizen who was interested in what we were up to. He had my confidence. I have to wonder if he was playing me,” Briggs said. Rocha was one of several Spanish-speaking officers Briggs had specifically asked for, along with John Penfold, his deputy chief of mission, and Tim Brown, the officer assigned to handling the Nicaraguan Resistance, the official name of the rebel Contra army. Rocha’s post put him at the heart of sensitive embassy work, including security assistance and access to Honduran military bases for logistics and training of the Contra army. It was in Honduras that Rocha began to build his reputation—or “legend” in spy terminology—as a conservative Cold War warrior. From Harlem to Yale That contrasted with his younger days at Yale as a leftleaning student who spent a summer program in 1973 in Chile, where he was allegedly recruited by Cuban agents, according to court documents. A rare, brown-skinned Hispanic recruit in the State Department, Rocha was born in Colombia and moved at a young age to the U.S., where he was raised in Harlem by his single mother, who worked as a seamstress. He won a scholarship to Taft, the elite private boarding school in Connecticut. There, he encountered racism, he later told the Taft school bulletin. Rocha went on to study at Yale, Harvard, and Georgetown, but never gave any outward signs of resentment toward his privileged white American colleagues. If that were his motive for becoming a Cuban agent, he masked his loyalties well. And if he harbored any left-wing sympathies, he hid that too. He was briefly married in college to an older Colombian woman, whose identity and possible role in his recruitment remains a mystery. During his PhD studies at Georgetown, Rocha had an internship at the liberal Inter-American Foundation (IAF), a congressionally funded alternative development organization. It was there he met his second wife, Deborah McCarthy, and they joined the Foreign Service together, Rocha via a special expedited program to recruit those from racial and ethnic minority groups. Rocha’s first job was Honduras desk officer in the office for Central American affairs, where he is remembered as a lively and entertaining colleague who revealed little about his personal life and was highly attentive to his superiors. When the then-ambassador to Honduras, John Negroponte, was doing the rounds in Washington, Rocha was his dutiful assistant, helping arrange his schedule. Rather than be intimidated by Negroponte, one of the department’s leading conservatives, Rocha threw a party for him at his modest apartment in Arlington. Manuel Rocha’s yearbook photo from Taft, an elite boarding school in Connecticut. COURTESY OF DAVID ADAMS
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