38 MARCH 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL The CIA had two stations in Tegucigalpa, one standard team inside the embassy and another paramilitary team at a separate location in the capital, known as “The Base,” that was dedicated to the Contra effort. “It was very easy for him [Rocha] to move around in that big embassy. He didn’t have to schmooze in dark bars or call attention to himself. It was a cesspool of good and bad information,” said Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA officer and Central America analyst who knew Rocha. “Maybe his primary function for his handlers was to sort out which was good and bad,” he added. This author spoke to three exiled former Cuban agents who said that any information Rocha supplied his handlers certainly made its way into the hands of the Sandinistas. After the Sandinista revolution in 1979, Nicaragua’s General Directorate of State Security (DGSE) hired a group of Cuban intelligence officers under Andrés Barahona, a legendary colonel in Cuba’s Ministry of Interior. Barahona was given a Nicaraguan identity, Renan Montero, and placed in charge of foreign intelligence activities, according to Enrique García Díaz, a former Cuban intelligence officer who defected in 1989. “The Cubans controlled everything,” said García. While Cuban agents handled classified information they suspected came from sources inside the U.S. government, Rocha’s identity would have been a closely held secret, said Jose Cohen, a cryptology expert who worked in Cuban intelligence until he defected on a raft in 1994. “I could tell there were people working in the U.S. government with access to very sensitive information. But I didn’t handle cases. It was very compartmentalized,” he said. It’s unknown how Rocha delivered information to his Cuban handler. Sending coded messages on shortwave radio to arrange drop-off times and places was one method the Cubans used in other cases, according to retired FBI Agent Peter Lapp, author of Queen of Cuba, about a Pentagon intelligence analyst, Ana Belen Montes, who evaded capture for 17 years. A Personality Change in Honduras? Some who knew Rocha noticed a change in personality in Honduras. “He became very hard-nosed,” said Maria Otero, who knew Rocha at IAF and ran into him again in Honduras after she was posted there for a microfinance organization. Otero, who later joined the State Department, recalls how Rocha unexpectedly knocked on her door in Tegucigalpa late one night wearing a beige trench coat. She was at home planning how to quietly leave the country with three small children after her husband, Joe Eldridge, a Methodist human rights advocate, had offended the Honduran military chief by penning an op-ed linking him to drug trafficking. An image contained in an affidavit in support of the criminal complaint filed by the Justice Department shows Manuel Rocha meeting with an undercover FBI agent. JUSTICE DEPARTMENT VIA AP, FILE Negroponte was impressed by Rocha’s pluck but also wondered where it came from. “I always thought he was a bit of an odd duck,” Negroponte told the Journal. Manual Rocha and his second wife in an undated photo from Instagram. INSTAGRAM
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