By Will Grant
BBC News, Havana
When the former US ambassador to Bolivia, Manuel Rocha, was arrested in Miami recently and charged by his previous employer – the US government – with having spent more than 40 years as a Cuban agent, it amounted to one of the biggest spying scandals involving the communist-run island this century.
While Manuel Rocha is yet to enter a plea, many observers remain baffled as to how he could have risen so high in the US diplomatic service while evading detection for so long, apparently honing a reputation as a hard-nosed conservative while secretly harbouring a deep-seated allegiance to the Cuban Revolution.
Evidence recorded by an undercover FBI officer, posing as a Cuban government contact, appears to show him describing the United States as the “enemy”, praising the late Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, and boasting about having successfully maintained his dual identity for decades.
One man who was not entirely surprised, though, was James Olson, the former head of counterintelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He has years of first-hand experience of Cuba’s intelligence service, the General Directorate of Intelligence (DGI).
“I would rank them as probably the most aggravating intelligence service I’ve ever worked against,” he says. “That’s not just because they’re so devious and so ruthless, but because they’re so good.”
Former CIA agent Olson says the idea that Cuba allegedly “ran” Rocha for four decades is part of their modus operandi, especially with ideological spies as opposed to mercenary ones.
“They also ran our other major Cuban losses for many, many years,” he explains, referring to a number of US citizens who were discovered to have spied for Cuba.
“They ran Ana Montes for 16 years, Philip Agee for 15 years, the Myers couple for 26 years.” The Rocha case, he says, is in keeping with their work.
‘They beat us’
Not so, he argues. In fact, he believes they are more sophisticated than ever.
“I consider the Cubans more disciplined and more effective pound-for-pound than the KGB ever was. The fact that the KGB – or the SVR, as it is today – maybe sponsoring them less than it had in the past, I don’t think has affected their ability to carry out operations in any way.”
“They’ve surpassed the KGB in terms of tradecraft and motivation and resistance to penetration,” he says.
It’s a point which came home to James Olson in June 1987, when a Cuban spy, Florentino Aspillaga, walked into the US Embassy in Vienna and defected. The testimony he gave to the Americans shocked US intelligence chiefs and revealed the extent and calibre of Fidel Castro’s spying network.
“Aspillaga told me some very disturbing things”, recalls Mr Olson. “He said that the Cuban DGI had successfully run 38 double agents against us. So every agent that we thought we’d recruited on the island was, in fact, being controlled by the DGI.”
It still rankles the retired CIA man that, by his own admission, the Cubans got the better of him.
“They owned us. They beat us. That’s one of the reasons I have this personal grudge against the Cuban intelligence service http://zorozuno.com/ because they have been so successful in operating against us.”
