Victor Manuel Roach, who was arrested in December for working as a spy for the Castro dictatorship for decades, told the judge in his case that he will plead guilty to the charges. Appearing in court on Thursday, Rocha and his attorneys let the judge know he will accept the plea deal offered by prosecutors.
A former career U.S. diplomat told a federal judge Thursday he will plead guilty to charges of working for decades as a secret agent for communist Cuba, an unexpectedly swift resolution to a case prosecutors called one of the most brazen betrayals in the history of the U.S. foreign service.
Manuel Rocha’s stunning fall from grace could culminate in a lengthy prison term after the 73-year-old said he would admit to federal counts of conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government.
Prosecutors and Rocha’s attorney indicated the plea deal includes an agreed-upon sentence but they did not disclose details at a hearing Thursday. He is due back in court April 12, when he is scheduled to formalize his guilty plea and be sentenced.
“I am in agreement,” said Rocha, shackled at the hands and ankles, when asked by U.S. District Court Judge Beth Bloom if he wished to change his plea to guilty. Prosecutors, in exchange, agreed to drop 13 counts including wire fraud and making false statements.
The brief hearing shed no new light on the question that has proved elusive since Rocha’s arrest in December: What exactly did he do to help Cuba while working at the State Department for two decades? That included stints as ambassador to Bolivia and top posts in Argentina, Mexico, the White House and the U.S. Interests Section in Havana.
By accepting the deal offered by prosecutors and pleading guilty, Manuel Rocha is ensured a prison sentence. However, it also ensures the public will never know the full extent of his treason. A win for the Castro dictatorship and the extensive espionage operations the Cuban regime carries out on U.S. soil.
Rocha may be taking the path of least resistance here, knowing he had little to no chance of winning if his case went to trial. But knowing how the Castro regime works, he could also be taking the safest path to ensure his family doesn’t pay the consequences if more damaging details of the Cuban dictatorship’s operations in the U.S. are revealed to the public during a trial.
Of course he changed his mind. This is now a legal game, and he’ll get off lighter this way, just as the Puerto Rican traitor got off lighter by “cooperating.” The US intel people obviously dropped the ball big time, again, and it’s better for everybody to tidy this up as much and as quickly as possible and “move on.”
What’s astounding is that a bankrupt third world POS like the Cuban regime has so many spies in the US. In that respect it behaves more like a large, sophisticated country than the LATRINE POS it is.
Which leads me to the mainstream media that despite all of the spies Cuba has still enables it and believes all of the corrupted pro-Cuba reports those spies put out like the pro-regime studies that Puerto Rican woman used to create.
It seems Castro, Inc. has been remarkably successful at recruiting spies prepared to betray the US for ideological rather than monetary reasons. No doubt that’s been deliberate, since the regime has always avoided paying anybody for anything insofar as possible. But yes, it has found such people, which suggests they’re more plentiful than one imagines–same as perverse people in general.