China’s giant spy balloon over the US: U2 photo

“Joshua son of Nun sent two spies out from Shittim secretly with orders to reconnoitre the country. The two men came to Jericho and went to the house of a prostitute named Rahab.”

With the end of the Cold War in 1991, following the collapse of the USSR, spying receded from the public mind along with global thermonuclear war, a something belonging to a rapidly receding past.

Given that spying has long been regarded as the world’s second oldest profession that was never going to be true. Every nation wants to get their hands on information that will enable them to feel more secure, or beat their rivals, whether it’s military, diplomatic or commercial information – and the more secret it is the more they want it, for secrecy implies value.

And there was recently a strange echo from that distant Cold War past with the arrest of American Ambassador Manuel Rocha by the FBI on charges of spying for Cuba. A former diplomat associate of his, Phillip Linderman, tells the sad tale:

As a fellow Foreign Service officer, I worked alongside Manuel in Havana and feel personally betrayed (as surely others do, too). As of this writing, Rocha has not made any public admissions, but the damning narratives in the court filing present many similarities with the case of Alger Hiss, perhaps the most notorious of all American ideological spies. Serving as an American diplomat, Hiss spied for mass-murderer Stalin, while Rocha’s loyalty was to the tyrant Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution.

Unlike other American spies of recent years such as Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, this was not a case of spying for money. The Cubans didn’t have to buy him with cold, hard cash. Amazing that in 2023 there could still be people deluded enough not just to believe in old-fashioned communism, but the pathetic Cuban version of it, and believe to such a degree that they’d spy for and betray their own country for it. But as Linderman points out:

If a worldly man like Rocha swallowed Castro’s ideological flim-flam and held onto it for an incredible forty years, there are probably still other undiscovered American officials out there also hiding a clandestine record of service to the Cuban dictatorship.

The writer thinks the closest comparison to Rocha is the famous Cold War spy, Alger Hiss, whose communist motivations were captured precisely by the former communist who exposed him, Whitaker Chambers, in a famous book called Witness. I’m one of those who thought all this commie love belonged to the past, so perhaps I should finally read it. Like Hiss (and John Le Carre’s fictional traitor Bill Haydon), Rocha helped cover his tracks by pretending to be right-wing, and it worked:

My hope today is that deep-cover Marxist Manuel at least chalked me up as counter-revolutionary to be shot and not just, as Lenin would have said, one more useful liberal idiot. 

Heh! There’s no question that Rocha would have caused serious damage to the US not just in Cuba but in the Latin American realm, but Linderman points out the ultimately pathetic aspects of staying loyal to Castro, both internally for the soul and externally:

Rocha saw firsthand all the abuses that were attributable to Castro’s totalitarianism: millions of Cubans forced into economic idleness and the resulting poverty; no free press, media or expression; corrupt officials rewarded with houses, cars and travel privileges; Potemkin hospitals with no medicine, while Cuban doctors were sent abroad; and above all, a Stalinist state security apparatus that destroyed Fidel’s enemies.

At some level, Rocha must have comprehended that the Cuban revolution was a myth. Castro and his collaborators wanted nothing but raw power, just like any old-fashioned Latin American caudillos. They skillfully manipulated the empty threat of U.S. intervention and el bloqueo yanqui as just useful propaganda tools to crush their internal opposition. In the face of such a stark reality, only fanatics refuse to reassess their values and commitments; only zealots stay loyal to obvious lies. 

I’ve bolded that last because they’re standard techniques used not just by other nations such as Iran but by groups here in the West.

During his posting in Havana and in other assignments abroad, Rocha likely double-crossed numerous anti-Castro Cubans, particularly democratic and human-rights activists who put their trust in American hands. That was the very real human cost of Rocha’s treachery.

Yet I doubt he changed history, or even meaningfully put U.S.-Cuban relations on a different path.

Exactly. Even more significant traitors like Kim Philby – or Fuchs at the heart of the Manhattan Project, or Ames and Hanssen) or a hundred others – really did not change the trajectory of the Cold War.

Having said that I’ve long wondered what the impact would be when the CIA lost thirty or so spies in China back in 2010-2012, rounded up and shot after Chinese Counter-Intelligence “exploited a loophole” – that’s as much as was ever said about this, with the US government never even publicly acknowledging the loss. Such things happen all the time in the world of spies and I assumed that the CIA would slowly and painfully rebuild their networks, and in any case, so much spying is now done electronically. But maybe not:

Today, U.S. spy satellites closely monitor China’s military deployments and modernization plans, while cyber and eavesdropping tools scoop up vast swaths of Chinese communications. Beyond that, U.S. knowledge of Xi’s plans comes mostly from inference and from parsing his frequent public statements, officials said.

China is a much tougher intelligence target than it was a decade ago, when the agents were lost. Xi’s security-first state employs Orwellian surveillance systems that vastly complicate spy operations inside the country. And U.S. intelligence must track China’s progress in fields as disparate as artificial intelligence and synthetic biology.

Knowing all the details of warships and other military assets, plus what builds them – industrial capacities and so forth – is crucial. But so is having some idea of what plans are being made to use them, and in that aspect the US is largely blind because of their lack of human intelligence gathering(“humint”). But when you read the following you have to wonder if it even matters when the TPTB won’t do anything with such information anyway:

Even more worrisome, however, is the fact that we knew about what Xi Jinping’s goals were and how he was going to be aggressively taking power in the run-up to his actually becoming Chinese President. And yet, as the WSJ report shows, his impact on China (and global affairs) was minimized or ignored by the then-Obama administration, and in subsequent administrations, there was a hope that China would “liberalize” and become a more global entity, rather than remain deeply nationalistic.

Sounds like those men in the 1930’s feeding information to Churchill about Hitler’s rearmament and how even detailed data was dismissed by Churchill’s Tory peers because appeasement was the policy.

At least the Liberalising-China nonsense has vanished, first at the hands of Trump and now even in the Biden administration – although you still have to wonder about the influence purchased by the China money connections of Hunter Biden and others in the Biden family.

And while China is the big boy on the block there are other, smaller players involved with spying – like Iran:

The Biden administration’s now-suspended Iran envoy Robert Malley helped to fund, support, and direct an Iranian intelligence operation designed to influence the United States and allied governments, according to a trove of purloined Iranian government emails…They showed that Malley had helped to infiltrate an Iranian agent of influence named Ariane Tabatabai into some of the most sensitive positions in the U.S. government—first at the State Department and now the Pentagon.
…
The contents of the emails are damning, showing a group of Iranian American academics being recruited by the Iranian regime, meeting together in foreign countries to receive instructions from top regime officials, and pledging their personal loyalty to the regime.

Malley was the US government’s chief interlocutor with Iran under both the Obama and the Biden administrations. If you want to know why the US has made no real progress in slowing Iran’s march to an A-Bomb, or why billions of dollars have been sent to the regime by the US, Malley is part of the answer – though we should not ignore the non-spy appeasers who undoubtedly lapped up all his arguments inside the State Department and especially in the Obama and Biden Administrations. Far more effective and damaging than Rocha’s pathetic communist support of Cuba:

Secretary of State Blinken is also an old schoolboy chum and classmate (in a fancy Paris lycée) in France… of Iran-agent Robert Malley.

Moreover, as this article asks, What Was the Role of the Iranian Spy Ring in the US Government in the ‘Intelligence Blunder’ With Hamas?:

Put this in the context of the same policy that released $6 billion to Iran to be placed in a bank in Qatar, which is Hamas’s major source of funding and where top Hamas leaders live to be safe, and you would be right to wonder how deeply our Iran policy is run from Tehran.

Maybe the spy-ring had no role at all, but look at the woman that Robert Malley hired and inserted into the Pentagon: Ariane Tabatabai is Rocha on steroids, though for a different ideology, Islamic Jihad:

Not only is Tabatabai the chief-of-staff to the Pentagon’s assistant secretary of defense for special operations, Christopher Maier, [the Defense Department’s top counterterrorism official]but, according to Navy sources, she recently became a US reserve naval intelligence officer.

… Tabatabai would receive access in her reservist intelligence role to such sensitive information as staff rosters and movements of US ships and submarines in the Persian Gulf, all of which is clearly of interest to Iran amid the current Gaza conflict. 

“The Navy has been actively training her to be an intelligence officer and giving her access to, not just what she has in her civilian job, but access to all the need-to-know information that a reserve unit has,” says the officer…“This naval reserve [role] gives her more clearance and access. Everyone she has contact with in the Navy intelligence realm is now potentially outed.”

And then there’s this as the cherry on top.