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The FBI described in a public video from its Counterintelligence and Espionage Division the strategy with which Cuba penetrated the U.S. government for decades: recruiting students and professors at elite universities before they had access to any state secrets.
The revelation, published on the agency's YouTube channel, comes from a conversation between Josh Obsfeld, the FBI's External Relations manager, and special agents Aliza and Tiffany, senior national intelligence analysts, who detailed the Cuban method of long-term recruitment.
It was simply a scattered group of students who had been recruited while studying or teaching at Ivy League universities, who held some sort of ideology or viewed the Cuban Revolution as something aspirational. The Cubans took advantage of this and recruited these individuals long before they entered the U.S. government, which makes them difficult to locate. By the time we managed to identify them, they had already been working in the government for a long time and were well-positioned
Among the most notable cases is that of Ana Belén Montes, who served as the principal analyst for Cuba at the Defense Intelligence Agency and was released in January 2023 after serving more than two decades of her sentence.
Another emblematic case is that of Walter Kendall Myers, a State Department official who spied for Havana for almost thirty years, following the same university recruitment pattern described by the FBI.
More recently, the case of the former ambassador with degrees from Yale, Harvard, and Georgetown, Víctor Manuel Rocha, shook the U.S. intelligence community. Rocha was sentenced to 15 years in prison in April 2024 for acting as an agent for Cuba for decades within the U.S. diplomatic and security apparatus.
According to the FBI, Rocha represented the last loose end of the network of Cuban espionage infiltrated within the highest levels of the U.S. government, an operation that spanned decades due to a strategy of patience and ideological recruitment starting from university classrooms.
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