Lucas: Border crisis presents another national security risk
It is good that the FBI brought finally down a U.S. ambassador who had been a career-long spy for Cuba.
But did it need 40 years to do it?
Because that is how long alleged spy Manuel Rocha, 73, of Miami, a veteran State Department official and former U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, had been secretly working for the Cubans, according to the FBI.
In announcing Rocha’s arrest last Monday, Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen, chief of the agency’s’ National Security Division, said “For decades Rocha allegedly worked as a covert agent for Cuba and abused his position of trust in the U.S. government to advance the interests of a foreign power.”
Rocha, a naturalized citizen from Columbia was, according to the FBI, a covert agent for Cuba’s General Directorate of Intelligence while serving on the National Security Council and as an advisor to the commander of the U.S. Southern Command, which overseas Cuban activity.
The FBI said he used to refer to Fidel Castro as “Comandante,” and his Cuban intelligence contacts as “Companeros.”
Why it took so long to catch Rocha, the FBI did not say even though Rocha’s actions “exposes one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent,’ according to Attorney General Merrick Garland.
So now with Rocha out of the way maybe the FBI can turn its attention to the 24,000 young, military-age Chinese “foreign agents” who have illegally crossed into the country in the last year. It could also investigate the armed carjacking domestic terrorists who have spread fear throughout Washington, D.C.
The young men crossing into the U.S. from the Communist People’s Republic of China are equal to two Chinese army divisions, or the equivalent to the two U.S. army infantry divisions that invaded Omaha Beach June 6, 1944, in the World War II Normandy Invasion.
Had the illegal Chinese immigrants arrived as a group and been armed when crossing from Mexico into Texas and Arizona it would have been an act of war.
But, dressed in civilian clothes, they simply walked in and headed for New York or Washington or Chicago or Boston or other politically correct and welcoming cities.
They all may be fine young men seeking a better life than they had in police state Communist China.
Or they could be spies, criminals or terrorists sent to the U.S. to destabilize the country.
Nobody, including the Biden administration and the FBI, knows who they are, where they are or what they plan to do. Nor do they seem to care.
This is not to single out the Chinese even though it is an adversarial country that ships thousands of Chinese men into the U.S. , along with the chemical makings of fentanyl, a drug that kills 200 Americans a day.
Thousands of other illegal immigrants are also flocking across Joe Biden’s open border from other adversarial nations like Iran and Russia which, like the Chinese Communists, want to weaken the United States.
This does not take into consideration the growing threat the Islamic terrorist groups sponsored by Iran, like Hamas or Hezbollah, that are suspected of sending terrorists across the border in the wake of the Israeli War against Hamas in Gaza.
FBI director Christopher Wray told a Congressional committee that an already heightened risk of terrorism in the United States has reached “a whole new level.”
“While there may have been times over the years where individual threats could have been higher here or there than where they might be right now, I’ve never seen a time where all the threats, or so many of the threats, are all elevated at exactly the same time.
“I see blinking (red) lights everywhere I turn,” Wray said, blinking.
The question is what he and the Biden administration doing about it other than waving them in.
Apparently not much.
The Biden government and the FBI cannot or will not even solve the growing carjacking problem by armed thugs under their noses in Washington, let alone deal with the Chinese invasion of America.
Why are you doing this to your country, Joe?
Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.
Attorney General Merrick Garland speaks last week in Washington about Manuel Rocha, the former American diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, being charged with serving as a secret agent for Cuba’s intelligence services. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)