“THE DEPARTMENT OF STATE INCREASINGLY VIEWED THE DOMINICAN TYRANT AS AN EMBARRASSMENT, AN AWKWARD INHERITANCE FROM AN EARLIER TIME, NOW LINGERING TOO LONG, IMPERILING THE FUTURE AND UNWITTINGLY PREPARING THE WAY FOR CASTROISM.”

—ROBERT D. CRASSWELLER, TRUJILLO,
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A CARIBBEAN DICTATOR, 1966

Rafael Trujillo hated Castro with a Latin passion. Castro had joined the Caribbean Legion in 1947, formed by advocates of democratic countries who felt Trujillo should be ousted for his crimes and civil-rights violations. Trujillo's Dominican regulars routed the ill-trained Legionnaires, but Trujillo never forgot Castro's dramatic escape. He swam a marathon distance through pods of sharks to reach the safety of a Cuban frigate that, in the Latin context, humiliated Trujillo. The general had never thought highly of Batista, considering him weak-kneed, but he absolutely detested Castro as a cultivator of the rabble and a menace to the Caribbean status quo; in his lexicon, a communist. The Dominican jefe had watched Batista's deconstruction with alarm. In April 1958 he delivered five planeloads of weapons to the Cuban army, and in December, as Batista's plight worsened precipitously, he offered to land two thousand Dominican troops in the Oriente Province and two thousand more in the Santa Clara area, where the Second Front was dug in. But Batista summarily rejected the offer, saying he didn't deal with dictators.

In 1959, “the Benefactor,” as Trujillo called himself, was at the peak of his power, the Caribbean's most formidable rainmaker, the possessor of its most potent armed forces. At age sixty-eight, he had the look of a wary trout and the scruples of an alley fighter. His paternal grandfather had been an officer in the Spanish secret police, and he himself had once commanded the Dominican national police. He was a comic-opera dictator, doting on gaudy uniforms and medals, and it was said that he never broke a sweat as he stood in the blazing sun for the pomp and circumstance. But he was distinctly unfunny. For three decades, he ruthlessly crushed opposition, and his torture chambers were infamous. As former US ambassador John B. Martin wrote, “Tortures to obtain confessions or satisfy sadism became bestial—naked prisoners were shocked in an electric chair; a prodder, an electrified metal rod used on cattle in stockyards, was applied to their genitals.”1 Trujillo was aptly called “the Beast of the Caribbean.”

Nevertheless, Trujillo devoutly wished to be accepted and supported by the United States, and his grip on the American mainland was tight. He contracted with the International News Service in New York to publish fiction about what a nice place the Dominican Republic was,² to counter unfavorable newsbreaks, and he employed a public-relations firm fronted by society columnist Igor Cassini. He was the poster boy of the Cholly Nickerbocker column that was syndicated across the country. He laid out untold millions trying to influence politicians and decision makers. According to Arturo Espaillat, he drew up “price lists for the purchase of US Congressmen,” with key committee chairmen running from $50,000 to $75,000.³ Conflicted senators like Strom Thurmond, James Eastland, and George Smathers rose like robots to his defense. Blackmail was one of Trujillo's lesser vices. “Sometimes, when dignitaries from the United States visited the Republic,” Martin disclosed, “his agents provided them with women and then secretly photographed them.”⁴ Everything he touched, he corrupted, but his “virtues” of anti-communism, merciless law and order, and name-your-price dealing endeared him to many an American policy setter. One of Trujillo's biggest fans was Vice President Nixon, who in 1955 ignored the dictator's odious reputation by showing up as his guest at the grand opening of the showpiece International Center in Santo Domingo. Nixon was so in the thrall of Trujillo that he even brought his wife, Pat, whom he rarely took anywhere. The germ of this cynical love-fest was a commodity that was sweetening the kitty of members of the US Congress: sugar. In the Caribbean, sugar was king and the royalties were substantial.

At this point, Rafael Trujillo's days were numbered. The Eisenhower administration was worried by his increasingly bizarre behavior in the wake of the Cuban-invasion fiasco. In February 1960 Venezuela had asked the Organization of American States (OAS) to censure Trujillo for “flagrant violations of human rights,” and he retaliated by dispatching Johnny Abbes, the head of his secret police, to Caracas to arrange a car bombing that narrowly missed killing President Rómulo Betancourt.5 Fearing that Trujillo's excesses would open the door to a Dominican counterpart of Fidel Castro, the OAS voted sanctions against his regime in August of that year. Several Latin American countries broke diplomatic relations with Ciudad Trujillo, and the United States felt compelled to follow suit.

Running a diplomatic leper colony rankled Trujillo, so he perversely negotiated a nonaggression pact with Cuba and made overtures to the Soviet Union. The threat of a new power alignment in the Caribbean alarmed Washington. As Robert D. Crassweller wrote in his 1966 biography Trujillo, “The Department of State increasingly viewed the Dominican tyrant as an embarrassment, an awkward inheritance from an earlier time, now lingering too long, imperiling the future and unwittingly preparing the way for Castroism.”⁶ Bucking State, however, was the powerful sugar lobby in Congress. Since 1934, the United States had subsidized raw sugar on the premise that it was necessary to pay more to ensure a steady supply. Although proponents of this system argued that it aided underdeveloped countries, the subsidies—paid for by consumers in the form of higher prices—were distributed by the sugar corporations more in the interest of profit maximization than social needs. Under Batista, Cuba was allotted the highest quota, leaving the bulk of Dominican cane to be sold to British brokers at the lower world-market price. Nevertheless, Dominican producers turned handsome margins because Trujillo kept the cost of labor low.

During the summer of 1960, Trujillo partisans in Washington waged a vigorous campaign to assign the lion's share of the Cuban quota, which had been cancelled after Castro took over, to the Dom Rep. Harold Cooley, who as chairman of the House Agricultural Committee reigned as sugar czar, made several expenses-paid junkets to visit Trujillo and was favorably disposed toward the Dominican bid. It was accepted, and Dominican exports doubled.

But by early fall, the Eisenhower administration, which by that time had committed to overthrowing Castro, reluctantly concluded that Trujillo had to be replaced for the sake of political balance. “It's certain that the American public won't condemn Castro until we have moved against Trujillo,”7 Ike is quoted as telling Secretary of State Christian Herter by Bernard Diederich in his 1978 Trujillo: The Death of the Goat. The White House approved covert aid to Dominican dissidents and a contingency plan to be implemented if the situation kept deteriorating. According to a 1974 Senate Intelligence Committee report, the plan provided that the United States take political action to remove Trujillo from the Dominican Republic as soon as a suitable successor regime can be induced to take over.

But first it would try to coax him out. In November 1960, Rafael Trujillo, wearing his green, bemedaled generalissimo's uniform, squatted silently on a couch in the National Palace, blinking froglike at his two guests.⁸ Normally Trujillo exuded cordiality when his old friend William Pawley came to call. For some time the American had been a financial advisor, drafting Dominican legislation on foreign investments and arranging the awards of mineral concessions. The two would have an animated conversation over snifters of brandy. But this time Trujillo had been tipped off that Pawley was not coming to discuss business matters.

Pawley, attired in the white linen suit and planter's hat he reserved for meetings in the tropics, brought with him Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, the close-mouthed, wavy-haired Cuban American who was Richard Nixon's boon companion and business front, as a proxy for the vice president.⁹ Finally, the general broke his silence by inviting Rebozo to sit next to him, a rare honor intended to symbolize his warm feelings toward Nixon.

As Trujillo was aware, Pawley, who had been Eisenhower's ambassador sans portfolio in trying to convince Batista to abdicate, was there representing the president and vice president to persuade him to step down. In my November 1973 interview, Pawley told me that Trujillo reacted badly. “What's the matter with me?” he snapped when Pawley delicately broached the subject. The dictator protested that he was the best friend the United States had in the Caribbean, and a staunch anti-communist to boot. When Pawley soothingly proposed that he might retire to a farm in America, Trujillo snorted, “The only way I'll ever leave is when they carry me out of here dead.” He had no way of knowing how prophetic his words could be.

The last thing Washington wanted was for leftist factions to fill any vacuum left by Trujillo's downfall, as happened in the Cuba experience. So Ambassador Joseph Farland established contact with a dissident group regarded as moderately conservative and pro-American. At a cocktail party when one member of the group asked Farland for rifles with telescopic sights, it was clear that assassination was on their minds.10 Farland relayed the request to the CIA's Western Hemisphere Division chief, Colonel J. C. King. King responded to Farland's proposal by querying State whether it would okay “sniper rifles or other devices for the removal of key Trujillo people from the scene.”¹¹ The answer was yes.

Fortunately, the Agency had an assassination plan for Trujillo, named EMOTH, already underway.¹² The dissident group had requested ex-FBI agents to carry out the assassination; first with cameras fitted with hidden guns, then a slow-acting lethal poison that could be transmitted to Trujillo in a handshake, then fragmentation grenades. But shortly after Pawley's futile November mission, the plot assumed its final form. The dictator would be killed by an action group led by Brigadier General Juan Tomas Diaz, whom Trujillo had forced into early retirement; General Antonio Imbert; and Antonio de la Maza, the revenge-minded brother of a pilot who was ordered killed by Trujillo because he knew too much about a kidnap-murder of an American civilian.¹³ A provisional government recognized by the United States would take over until elections could be held.

The EMOTH conspirators planned to gun down Trujillo in the apartment of his mistress.¹⁴ They asked for automatic weapons on the excuse that a firefight might erupt, but in fact they wanted tangible proof that the United States stood behind the coup. The CIA broke down the weapons and packed them in specially marked food cans consigned to a Cuidad Trujillo supermarket owned by Lorenzo “Wimpy” Perry, an American who had once trained Dominican pilots. Perry delivered the cans to the EMOTH group. But Washington still had not given final approval. Ironically, Trujillo had received a temporary reprieve by John Kennedy's election victory. Kennedy advisor Adolph Berle was chairman of the giant Sucrest Corporation and a Trujillo partisan. Vice President Lyndon Johnson's attorney crony, Abe Fortas, was a Sucrest director. Ellsworth Bunker, a roving diplomat, was a past president of National Sugar Refining Corporation. All represented substantial investments in the Dom Rep, and they began to form a consensus that Trujillo might be redeemable after all.

The CIA informed the new president that some weapons had already been turned over to the conspirators and that it was prepared, if authorized, to transfer machine guns and grenades to their station in Cuidad Trujillo. The Agency refrained from making any recommendations as to whether to proceed; the ball was tossed to the White House. On May 29, 1961, Kennedy ordered the CIA to pull out of the conspiracy, “We must not run the risk of US association with political assassination since the US as matter of general policy cannot condone assassinations.”15

On May 30, 1961, Trujillo's thirty-one-year rule ended as he was being driven down the seaside highway en route to a rendezvous with his mistress. His car was overtaken and forced to stop. Trujillo died fighting back.

In the Dom Rep, army loyalists clamped a news blackout on the capital as they searched for the conspirators. The State Department got wind of the assassination and relayed the news to JFK, who was in Paris meeting with Charles de Gaulle. There, Pierre Salinger casually mentioned Trujillo's demise during a press conference. It was the world's first notice that the dictator was dead.

Salinger's gaffe caused severe headaches in Washington; the news from Paris implied that the United States had advance knowledge of the assassination. “If people think we did anything to Trujillo,” fretted Dean Rusk, “they might look at this as a license to go after Kennedy.”¹⁶

Ramfis Trujillo, son of Rafael Trujillo, also happened to be in Paris. He reacted to the news of his father's death by chartering a commercial jet on the family credit card to return home. Upon landing, he had all the known conspirators run down and executed. At the White House, an overeager presidential assistant named Richard Goodwin, who had supported EMOTH, was twisted in knots by the fact that the old regime survived. “He danced around the White House, demanding that we get Allen Dulles on the line and call out the fleet,” an aide to George McBundy recalled.17 “He was ready to send in the Marines! Fortunately cooler heads prevailed.”

The American entrepreneur Perry, whose market had been used as the weapons terminal, was safely secreted out of the Dom Rep. If the younger Trujillo knew of the CIA connection to his father's murder, he saw no need to make a public issue of it. His father was gone, and the country was his.¹⁸