Enemies: A History of the FBI (37 page)

American military, economic, and diplomatic relationships hung in the balance if Trujillo’s power was challenged. But Farland kept reporting, and he reported it all—the torture chambers, the political assassinations, and the fawning tributes Trujillo received from members of the American Senate and House in exchange for money and sex.

“Trujillo was in complete control,” he said. “He was eliminating his opponents. Murder was in style. It was completely amoral.”

Farland encountered his fellow Americans under unusual protocols. The list of politicos who enjoyed Trujillo’s money, rum, and girls was long. The once and future Dominican ambassador to the United States, Manuel de Moya, one of Trujillo’s chief intelligence officers, maintained a mansion on the edge of Santo Domingo where American congressmen were entertained—“a love nest just outside of the city that you entered by a maze of hedges so no car could be observed,” as Farland described it. “It was totally wired. There were two-way mirrors. There was a supply of whatever one wanted in the way of your desire. A number of our Congressmen made use of that and were photographed and taped. I had one Senator come down and I said, ‘Senator, I and my country team are prepared to brief you.’ He
said, ‘I know all I want to know about this damn country. All I want from you is to make diddly-darn sure that I’m well-supplied with liquor in my hotel room for a week.’ ”

Farland started cleaning house at the American Embassy. He had a feckless CIA station chief as a counterpart in the Dominican Republic. “One day, he came to me and said, ‘Mr. Ambassador, I hate to bother you, but I’ve locked myself out of my office.’ ” Farland “picked the lock and opened it up,” he recounted. “This was my old FBI training.” The station chief was soon replaced.

Farland also found that his second in command at the American Embassy, the deputy chief of mission, was “definitely in the pocket of Trujillo.… The stupid character, he even told me he had spent some time in Manuel de Moya’s love house.” The ambassador replaced him with a trusted number-two man, Henry Dearborn. He too was appalled at the representatives of American democracy who were Trujillo’s honored guests. “
Senator Eastland was one,” Dearborn said. “He wasn’t the only one.”

Farland made friends with Trujillo, after a fashion, and gathered through him a ream of intelligence about the rise of Fidel Castro in Cuba. “
Castro has among his chief lieutenants known Communists and is receiving financial support from Soviet Union,” Farland wrote in a top secret cable to Washington on December 15, 1958, seventeen days before the revolutionaries took Havana. The CIA did not see that threat for many months.

On January 29, 1959, Hoover held the floor at a formal meeting at the State Department on the crisis in the Caribbean. Addressing the CIA’s Allen Dulles, eight leaders of the State Department, and the immigration service chief, Hoover had boasted that he had “
a considerable amount of information” about Cuban exiles working for and against Castro in Miami, New York, New Orleans, and across the country. Hoover ordered every agent in the FBI to stay on top of the Cubans. Was Castro himself a hard-core Communist? Who was working for him, and against him, in the United States?

On March 31, 1959, on orders from Hoover, FBI agents interviewed a gun-running American soldier of fortune, an ex-marine and army intelligence officer named Frank Sturgis, aka Frank Fiorini. He gave them a detailed look inside Castro’s revolution. He had fought with Fidel in the mountains, and supplied him with weapons and aircraft. After the revolution, Castro had assigned him to expel American mobsters from Havana’s casinos. Sturgis had looked at the house odds and bet on America. He told the FBI he had decided to change sides: he “
offered his services as an ‘agent’
for the United States Government,” reporting directly to Hoover. (Sturgis went on to work for the CIA and, years later, for the White House: he was one of the burglars arrested in the break-in at the Watergate Hotel.)

The FBI’s reporting on Cuba was mostly on the mark. It opened up a world of secrets, including the connections among American casino operators in Havana, the Mafia, anti-Castro Cubans, and the CIA. The FBI named the hard-core Communists in the Castro camp and precisely placed Castro’s leftward movement on the political spectrum. The Bureau confirmed Farland’s reports that Castro and Trujillo were plotting coups against each other.

President Eisenhower decided to do away with both of the dictators.

First he canceled every dollar of military aid to the Dominican Republic. It fell to Farland to inform the generalissimo. “
I went all by myself,” Farland recounted in a tape-recorded oral history. “He had his ambassador to the United States, the head of the army, the head of the navy, and the head of the air force standing there at attention. He blew up. He turned red. He proceeded then to do the unmentionable. He began a tirade against Eisenhower, my president. He called him stupid, said that he didn’t understand politics, didn’t understand what was going on in the Caribbean, and he called him—I hate to say this on tape—a ‘son of a bitch.’ When he did that, my diplomacy took a flight out.… I decided the time had come when I would have to say a few words in support of my country, which I did, ending up by saying, ‘As far as you are concerned, in my estimation, you’re nothing but a two-bit dictator and your country compared to mine is nothing but a fly speck on a map.’ ”

Trujillo was wearing a revolver. Farland thought to himself: “If you blink, you’re dead.… But I didn’t blink. He blinked. He came walking around the corner of the desk and said, ‘Mr. Ambassador, my friend, in moments of stress, we oftentimes make comments that we really don’t mean. Let’s forgive and forget.’ I couldn’t help myself. I said, ‘Trujillo, I am a Christian. I will forgive, but I won’t forget.’ I turned on my heel and walked what looked like 24 miles across that office, all the time wondering if I was going to get a .38 in my back.”

Farland plotted in secret with Trujillo’s opponents in the Dominican Republic. Their plans involved the death of the dictator. “I was pretty close to the underground,” he said—close enough that he sent the State Department a list of dissidents who were prepared “to take over the government once Trujillo was assassinated.” It was crucial to the United States that these
men were certifiable anti-Communists. Farland assured Washington that they were: “These were lawyers, doctors, engineers, top-flight merchants, people generally who had been trained in the United States.”

Farland reported that they wanted the United States to provide them with a clandestine shipment of weapons to kill Trujillo. The conspirators’ wish list, conveyed by Farland to the CIA, also included a hit squad of “
ex-FBI agents who would plan and execute the death of Trujillo,” in the words of Richard Bissell, the CIA’s covert-operations chief.

By April 1960, Eisenhower had resolved that the United States should prepare “
to remove Trujillo from the Dominican Republic.” It would be done “as soon as a suitable successor regime can be induced to take over with the assurance of U.S. political, economic, and—if necessary—military support.”

On May 13, 1960, the president summoned Farland and two of his State Department superiors to the White House. The president, according to notes taken by his military aide, told Farland that “
he was being bombarded by people who are opposed to Castro and Trujillo”—and that “he would like to see them both sawed off.”

President Eisenhower did not get the job done. The Kennedy administration inherited the conspiracies to commit murder in the Caribbean.

28

DANGEROUS MAN

T
HE WAR BETWEEN
J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was a scorched-earth campaign that burned throughout the 1960s. It threatened to consume the FBI, the Justice Department, and the White House.

Robert Kennedy said he found Hoover “
rather frightening”—a “dangerous” man who ran “a very dangerous organization.” But he believed “it was a danger that we could control.” RFK thought he could impose his authority over Hoover: “For the first time since he had been Director of the FBI, he had to take instructions or orders from the Attorney General of the United States—and couldn’t go over his head.”

But Hoover did not care to be instructed by an insolent young man who had never commanded anything but his brother’s presidential campaign.

Hoover believed that “
Bobby was trying to take over the FBI, and run the FBI, water down the FBI,” the director’s close aide Deke DeLoach said. “He was trying to re-do the whole machine to his own liking, and he didn’t have the experience or respect to command things like that.”

Robert F. Kennedy was thirty-five years old, born in 1925, just weeks after Hoover had taken charge of the FBI. He had not asked to be the attorney general, nor was he his brother’s first choice. But there was logic to it. JFK was the third president in a row to appoint his campaign manager as attorney general; the office had become a political post, requiring loyalty above all. Robert Kennedy was first and foremost loyal to his brother. And their father, whose millions had helped win the election, demanded it.
Hoover had told his old friend Joe Kennedy that he approved of the appointment. He regretted that.

The president and the attorney general tried to be deferential to Hoover at first. But deference did not come naturally to them. The president had
thought an occasional private White House luncheon would satisfy Hoover. “
We did it for the reason of keeping him happy,” RFK said. “It was important, as far as we were concerned, that he remain happy and that he remain in his position, because he was a symbol—and the President had won by such a narrow margin.”

But breaking bread at the White House a few times a year did not suffice. Nothing did. Almost everything about Robert Kennedy angered the director. The attorney general’s crime was grave. “
He offended the FBI,” said RFK’s deputy at Justice, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach.

“W
E DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO
”

The lingering problem of Rafael Trujillo shaped the start of the struggle between Hoover and Robert Kennedy.

On February 16, 1961, the fourth week of the new administration, Attorney General Kennedy signed orders aimed at uncovering the political corruption that the regime had used to maintain its power. The first of some 582 FBI wiretaps and nearly 800 FBI bugs authorized during the Kennedy administration were installed.

The FBI wiretapped the congressional office of House Agriculture Committee chairman Harold Cooley, the home of the committee’s clerk, the Dominican Republic’s embassy and consulates, and the law offices of Trujillo’s lobbyists. As far as can be determined by existing records, it was the first time since the Harding administration that an attorney general had ordered a member of Congress wiretapped.

But RFK soon balked. The investigation hit too close to home. If it were pursued, it could ensnare congressmen, senators, and politically connected lobbyists, most of them conservative Democrats—power brokers that the Kennedys needed to hold Congress in line. The only person ever charged was the gossip columnist Igor Cassini, a Kennedy family friend, the brother of Jackie Kennedy’s favorite fashion designer, a social butterfly, and a paid shill for Trujillo. And the facts in that case came from an investigative reporter, not the FBI. Robert Kennedy later called the Trujillo investigation the “
most unpleasant” case he ever confronted—a high standard—and “the only investigation I’ve called off since I’ve been Attorney General.”

Kennedy called off the case after the generalissimo was ambushed and
assassinated by his opponents on the outskirts of his capital on the night of May 30, 1961. The moral support of the United States did not save twelve of the fourteen conspirators from brutal revenge killings at the hands of Trujillo’s son, brothers, and political heirs, who quickly regained power.

“
The great problem now,” RFK wrote shortly after Trujillo’s assassination, “is that we don’t know what to do.”

It took years for the White House to find an answer. The final solution lay with J. Edgar Hoover. In the end, Hoover himself would choose a new leader for the Dominican Republic.

“F
IRING
J. E
DGAR
H
OOVER
? J
ESUS
C
HRIST
!”

By Robert Kennedy’s own admission, he did not lie awake at night worrying about communism or civil rights when he became attorney general. He thought about organized crime. He wanted the FBI to go after the Mob, as he had done when he served on the Senate Rackets Committee.

He tried to take control of the FBI—by law his right—and the struggle would consume him for the rest of his days at Justice.

Hoover was outraged that the attorney general wanted to go after Mafia dons instead of Moscow’s agents. He was furious that Kennedy poor-mouthed the pursuit of Soviet espionage. He was contemptuous of his big ideas for a federal crime commission and organized-crime strike forces. He was appalled at his penchant for off-the-shelf operations, his back-channel deals, his one-on-one meetings with a Soviet embassy officer who was known as a KGB spy, and his role as the president’s all-purpose political fixer for problems foreign and domestic.