Red Heat by Alex Von Tunzelmann

Author:Alex Von Tunzelmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

12

THE DEATH OF THE GOAT

Late that April, Rafael Trujillo was sailing the waters off Barahona in his yacht, the Angelita. A group of aides was with him but, despite the party and the salty air, he was in a bad mood. He turned to the group with a menacing smile and said, “Which one of you will be the Judas who will betray me?”

There was a chorus, almost in unity: “What’s that, Chief?”

“Yes, you heard me,” Trujillo replied. “Yes, one of you will betray me.”1

It was true, though he could not have known it. At least one of the men on the Angelita that day was involved in the conspiracy to bring him down. The man’s name has not been recorded; nor has his reaction to Trujillo’s eerie words.

The conspiracy was in two parts, an action group and a political group. The action group was overseen by a public administrator, Tony Imbert, and a private construction contractor, Salvador Estrella. There were six more in it, including Antonio de la Maza, the brother of Octavio de la Maza, whose “suicide” had been a key event in the case of the Galíndez disappearance. The political group had at its helm Trujillo’s childhood friend General Juan Tomás Díaz, supported by the secretary of state for the armed forces, General José “Pupo” Román, and by a wealthy landowner, Luis Amiama Tió. Many of the conspirators were wealthy former Trujillistas. Pupo Román was married to Trujillo’s niece.

In the days after the Bay of Pigs, the CIA was thrown into chaos over whether to continue with the assassination of Trujillo. Some wanted him dead; some still believed that he could be charmed out. Either way, the timing looked bad. On 19 April, the same day the Bay of Pigs failed, Hank Dearborn, the American consul in Ciudad Trujillo, had received a new consignment of submachine guns from the CIA. He was supposed to wait for authorization before passing them on to his opposition contacts. On 25 April, he was told by the CIA to keep hold of the weapons, on the grounds that “filling a vacuum created by assassination [is] now [a] bigger question than ever [in] view [of] unsettled conditions in [the] Caribbean area.”2 The agency had thought that, by May, the Cuban Revolution would be over. It was not. If Trujillo fell now, Washington’s worst fear might be realized. Fidel Castro might invade the Dominican Republic, and there might be another Cuba.

Meanwhile, the diplomat Bob Murphy and the gossip columnist Igor Cassini were still advising Kennedy to offer “friendly guidance” to Trujillo, and bring him back into the fold. Mac Bundy had to warn Kennedy off. “At the risk of misunderstanding, I think I ought to add that if the public were to know that Igor Cassini is providing public relations help to Trujillo, your own personal position as a liberal leader might be compromised,” Bundy wrote on 2 May. “I cannot help thinking that your own position should be fully disengaged from any venture of this sort.

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