Enemies: A History of the FBI (85 page)

  
3.
“If it was highly politically explosive”:
Katzenbach oral history, RFKL.

  
4.
Eisenhower himself had named:
Memorandum of Conversation between Eisenhower and Secretary of State Christian Herter, Aug. 30, 1960, DDEL. Congressman Cooley, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, became the target of an unprecedented FBI investigation into political corruption inside Congress four weeks after the start of the Kennedy administration. The congressman, on the take from Dominican Republic dictator Trujillo, was lobbying the new secretary of state, Dean Rusk, for changes in the administration of the law affecting sugar quotas; Trujillo and his families stood to gain or lose millions of dollars. On Feb. 16, 1961, twenty-six days after the new administration took power, Attorney General Robert Francis Kennedy approved FBI wiretaps on Cooley’s secretary’s telephone in the Capitol, on a lobbyist for the Dominican Republic, and on three Department of Agriculture employees; the FBI later bugged a hotel room where Cooley met with representatives of the Dominican Republic. The question of a dictator having a powerful congressman in his pocket was not simply a question of political corruption. It took on national security implications as presidents tried to cope with the question of dictatorships—Cuba’s among others—in the Caribbean. Excerpts from the records of a Feb. 14, 1961, meeting between Rusk and Cooley, which took place two days before RFK approved the wiretaps, give a flavor of the case:

Secretary Rusk opened the conversation by stating that the Administration accepted a 21-month extension of the sugar bill, wanted it enacted as soon as possible, but felt it of great importance that the bill, as submitted by Congressman Cooley, be amended to give the President discretionary power with respect to that portion of the Cuban quota which might otherwise have to be allocated to the Dominican Republic.

The Secretary based this letter request primarily on the serious potential threat to United States and hemisphere security which is presented by the present situation in Cuba. He indicated that it was essential to take vigorous action to prevent the Castro regime from continuing its efforts to upset peaceful and friendly regimes in Latin America and from becoming a more serious military threat to the United States.… To many of these Latin American countries, led by Venezuela, the Dominican Republic presents an equally serious threat to their stability. Failure of the United States to see the problem of Trujillo as a threat equally as serious as Castro will deprive us of the support and sympathy which we need.…
   To these people it is incomprehensible that the United States should be willing to punish Castro by not buying sugar in Cuba and then turn to the Dominican Republic to replace much of it. It is a windfall and a reward when they think only punishment is justified.
   From a United States standpoint, we are also concerned about the current political activities of Trujillo. His propaganda machine, which is well financed, is extremely active and a cause of concern to our intelligence agencies. His publicity has become violently anti-American and sympathetic to many Soviet interests. There is evidence that his regime is in contact with Soviet bloc and Castro representatives.
   Congressman Cooley [and House Speaker John McCormack] pressed a number of questions with respect to what we expected to happen in the Dominican Republic if Trujillo was upset. Their great fear was that this prevented an opportunity for a Castro-sponsored regime to take over.… Congressman Cooley indicated that he had been discussing the problem of Dominican Republic sugar with a number of people in recent days.… Everyone he had talked to had agreed with the Secretary that our Latin American policy would be seriously prejudiced by continued United States purchases of former Cuban quota sugar from the Dominican Republic. He was, therefore, sympathetic to the idea of giving the President discretionary authority. However, he thought it would be desirable in order to secure an orderly transition and prevent a Castro-type take-over if Trujillo could be persuaded that now was a good time for him to retire to some quiet part of the world. He was known to have a substantial fortune abroad.… Congressman Cooley suggested that he knew some people who were close friends of Trujillo and could carry such a message to him. They would be persuasive and he thought he might listen to them. He thought this should be done before any action was taken on sugar legislation.
   The Secretary protested strongly that there was not time to undertake such a step, even if it were a wise thing to do, before enacting sugar legislation. In addition he felt that the persuasiveness of any such approach would be greatly increased if the President had already been given discretionary authority to cut off the Dominican Republic allotment before Trujillo was talked to. Otherwise, he could still hope that his friends in Washington could save the day for him as they had in the past.

  
5.
“Get into the underground”:
Farland oral history interview, FAOH. A West Virginia native who married the daughter of a coal-company owner, Farland had become a wealthy man, and retired from the FBI after the war, but he had kept his hand in Washington, becoming a major campaign contributor to the Republican Party, and joining the State Department as a troubleshooter in 1955.
   His career path was highly unusual. Farland went on to serve as Kennedy’s ambassador to Panama (one of only two Republicans ever to serve as an ambassador under JFK). He became Nixon’s ambassador to Iran and Pakistan—where, in the crowning covert mission of his career, he secretly smuggled Henry Kissinger over the Himalayas for secret talks with the Communist leaders of China.
   When Farland arrived in the Dominican Republic, the FBI had been embroiled for three years in the case of the kidnapping and killing of an American. A twenty-three-year-old American pilot named Gerald Murphy, who flew for a Dominican airline, had disappeared. His parents in Oregon had mobilized their congressman, Charles Porter, who had demanded an FBI investigation. A federal grand jury had convened in Washington. The case led to the prosecution of a rogue ex-FBI man named John J. Frank. Frank had become one of the people he pursued—an international criminal. After joining the CIA for a short tour, he had parlayed his position into a more lucrative post: a secret agent for Trujillo.
   Frank had played a central role in the murder of Jesús de Galíndez, a Columbia University professor who had tutored Trujillo’s children, fled the dictator’s regime, and moved to New York, where he wrote a book about Trujillo’s crimes. Galíndez had reported threats against his life to the New York office of the FBI, to no avail. Frank arranged for Galíndez to be kidnapped at the subway stop outside the gates of Columbia University, stuffed in a car, driven out to a small airfield on Long Island, and thrown into the back of a private aircraft. The plane had been chartered by Joe Zicarelli, a prominent member of the Mafia in New Jersey and a henchman for Trujillo. The pilot was Gerald Murphy. Murphy flew Galíndez down to the Dominican Republic. Trujillo killed Galíndez. Then he murdered Murphy and his Dominican co-pilot in order to keep the conspiracy a secret.
   Frank had been arrested and indicted on four counts of serving Trujillo as an unregistered foreign agent, the Justice Department’s strategy for charging spies under diplomatically delicate circumstances. The logical next step, from the prosecutor’s standpoint, was to indict the Dominican consul general in New York in the conspiracy to kidnap Galíndez. The FBI reports that guided the grand jury proceedings came from wiretaps placed on the Dominican embassy in Washington. The case was monitored by the attorney general, the chief of the Justice Department’s criminal division, and Hoover himself.
   Trujillo had overseen the plot. How would Washington deal with him? The United States never had charged a foreign leader with capital crimes committed on American soil. President Eisenhower had been questioned on that very issue at a news conference: Did the FBI have jurisdiction to investigate whether “agents of a dictatorship which enjoys diplomatic immunity here are assassinating persons under the protection of the United States flag?” Ike had replied: “I don’t know anything about this.”
   Hoover assured the president that the FBI was on top of the case. But he balked. He informed the Justice and State departments that the case against Trujillo and his henchmen was not “sufficiently watertight.”
   Ultimately the president would have to decide to kill the investigation or cut the knot that bound American interests to a tyrant.
   The former FBI agent, John J. Frank, was ultimately convicted as an unregistered foreign agent of Trujillo’s dictatorship, but he never revealed any details of the larger conspiracy.

  
6.
“Senator Eastland was one”:
Dearborn oral history, FAOH. If the Trujillo case had been pursued as a criminal matter, even as formidable a senator as Eastland could have been charged with acting as an agent of a foreign power.
   The political intelligence Farland and Dearborn developed—almost all of which made its way through back channels to the FBI—included the sordid details of visits of other American luminaries on Trujillo’s payroll.
   The former American ambassador to the Court of Saint James’s—the immensely wealthy and ambitious Joseph Kennedy, father of Jack and Bobby—sent a family retainer, a society gossip columnist named Igor Cassini. Then the business magnate Bill Pawley brought a bipartisan team—Bebe Rebozo, who was Nixon’s close friend, and Senator George Smathers of Florida, Jack Kennedy’s best buddy on Capitol Hill. “Smathers, Bill Pawley and Bebe Rebozo and I all went to see Trujillo,” Dearborn recounted. “Smathers gave him this talk. He said, ‘Generalissimo, you have the opportunity to be a great hero in this hemisphere. You have the opportunity to be one of the few dictators, one of the only dictators, who was ever able to turn his country into a democracy during his lifetime. If you would do that you would really be a hero to your people and to the hemisphere.’ ”
   Dearborn said: “I sat there thinking, ‘Oh Lord, you don’t know who you are talking to.’ ”

  
7.
“Castro has among his chief lieutenants”:
Four reports from Farland as well as information clearly derived from him are in FRUS 1958–1960, Volume 6,
American Republics
, “United States policy regarding certain political developments in the Caribbean and Central American area,” pp. 357–459.

  
8.
“a considerable amount of information”:
Hoover cited in “Memorandum of a Meeting, Department of State, Jan. 29, 1959,” pp. 357–360.

  
9.
“offered his services”:
M. A. Jones to DeLoach, Subject: Frank Fiorini, aka Frank Anthony Sturgis, IS [Internal Security]/Cuba, April 1, 1959, FBI/FOIA. Summaries of the Sturgis memo went to the CIA, leading to the recruitment of Sturgis. They also went, in a sanitized form, to the State Department. In the summer and fall of 1959, Farland’s reporting from the DR and stepped-up FBI surveillance of Cuban intrigues in the United States began to reach a critical mass.
   The reporting from the Dominican Republic and Cuba proved a pivotal factor in Hoover’s decision to open up a new front for the FBI in 1959: the systemic bugging and wiretapping of the Mob. Farland’s reporting on the connection among American politicians, organized crime, and Caribbean strongmen eroded Hoover’s longheld resistance.
   Hoover got into the act in the summer of 1959 as a Senate subcommittee stepped up its public interrogation of Mafia dons. The driving force of the Senate subcommittee, known as the Rackets Committee, was its counsel, Robert F. Kennedy. RFK, drawing on his experience as minority counsel for the McCarthy committee, hired three talented ex-FBI agents as rackets investigators. One of them, Walter Sheridan, also had worked for the National Security Agency and had gained experience in the uses of electronic surveillance.
   An illegal bug planted in Las Vegas serendipitously led the FBI into the CIA’s plots against Castro. On Oct. 31, 1960, the Bureau picked up an arrest report from the Las Vegas police department. A hotel maid had stumbled on a bug being installed on orders from a detective named Arthur Balletti. The detective had been hired by a private eye named Robert Maheu—an ex-FBI agent who worked for the billionaire Howard Hughes, moonlighting as a CIA informant and a servant of the Vegas mob. The target of the bug was Giancana’s two-timing girlfriend, the nightclub singer Phyllis McGuire. Hoover’s handwritten orders pushed the FBI full speed ahead: “Yes & press vigorously on Giancana, Maheu & Balletti. H.”
   The Las Vegas bugging arrest allowed the FBI to lean heavily on Maheu, who eventually laid out the details of the 1960 CIA-Mafia contract on Castro.

10.
“I went all by myself”:
Farland oral history, FAOH.

11.
“ex-FBI agents”:
Testimony of Richard Bissell, former CIA clandestine division director, Church Committee, July 22, 1975.

12.
“to remove Trujillo”:
Herter to Eisenhower, “Possible Action to Prevent Castroist Takeover of Dominican Republic,” April 14, 1960, DDEL.
   Trujillo’s enemies were emboldened by Ambassador Farland and his number-two man, Henry Dearborn, who succeeded him as the acting ambassador. Both Americans had assured the conspirators that the United States would smile upon their work. “Ambassador Farland had had contacts with the opposition and had brought me in on them,” Dearborn said. The opposition did not trust the CIA, but “they had gotten to trust Farland and me. So I carried on the contacts with the opposition, reporting to CIA. We were using all these weird means of communication because we didn’t want to be seen with each other. Things like notes in the bottom of a grocery bag, rolled up in cigars. They were asking us for advice at times. They were asking us for help at times.
   “They developed an assassination plot,” Dearborn said. “I knew they were planning to do it. I knew how they were planning to do it. I knew, more or less, who was involved. Although I was always able to say that I personally did not know any of the assassins, I knew those who were pulling the strings.
   “What they wanted from the U.S.,” Dearborn said, “was moral support and, later, material and token weapon support.” They were not disappointed. The CIA sent them three .38 caliber pistols and four machine guns, delivered to the Dominican Republic in a State Department diplomatic pouch. By the time the weapons arrived, Farland, the FBI agent turned ambassador extraordinary, had returned to Washington.