The Devil's Chessboard

by David Talbot

  During the Spanish Civil War, Galíndez had fought in a Basque brigade against Franco’s forces. After Franco’s triumph, he fled for his life to France and booked passage on a ship to the Dominican Republic, where strongman Rafael Trujillo had promised sanctuary to Spanish exiles. Arriving in late 1939 in Santo Domingo, the capital city, which the dictator had renamed Ciudad Trujillo after himself, Galíndez found work as a professor of history and languages, and later as a government adviser. But he and most of his fellow Spanish refugees soon discovered that they had “left Franco’s frying pan and landed in Trujillo’s fire,” in the words of a Dominican diplomat.

  Rafael Trujillo had ruled the Dominican Republic since 1930, an operatic reign of terror that combined equally florid measures of violence and pageantry. His theater of blood included the horrific 1937 mass slaughter of thousands of Haitian immigrant workers, including women and children, many of whom were hacked to death with machetes. Trujillo’s political enemies were rounded up and tortured in the notorious concentration camp at Nigua and in the La Cuarenta dungeon. Others were assassinated and their bodies displayed in macabre festivals, like the murdered rebel leader Enrique Blanco, whose corpse was tied to a chair and paraded throughout his home province, where his peasant followers were forced to dance with his remains.

  Those who fell into disfavor with Trujillo’s regime lived in mortal fear of being denounced in the notorious gossip column of the leading government newspaper, El Caribe. Denunciations could ruin careers or destroy lives. It was “a method of [execution] that was slower and more perverse than when he had his prey shot, beaten to death, or fed to the sharks,” as the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa observed. “El Jefe,” as the dictator was known, was a master of fear. During the later years of his regime, in the 1950s, all it took to spread panic in the capital was for one of his security cars to crawl through a neighborhood. The black VW Beetles, known as cepillos, created the suffocating “sensation that Trujillo was always watching,” in the words of one historian.

  Trujillo was also infamous for his official larceny, taking over all of his country’s core industries, including oil, cement, meat, sugar, rice—and even the prostitution trade. Running the Dominican economy as a family business, he amassed a personal fortune that made him one of the wealthiest men in Latin America. Trujillo’s sexual appetites were equally gluttonous, earning him the title of “The Goat” on the streets of the capital. He plowed his way through three wives, two mistresses, and countless young women whose physical charms briefly captivated him. Trujillo, whose mother was a Haitian mulatto, sought out plump white women—the beauty standard of the local aristocracy, which never fully accepted the coarse former army sergeant. At his 1929 wedding to socialite Bienvenida Ricardo, Trujillo horrified the guests and confirmed Dominican high society’s worst suspicions when he used his military sword to cut the elegant wedding cake, sending the towering confection—adorned with frosty angels and delicately sculpted sugar flowers—crashing to the floor.

  But Trujillo’s common ways won the admiration of many in the poor, uneducated ranks of Dominican society. He was especially popular among men, who admired his naked ambition, sexual aggression, and dandified fashion style. He embodied a strutting style of masculinity known by locals as tigueraje, an earlier version of “gangsta” bravado that turned flashy bad boys, or “tigers,” from the barrios into emblems of cool. Trujillo also provided thousands of young men from the lower orders—including mestizos, blacks, and other traditional social outcasts—a path upward, by expanding the Dominican civil service as well as the military, transforming his army into the second most powerful force in Latin America, after Venezuela’s.

  Trujillo further ensured his control of the presidential palace by assiduously courting the powerful giant to the north, pledging his nation’s allegiance to the United States during World War II and the Cold War, and showering money on Washington politicians and lobbying firms. Trujillo’s courtship of Washington paid off. By 1955, John Foster Dulles’s State Department was celebrating the strongman as “one of the hemisphere’s foremost spokesmen against the Communist movement.” That same year, Vice President Nixon visited the Dominican Republic and made a public display of embracing Trujillo. The United States should overlook the notorious defects of the Dominican dictator, Nixon later advised Eisenhower’s cabinet, because, after all, “Spaniards had many talents, but government was not among them.”

  Despite his enormous wealth, Trujillo himself was too thuggish a character to work his way into polite company, at home or abroad. But by the 1950s, his roguish social circle had produced several personalities smooth enough to be embraced by the international jet set, including his first daughter, the sexy bad girl, Flor de Oro, and the suave ladies’ man she was once married to and never got over, playboy-diplomat Porfirio Rubirosa. The leading symbol of Dominican masculinity on the world stage, Rubirosa started his career as a lowly military aide to Trujillo, parlaying his connections, good looks, and sartorial elegance into becoming one of the most celebrated Latin lovers of his day—“the Dominican Don Juan,” the “Caribbean Casanova,” as the international press anointed him.

  Rubirosa, affectionately known as “Rubi,” was the son Trujillo always wanted—much more polished than his own crude, debauched offspring, Ramfis (named, in Trujillo style, for a character in the Verdi opera Aida). The dictator, like the rest of the Dominican male populace, reveled in the tales of Rubi’s romantic exploits. The dapper playboy had passionate affairs with blond movie goddesses like Kim Novak and courted some of the world’s richest women, including American heiresses Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton, both of whom he married. Some in high circles sneered that Rubirosa was unworthy of their company, a lounge-room charmer with a permanent tan and an oily sheen. But women sang his praises. Hutton was particularly graphic about Rubi’s appeal, recalling her former husband with ripe fondness even after their divorce: “He is the ultimate sorcerer, capable of transforming the most ordinary evening into a night of magic . . . priapic, indefatigable, grotesquely proportioned.”

  This was the Dominican image—lusty and glamorous—that Trujillo wanted to project to the world, and particularly to the United States. Maintaining this positive image of robust vitality with his neighbors to the north was not simply a matter of ego gratification for the dictator. Trujillo reaped $25 million a year in foreign aid from Washington, much of which ended up in his personal overseas bank accounts, and he was eager to keep the American dollars flowing. The CIA further enriched the dictator with secret payments, delivering suitcases stuffed with cash to his hotel suite whenever he visited New York for UN meetings.

  While Trujillo succeeded in crushing dissent at home, by 1956 there was one man—Jesús de Galíndez—who, in the dictator’s mind, threatened his regime’s world image. Galíndez, who lived in a book-stuffed apartment on lower Fifth Avenue and enjoyed going to Latin dance clubs at night, did not strike his academic colleagues at Columbia as an international man of danger. But to Trujillo, he was a treacherous serpent who was poisoning opinion against his regime. Not long before he vanished, Galíndez had completed a damning, 750-page dissertation on the dictator’s odious rule, “The Era of Trujillo,” and submitted it for a PhD degree at Columbia. Scholarly theses do not normally incite violent passions. But Trujillo knew that Galíndez, who had worked in the Dominican civil service, had inside information about his savage and corrupt regime. El Jefe, who saw the Galíndez monograph as a stab in the back, brooded about the betrayal. Trujillo agents tried to convince Galíndez to sell the manuscript to them, offering as much as $25,000, but the scholar refused. The dictator decided that left him with only one course of action.

  Galíndez saw his scholarly exposé of the Trujillo tyranny as part of a broader campaign of popular liberation. In the mid-1950s, ironfisted regimes like Trujillo’s dominated Latin America, with dictators ruling thirteen of the region’s twenty nations. The Eisenhower administration found these despots to be useful Cold War allies;
they allowed U.S. corporations to exploit their nations’ people and resources, and they cracked down on labor agitation and social unrest as Communist-inspired. But Galíndez’s scholarly activism—which included numerous magazine articles and pamphlets he published in Mexico and the United States, attacking the Trujillo regime and championing human rights in Latin America—was part of a new intellectual ferment that was challenging the old order.

  It was his experience as an exiled Basque freedom fighter, said Galíndez, that made him deeply sympathetic to the region’s social struggles. His own people’s doomed crusade for self-determination made “the problems of Puerto Ricans in New York . . . or the drumbeat of a black Caribbean” reverberate inside him, he wrote.

  Galíndez’s life in New York, as a politically active refugee at the height of the Cold War, was a complex web. In addition to his activism against Trujillo, the scholar served as the U.S. representative of the Basque government-in-exile. Galíndez also maintained an ambiguous relationship with U.S. security officials. Galíndez’s escape to the United States in 1946 was no doubt made smoother by the fact that he had been secretly working as an informant for the FBI during the war, passing along information about suspicious pro-Nazi activity in the Caribbean. After he arrived in New York, the bureau asked him to spy on Communist-affiliated members of the anti-Franco resistance in the United States. In May 1951, the special agent in charge of the bureau’s New York office told FBI chief Hoover that Galíndez was “an invaluable informant,” whose reports were “extremely detailed, accurate and thorough.”

  But FBI reports on Galíndez also noted that the Basque exile was strongly critical of U.S. foreign policy in the Eisenhower-Dulles era. He had been heard denouncing the administration for supporting the admission of Franco’s Spain to the United Nations, and for backing Latin dictators like Trujillo and Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza. In April 1955, Galíndez told an FBI informant in Miami that “since John Foster Dulles entered into the picture, the United States has started to write the blackest pages of its international relations. Never before in the history of the world has one single Government more effectively supported dictatorial powers in free nations.”

  Despite his scathing remarks about Eisenhower-Dulles policy, which made their way into Galíndez’s FBI files, the bureau continued to have confidence in him, paying the university lecturer up to $125 a month plus expenses for his information. The FBI also helped Galíndez gain permanent residence status in the United States. The activist-intellectual placed limits on what he would do for the FBI—he refused, for instance, to publicly testify against suspected Communists in the anti-Franco movement, arguing that it would blow his cover. He was clearly playing a deeply intricate game of exile politics, perhaps believing that his relationship with the FBI provided him and his embattled causes some protection.

  But the bureau knew that Galíndez was not safe. On March 6, 1956—five days before he disappeared—an FBI official noted in a memo that Galíndez’s dissertation on Trujillo “may involve informant in personal difficulties . . . this matter will be watched closely and the Bureau kept advised.”

  Galíndez was well aware of his perilous situation. Trujillo maintained a network of agents in the United States, and they had already killed at least one opponent of his regime in New York. Strange notes were slipped into his books on campus and disturbing phone calls were made to his home. One day, two tough-looking Dominicans in bright tropical shirts sat in on a class he was teaching.

  But it was not Trujillo thugs who were responsible for Galíndez’s disappearance on that chilly March night after he taught his final class. His kidnapping was a sophisticated operation run by Robert A. Maheu and Associates, a private detective firm staffed by former CIA and FBI employees that the intelligence agency used as a “cut-out” to do dirty jobs on U.S. soil, where the CIA was forbidden by law to operate.

  Grabbed by Maheu agents who were waiting for him in his apartment, Galíndez was drugged and carried into an ambulance, then driven to a small airport in Amityville, Long Island. There he was loaded into a twin-engine Beech airplane that was specially equipped to fly long distances and flown south, stopping for refueling after midnight in West Palm Beach, before continuing on to the Dominican Republic. After landing in Trujillo’s kingdom, Galíndez—still half conscious—was transported to Casa de Caoba, the dictator’s favorite hideaway. There, Trujillo, dressed in a riding outfit, confronted the traitor with the evidence of his betrayal—a copy of the dissertation, which his agents had stolen. “Eat it,” he commanded. The dazed Galíndez took the pile of papers but could not keep hold of them, letting them fall to the floor as his head slumped to his chest. “Pendejo!” screamed the dictator in his high-pitched squeal as he flayed Galíndez’s head with a riding crop.

  Galíndez was taken to a torture chamber in the capital city, where he was stripped, handcuffed, and hoisted on a pulley. Then he was slowly lowered into a tub of boiling water. What remained of him was thrown to the sharks, a favorite disposal method of the dictator.

  The abduction of the Columbia University academic from the streets of Manhattan is the first flagrant example of what would become known during the War on Terror, with bureaucratic banality, as “extraordinary rendition”—the secret CIA practice of kidnapping enemies of Washington and turning them over to the merciless security machinery in undisclosed foreign locations.

  During his final seminar, Galíndez mentioned several times that he was being “threatened by Trujillo people.” Maria Joy, one of his students, thought that he was showing off. But later, after she read about his disappearance in the newspapers, Joy felt “horrified”—not only because Galíndez had vanished but because something like this “could happen in the United States.”

  “If this can happen here, what is left?” she wrote in a letter printed in The New Republic. “There is no hope. . . . Everybody who has some sense of responsibility and a feeling for democracy and freedom should be concerned.”

  There was a flurry of public concern over Galíndez’s disappearance. On April 24, a group of Columbia University professors asked the Justice Department to investigate charges that Trujillo’s regime had assassinated their colleague. The following day, the case worked its way into President Eisenhower’s press conference when a reporter for the Concord (New Hampshire) Monitor asked if the administration planned to examine whether “the agents of a dictatorship which enjoys diplomatic immunity are assassinating persons under the protection of the United States flag?” Eisenhower replied that he knew nothing about the Galíndez affair but said he would look into it.

  But, in truth, the CIA had already moved swiftly to shut down the case. New York Police Department officials, informed that the disappearance was a highly sensitive national security matter, put the case in the hands of the Bureau of Special Services (BOSS), the NYPD’s intelligence section. The CIA, which had no jurisdiction to investigate domestic criminal cases, used secret police units like BOSS to take charge of delicate investigations within the borders of the United States. Dulles himself communicated the importance of the Galíndez case to the NYPD, asking police officials to send a detective to the scholar’s Greenwich Village apartment to retrieve the contents of his briefcase. Police commissioner Stephen Kennedy made sure the CIA director’s request was promptly carried out, and the papers inside Galíndez’s briefcase were delivered to Dulles. Kennedy made it clear to the detective that he was to keep his mouth shut about the errand.

  John Frank, the Maheu operative who organized Galíndez’s kidnapping, was closely connected to some of the principal BOSS inspectors working on the case. Frank was a shrewd, ambitious operator who, like Maheu himself, had begun his career as an FBI agent during World War II, before going to work for the CIA. The forty-two-year-old Frank lived in Washington, where Maheu’s detective agency was based. But he kept an office in Trujillo’s salmon-colored, Italian Renaissance–style palace, as the high-paying dictator became an increasingly important client of the Maheu
firm. Frank won the trust of the volatile El Jefe, who made him his bodyguard during state visits to Europe and the United States. The Maheu agency was also given a lucrative contract to upgrade Trujillo’s security in the Dominican Republic.

  Although Frank liked to play tennis with friends in the spy set and boasted of reading Voltaire in French, he was not part of the CIA’s Georgetown inner circle. Men like Frank and his boss, Maheu, were CIA contractors, entrusted with some of the agency’s most risky and squalid tasks. They were not the sort of men who played tennis on Allen Dulles’s backyard court. Maheu later claimed that the Mission: Impossible TV series was based on his firm’s exploits—a secret team whose actions would be “disavowed” by the government should any of their agents be “caught or killed.” Men like Maheu and Frank were expendable.

  Bob Maheu fit the profile of an FBI gumshoe more than a CIA spook. A balding, rubbery-faced man, he had the bright-eyed, genial looks of a comedian who was overly eager to please his audience. But his eyes could go suddenly dead, and his jaw could become grimly set. He came from humble origins—the son of devout Catholic, French-Canadian immigrants who ran a small soda bottling company in a Maine mill town. Maheu worked his way up, graduating from Holy Cross and then Georgetown Law, and getting hired as a field agent by the FBI, where he worked on sensitive national security cases during the war. But Maheu was not content to stay on J. Edgar Hoover’s civil service payroll.

  In 1954, he opened up his own security business, with the CIA—which put him on a $500 monthly retainer—as his leading client. The CIA used Maheu and Associates as a front, putting undercover agents on Maheu’s staff. The agency also directed a stream of highly sensitive, and rewarding, contracts to Maheu, including a major job for Greek shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos that established the company as a leading player in the private security field. Maheu’s firm was hired to help sabotage an agreement between Niarchos’s business rival Aristotle Onassis and the Saudi royal family that the international oil cartel and the Dulles brothers feared would corner the oil shipping business and harm Western interests. The oil caper involved a series of shady maneuvers aimed at smearing the reputation of Onassis—and perhaps even more ruthless actions to eliminate supporters of the Onassis deal in the Saudi royal court. After the successful resolution of the case, a grateful Niarchos gave Maheu a bonus big enough for him to buy a dark blue Cadillac and a split-level house in Sleepy Hollow, Virginia, to which he added a swimming pool. Maheu would become the top-paid security contractor in the country, taking on confidential missions for Vice President Nixon and eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, who later hired him to run his Las Vegas empire.