by Tim Weiner
The president turned to Hoover for a full report on the case. “Mitchell had been found to have homosexual tendencies,” Hoover told the president, and “Martin was noticeably unstable.” But the Pentagon had granted them top secret security clearances nonetheless. The president found this outrageous. He connected communism and homosexuality, as did Hoover; they both believed without question that homosexuals were especially susceptible to foreign intelligence services.
“The President expressed amazement that these two men had been retained after such information had been developed,” Hoover recorded in his dictated memorandum of the conversation. “He instructed the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, to call in the officials who were responsible for clearing these two individuals and in the words of the President, ‘Give them hell.’ ”
The president asked Hoover how to cleanse the government of this threat once and for all. Hoover recounted:
There was some discussion then upon the part of the President and the Attorney General as well as myself about the setting up of a list of homosexuals in order that there be some central place to which inquiries might be directed concerning individuals who may apply for Government employment or be in Government employment.…
The President was of the opinion that this information should be in the FBI and suggested that steps be taken to see that we gathered together in the FBI any information concerning such tendencies upon the part of individuals who are either in Government or may apply for positions in Government so such information would promptly be available to all Government agencies.
The President seemed to be greatly concerned about this entire problem and left no doubt … that he was thoroughly opposed to the employment or retention in employment of individuals who might have such tendencies.
The FBI’s Sex Deviates Program had been in effect since 1951; the files filled hundreds of thousands of pages. President Eisenhower’s 1953 executive order banning homosexuals from government service equated “sexual perversion” with espionage, sabotage, mental illness, drug addiction, and membership in the Communist Party as behavior that constituted a danger to national security. But there had never been a central file at the FBI comprising a who’s who of homosexuals in America. Now there would be.
Hoover may not have had a sex life of his own. But he had a deep interest in other people’s secret lives—notably, the life of the next president of the United States.
27
“MURDER WAS IN STYLE”
AT THE END OF 1960, Hoover and the FBI became enmeshed in President Eisenhower’s plans to assassinate both Fidel Castro and Rafael Trujillo, the dictators of Cuba and the Dominican Republic respectively.
Hoover started to see the outlines of these dark conspiracies just before John Kennedy very narrowly defeated Richard Nixon in the November 1960 election. His gimlet eyes were opening to an underworld of power. He grasped connections between the American government and organized crime.
On October 18, 1960, Hoover wrote a terse memorandum to Richard Bissell, the CIA’s covert operations chief, with copies to the top men at Justice, State, the Pentagon, and the FBI’s chain of command. It concerned Sam Giancana and Fidel Castro.
Hoover had read FBI reports that Giancana, while enjoying a meal at La Scala, the best Italian restaurant in New York, had boasted that “Castro was to be done away with very shortly”—by November. The mobster said he had met with the hired assassin three times in Miami. The instrument of death was to be a poison pill. And, as Hoover soon discovered, the CIA was behind the plot. Hoover started an all-pervasive electronic surveillance of Giancana—not only wiretaps and bugs, but parabolic microphones that could pick up conversations at a distance of hundreds of feet, a new technology used only in the most sensitive spy cases. “You are advised that its use has been confined to top Internal Security and Espionage cases in the past,” Hoover wrote to the FBI special agent in charge in Chicago. The Giancana investigation now was an intelligence case.
The FBI learned that Giancana was one among ten members of “the commission,” which oversaw the work of Mafia families in the United States and the Caribbean. Mafia dons aimed to revive Mob-owned casinos in Havana from which they had been expelled by Castro, who had come to power in Cuba on January 1, 1959, by overthrowing the dictator Fulgencio Batista. Failing that, they would move their gambling and graft operations to the Dominican Republic.
The Mob liked Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo, an American ally who had held power in the Dominican Republic since 1930. He ruled by fear and fraud. His wealth, wrung from the soil of the island and the sweat of his subjects, was measured in hundreds of millions of dollars. His crimes included murder and kidnapping on American soil, the bribery and corruption of members of the United States Senate and House, and the subversion of rival Latin American leaders.
“THE PRESIDENT WAS ENTITLED TO KNOW”
Hoover had gathered a trove of political intelligence on the murderous politics of the Caribbean during the late 1950s. His best sources included an FBI veteran turned American ambassador in the Dominican Republic, his agents and legal attachés in Miami and Havana, and the CIA counterintelligence chief, James Angleton.
A common denominator of their reporting was political corruption in Washington. Ten members of Congress had been convicted of crimes during Hoover’s years at the FBI; almost all of the cases involved relatively minor-league cases of graft. But Hoover learned through secret intelligence that some of his strongest allies in the Senate had been pocketing bribes from Batista and Trujillo. Hoover had received a report from Angleton, based on a tip from the Cuban consul general in New York, that “Senator Homer E. Capehart has received the sum of $20,000 as a ‘fee’ to effect the entrance and asylum in the United States of Batista.” Capehart, an Indiana Republican, had been one of Hoover’s most vocal supporters in the war on communism in the Senate since 1945. Hoover also received intelligence from the American ambassador in the Dominican Republic that his most powerful supporter in Congress, Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, received money and other favors from Trujillo, one plantation master bestowing largesse on another.
Hoover shunned criminal investigations of congressmen. He very rarely handled matters involving money, sex, and politics as law enforcement cases. He classified them as intelligence matters, fit for his files and the president’s eyes only. He brought salacious political secrets about members of Congress to the White House, and presidents from Franklin Roosevelt onward usually savored them.
“If it was highly politically explosive … the President was entitled to know,” said Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, later the attorney general of the United States. “The Bureau didn’t give you a lot of other stuff. They did if there was homosexuality or something of that kind involved.… You know, little girls or something like that.”
Hoover never pursued Eastland on charges of corruption; it would have been awkward in the extreme to investigate his favorite senator, the Democratic chairman of the Judiciary Committee and its Internal Security Subcommittee. But Hoover had told President Eisenhower that other members of Congress were in Trujillo’s pocket. Eisenhower himself had named two of them in a White House meeting: Senator Allen Ellender, Democrat of Louisiana, the chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and Representative Harold Cooley, Democrat of North Carolina, the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee. The committees set the sugar import quotas allocated to the Dominican Republic; their decisions generated millions for the dictatorship; their chairmen received considerable largesse in return. Trujillo personally controlled roughly two-thirds of the crop and took the lion’s share of the profits.
Trujillo had distinguished himself to his American allies as a bulwark against communism. He had asserted in interviews with American newspapers that he had given the United States priceless intelligence on a “Caribbean Comintern” with headquarters at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City and bases in New York, Miami, and Puerto Rico. Vice President Nixo
n had toured the Dominican Republic and hailed Trujillo in public and private. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., was one among many of Trujillo’s well-paid Washington lobbyists. Trujillo bought favorable publicity by siphoning money into the hands of newspaper owners, broadcast magnates, advertising agencies, and syndicated columnists through his political and intelligence operatives, who worked out of fifty-four consulates in the United States. His going rate for endorsements from powerful and prominent gringos was $25,000 in cash.
The problems Trujillo presented were without real precedent in American political history. The United States had installed pro-American rulers through coups and plots. But it never had removed one.
“GET INTO THE UNDERGROUND”
The president, the Dulles brothers, and J. Edgar Hoover hit upon an unusual solution to the problem of Trujillo. They sent a veteran FBI agent down to the Dominican Republic as the new American ambassador.
Joseph S. Farland was not a typical diplomat. His skill was in secret operations. Farland had become an FBI agent in 1943. His assignments included wiretapping, black-bag jobs, and undercover surveillance. As he explained, Hoover had chosen him to be “one of the very select group of individuals,” part of “a secret organization within a secret organization” working against the Soviet atom spies. “Our work was to get the information as to who was who and who was doing what to whom and how they were doing it.” His new assignment in the Dominican Republic was not all that different. He recalled his orders: “Get into the underground and find out what is going on and what is going to happen at this time and in the future. It’s a delicate operation, but your background and training make you the best possible selection we have in the Department. We do not want to eliminate Trujillo. In other words, assassinate him. But we want him to take his loot and go off.”
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 assu
red 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
THE 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.