Assassin: The Terrifying True Story Of An International Hitman

by Robbins, Christopher

  For inspiration Dr Sosa turned to the methods of his dead hero Trujillo, who had been something of a poet in the language of fear. The dictator had been able to instill fear into men’s lives as a permanent emotion and his Horsemen of the East had created an almost supernatural terror when they rode out at night to slaughter their leader’s enemies. They were both real and symbolic reminders of the penalty for dissent; not only a merciless death squad but also an intense psychological weapon. The sound of their pounding hooves had the power to empty a village, and the time was ripe to resurrect them.

  They were replaced with a group of young thugs and their mounts became white American automobiles in which they prowled the streets of Santo Domingo after dark. The group was given the support of the police and the tacit blessing of the president and soon eclipsed the memory of the horseman with its random brutality. Originally given the pompous title of the Democratic Anti-Communist Front, the population simply referred to it as La Banda - the gang.

  The gang had been put into the competent hands of Constantino Felix, another old hand from Trujillo’s intelligence service. Felix in turn brought in ‘Tuto’, a man who had trained members of the Tonton Macoute in Haiti and had been personally congratulated by Papa Doc for his work. The gang’s brief was that they should wage war against the communists and their supporters and that the department would pay members a nominal salary of between 100 and 150 pesos a month and supply them with arms. The gang’s definition of communism was even vaguer than that of either the CIA or Dr Sosa and embraced the whole of the working class and student population. It soon lost all pretence of political direction and concentrated on stamping viciously on any form of unorthodoxy and became the home and delight of every yobbo in the city.

  La Banda turned Santo Domingo into a ghost town. At sunset the beggars on El Conde Street scurried out of the downtown business section for fear of being attacked by members of the gang. The average Dominican began to feel it to be a feat of daring to set foot outside of his home after nightfall. Anybody who did was likely to fall under the unsavoury title of ‘suspicious person’; to be out and about at the same time as La Banda was to indulge in unorthodox behaviour which could be interpreted as sympathy for the communists. The penalty was likely to be death.

  Often the victims were students and schoolchildren. One young student, Miguel Gerrero, was shot pointblank by La Banda when leaving his home, while another, Luis Lamouth Gonzalez, was shot down while standing in the doorway of his high school. Workers were also likely targets for the gang. One man driving innocently along a coastal road was riddled with bullets when two white cars belonging to La Banda overtook him and opened fire. On another occasion the dead bodies of five young men were found dumped in different parts of Santo Domingo after they had been kidnapped and murdered by the gang. No reason for any of these killings was discovered.

  When La Banda carried out one of its raids it was often joined by members of the police. The raids were concentrated mostly on the seething slums of Santo Domingo and were carried out in the early morning when hundreds of suspects were rounded up. Fatalities were the norm. During one raid a stray bullet killed a seven-year-old girl asleep in her bed.

  When a newspaper photographer snapped Police Lt. Oscar Nunez Peña together with members of La Banda in a raid, he was attacked. The gang, in common with the police, did not tolerate criticism and over-reacted in the most extreme manner. When pupils of the Juan Pablo Duarte secondary school - the largest in Santo Domingo with 1,200 pupils - were unwisely angered to the point of holding an open protest in the school grounds, the reprisals were immediate.

  The school was attacked by armed members of the gang together with a force from the national police. The pupils themselves were locked into the school grounds as a routine precaution against petty thieves and were all present when the attack took place. The locked gates irritated La Banda and they opened fire without warning or provocation. Students outside the main building ran for whatever cover they could take. At the first shots a large force of police arrived and also started to fire into the building until the attack took on the aspect of a full scale military assault.

  Police then shot off the lock on the gates of the steel mesh anti-cyclone fence surrounding the school buildings. They charged the front entrance of the school while members of La Banda stormed the rear. Pupils made a vain effort to keep their attackers at bay by hurling stones at them as they crossed the wide patio from the front gate to the school building. But they were not to be stopped and clubbed down students and teachers who stood in their way. One boy was shot in the head and had to be rushed to hospital while another had his skull broken with a blow from a rifle butt.

  Pupils were dragged out screaming while others were trampled underfoot in the panic. Young children were herded on to the south side of the pavement while their seniors were bundled into prison vans which lined the north side of the street. Journalists who had been alerted by the shots rushed to the scene only to be turned away at gunpoint.

  Even in the face of continued outrages by the gang, and repeated protests over the support given to it by the police, the president still blandly denied its existence, despite the fact that at the height of its activity it was held responsible for a death a day. He scoffed at people who spoke of police involvement and national panic. ‘What decent person has been a victim of this violence?’ he asked reporters at a press conference. ‘It cannot be conceived that an institution as respectable as the Dominican police can be charged with organizing and shielding terrorist activities.’

  For his part the police chief gaily chirped: ‘The country is enjoying a period of unprecedented calm and tranquillity.’

  The opposition hinted darkly at a ‘foreign power’ being behind La Banda and the Wall Street Journal went as far as to print the rumours and name the power as the U.S.: ‘Many Dominicans suspect that the large U.S. embassy here is behind La Banda. There isn’t any evidence to substantiate that, and individual embassy members are reportedly opposed to La Banda. But the embassy has done nothing to publicly disassociate itself from the terror.’

  But throughout there was never any mention of Dr Sosa. His stooge, Constantino Felix, gave secret press conferences as the secretary-general of the Democratic Anti-Communist Front but the name of the Intelligence chief never passed his lips. The doctor remained the anonymous power behind the throne.

  At the same time that La Banda was going about its business, the department was manipulating the various factions of the left into open warfare against one another. Dr Sosa’s intention was to play upon the hatred that already existed between them and agents were infiltrated into the Pro Castro and Maoist parties. The result was a series of attacks, killings and reprisals. The war alienated the general public and at the university, the hotbed of revolutionary activity, left-wing students demanded an end to the MPD/Pacredo banditry. The young left calling for the destruction of the two most militant parties was music to the doctor’s ears.

  A similar policy was carried out against POUASI, the militant dockers’ union. Agents from the department took up position in a house near the union HQ and opened fire on a routine police patrol that was cruising by. The police reported that they had been shot at by the dockers and the war was on.

  A whole battalion of armed police attacked the HQ while the secret police carried out a thorough manhunt of union members who were either beaten up and imprisoned or murdered and left without personal documents to identify them. The department kept things on the boil by cold-bloodedly shooting down a young police officer and then providing ‘proof’ that it was the work of the union.

  But POUASI proved a tough nut to crack (it was the dockers’ union who had been the backbone of the armed uprising in 1965 which precipitated a U.S. invasion of the island) and they fought back until it seemed that a civil war was imminent. President Balaguer intervened and dealt directly with the union.

  The peace move came as a shock to Dr Sosa who was relaxing with General Me
lido Marte on his verandah nursing his customary tumbler of Scotch when the news reached him. He leapt out of his chair and hurled his glass against the wall. ‘There’s no need for the president to approve of communists,’ he screamed. ‘How much longer are we going to have to put up with this man’s cowardice? You see what’s happened now? I’ve got a good mind to give up all this bother. Balaguer is behaving, as usual, like a terrified virgin.’

  The general attempted to soothe his friend with proverbs. ‘Don’t worry, some things are worth waiting for; as the song says - nothing bad lasts a hundred years. Don’t throw everything away now when you know our time is coming.’

  The doctor consoled himself with a campaign against the revolutionary section of the taxi drivers’ union which called itself UNAGHOSIN. He called a meeting with two taxi drivers, the Mendoza brothers, who were ex-servicemen and good friends of the department.

  ‘I wanted to see you because we need six Austin cars and they must be painted in the colours of those belonging to UNACHOSIN,’ Sosa told the brothers. ‘The drivers must be ex-servicemen whom you can trust.’

  The brothers promised that everything would be carried out as ordered. Sosa turned to Perez and said, ‘I’m going to send a memo to the president to tell him that UNACHOSIN is planning a strike which will be accompanied by terrorism and attempts on the lives of members of the armed forces, the national police and government officials.’ The memo was marked ‘Urgent’ and delivered to the palace by hand.

  The doctor kept the real motives of his actions a secret from the majority of his men. He liked them to believe in what they were doing, for if the chief displayed amorality, disloyalty and self-interest on every occasion his men might be tempted to indulge themselves similarly.

  On this occasion he briefed two Cubans to circulate the rumour around the department that there was going to be trouble with the taxi-drivers. The Cubans did their job well and when Perez came into work the following day everybody was talking about the union trouble ahead. Agents were telling one another that there was to be a military coup which would be heralded with outbreaks of violence and a strike by UNACHOSIN which would later be backed up by other unions. The agents believed the rumours to such an extent that they started to file them as factual reports, packed with information to the effect that the union was holding secret meetings in different parts of the city and that members were being provided with arms by Casimiro Castro, a leading member of the PRD opposition party. So many reports were filed by so many agents that Perez would have been convinced of the proposed terrorism if he had not heard his own chief plan it. Perez was forced to join in the hypocrisy and turn the reports into memos. The situation of an intelligence department planning something and spreading rumours to its own men which are then repeated back as the truth is a cautionary tale that all intelligence services everywhere might heed.

  Between mouthfuls of chicken Sosa told his assistant the plans concerning UNACHOSIN. ‘I’ll wipe them off the map,’ the chief said confidently. ‘The best thing to do when a dog has rabies is to kill it. Kill the dog and the rabies is exterminated. Those bastards worry me. Communism is taking a hold of the country again - thanks to the all-forgiving president. The reds are even assisted by the government these days.’

  The six taxis, painted in the UNACHOSIN colours and with suitably dubious drivers, were subsequently put at the department’s disposal. In an erratic and ruthless campaign of random terror-tactics carried out over a period of days they bombed bars and shot pedestrians in the street. The union was discredited in the eyes of the public and the police killed and arrested many of its members.

  In the midst of all this activity the life of Miguel Perez became more and more miserable and his diary became a record of sleepless nights and near despair. But his loyalty to the department was ensured when his chief made him a present of a somewhat beaten-up second-hand American car.

  It came at the height of the department’s operations at the instigation of General Melido Marte. ‘Look here, Manuel, you ought to look for a car for your right-hand man,’ the General chided Dr Sosa. ‘Things are getting nasty and it isn’t a good idea for him to ride around in taxis.’ The new car sends a ripple of joy through Perez’s diary: ‘I don’t deny that I was thrilled and happy. I said that he really ought not to have spent so much money and that I would have waited,’ he wrote, once again the loyal assistant.

  The gift of the car is recorded lovingly as one of a very few pleasant incidents in a bleak routine. It takes up pages in his diary while he is often skimpy and cryptic when cataloguing the grimmer aspects of his everyday life. In a document that often turns into a lament these few bright pages sparkle. Perez is so obviously delighted to be able to record something apart from his dirge of death that he cheerfully nudges aside the murder and corruption to give his yellow car the space that it deserves. It even seems to have temporarily cured his insomnia.

  Death warrants were becoming daily correspondence and passed across the bureaucrat’s desk with monotony. Even Perez, who was certainly not in the least left-wing, realized that most of the department’s enemies were imaginary. But he did his work without asking too many awkward questions and accepted his chief’s more fantastical scheming with a weary mental shrug.

  The most extraordinary plot of all, however, was the brainchild of Anthony Ruiz of the CIA. Ruiz staggered even the Machiavelian Dr Sosa by asking the department to kidnap a high-ranking officer at the U.S. embassy.

  The CIA provided the department with a precise breakdown of the daily movements of Lt. Col. Donald J. Crowley, the U.S. embassy’s Air Attaché in Santo Domingo. The colonel was a man of habit and always exercised one of his ponies on the polo ground of the Embajador in the early morning before going to work at the embassy. It was a quiet time of the day when few of the hotel guests were up, and the colonel always arrived on his own and no doubt felt he had a right on the ground since the Dominican government had billed the U.S. army $176,389.79 for damages incurred during the 1965 uprising, when it was used as a helicopter pad. The idea behind the kidnapping was to put pressure on President Balaguer to stage a massive campaign against the left, one which would finally break its backbone.

  Crowley was duly snatched from the polo ground at 7.30 in the morning, blindfolded and forced to lie on the back seat of his captor’s vehicle. In the afternoon of the same day responsibility for the kidnapping was claimed by an extreme left-wing group - the 14th of June movement - which offered to set the colonel free in exchange for the release of 21 political prisoners held on charges of terrorism, robbery and murder. The group threatened to kill the Air Attaché if any repressive measures were taken against the left.

  The kidnapping had the hallmark of authenticity but at first the president was unwilling to bargain. He was eventually put under such pressure from the U.S. embassy that he was forced to accept the kidnapper’s demands. The political prisoners were put on a plane to Mexico and on their arrival Colonel Crowley was dropped off from an automobile unharmed and still blindfolded, in an upper-class residential neighbourhood of Santo Domingo.

  The CIA wanted the political prisoners out of the way. Their continued imprisonment on political charges made them a focal point and constant provocation to the militant left. Deportation meant that an articulate and dangerous group of hardcore revolutionaries was rendered both harmless and vulnerable.

  They were surrounded by newsmen on their arrival in Mexico City and one of them, Juan Pablo Gomez Zarate, tried to make the world aware of what was going on in his country. He accused plain-clothes agents of the Dominican police of staging a systematic campaign of assassination and said that most of the group had been tortured and beaten by police and that some prisoners had died as a result.

  Back in Santo Domingo Dr Sosa heard there had been a hitch. Colonel Crowley - who had no idea that he was being kidnapped on CIA orders - had caught a glimpse of Rafael Gonzalez, whom he assumed to be a guerrilla, but who in a fact was Cuban agent R-125. If Crowley e
ver identified Gonzalez at a later date, and it was discovered that he was an agent of the department, the whole plan was in danger of being exposed.

  An order was sent out to investigate Gonzalez and agents told to act according to previous instructions. These instructions were the same for every mission - a mistake was paid for with a life. A few days later the agent Gonzalez was found dead on the motorway.

  The department now embarked on a systematic search-and-destroy operation which was intended to round up all political undesirables in the country. The CIA were quick to file their own list of certain individuals they were particularly keen should be eliminated for ‘impeding U.S. interests in the Republic’. The department immediately despatched its agents to hunt them down.

  For days the newspapers were full of stories of arrests and left-wing sympathizers fleeing the country. The kidnapping resulted in the eventual arrest of numerous left-wing political figures, and of these twenty were machine-gunned before getting into court, while the rest were exiled or gaoled.

  Sixteen

  In the midst of these hysterical campaigns the mental and physical condition of Miguel Perez was declining rapidly. His insomnia had grown into such a constant companion that reference to it in his diary stops and he begins to mention periods of sleep instead. ‘Went to lunch 12.30. After that I went to the guardhouse and had a good sleep until 3.30,’ one entry says of a pleasant siesta.

  His run-down state became a topic of conversation among the agents when they sat together making murderers’ small talk on the villa’s verandah. Manola Santamaria told him he needed a couple of weeks’ rest and that he should ask Dr Sosa to send him somewhere to relax, truly terrifying advice.

  Even the chief seems to have been a little worried at Perez’s condition. The doctor was always careful to attend to details - the loyalty of his assistant, who was in the thick of things and knew the department’s innermost secrets, was especially important. One night, as Perez was tidying his desk and about to go home, his chief asked him to stay behind and have a drink.