Assassin: The Terrifying True Story Of An International Hitman

by Robbins, Christopher

  ‘Thank you, no,’ Perez replied. ‘I want to get home early because it is my eldest son’s birthday.’

  His chief congratulated him and pulled out his wallet.

  ‘Take this,’ he said. ‘It’s my present to the boy. You should have told me earlier and I would have let you get away.’

  Sosa handed his assistant 500 pesos which he tried to refuse, saying that his chief should merely drink his son’s health. ‘I really didn’t want to take it,’ Perez writes in his diary, ‘partly because I knew where it had come from and partly because it wasn’t really my son’s birthday. I had made up the excuse in order not to stay. But he insisted and in the end I took the money.’

  This time the bribe did not rest so easily on his conscience and, almost insane with the need to talk to someone, he decided to tell his wife everything. But with characteristic weakness he changed his mind when faced by her and gave her 200 pesos to buy clothes for her family instead.

  The following morning he changed the remaining 300 pesos into small notes and stopped off at the grandiose Altagracia Church on his way to the office. The church is in one of the smart parts of Santo Domingo but gathered around its entrance is a sad collection of the city’s beggars: crippled men, women and children beg pitifully for alms on the church steps.

  Perez stood among them and tried to buy himself off. ‘Trying not to be noticed I looked for a suitable place and dropped the money. I thought that in this way the money would do more good to more people, people who, though they had awful lives, I almost envied because they didn’t have my particular problem - working for a department of killers and thieves. I thought they at least were happy in their way.

  ‘I wanted to wait and see the surprise on the faces of those unhappy creatures. So I hid about fifty yards away from where I had dropped the money. One of them, who was following a man he was soliciting for alms, noticed the money and began to gather it up. Others who saw what was happening hurried to the spot. So I spent ten or more minutes of the greatest joy and happiness watching the happiness of those unlucky people. As soon as they had picked up the money they all left the church, probably because they were afraid someone would come back to claim it from them. But I noticed that one of them - I think the eldest - wasn’t behaving like the others and I think he was so handicapped he hadn’t managed to get any of the money. So I went up to him and gave him twenty pesos of my own money whereupon his face took on the same look of happiness as the others.’

  It was 300 pesos well spent and in a surge of confidence he decided to unburden himself and take the risk of sharing his secrets. He chose his uncle, Monsignor Perez Sanchez, who was a priest. The old priest listened to his nephew unmoved and when his reply came it was unsympathetic. ‘The best thing you can do is keep your mouth shut,’ the priest told him firmly. ‘That way you will avoid trouble for the family.’

  Men of the cloth tend towards pragmatism in the Dominican Republic and the advice, although hardly Christian, was sound enough. But Perez had run out of excuses and after four years of telling himself he must leave the department he was finally moving towards action.

  For some time Perez had been collecting damaging material as his ‘life insurance’. Matters of great importance were usually dealt with orally, but it was often necessary to send written messages to the CIA and agents of the department. The system for this was very strict. A message was sent with an agent, read by the other party and signed for. It was then returned to the department where Sosa locked the document in his personal safe. The idea was that nobody but the chief had access to anything really incriminating and in theory the system was foolproof.

  Clever as Dr Sosa was, laziness held a privileged position among his vices. In practice most of the department’s messages were returned to Perez who took them to his chief. Sosa would indolently sling the keys at him and tell him to put the documents in the safe. If the chief had been over-indulging himself in Scotch, one of his other privileged vices, Perez would sometimes be obliged to keep the keys overnight. It meant that he was the only man with access to Sosa’s secret files and he had made good use of his unique position.

  At the end of the day, if Sosa was absent and Perez had the keys of the safe, he would remove documents from the safe two at a time and slip them into his briefcase. On his way home he stopped at a friend’s office in the town to make photostats and then the following day he would wait for his chance to place the documents back in the safe. It was always done in his usual methodical, office-like manner, and his chief never suspected him.

  It was through this that Perez came across the most ambitious of his chief’s plots. At first he was merely confused by a volley of reports between the department and Military Intelligence referring to parts one and two of a Plan A. Several days later he began to realize the extent of this plan. He had gone into the office as usual, dutifully pointing out in his diary that he was an hour late due to trouble in starting the car, to find a note on his desk from the chief telling him to get on immediately with dispatching orders to the Cuban agents.

  Perez set about his task. The orders seemed to add up to one thing only - a mass extermination of all political opponents whom Sosa thought stood in his way. The list was made up mostly of left-wing figures but also included the doctor’s opponents on the extreme right and some high-ranking officers within the government. Perez also understood that the Cuban agents who were to carry out the assassinations were to be eliminated themselves afterwards. Of all the plots the department had hatched this was the most complete.

  The first report that Perez methodically filed was a confidential memo to the commander of the twenty agents coded as Zone A. It ordered him to keep a close watch on a number of listed people and to start thinking carefully which agents were to be used for the assignment. The people on the list were of an importance that staggered Perez.

  Topping the list was ex-president Juan Bosch, leader of the opposition, closely followed by a host of high-ranking military, newspaper editors and prominent left-wing personalities. Altogether they made up a total of 48 people.

  ‘I arrived home tired and nervy. I couldn’t go on putting up with such misery and torment but I didn’t have the courage to carry out what I had thought of doing, in spite of having the vital photostats of the documents from Dr Sosa’s personal files.’

  A couple of days later Perez’s suspicions of the mass murder were finally confirmed beyond doubt. Sosa, in a state of panic over some news he had received, stated blatantly that the killing was to begin. The news that had upset him was that President Balaguer was planning another of his many reshuffles among the chiefs of department.

  ‘We all know how devious Balaguer can be,’ Sosa told Quezada, who brought him the news, ‘but we daren’t wait for his decision before starting our plan. We must all be ready.’ Then he dropped the bombshell which stunned his quiet assistant sitting invisibly at his desk. ‘Tonight I’ll send for the Cubans who will do the killing.’

  ‘We’ll start with Eliseo Andujar and Barahona - both of whom I consider dangerous. I can’t stand that bastard Barahona. Next we’ll make the final preparations concerning Braulio, Nivar and Checo.’ It was nothing new to Perez to hear his chief announce the assassination of certain people but this plan really startled him. It included officers whom he considered to be loyal to the president. The last three names that Sosa mentioned - General Braulio Alvarez Sanchez, General Ney Nivar Seijas and Colonel Checo - were all important members in the armed forces’ hierarchy.

  That night on the radio the bureaucrat heard the news that Plan A had swung into operation. Barahona and his wife, the radio reported, had been attacked by two unidentified men and riddled with bullets. Miraculously they had not been killed.

  In the office the following day Perez found his chief in a paroxysm of rage. Before him, pale and uneasy, stood Juan Aguiler, the head of the Cuban agents. ‘Your men behaved like children,’ Sosa screamed at him. ‘I want you to pack them off to Miami and I never want
to see them again. What they did could have given the whole game away. It seems that Tomas was recognized and that’s one reason good enough to get them out of the country at once.’ He waved a threatening finger at Aguiler. ‘The only reason I’m not killing them is because they’re friends of yours. If they weren’t they’d be dead. Go and book their tickets.’

  The Cuban agents’ mistake meant that Sosa was forced to shelve his plan for a couple of days and he spent the time in conference with his confederates ironing out details. Finally, a large group of Cubans arrived at the department to be given last minute instructions. It was a ferociously hot day so the meeting was held out on the patio, which made it easy for Perez to listen in.

  Sosa was amused by his assistant’s sudden interest. ‘That’s what I like to see,’ he said, laughing. ‘You by my side when I am giving orders.’

  ‘Have a good look at the photos I’m about to show you,’ the chief told his men. ‘All of these people have to be got rid of at a certain specified time. On the back of these photos are details of where they sleep or spend the night. Commit these to memory, plus the face of the person in each photograph. Then destroy the picture.’ He handed the agents the photos of the people they were assigned to kill. ‘Anyone who makes a mistake will die for it,’ he told them. The doctor softened his stern warning by cheerfully handing round tumblers full of whisky.

  Seventeen

  Although Perez had decided to expose his chief, he was a long way short of the kind of courage needed to act on his decision. But a grotesque event created such revulsion for his tyrannical overlord that he was finally able to summon it.

  Dr Sosa was drinking heavily throughout the preparatory stages of Plan A and was typically half-drunk when a woman arrived at the department making enquiries about her son. Perez heard her arguing loudly with the guard and went to see what was happening. He spoke curtly to the man on duty and told him that he should not shout and argue with people who came to the department as it was bad for their image. This extraordinary remark shows the level of unreality that Perez operated on; while the department murdered and tortured he was still removed enough to consider a public image of disciplined good manners.

  Perez took the woman along to see Sosa and once in the chief’s office she immediately burst into tears and explained between sobs what had happened. Her son was Senora Sosa’s mechanic and had made the fatal mistake of making a pass at her.

  ‘I remember the incident,’ Perez says, ‘because I handled an order to the officer in charge of Group A telling him to arrest the boy and take him to the interrogation centre. The order continued that as soon as the boy was there Dr Sosa was to be informed and would carry out the interrogation personally.’

  Perez felt sorry for the woman. ‘As I watched the pathetic tableau I saw that Dr Sosa had a mocking smile on his face. The poor woman’s eyes were red from crying. She was about 45 years old, really very pretty, with black hair and light brown skin the colour of cinnamon and she moved gracefully. But in spite of her beauty, she looked more dead than alive.’

  Dr Sosa told the distraught mother that it was true that her son had been arrested and interrogated but that he had since been released and had returned to the provincial town of Santiago. Perez listened sceptically: ‘I remembered how I had heard that the woman’s son had been badly beaten up by Dr Sosa during his interrogation.’

  But the woman seemed pacified by the news that her son had been set free. She mopped at her face with a handkerchief and then made the terrible mistake of asserting her motherly rights. ‘The boy is all I have in the world and if anything were to happen to him you’d have to deal with me as well.’

  The veiled threat infuriated Sosa. He leapt out of his chair and struck her across the face. Then he shouted for the agent on duty to take her to the guardroom. ‘The woman started to cry loudly but she was silenced by another blow to the head with the butt-end of the gun which the agent carried, and was dragged away,’ Perez records.

  Sosa poured himself a large Scotch and drank heavily for an hour and then ordered his maid up from the kitchen.

  ‘When she came he told her that the woman in the guardroom needed a bath and she was to see to it. While she was at it, he said, the maid ought to have a bath too. The doctor was a bit drunk but he was still speaking clearly, although what he had just said seemed nonsense to me. As the maid was leaving Dr Sosa pulled out his wallet and gave her 100 pesos, telling her to buy herself some new clothes.’

  The maid went into the guardroom and soon returned to inform Sosa that the woman was taking a bath. She had not taken Sosa’s command seriously to have a bath as well and was still clothed. The chief said that he would order the guards to take the woman into his voodoo chapel and that the maid should accompany her.

  ‘Dr Sosa was about to go out and then turned to me and said, “Don’t stay here. Come with me so you can see what I do to people like that woman.” When we got to the chapel the woman was there naked and crying. Dr Sosa told the maid to undress which she did without ado. Then he said, “You know what I want you to do. Take this woman by force until she can’t stand any more or even talk.” The maid immediately threw herself on top of the woman who was quite unable to defend herself although she cried out in desperation. She implored Dr Sosa to kill her rather than make her suffer in such a way.

  ‘Dr Sosa replied that she could either put up with it and have her son free or she could refuse and he would die accidentally. The woman had no choice so I witnessed something absolutely terrible. Dr Sosa guffawed with laughter. It was all too immoral for me to describe in writing - I couldn’t take it, and praying that God would take note, I returned to my office where I could neither see nor hear what went on. I was very nervous and upset by what I had seen already but I set about doing the routine work. As I worked I wondered how it was possible that in a room where there was a large altar and statues of several saints such a disgraceful thing could be committed. I prayed to God that he would hasten the death of the scoundrel Dr Sosa. I calmed down and thought of the Almighty.

  ‘It must have been two hours later when the doctor came into my office. “Go and see what a state those two are in now,” he said. I had no idea that lesbian had so much experience. If you had stayed you would have sampled a real marvel. But you, with your humanitarian sentiments,

  had to go.’

  When Sosa was drunk he enjoyed frightening his assistant. Perez’s humanitarianism really did annoy him. ‘One of these days it’ll get the better of you,’ he said, ‘and I don’t know where you’ll end up.’

  ‘I told him that the spectacle had really nauseated me and I hadn’t enjoyed it at all,’ Perez says. Some time later he saw Manolo Santamaria come out of the chapel carrying the woman. He thought that she had passed out or was asleep but when he went over to ask if she was ill he noticed a strong smell of chloroform. He was told not to worry. ‘She won’t play any tricks on us again,’ one of the agents called out cheerily.

  Upset beyond caution he went straight to Sosa and asked what had happened.

  ‘That woman gave me a lot of headaches,’ the chief said sternly. ‘She knew the department had imprisoned her son so it’s best to have her out of the way for a time.’ Sosa looked his assistant in the eye. ‘And I’ll tell you something else - people who could make trouble are best eliminated because the dead never talk.’

  ‘Too true,’ Perez replied. ‘I honestly couldn’t think what else to say that he couldn’t take the wrong way.’

  But despite his timidity in the face of his chief Perez had been pushed even beyond his very elastic limits. That night he sat down and wrote a long letter to President Balaguer. He explained everything that had happened in the Presidential Intelligence department while he had been there and gave details of the plot underway which was intent on overthrowing the government.

  The letter was an act of contrition and Perez wrote way into the night. It was impossible to deliver it personally as the president was attended constantl
y by Dr Quezado, his personal aide, and Lt. Cedano of the presidential escort - both cronies of Dr Sosa. He entrusted the delivery of the letter to a friend.

  It was only a matter of time before his chief discovered his action and then the order would go out for his death. He needed every minute he had left to make good his escape so it was necessary not to stir up Dr Sosa’s suspicions prematurely. He telephoned his chief to say that he was ill and would not be able to go into the office for a few days. Sosa replied casually that it would be all right.

  A few hours later he received a frantic call from an agent who had befriended him over the years. The letter he had written to the president had fallen into Dr Sosa’s hands. The order had just been issued to have him eliminated. The agent wished him luck, advised him to flee the country and rang off.

  The dull fear that Perez had felt over the four years in the department suddenly swamped him in its reality. He says that he does not know how he managed to remain sane over the next 48 hours. In the streets he would stop dead, overcome by a sudden wave of terror, and would wrestle for self-control.

  He knew that he could be shot dead at any moment and that there was nowhere he was safe. He contacted a lawyer who had access to the president and told him of the contents of the documents. The lawyer promised help but told him flatly that his position was one of extreme danger.

  The impossibility of his situation seems to have turned Perez temporarily into a man of steel. He made personal contact with several of the men on Sosa’s list and warned them of the danger they were in. He saw Jose Francisco Pefia Gomez, the Secretary General of the opposition party (PRD) and Norge Botello, head of the Students’ Federation, and also managed to get a message to Barahona telling him who was responsible for the attempt on his life. Then he sent details of the death lists carrying the names of Juan Bosch, the opposition leader, Casimiro Castro, a revolutionary leader, General Elias Wessin y Wessin and Rafael Morrillo to the men concerned.