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“walking on the bottom of the sea,”
American institutions had a different attitude, she observed. “America is ‘You’ve got to be doing something, buddy,’ whereas in Europe, you can just ‘be.’”
Jung Institute.
Allen Jr. did not leave Bellevue until he heard that his father was dead. Joan eventually arranged to take him out of the sanitarium and move him to Santa Fe, where she had found her own sanctuary and was able to look out for her brother. Sonny never returned to an institution. Joan became his legal guardian. The two elderly siblings still live in Santa Fe, in the same house now, both trying to make sense of their past, in their own ways.
and booked passage on a ship to the Dominican Republic, where strongman Rafael Trujillo
the dictator
reign of terror
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.
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.
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
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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.”
one man—Jesús de Galíndez—who, in the dictator’s mind,
Galíndez saw his scholarly exposé of the Trujillo tyranny as part of a broader campaign of popular liberation.
dictators ruling thirteen of the region’s twenty nations.
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.
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
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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.”
kidnapping was a sophisticated operation run by Robert A. Maheu
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.
during the War on Terror, with bureaucratic banality, as “extraordinary rendition”—the secret CIA practice of kidnapping enemies of Washington and turning them
CIA had already moved swiftly to shut down the case.
Bureau of Special Services (BOSS), the NYPD’s intelligence section.
Police commissioner Stephen Kennedy
John Frank, the Maheu operative
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
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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
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
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 shippi...
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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 o...
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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.
These were the cops of the CIA—tough men, many of them ex-FBI and Catholic, who, like Maheu, were not afraid to get their hands dirty. The CIA had an elite reputation, but within the organization there was a distinct class system: the Ivy League types on the top; the ex-FBI hard guys and former cops in the middle ranks of enforcement; and the even more ruthless, and disposable, hired guns at the bottom.
the CIA disseminated other disinformation about Galíndez to its friendly press assets,
Department and the CIA, John Frank was finally charged with an astonishingly light offense: failure to register as a foreign agent.