CIA and the Dominican Republic: The 1961 Trujillo Assassination, 1965 U.S. Invasion, and Cold War Power Struggle

CIA Ghosts Haunt Dominican Republic Power Games

 

     Caribbean history isn’t all beaches and piña coladas. Sometimes it’s violence just out of sight and secrets nobody wants dug up.

     Look at the Dominican Republic.

     For thirty years, Rafael Trujillo ran the country like it was his personal property. He smiled for the cameras, but behind the scenes he ruled with fear. His secret police, the SIM, kept people in line with torture, threats, and midnight knock-on-the-door disappearances. And Washington put up with him for a long time because he was fiercely anti-communist. Back then, during the early Cold War, that alone was enough to earn a free pass.

     By the late 1950s, though, Trujillo had become more trouble than he was worth. Too violent. Too reckless. Too hard to defend. The CIA, which had once ignored the mess, started paying attention. When Dominican insiders began plotting to kill him, the Agency didn’t shut it down. Declassified files show the CIA supplied weapons to the plotters in 1961. It wasn’t some big-budget spy movie operation. Just enough help to tip the scales. Trujillo was ambushed and shot on a lonely highway, and just like that, the balance of power in the Caribbean shifted.

The SIM was officially dissolved in 1962. On paper, it was gone. In reality, its agents scattered fast when the heat came down. Some vanished. Some changed identities. Some kept their heads low and waited.

     The chaos that followed opened the door to something even bigger. In 1965, the country exploded into civil war after reform-minded president Juan Bosch had been pushed out. Washington saw it and thought one thing: not another Cuba. President Lyndon B. Johnson sent more than 20,000 U.S. troops into the Dominican Republic. And while the soldiers were visible, the CIA was working hard in the background. At one point, it had its second-largest station in the world there, behind only Saigon. That tells you how seriously the U.S. took the idea of communism gaining ground just ninety miles from Puerto Rico.

     The CIA’s mission was simple on the surface. Prevent a communist takeover. In practice, it meant intelligence gathering, political influence, cultivating assets, and shaping outcomes. The Dominican Republic became a chessboard, and the pieces were very real people.

     Fast forward to today, and history doesn’t feel so distant.

     That shadow world is the backbone of my spy thriller Mission Of Vengeance, set against the modern Dominican Republic. In the novel, the current DR president isn’t just haunted by Trujillo’s legacy. He’s weaponizing it. He’s been using remnants of Trujillo’s assassins to threaten political opponents, breathing life into something that was supposed to be buried decades ago.

     The SIM may have been disbanded, but in fiction, as in life, networks don’t just evaporate. They evolve.

     In Mission Of Vengeance, Corey Pearson uncovers that the old SIM torturers were replaced by a new generation. One of the descendants, Jose Garcia, slipped away years ago with a fortune and landed in Nassau, Bahamas. He set up a phony trust fund for his kids, a clever front for darker ambitions. That money helped launch a rogue assassin squad alongside his brother Carlos and other SIM loyalists. The originals are gone now, but Carlos’ two sons picked up the torch. The family business lives on. SIM’s still kicking.

     And here’s where modern intelligence tradecraft collides with Cold War ghosts.

     In the novel, the U.S. President Rhinehart and General Morrison confront the Dominican president with hard evidence. The NSA has been listening. They’ve intercepted communications ordering SIM descendants to rough up political adversaries. The Americans hold the leverage and aren’t shy about it. Let Corey Pearson operate on Dominican soil to take down former KGB spies hiding on a Russian oligarch’s yacht, or watch the incriminating intel go public.

     Those Russian operatives aren’t small-time players. They’ve murdered an American family and orchestrated a suicide bombing at a summit of Caribbean officials, killing and wounding CIA operatives on Pearson’s team. The stakes are personal. They’re geopolitical. And they echo the same Cold War tensions that once turned the Dominican Republic into one of the CIA’s busiest outposts on the planet.

     What makes the Dominican Republic such fertile ground for a thriller isn’t just the beaches or the politics. It’s the layered history. A dictator backed, then undermined. An intelligence service dissolved but never fully erased. A U.S. intervention that left deep fingerprints. A CIA station once second only to Saigon.

     In places like this, the past never really stays buried. It waits. It adapts. And sometimes, it picks up a gun again.

 

Robert Morton is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) and writes about the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). He also writes the full-length Corey Pearson- CIA Spymaster Series, which blends his knowledge of real-life intelligence operations with gripping fictional storytelling. His thrillers reveal the shadowy world of covert missions and betrayal with striking realism.