Plot to assassinate Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic)

For more than thirty years, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina ruled the Dominican Republic. By 1960, the State Department considered him an embarrassment, and President Eisenhower had authorized the CIA to support Dominican exiles seeking his overthrow. What began as political support gradually moved toward direct involvement in his killing.

CIA officers in the embassy in Santo Domingo developed contacts with a group of Dominican dissidents. The plotters asked for weapons. In early 1961, the agency authorized the delivery of three pistols, three carbines, and ammunition through the diplomatic pouch. The weapons were passed to the Dominican conspirators by an embassy officer. Two of the carbines were among the firearms the plotters carried with them on the night of the killing.

On May 30, 1961, Trujillo was ambushed on a highway outside the capital. A group of attackers riddled his car with gunfire and killed him in a brief shootout. Most of the plotters were captured and executed in the months that followed. The Trujillo era ended; a long political crisis began.

The Church Committee, in its 1975 report on alleged CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders, found that the agency was involved in the conspiracy that produced the killing, but that the actual weapons fired at Trujillo were probably not the CIA-supplied carbines. The agency had clearly armed the plotters and encouraged them, the committee concluded; whether U.S. metal was in the bullets was a narrower and less important question.

The Family Jewels memorandum, compiled in 1973 by the CIA's own staff, lists the Trujillo case as one of the agency's foreign assassination involvements. The Rockefeller Commission of 1975 reached the same finding.