The document is short and straightforward. It is a letter written by Marvin L Gray Jr. to a commissioner named David Belin, who is an attorney working in the Rockefeller Commission. In this letter, Marvin protests against the use of a draft memo as evidence to be used in the commission. Attesting that his reporting in the memo is true to the best of his knowledge but that it wasn’t reviewed by other staff and, therefore, shouldn’t be held responsible and that since the document wasn’t officially used and only made as a draft, he wants to argue against its use as evidence for the commission and is writing this letter to submit his protest in writing so that it can accompany the memo in the commission.
Now while the document itself doesn’t say much, it was a start to a lot of questions that led to me finding stunning examples of how the CIA, as an arm of the federal government, interacted with other areas of Latin America during the cold war. The Rockefeller Commission was set to look for any wrongdoing of the CIA and to look for evidence if any agency took steps to assassinate foreign leaders. Specifically, what this document relates to is section C of the 86-page Rockefeller Commission summary report. There we see how the United States describes the political situation in the Dominican Republic. At this point in time, it is well known that Rafael Trujillo has ruled the Dominican Republic with casual use of arrest and torture. As president, he has led the Dominican Republic to grow politically isolated, as many OAS member countries sever political ties with the country after Trujillo sponsored an assassination attempt on the President of Venezuela. The United States sees this tense situation that is bubbling after the 30-year rule, and they have to wonder how they should respond. They see that there are attempts to assassinate Rafael Trujillo by the Cubans sponsored by Venezuela, and in their mind doing nothing would be bad and eventually lead to a bad outcome. It is the hope of US operatives that some limited involvement will allow the US to influence the outcome of the aftermath of an assassination, collapse, or fleeing of the regime. There were some rules against agencies supplying weapons to groups in foreign countries, but they found ways to break those rules with justifications. For instance, the CIA didn’t plan the assassination, but they had regular contact with the group planning the assassination and also advised them on mistakes in the planers the plotters came up with on their own. It was a tug of war for the CIA operatives to deliver arms to these plotters. There were internal rules they danced around, and they decided not to inform the state department or ask for permission. Eventually, they sent pistols, three M1 carbine rifles, and ammunition. They did this concluding it didn’t break any arms embargo since the arms came from the US consulate and not the US directly. This not only demonstrates the complexity that goes into how the US interacts with Latin America, where you have multiple government groups acting basically independently from each other. But it also demonstrates how badly these operatives wanted to influence the regime to come after. The CIA’s main goal in all this was to prepare and organize a Pro US group that could lead the government afterward. In fact, in their own words, when they were having trouble not breaking the rules to deliver arms to these groups out of fear of discouraging the group, wanting to assure them of US support. In the end, other parts of the US government do become aware of the CIA’s involvement in this assassination plot only after the CIA tries to ask for automatic weapons. President Ford didn’t want the United States to have a bad reputation in the world and argued assassination of the world wasn’t a legitimate action for the US and that the assassination of a democratic leader goes against its values. So a letter is sent to the consulate and CIA to destroy all evidence of involvement with the plotters. That’s what the original document we were discussing has to do with. The Rockefeller Commission was looking for evidence of the CIA breaking rules, and the letter sent to the consulate alludes to the acknowledgment that they know they broke the rules doing this operation and they want the CIA to stop. Interesting to see the conflicting aims of the actors on the ground and their reaction to the current political circumstances. It’s also interesting to see how the US can get involved and how ultimately how, it can take so little to have an outsized impact.
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