All the King's Men

A blue and white U.S. Air Force JetStar from the special White House squadron touched down at San Isidro airbase, 9 1/2 miles east of battle-torn Santo Domingo. In the city's rebel stronghold, one of Colonel Francisco Caamano Deno's leftist advisers brightened visibly at the news. "Ah," he asked eagerly, "Johnson has come?"

No. The plane merely carried a top-level, four-man presidential mission (see THE NATION). Practically everyone else was there trying to settle the month-old civil war. But in the fourth week of fighting and maneuvering, all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't seem to put the Dominican Republic together again.

The battle raged on--with a rising crescendo that outdid even the first violent days of the revolt launched in the name of deposed President Juan Bosch. What hope there was for a solution came not so much from the diplomatic palaver but from military action. In an all-out attack in the northern part of the city, the suddenly resurgent loyalist forces of Brigadier General Antonio Imbert Barreras dealt a severe blow to the conglomeration of rebellious soldiers, Communist guerrillas and pro-Bosch civilians led by Colonel Caamano.

Still Another Coalition. The upturn in Imbert's fortunes apparently caught the U.S. by surprise. When Presidential Adviser McGeorge Bundy & Co. flew south early in the week, rumors flooded Santo Domingo that his mission was to bypass Imbert and negotiate a peace with Caamano's rebels. The U.S. position was still Constitutionalism Si! Communism No! But the situation seemed to favor Caamano, sitting cockily in his downtown rebel enclave, refusing to talk with Imbert and sending out snipers to shoot up the city at will. By contrast, Imbert, while he claimed to control most of the country, seemed to have little military strength behind him. Under those circumstances, and desperately striving for peace, the U.S. was prepared to offer a new "broad-based" coalition acceptable to both sides but primarily designed to mollify the non-Communists among the rebels.

The U.S. even had a man: Antonio Guzman, 54, a prosperous planter and one of the few Dominicans with any claim to neutrality. Guzman was known as an outspoken antiCommunist, served in Bosch's Administration as Minister of Agriculture. A few days before the Bundy mission to Santo Domingo, Guzman was secretly flown to Washington for talks with U.S. officials, apparently passed muster, and was flown home again. On its flight to the Dominican Republic, the Bundy mission stopped in Puerto Rico and won Bosch's approval of Guzman. Rebel Leader Caamano also agreed to go along. But not Tony Imbert and his embattled loyalist junta.

In his Congressional Palace in the U.S.-guarded International Zone, Imbert snorted that Guzman was "a Bosch puppet." Imbert refused point-blank to dissolve his own Government of National Reconstruction, argued vehemently that Guzman would be tantamount to turning the country over to the Communists. Bundy and the others repeatedly pleaded with Imbert to step gracefully aside. Each time the answer was the same. "Why the hell did you bring all those troops here if you weren't going to stop Communism?"

Storming the Palace. The question was how much Imbert could do about it. From the first, the U.S. had never considered him as more than an emergency stopgap. He was encouraged to form his loyalist junta at a time when only U.S. troops stood between the Dominican Republic and a rebel victory. Loyalist troops were demoralized; most of them refused to budge from their bases in the countryside. Imbert, at least, was one man ready to fight. In the first days of the revolt, he had collected some 300 troops, who stormed the National Palace and then held it in the face of rebel attacks.

Now Imbert quietly rallied loyalist troops to fight the growing concentration of well-armed rebels in the northern part of the city. With tanks and heavy artillery, one column pushed in from the western garrison of San Cristobal, 17 miles from Santo Domingo. Another column rolled down from the north across Peynado Bridge. In all, Imbert gathered 2,000 troops to attack an estimated 1,000 rebels holed up in an area that contains, among other things, low-income dwellings, small shops, the city's only peanut oil plant and the Pepsi-Cola plant, which provided an almost limitless supply of bottles for Molotov cocktails.

Wearing their caps backwards to distinguish themselves from the rebels, Imbert's troops proceeded to batter the rebels in a full-scale battle. Clanking through the narrow streets, loyalist tanks fired point-blank into every house suspected of harboring rebels. So vicious was the fighting that a hapless taxi driver who got out to fix a flat was gunned down and lay there a day because no one dared venture into the street. Rebels trying to escape through the rat-infested sewers were flushed out with tear gas.

As the rebels fell back before the assault, Colonel Caamano railed that U.S. Marines and G.I.s were fighting side by side with the loyalists. The rebels said that paratroopers had helped Imbert's men capture Radio Santo Domingo, were moving in to secure areas attacked by the loyalists. The U.S. answer to this was a flat denial. At the White House, Press Secretary George Reedy insisted to newsmen: "The President's instructions to the troops when they went in were to observe neutrality. When the President issues instructions, we assume they are followed."

"We Won't Repulse Them." The U.S. admitted nothing more than sending teams of paratroopers equipped with walkie-talkies to keep Imbert's units from firing by mistake into U.S. positions. As they had all along, U.S. paratroopers manning the corridor checkpoints searched every Dominican male for guns before letting him pass. The G.I.s were ordered not to trap the rebels north of the corridor, as Imbert's forces squeezed them up against the line. "We are not going to repulse them," said U.S. Commander Lieut. General Bruce Palmer. "But we won't let them through with their weapons."

Obviously, with 20,500 marines and paratroopers on the scene, there had to be mistakes and isolated violations. Even so, virtually all the gunfire last week was in response to rebel sniping that has continued since the first marines stepped ashore. In a single 24-hour period, the U.S. reported 95 separate incidents to the OAS, bringing the total to 498 in 15 days. All told, 19 Marines and paratroopers had been killed, another 115 wounded.

Rebel mortars tossed four shells into U.S. positions east of the Ozama River. One evening a rebel tank drew up to the west side of Duarte Bridge and started lobbing shells at the paratroopers on the other side; the paratroopers finally destroyed the tank with seven rounds of 106-mm. recoilless-rifle fire. A sniper picked off a paratroop lieutenant in the U.S. corridor with a single shot in the temple. Two marines driving a water truck blundered into a rebel area, ran into a hail of rebel bullets. One Marine was wounded, captured and later released. The other was killed instantly; his body remained for a day sprawled across the truck, flies buzzing about his face, his feet stripped of boots.

The sharpest firefight came near the presidential palace, where a 30-man rebel patrol opened fire on loyalist troops, incidentally spraying nearby Marine and Airborne positions. In the exchange, two paratroopers were wounded. When corpsmen tried to reach them, they too were fired upon. Finally, after an hour, an Airborne colonel ordered a 3.5-in. rocket launcher to fire on the rebels. Four rockets ended the fight, with six rebels dead, nine wounded. Among the rebel dead: Colonel Rafael Fernandez Dominguez, 34, a devoted Bosch follower, who had been serving as military attache in Chile when the revolt broke out, and Juan Miguel Roman, a well-known Dominican Communist who had served in the Castroite 14th of June movement.

Savoring Victory. After seven days of bitter fighting, Imbert's loyalists had driven most of the rebels out of the northern sector of Santo Domingo. And now the man who had won sudden fame and a general's rank by assassinating Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo stepped out on a balcony of the Congressional Palace. Before him stood a cheering crowd of 2,500 supporters. "We have absolute control of the Dominican Republic," declared Imbert. "We will unify and guarantee the welfare of the entire Dominican family." "Down with Communism! Down with Communism!" chanted the crowd.

Savoring his victory, Imbert was still reluctant to negotiate a coalition government with Caamano's rebels. Instead, he called for their unconditional surrender. The only truce he would agree to was a plea for a 24-hour ceasefire to remove the dead and wounded from the blasted northern section of Santo Domingo. Estimates put the casualties at 400 dead, possibly 1,000 wounded, and litter teams worked frantically to carry them out. The U.S. had set up a 60-bed Navy hospital and a 200-bed Army hospital, sent medicine and food to jammed Dominican hospitals. Paratroopers handed out free food to long lines of hungry people.

Imbert still talked of resuming the attack--this time against the main rebel force in downtown Santo Domingo. That would mean pushing across the corridor held by U.S. troops, and the U.S. showed little inclination to let him press on with what would surely bring the bloodiest fighting yet seen in the Dominican Republic. Instead, the U.S. intends to stand as a buffer between the loyalists and rebels while the diplomats seek some sort of compromise government. U.S. officials hope that Imbert may be less adamant about negotiating as the rebels grow weaker. U.S. intelligence reports tell of plummeting morale in the rebel area. Many of the disaffected Dominican army officers with Caamano are reported to be ready to give up; so are the supporters of Juan Bosch, who now seem to be continuing more out of fear than fanatic conviction. If so, that would reduce the rebels mainly to hard-core Communists, and OAS peace-keeping troops might be called upon to deal with them.

More Than a Symbol. How much of an effort the OAS can muster to help restore peace in the Dominican Republic remains to be seen. There were some indications that the Inter-American Armed Force was becoming more than a mere symbol. Brazil announced that it was sending 1,300 combat troops to bolster the handful of Costa Rican, Honduran and Nicaraguan soldiers already in Santo Domingo. The U.S. responded with a pledge to pull out an equal number of troops as the Latin American units arrive. The OAS then voted to put the entire peacekeeping force, including U.S. troops, under a Brazilian general, with a U.S. officer as deputy commander.

The man who now appeared to be the key to the situation was the loyalists' Tony Imbert, who had surprised almost everyone by his show of strength and determination to clean out the rebels. As one Latin American diplomat told OAS Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker: "You uncaged a tiger. Now cage him." At week's end Imbert rejected a permanent ceasefire, though he promised to refrain from "initiating any aggressive actions"--at least temporarily. True to form, the rebels began shooting again. New sniper fire poured into U.S. positions, and another four paratroopers were wounded.

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