I spent lastnight reviweing my interview notes with Imbert. The way Diederich describes the evolution of the plot in his book is vague and murky. I made a list of 14 questions before I met with General Imbert, the priority was to clarify the order of events, the timeline. The first question I asked him was,"Who recruited you?" Imbert responded that de la Maza had approached him through his friend Estrella Sahdahla. The way Diederich describes it, Estrella and de la Maza were friends but did not confide in each other that they were both planning on killing Trujillo until a week after the Mirabal murders. It was at that meeting that Estrella told de la maza that Imbert had already decided to kill Trujillo. That is what lead de laMaza to approach Imbert, that de La Maza knew that Imbert was set on killing Trujillo. There is a lot more to all this.
Diederich claims that Imbert used to visit his brother once a week in prison and that in 1960 his brother told him that the only way he would ever get out of prison was if Trujillo was "physically eliminated", killed.
I then asked him who started the plot. He told me it was General Juan Tomas Diaz and de la Maza, and that de la Maza had wanted revenge for his brother's murder. He told me that more than once and so did others present at that interview. De la Maza had approached General Diaz in early 1960, when he was a commanding general in (from memory) Santiago. De la Maza kept urging action against Trujillo and General Diaz agreed that Trujillo had to be removed. When General Diaz was transferred in July to SD, his office was in the national palace, down the hall from trujillo. De la Maza urged him to recruit soldiers in the palace to turn on Trujillo. Diaz told him he doubted any soldier there would.
The Mirabals were killed on November 25th.
The CIA was in negotiations with many, many, different groups. By August the American officials in SD had decided on backing the Diaz group. It was the fact that Diaz was part of the group that sold them on that particular group(as well as strong anti communist views). All of this predated the Mirabal murders. Imbert was brought into the plot sometime in December.
That Trujillo did not die fighting ,as every single biography I've ever read on him states,(including Dominican sources like Genral Espailliat) caught me completely off guard.
Imbert told me that he tried to speak with de al Cruz TWICE in the decades that followed, but that de la Cruz ALWAYS refused to speak with him. De la Cruz stuck with his official story(Trujillo died fighting) and went with it to his grave. (He was a retired army Major)
More of this later.
