Historical Dictionary of United States Intelligence

investigated the Iran-Contra Affair. First elected to the Senate in 1961, John

Tower spent most of his career in the Senate. In 1989, President George H. W.

Bushappointed him secretary of defense but the Senate declined to confirm

him. Subsequently, Senator Tower served as the chair of the President’s For-

eign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB).

TRICYCLE AFFAIR.German spy Dusko Popov, who also doubled

for Britain, claimed that Berlin had asked him to procure information

about Pearl Harborin mid-1941. In his 1974 book, Spy, Counterspy,

Popov claimed that when in the United States to spy for the Germans,

he relayed the requirements from his German masters, including the

their curiosity about Pearl Harbor, to Federal Bureau of Investiga-

tion (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover, who passed the information on

to military intelligence. Neither the FBI nor military intelligence did

anything with Popov’s information, which during the Cold Warfu-

eled the theory that President Franklin D. Rooseveltknew about the

Pearl Harbor attack beforehand but did nothing to stop it in order to

have the United States enter the war on the side of the Allies.

TROPIC (OPERATION). In the summer of 1952, the Central Intelli-

gence Agency (CIA) tried to establish a resistance network in the

Manchuria district of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Civil Air

Transport(CAT), the CIA’s proprietaryairline, dropped two agents

and supplies into Kirin province, intending to retrieve the agents by us-

ing the All American system. However, the operation was betrayed, the

retrieval aircraft shot down, and the crew killed. The Chinese captured

the two CIAagents who had been dropped, and they were incarcerated

until 1971 and 1973, respectively. Such drops and pickups continued

into the early 1960s. See also COLDFEET (OPERATION); SKY-

HOOK SYSTEM.

TRUJILLO (MOLINAS), RAFAEL LEONIDAS (1891–1961).

Rafael Trujillo was the Dominican Republic strongman from 1930

until his assassination in 1961. Trujillo, a Dominican military officer,

rose through the ranks quickly, becoming a general in 1927. He

seized political power during a revolt against President Horacio

Vasquez in 1930 and wielded absolute control for the next 30 years

through his command of the army, by placing his family members in

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