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Meanwhile the U.S. embassy was gathering Americans and other foreigners at the Embajador Hotel for evacuation. More than 500 people were waiting at the hotel and on the grounds when a group of rebel teenagers, most of them kids from 16 to 18, suddenly appeared waving burp guns. They lined the men up against a wall as if to execute them, then fired their automatic weapons harmlessly into the air. "Those brats just seemed to delight in terrorizing us," said one U.S. housewife. Only the arrival of a rebel army colonel stopped the gunplay and permitted the removal of the refugees to the port of Haina, twelve miles away. There the U.S. Navy was already waiting to load 1,172 of them aboard transports. Some 1,000 other Americans elected to stay behind, hoping the disorder would soon be ended.
"Collective Madness." For a time, it did seem about over. Deciding that they were licked, most of the leaders of the army revolt trooped into the U.S. embassy, asked U.S. Ambassador Tapley Bennett to arrange a ceasefire. He called Wessin y Wessin, who immediately agreed. Fearing reprisals, dozens of rebels, including Acting President Molina, fled to political asylum in foreign embassies. A junta composed of pro-Wessin y Wessin officers was sworn in as a provisional government.
The surrender of the army rebels had little effect on the civilians, who by now were beyond recall. All day Wednesday the fighting intensified; Wessin y Wessin's troops launched assault after assault in an attempt to cross the Duarte Bridge. Each time they were driven back. President Johnson ordered the first 405 marines ashore to protect American lives at Embajador and to guard the U.S. embassy downtown. Helicopters evacuating the remaining Americans and other nationals drew rebel gunfire. Snipers opened up on the Marine company dug in around the embassy; the leathernecks fired back, killing four rebels. The Salvadoran embassy was sacked and burned; shots spattered into the Mexican, Peruvian and Ecuadorian embassies. "This is collective madness," U.S. Ambassador Bennett told newsmen. "I don't know where we go from here."
List of Reds. In San Juan, Bosch had his kind of answers. He charged that the U.S. had been duped into intervening by military gangsters in the Dominican Republic. "The only thing that Wessin y Wessin has done," he said, "is to bomb the first city of America like a monster." Bosch conceded that "a few Communists" might be fighting on his side, but insisted that his supporters were in complete command of the rebels. In reply, the State Department released a list of 58 Communist agitators, many of them graduates of Red Chinese and Czechoslovakian political warfare schools, who were leading the street fighting. Some of the leaders: Jaime Durán, a Cuban-trained member of the Dominican Young Communists' Party; José D. Issa, a Communist who received guerrilla training in Cuba, visited Prague in 1963, Moscow in 1964; Fidelio Despradel Roques, a Peking-lining Communist.