Companero
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Markus Wolfe, the renowned head of East German counterintelligence, immortalized as Karla in the novels of John Le Carré, was interviewed in 1995 by the producers of a documentary on Che Guevara. He stated categorically that Tania never worked for the MFS.63 Moreover, Wolfe never mentioned her in any of his public interviews or during his trial in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall; he refers to her in his memoirs, published in 1997, but abstains from implicating her as his agent. Of course, he could have been lying; or perhaps, having now reached his eighties, he could no longer recall the names of all his subordinates. But Tania was a notorious figure and it seems implausible that he would forget a Mata Hari of her stature, if indeed she had been under his control.
It is in fact quite likely that Tania, like thousands of other young people from Germany and the East bloc, was indeed approached at one time by her country’s intelligence services. With her excellent Spanish and her Argentine origins, she was a natural candidate for international espionage. She may even have traveled to Cuba in August of that year while still under Wolfe’s orders. But there is no evidence, either in the German and Soviet archives or in her behavior in Bolivia, to suggest that she was a provocateur or double agent. It is of course possible that she simply fell in love with Guevara, and that this made her commit a series of mistakes unworthy of an agent with her training and experience.
Ulises Estrada maintains, three decades later, that she was infatuated with Che and wanted to be by his side at any cost.*24 Like Michéle Firk in Guatemala in the 1960’s and the admirers, of Subcomandante Marcos in Chiapas today, she aspired to be a guerrilla fighter—not just a bureaucratic liaison between leaders and combatants in La Paz, escorting people to hotels and helping them establish contact, a mere witness to important decisions and heroic deeds. Her sights were set on a greater goal: to participate in guerrilla warfare. When hostilities broke out, her wish was fulfilled; she was unable to return to La Paz in her previous identity, and was forced to stay in the camp.
Were she and Che lovers? It is impossible to say. The surviving witnesses of this period have given contradictory reports. Only five people who might have a well-founded opinion are still alive; among them, Pombo and Urbano are Cuban apparatchiks with no independent say in the matter. Two of the others, Debray and Bustos, have refused either to suggest that they were lovers or to deny it. Debray is skeptical, because he doubts that in the jungle Che had the energy required for anything more than a platonic relationship.†15 Bustos has never addressed the issue. Benigno was unclear in his book, but in a later interview asserted that they did have an affair—though he provides no conclusive arguments to back his claim.64
There are two elements in favor of this interpretation. First of all, the precedents: Tania and Che met in late 1960, attended countless meetings and parties together, and were both in Prague during the spring of 1966; everything indicates, at the very least, that she was in love with him. In the second place, when Tania’s body was recovered in August, rumors circulated that she had been three months pregnant at the time of her death. However, there is no record of an autopsy. Some have speculated that the autopsy may have been carried out by the same physician who amputated Che’s hands after his death, a Bolivian named Abraham Baptista Moisés.‡6 If Tania was pregnant, the father may have been Che Guevara. But there is no definitive evidence regarding all of this, and one may suppose that, if there were, some trustworthy witness would have surfaced in the course of the last thirty years.*25 It seems plausible that Tania was simply a revolutionary groupie, quite naturally fascinated by the larger-than-life guerrilla fighter she met in Berlin. The situation could easily lend itself to temptations and misinterpretations. But it appears unlikely that Che rediscovered the enchantments of his earlier Argentine loves in the austere and somewhat masculine figure of Tania.
Ciro Bustos, the second important visitor to the camp mentioned earlier, arrived at the camp with Tania in March. He was not the first Argentine summoned to Bolivia. During the first days of February, a leader of the Argentine journalists’ union, Eduardo Josami, was contacted by Tania in La Paz and then conducted to Camiri. There he learned that Che had left camp on his reconnaissance mission and would be back in two weeks. Josami opted to depart and return a month later, rather than awaken suspicions in the area. As things turned out, he never made it to the base. He now recalls that “the purpose of the trip was never clear to me.” He was shocked at the “precariousness” of the rebels’ situation, and was concerned that so many journeys back and forth in the jeep with Tania and two other Peruvian recruits would finally alert the armed forces.†16 They did.
In contrast, Bustos did eventually reach Ñancahuazú. He had known Che since 1963, at the time of Jorge Masetti’s failed expedition. Tania had invited Bustos to the camp in January; he arrived on March 6, along with Régis Debray. A mediocre painter and naive leftist, Bustos had been assigned his mandate by Che long before. He was to prepare Guevara’s return to his native country, organizing Communist dissidents and factions, Peronists, and even Trotskyists in order to assemble an armed group in Argentina. Bustos was not scheduled to spend much time in Bolivia; he was to leave quickly and discreetly. Instead, he ended up spending three years in the Camiri jail, along with Régis Debray.
The Frenchman was on his third trip to Bolivia in as many years, but this time his mission was more purely political in nature. His purpose was to transmit messages and analyses from Fidel Castro to Che Guevara, and back. In addition, Debray was meant to serve as liaison between Che and other revolutionaries in Latin America; his next destination was São Paulo, to coordinate Guevara’s plans with those of Carlos Marighela.65 His stay at the camp was likewise intended to last only a few days, so he could leave Bolivia as quickly as possible.
The three visitors spent less than a month with Che at the guerrilla base. Their departure would trigger another, debilitating crisis that would divide the guerrilla forces in two. But it was preceded by several additional events which shattered any hopes of rest or tranquillity. First, the guerrillas’ communications equipment broke down; then a series of desertions and indiscretions took place, furnishing the Bolivian army with a gold mine of information.
Communications were the Achilles’ heel of Che’s expedition. The guerrillas had brought two huge, heavy American transmitters still operating with vacuum tubes and dating from the Second World War, which required an autonomous generator. According to one of the officers in charge of Bolivian affairs in Cuba,
They had a radio transmitter which never really worked, an enormous machine with its own motor which they were never even able to install. They never had communications with the outside world. The only radio they had was a six-band receiver with which they listened to Radio Havana, but they were unable to transmit anything.66
One of the two devices got wet and stopped working in January; it had to be buried in a cave. As for the other one, two of its tubes were broken, and El Loro, Jorge Vázquez Viaña, was commissioned to buy new ones in Santa Cruz. Instead of purchasing a box of them he only bought two, and deposited them on the floor of the jeep. The tubes were totally useless by the time they reached the guerrillas’ headquarters after 1,600 kilometers of bad roads.67 The guerrillas ran out of gas for the generator in March; they were never able to obtain any more. Their two other radios, designed for shortwave aficionados, soon broke down as well. They had a radio-telegraph—but lacked the codes needed to operate it:
Everything was improvised. The communications equipment is supposed to work, but when you get there it doesn’t work at all, it’s a piece of shit. You buy walkie-talkies that are supposed to be the best in the world and they turn out to be useless, they’re really toys for children. Then the batteries run out and there are no more batteries.68
Beginning in February, Che lost contact with La Paz, Havana, or anywhere else, save to receive messages. He could not transmit reports, pleas for help, or war communiqués.*26 When the urban network disintegrated and th
us communications by messenger were severed, all links to the outside world were lost. Che was alone. Cuba became aware of this situation in February; from then on, Havana’s only news from Bolivia stemmed from press reports. Che’s support team on the island obtained no direct information, except when messengers arrived from the camp during the first few months and through the urban network liaison, Renán Montero, when he returned to Cuba in March. Given the central importance of communications in guerrilla warfare, isolation was an ominous sign indeed. Havana did not seem unduly alarmed.
The onset of hostilities and the guerrillas’ exposure caused new desertions and led the armed forces to the rebel camps. At a general meeting on March 25, Che scolded everybody, and lashed out at Marcos and removed him as head of the vanguard; he offered either to demote him to foot soldier or ship him back to Havana. He then declared that three of Moisés Guevara’s recruits were useless, as they contributed nothing and refused to work. They requested permission to go home; Che determined to dismiss them as soon as possible. In the meantime, if they refused to do their duties they would be deprived of food, along with another Bolivian recruit named Eusebio, “a thief, a liar, and a hypocrite”; he, too, asked to leave.
On April 7, the Bolivian army’s Fourth Division occupied the rebels’ main camp. Their field hospital, medicines, oven, and countless belongings were taken over, providing military intelligence with a lode of data. Even so, the army suffered another defeat on April 10: two ambushes along the river leading to the camp resulted in nine dead, a dozen wounded, thirteen prisoners, and considerable booty for the guerrillas, including weapons, hand grenades, and ammunition. Rolando’s group displayed great tactical skill by not retreating after the first ambush; rather than strike and flee, it struck twice. This was the most inspiring episode of the war for the guerrillas; it demoralized the government, encouraged rebel supporters, and thoroughly disconcerted the regime of René Barrientos.
The situation was indeed alarming for the Bolivian authorities. In just two weeks, they had suffered eighteen dead and twenty wounded, and lost considerable amounts of supplies. During the same period, the guerrillas had only one casualty—Jesús Suárez Gayol (el Rubio). Morale among the armed forces was falling rapidly. Officers exaggerated the number of rebels—some spoke of five hundred—and their military prowess. Barrientos toured the area and promised to crush the uprising as soon as possible; but his nervousness and erratic behavior were obvious to all. Only with time and considerable U.S. prodding did General Alfredo Ovando finally take charge of the government’s response. He realized that the war would inevitably drag on, requiring foreign arms, training, and intelligence; he would need elite fighting units that could be effective against irregular forces.
Though the military were certain of Che’s presence, they preferred to speak of Cubans and foreigners in general. They avoided mentioning him by name whenever possible: “The first reports about the possible presence of Che Guevara have been handled with great care; we did not make them public, but [have] contacted the intelligence services of other countries to see if they can be confirmed.”69 The United States did not want the news to spread either, and tried to keep out the international press.*27 The authorities’ discretion served them well. As Mario Monje pointed out in a letter to the Central Committee of the PCB in 1968, the fact that Che’s identity was kept secret might have protected him, but it also prevented militants from joining an uprising led by the comandante, now a legend throughout Latin America.
How and when was Che’s presence in Bolivia definitively ascertained? Gustavo Villoldo, who first arrived in Bolivia in February and returned in late July to head the CIA’s Country Team, became convinced of Guevara’s role thanks to three infiltrators in the urban network mounted by the Cubans and Communist Party. Villoldo refuses, to this day, to reveal the names of the two Bolivians and one Peruvian, who still live under CIA protection. He adds, “I can tell you that we placed a series of assets and those assets began giving us the information we needed to neutralize [the uprising]. That entire mechanism, that logistical support … left the guerrillas completely isolated. We completely penetrated the urban network.”70
Larry Sternfield, the CIA station chief in Bolivia until April 1967, has confirmed that he knew of Che’s presence before the Bolivian authorities, thanks to mid-level Bolivian sources working for the CIA.71 John Tilton, Sternfield’s successor, has corroborated this in his unpublished memoirs: “Barrientos had called me at home that night to ask about a rumor that Che Guevara was in the country. I arranged a meeting and told him I thought the rumor was true.”72 It is not surprising that the CIA establishment at Langley was reluctant to believe its station chief in La Paz; it had reacted similarly in regard to Lawrence Devlin’s reports about Che in the Congo. Tilton still resents the obstacles he confronted when he tried to transmit his suspicions to CIA headquarters.
By the time Debray and Bustos were captured on April 20, the armed forces already possessed all the information supplied by the deserters and their semiprisoner Salustio Choque Choque, and were already convinced that the guerrillas’ leader was Che Guevara.*28 In addition, the Bolivian Communist cadre Jorge Vázquez Viaña, El Loro, was wounded and captured by the army on April 24. Some have said that he was trying to flee; others, that he was simply careless. After surgery in a military hospital, he was interrogated by a CIA agent who went by the nom de guerre of Eduardo González. To complicate matters further, there were two CIA officers operating in Bolivia under the same name: González, who arrived first; and Gustavo Villoldo who, as previously noted, disembarked in July and would later appear in photos alongside Che’s corpse at Vallegrande.†17 It was the former González, now deceased, who interrogated Vázquez Viaña, Debray, and Bustos. González set a trap for El Loro, presenting himself as a journalist from Panama; Vázquez Viaña spilled everything he knew, down to the last detail.73
During his first week of interrogation and beatings, Debray stuck to his story: he was a journalist who had come to Bolivia to interview the guerrillas; he had heard rumors of Che’s presence, but had not actually seen him. Subsequently, he would acknowledge having interviewed Che, but maintained that the comandante was no longer in Bolivia. Armed with El Loro’s information, González confronted Bustos. The latter was the first to succumb, drawing portraits of the guerrillas and giving a full description of the camp, complete with maps and access routes. Bustos broke down when his captors showed him the photographs of his two daughters whom they threatened to kidnap. Lacking the integrity and stamina needed to resist interrogation, Bustos was not even beaten.
On April 18, Che himself triggered a new crisis for the guerrillas. Forced by the revelations of the deserters to relocate, ensure the safe departure of his guests Debray and Bustos, and seek new supply routes, he decided to separate his forces. Intended as a temporary measure, the division would prove both lasting and fatal. The group was too small to be split; its two halves, lacking any form of communication, would spend the next four months seeking one another in the Bolivian wilderness. Though they came within a few hundred meters of each other and even opened fire among themselves upon several occasions, they never re-established contact.
Originally, Che’s intention was to provide a safe escape route for Bustos and Debray. Both men offered, perhaps reluctantly, to join the guerrillas when they grasped how difficult it would be for them to depart from the area, now surrounded by the army. Che objected that Debray would be more useful elsewhere, relaying messages to Fidel and organizing foreign support. An international campaign had become all the more necessary when hostilities broke out and the urban network collapsed. Che noted in his diary that Debray had been too “vehement” in his request to leave the camp, but he finally agreed. He left his second in command, Joaquín (Juan Vitalio Acuña) with seventeen guerrillas, including Tania, who could no longer return to the city, several sick men, and four of Moisés Guevara’s recruits, who were meant to be dismissed as soon as possible. With the remaining t
hirty combatants, Che headed south toward Muyupampa; he hoped to capture the town and dispatch his two visitors in the ensuing confusion. Then his group and Joaquín’s would rejoin, avoiding any contact with the enemy.
The army, however, reached Muyupampa first. Guevara’s vanguard, in the meantime, met with a Chilean-English journalist who had supposedly been led to the guerrillas by some children. George Andrew Roth made a deal: in exchange for an interview with Inti Peredo, if set free he would return to Camiri with Debray and Bustos, vouching for their status as journalists.*29 The arrangement did not work out; Debray and Bustos were arrested by the police regardless, and handed over to the army’s Fourth Division. They were interrogated with the violence typical of Latin America’s armed forces, and probably would have been killed had their arrests not become known, setting off an outcry in the world press. Pressure from the CIA (which was not acting out of altruism, but simply in the hope of obtaining more information) also helped. Both men were judged and sentenced to thirty years in jail. They were released only in 1970, when a new government came to power in Bolivia.
Che had failed to establish alternative, back-up meeting points with his rearguard in case the original rendezvous was foiled by the army or unexpected circumstances. The lack of communications—either between the two guerrilla units or a third party (La Paz or even Havana) made it impossible for the two detachments to regroup. When army maneuvers forced Che to march north, away from the original meeting point with Joaquín, all contact was lost. Still, he never stopped hoping for a reunion. When his companions begged him to change strategy, he became furious: “We once dared to say to him, ’Why don’t we stop searching for Joaquín and let them fend for themselves?’ He didn’t even let us finish. He threw a huge tantrum.”74 Because the area was sparsely populated and its few inhabitants were reluctant to speak with the guerrillas, out of fear or hostility, in the absence of direct communication only luck would have brought the two groups together again. And Che’s expedition was singularly unlucky.