Hunting Che

by Mitch Weiss

  The State Department interceded with Henderson’s draft board to have him excused from military service, then sent him to a series of consular jobs in small cities in Latin American countries, including Mexico, Chile, and Bolivia. He gained a reputation as a no-nonsense, tireless worker. In the late 1940s he was assigned to Washington because of his expertise in Latin American economic issues. He helped President Truman craft a point in his 1948 inaugural address, about the importance of offering technical assistance to foreign nations. In the fullness of time, President Kennedy appointed him as ambassador to Bolivia.

  Henderson had been dealing with Barrientos for years. He knew the president could be charming at times, but prone to whining, too. The big meeting at the presidential palace began with a wheedling ramble about how the United States had to send more aid, how Bolivia’s national security was threatened. Nothing new.

  The ambassador told Barrientos that he would discuss the issues with Tope, the Air Force general then in Bolivia on a fact-finding mission for SOUTHCOM. Barrientos nodded. It was a good move. The president liked Tope. They both were air force officers, and Barrientos could talk candidly to him—military man to military man. Tope would understand, Barrientos thought. Over the last week, Barrientos had met twice with Tope and other Bolivian commanders to discuss military strategy. This next time, though, the two men would chat alone.

  When Tope arrived, Barrientos told him his army needed high-powered, up-to-date military equipment. He claimed that the better weapons would boost troop morale. He warned Tope that if the guerrillas gained a foothold in Bolivia, the revolution would spread like a cancer to neighboring countries, and the United States would face another Vietnam-like dilemma. He asked Tope: Could the United States stand by and watch as Communist-backed insurgencies toppled the stability of Latin America nations?

  Tope sat for a moment and collected his thoughts. He had been interviewing Bolivian military officials for weeks. He had visited outposts and watched as the men trained. In a detailed report on the Bolivian crisis that he was preparing for SOUTHCOM, Tope concluded that the Bolivian military was a mess. The command structure was appointed on the basis of “personal loyalty and political patronage,” and “military training at higher levels is generally archaic, impulsive and self-aggrandizing.” In addition, there was no field intelligence or communications equipment. The entire military needed an overhaul, but there wasn’t time for that. Tope termed the situation “highly volatile.” Threats in urban areas and the mines remained very real, he said, and their “immediate impact on both the economy and the government could be much more disastrous than the present guerrilla activity.”

  Sitting there with the hopeful president, Tope knew that new rocket launchers were not the answer. His answer was blunt. Barrientos had to make systemic change in the Bolivian military.

  “An untrained conscript will drop a modern weapon just as quickly as a Mauser,” he told the president. He pointed out that the Viet Cong guerrillas supplied themselves largely by picking up U.S. equipment dropped by South Vietnamese soldiers. Tope brought the conversation back to the present crisis. How many guerrillas were out there? he asked.

  Barrientos didn’t know for sure. But he firmly believed there were several hundred of them, hard-core, professional Cuban-trained paramilitaries, spread out in different locations in the Rio Nancahuazu valley. For some reason, Ambassador Henderson was deliberately underestimating the rebel band’s strength.

  Tope was on Henderson’s side, but he didn’t have facts to counter Barrientos. He didn’t know the size of the force, and nobody else knew, either. Even after years of work and millions of dollars of aid in the region, the United States still did not have a reliable intelligence network in Bolivia. Information gathering was just as skimpy in other Latin American countries. Hell, they didn’t even know for sure if Che was dead or alive.

  It was inexcusable.

  Tope knew that had to change. U.S. troops were banned from the combat area in Bolivia. But that didn’t mean the CIA couldn’t help. They needed proper intelligence, and they needed it right now.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Intellectual Revolutionary

  Roosters crowed up the sun at Muyapampa, a farming pueblo in the Andes foothills. Macaws and parrots fluttered overhead. About two thousand campesinos and shopkeepers lived in the dusty town, but no one but a soldier would be up so early.

  The soldier was on checkpoint duty, part of the regional security alert. His platoon had only arrived the night before, and he had drawn the short straw. When he saw three men walking down the dirt road into town, he couldn’t be sure the sunlight wasn’t playing tricks on his tired eyes. Dressed in dirty civilian clothes, they were taller than the usual Bolivian peasant. They didn’t belong there. As they drew closer, the soldier saw that one of them had a camera draped over his shoulder.

  “Alto o disparo,” the soldier shouted.

  The men stopped and lifted their hands over their heads.

  The soldier had no idea if the three were guerrillas. He only knew they looked suspicious. Who the hell would be walking down the road at 5 A.M.?

  “Don’t shoot. We are international journalists,” the cameraman said. He spoke with a foreign accent. The soldier called for backup.

  “They say they’re journalists,” he told his sleepy companions. The strangers put out their hands to shake, as if they’d been introduced. The soldiers answered with their fists until an officer finally arrived and ordered his men to stop.

  The sun was up before Captain Julio Pacheco sat down with the men and started asking questions.

  George Andrew Roth, the man with the camera, said he was British. A photographer chasing a story, he said he had worked on stories with the Bolivian Army, too.

  The second man said he was Ciro Roberto Bustos, an Argentine painter and a salesman. The third man was thin and sunburned, with sandy hair and a beard. Jules Regis Debray, a twenty-six-year-old French philosophy professor, said he was on assignment, writing about the guerrillas for a magazine in Mexico. Pacheco transferred them to the Fourth Division headquarters in Camiri for additional questioning.

  The Frenchman knew it was only a matter of time until the Bolivians figured out who he was. Debray, a well-known Marxist, had close ties to Fidel Castro. He literally wrote the book on the very guerrilla strategy being used in Bolivia, the widely read Revolution in the Revolution. He’d got himself into this mess. He was smuggled into Bolivia the previous September by Tania, the East German sleeper agent who’d set up the ratline from La Paz to the guerrillas’ camp near Camiri. Finally, after years of theory and rhetoric, Debray made his way to the jungle hideout to live the life of a revolutionary.

  It was nothing like he’d expected. It was horrible, in fact—months of filth, insects, and uneducated men playing macho games in a steaming, stinking jungle camp. Bustos had been out there even longer and was just as fed up.

  When Roth showed up at the camp, Debray saw him as his ticket back to civilization. Roth was the only one of the three with journalism credentials. He’d arrived in Bolivia a few weeks before from Chile, hell-bent on interviewing real guerrillas for a story. He’d weaseled his way into a Bolivian Army unit and persuaded the officers to let him read a diary seized from the guerrilla hideout in the Rio Nancahuazu valley. He gleaned enough clues there to help him track down the rebel group. Roth had a childlike disregard for his own safety, and one afternoon he simply showed up unannounced in the guerrilla camp.

  The reporter received a cool reception. The interview he’d risked his life to get consisted of terse yes-and-no answers to his many questions.

  As soon as the interview ended, Debray approached the rebel leader with his plan. Everyone knew he and Bustos wanted out. Roth, with his camera and notebooks, could help them past the army patrols. They all could pretend to be journalists, and their foreign accents would uphold the story, and the leader wasn’t sad
to see them go.

  Debray and Bustos offered to share their stories of life in the camp in exchange for Roth’s help. Roth didn’t have a lot of options, so he agreed. The trio walked out of the rebel camp the evening of April 19. They were in government custody within hours.

  The Frenchman could feel his luck running out.

  A line of campesino faces watched silently as he was led down the street and through the gates of the police station. Standing off to one side of the patio was a local photographer who’d been tipped off that some captured guerrillas were on their way. He stepped forward, raised his camera, and snapped several frames as the soldiers shoved the three men into the station. Debray decided he was going to die within the next few hours. He did not have to tell any secrets beforehand. And so the following hours were a hail of fists, kicks, and elbows, then a sudden shift to the cabin of an airplane. As the plane climbed over the jungle canopy, a Bolivian officer slid the cabin door open and dragged Debray to the edge.

  “Talk to me, or out you go,” he shouted.

  Debray simply closed his eyes and tried to enjoy the cold wind on his face. His bluff called, the officer pulled him back from the brink.

  The following day, the Bolivian government released a report claiming “three foreign mercenaries” were killed in a battle with guerrillas. But when photographs of the trio emerged, the report was amended—the three men were in prison in Camiri, it said.

  The local photographer had saved their lives, providing evidence they were alive and in custody.

  Roth was released in July, three months after his arrest. He was never charged with a crime, which led to rumors that he was a CIA informant. A former Peace Corps language teacher, Roth said he took up journalism to make more money.

  For the first few days, Debray and Bustos were shuffled between their cell and long interrogation sessions. Debray kept silent until the Bolivians used a hammer to pry the information out of him. Once, a Bolivian officer emptied the magazine of his .45 pistol into the dirt floor between Debray’s knees.

  At first, the Frenchman stuck to his story, saying he was at a nearby guerrilla camp for a story. After a few days, a Cuban-American CIA operative named Gabriel Garcia showed up. He didn’t hit Debray or threaten to throw him from a plane. Instead, he sat down, took out his pen and pad, and started asking questions about why Debray was really in Bolivia. He wanted to know about the guerrillas and the camps.

  Sitting across from the CIA man, Debray was beaten. Worn out from his ordeal, his ears ringing from the point-blank barrage, the Frenchman was ready to trade information for survival. Maybe the CIA could save him.

  Garcia just asked questions and took notes. It took a long time, but finally the subject of Che Guevara was raised.

  Che was the reason Debray had come to Bolivia, the Frenchman admitted. He’d always wanted to meet and interview him, and he’d learned Che was helping start a revolution in the Bolivian jungle.

  Garcia soon put away his notebook and excused himself. Within the hour, his report shot back to La Paz and Washington—a captured guerrilla with clear ties to Castro had confirmed that Che Guevara was working in Bolivia.

  He might be lying. They would need more proof.

  The Bolivian government, meanwhile, decided to make an example of Debray. Charged with murder, arson, armed insurrection, conspiracy against the state, and illegal entry into Bolivia, Debray was paraded before press cameras in the striped uniform of convicted criminals. Propaganda posters labeled him an assassin. “He who kills with steel will die by steel,” one poster declared.

  For Debray, the revolution was over. He languished in a dirty cell, wondering if he would ever get out of Bolivia alive.

  * * *

  The arrest of Debray added to the presidential frenzy.

  First the ambushes, then the Bolivian high command proclaiming that hundreds of Cuban-trained fighters were flourishing in the scrubland, and now Debray, a foreign Marxist, was wandering the same neighborhood, with two accomplices.

  In public President Barrientos exuded cool confidence. Privately he screamed for blood. Here was more proof that outsiders were plotting his overthrow.

  At the end of April, Ovando finally publicly admitted that Debray, Bustos, and Roth were alive and in custody, that the military was investigating suspected links with the guerrilla movement. That was all. There was no more news about the men for the time being.

  Stony silence may have suited the government, but the world outside was not satisfied with so little. Debray’s friends and family were campaigning for him in the international media. French president Charles de Gaulle called Debray a “young and brilliant university student” and demanded his release.

  Barrientos was incensed.

  Debray and his followers were involved in a war that was spreading death in Bolivia, he told reporters. They deserved to pay the maximum price, he said. He intended to petition the Bolivian Congress to reinstate the death penalty. Groups formed to support Barrientos’s position, including one comprised of families of the soldiers slain in the ambushes. Their statement to the press reads thus:

  Mrs. Debray wants her son back. We say to her that she lost him long ago, even before he arrived in Bolivia. She lost him when he distanced himself from God and his mother to join the pack of criminals without God, without homes, without a flag. She lost him when he was the instigator of cowardly assassination, when he became the theorist of cowardly slaughters in Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia.

  Now the mother of the idealistic guerrilla should resign herself, and realize that her son no longer belongs to her. He will be put before a court that will judge his exploits as a mass murderer.

  They wanted Debray dead.

  So did Barrientos, who was tired of stories that painted him and Bolivia in a bad light. He wanted to show journalists that the military was in control. He brought them along to inspect military posts in the war zone. At several stops he gathered locals to hear him denounce the guerrillas’ actions and promise to destroy the uprising. But he knew there was a long way to go. The uncertainty was driving him mad.

  CHAPTER 7

  Welcome to Bolivia

  The two C-130 cargo planes raced down the runway at Howard Air Force Base in Panama and lifted off one at a time. As they climbed into the clear night sky, Shelton stretched his legs out and tried to sleep.

  But his mind kept going over the mission. They had nineteen weeks to turn a bunch of conscripts into an elite Ranger battalion. It wouldn’t be an easy job, even if his commanders gave him twice as much time. But Shelton felt good about his team—sixteen Special Forces officers and sergeants. This was a textbook Special Forces mission. He knew his men were up to the task.

  Small mobile training teams were the heart of Special Forces. Shelton was the officer in command, with a warrant officer as his assistant and a senior noncommissioned officer to handle details. The team had the requisite sergeants in charge of weapons, communications, medical needs, engineering, and intelligence. Designed to spend months deep inside hostile territory, the unit could survive without extensive resupply from the outside. The men were cross-trained in one another’s specialties, and most spoke at least one foreign language.

  It was a long road to the Green Berets, and each man had had to prove his worth to be admitted. It began with an extensive training course at Fort Bragg, a series of tests to determine which soldiers had the physical and mental toughness necessary. If they made it through, they might move on to full Special Forces training.

  Training “host nations” soldiers was a big part of the Green Beret mission, taking the best men from a foreign force and turning them into elite fighting units. The strategy was simple: Train their armies, and they would defend their own borders. Thus, Communism could be checked without risking the lives of U.S. soldiers.

  Shelton knew his team could slip into the jungle and take down Che themselves, but
they were barred by diplomacy from going near “the red zone”—the Bolivian operations area. They would have to watch from the sidelines. That was fine with Shelton because he’d already seen men blown to pieces on the battlefield. There was no glory in war, only carnage and confusion. He had seen war up close, and he wasn’t looking for more of that ugly shit.

  The team was fully briefed on Bolivia, well aware of how sensitive their mission was. The communications sergeants held the highest security clearances. They were simply the two best radiomen on the Panama base: Sergeant Alvin Graham, a handsome man whose thick mustache and dark sunglasses gave him a “Hollywood” look, and Staff Sergeant Wendell Thompson, a clean-cut African-American from upstate New York.

  With Special Forces teams deployed throughout Latin America, the Eighth Special Forces Group Operations Center (OPCEN) maintained a twenty-four-hour communications watch. The team would be in constant contact with headquarters. Graham and Thompson assured Shelton they’d prepared for anything; they’d laid in extra batteries, spare antennas, tubes, and screws. He made them double-check before they left Panama. No one knew how well the radios would work so deep in the jungle, so they packed civilian radios, too, just in case. The plane was crammed with equipment, ammunition, and food.

  “We’re a small team,” Shelton said. “This is the tip of the spear. If something happens, we need to be in touch with the OPCEN. I want twenty-four-hour contact.”