by Mitch Weiss
It was a long flight down to Santa Cruz. Shelton tried to relax, but the C-130 was made for hauling cargo, not people. He had to get some sleep. He hunkered in, pulled his cap over his eyes, and took a deep breath. Consciousness only returned when the cargo plane roared onto the dirt runway in Santa Cruz.
A shaft of sunlight cut through the dark cargo hold. Shelton rubbed his eyes. He looked out the window so he could see Bolivia. A cluster of trucks idled near the rickety control tower. As the plane rolled to a stop, Master Sergeants Milliard and Rivera-Colon stood near the cargo door, their berets on their heads.
“Shit,” Shelton said under his breath. “So much for a low profile.”
He decided to make the best of it.
“We’re going to make a grand entrance,” he said to the soldiers waiting in the cargo bay. “Put ’em on.”
Graham, Thompson, and the rest of the team fished their berets out of the cargo pockets of their fatigues and pulled them on over their crew cuts. The engines muttered into silence, the propellers chopped the window light into shadow-light-shadow. After some shouts, bangs, and hydraulic groans, the air force crew got the great back ramp open. Hot air rolled up into the plane’s vast belly.
The team trudged down the ramp, shaking the blood back into their stiff legs. Milliard and Rivera-Colon stepped up to greet them. Milliard, a grizzled Massachusetts Yankee, had spent the last couple of weeks clearing brush and building a firing range, lining up deliveries of food and supplies to La Esperanza. It took a lot of doing, but Milliard, with his thick Boston accent, was the perfect soldier for the job. His career mirrored Shelton’s—they had both served in Korea and spent time in Vietnam. Milliard was one of Shelton’s go-to guys.
The Special Forces team and Bolivian soldiers unloaded the two cargo planes and packed a convoy of trucks. By noon, the convoy was bouncing along the rutted road to La Esperanza, the team’s new home.
The soldiers were surprised when they arrived. They thought they would have to start from scratch, but the abandoned sugar mill gave the training a head start. The building had a roof. The original power lines were still there, so they could hook up generators and have lights in their little huts in the village. When they drove through the village the people seemed genuinely friendly, smiling and waving at the convoy.
Once the trucks were unloaded, Milliard and Rivera-Colon briefed everyone on the latest guerrilla activity south of Santa Cruz.
The ambushes of March 23 and April 10 were old news, but there’d been a few brief skirmishes since then, and the discovery of Bustos, Debray, and Roth. In fact, Debray was being held in La Esperanza, if only temporarily.
Milliard and Rivera-Colon told them the country was full of fear, but that no one was more scared than Barrientos and his high command. No one knew how many guerrillas were out there, and the phantom of Che Guevara seemed to hang over every conversation.
The briefing heightened the Americans’ feeling of urgency. If Che was there, they’d have to work quickly to train the Bolivians, who would be arriving in the next few days. For now only a small Bolivian security force was assigned to La Esperanza. Shelton reviewed their mission: teaching the Bolivian Ranger battalion “basic individual, advanced individual, basic unit, and advanced unit training.” All would learn counterinsurgency tactics, and officers and noncommissioned officers would be briefed on command and control techniques.
After the briefing, Milliard and Rivera-Colon gave the team a tour of the village. Two armed guards stood outside the nondescript shack where Debray was jailed, waiting for his trial. One of the guards brought the captive outside for air. He wore a white jumpsuit with black vertical stripes, like a cartoon convict. He looked tired, the men thought.
The men toured the sugar mill site. Most of them were preoccupied with mundane things—latrines, sleeping quarters, fly screens. The men were accustomed to tropical Panama, with its deadly snakes and insects, but there at least the men had their own barracks. This place was almost primitive. Yes, they might jerry-rig some electricity to the shacks. But there was no air-conditioning. No indoor plumbing, either. Mosquitoes and flies descended as the sun went down.
When they reached the edge of a field, Rivera-Colon pointed to the marksmanship ranges. The sugar mill would be the focal point, with classroom instruction in the workshops, garages, and storage areas of the huge structure. A foursquare brick warehouse near the mill was chosen for the communications and storage depot. Shelton knew he’d be spending a lot of time there. He walked inside and looked around. There were few doors and windows, a red tile roof. Weeds grew up from cracks in the floor tiles, and birds nested in the ceiling timbers. It was hot and miserable inside, but he felt at home. He’d been in a lot of godforsaken places. He’d done a similar mission in Laos, training men to fight the Pathet Lao guerrillas, in even more primitive conditions. Talk about dense jungles, he thought—in Laos, there were places where the foliage blocked out the sun for square miles, where you could sometimes run into tigers, or even an elephant. This was quaint by comparison, charming.
Shelton had seen enough. He bounded outside and told his men to unpack. Everyone was road-weary. The team needed time to unwind. No one could say when they’d get that chance again.
* * *
Dioniso Valderomas watched the military trucks roar into his village, scattering the cocks and hens that usually ruled the streets. Even the tiny chicks ran out of the way.
The villagers were just as worried, but they had no place to run.
Strange soldiers in green uniforms jumped off the trucks. Some stretched to loosen up. Others headed straight to a squat white-brick building that had been abandoned a few years before, along with the sugar mill. Dioniso watched them from his front yard.
These were not local police officers or Bolivian Army soldiers. They were tall and clean-shaven and wore yellow stripes on their sleeves. They carried complicated rifles and unloaded dozens of crates with words stenciled on the lids in black paint.
His neighbors peeked from behind the trees, wondering what the soldiers were doing. There had been a lot of strange activity in La Esperanza in the past few weeks, and nobody bothered telling the locals what they were up to. Trucks and heavy equipment arrived, and men from out of town cleared abandoned fields. No one had seen this kind of activity since the sugar mill was open.
Valderomas had lived through the sugar mill era, and he recalled those days with satisfaction. He raised meat and vegetables and sold them to the men who worked at the mill. He’d saved enough money to build a four-bedroom house with a fine tin roof. It was right in the middle of town, but set back enough that the palm trees shaded it from the sun. He’d married the beautiful Helena, and the two of them were raising four babies. Dioniso was thirty-five, but he looked ten years older, with strong hands and dark brown eyes. The sun had turned his skin leathery, and he’d lost a few teeth over the years. But his was a good life. Every morning he and his wife rose to the music of crowing roosters. It was a good, peaceful life, and he did not want anyone to come and change it for him.
The men lounged on the porch of Kiosko Hugo store and discussed every truck that rolled by, every rumor, every report they heard over their transistor radios. No one knew how it all fit together, and no one cared too much. They’d heard about the Frenchman in the old house, and they’d heard about Che Guevara, the elusive Communist who might be behind the killings up in Nancahuazu. Maybe he was the reason these foreign soldiers were here?
Valderomas listened as the literate told what they’d seen in the newspapers and the men with radios relayed the morning’s news reports. The old schoolteacher said the guerrillas were trying to overthrow the government. They wanted better living and working conditions for the campesinos and miners. Che was a person who cared for the poor, he said—the guerrillas were right.
For Valderomas, that didn’t make sense. Life wasn’t so bad in La Esperanza. The government
mostly left them alone. They were free to come and go as they pleased. If they had money, they could buy land and make a living. Politics were for people living in Santa Cruz and La Paz, unhappy people.
Valderomas could think of only one way he would change the local scene: the school. He and his generation pushed their children to go to school. La Esperanza had a small schoolhouse, but it was so poorly kept that class was canceled every time it rained. On really hot days the classes moved outdoors. Dioniso knew his children might not be happy with the simple rural life he’d chosen, and that education was the only way to increase their options.
He felt protective of his family, and warned Helena and the niños to stay inside the house when the strange soldiers were around. He didn’t want his family anywhere near them.
“This is no good. These foreigners should not be here,” he told his wife.
But as time went on, the soldiers seemed to settle in for a long stay. The children couldn’t live indoors forever. Dioniso couldn’t help but feel that their quiet life, like the bustling sugar mill era, was soon to be a memory.
CHAPTER 8
The Men in Bolivia
CIA officer Larry Sternfield flipped some papers on his pad and looked across the table at Félix Rodríguez.
Cuban, descended from Basque stock—Spaniards who didn’t consider themselves Spanish—Rodríguez was clean-cut and thick-set, with wavy black hair and the mind of a chess player. He could store away facts and think several steps ahead—something extremely helpful during interrogations. He was easygoing, with a disarming smile that built rapport. He could coax needed facts from even reluctant sources. He was fearless, with a deep sense of duty and a character strong enough to withstand repeated disappointments. Rodríguez had dedicated most of his life to fighting Communists. It was that dedication, coupled with his aptitude for intelligence work, that kept him high on the CIA payroll.
For the last couple of days Sternfield had been ensconsed in a Homestead, Florida, house interviewing Cubans for a secret mission to Bolivia. Humidity hung in the air, and both men could hear the air conditioner dripping and laboring in the kitchen window.
Sternfield liked what he saw.
Born on the island in 1941, Rodríguez was the only child of an upper-middle-class family with social ties to Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. His uncle, José Antonio Mendigutia Silvera, had been minister of public works. Rodríguez came to the United States in 1954 to attend school in Pennsylvania. In 1958 he headed to Cuba for a visit, stopping on the way in Mexico to spend New Year’s Eve with his parents.
While the world sang “Auld Lang Syne,” the Rodríguez family learned that Batista had fled and that guerrillas led by Castro’s 26th of July Movement had taken power in Cuba.
Rodríguez’s parents, along with thousands of middle-class Cuban refugees, poured from their Caribbean island into Miami, where they set up a byzantine society in exile designed to last for generations.
Young Félix never returned to Cuba. He dropped out of school to join the Caribbean Anti-Communist Legion, created by Dominican Republic president Rafael Trujillo. The Legion aimed to overthrow Fidel Castro, but its invasion was an embarrassing failure. Rodríguez finally graduated in June 1960 and went to live with his parents in Miami.
Thoughts of freeing his homeland consumed his life. In September he joined a group of CIA-funded Cuban exiles in Guatemala for military training. They were called Brigade 2506, and they were supposed to infiltrate Cuba a few weeks before America made its own guerrilla attack on the island.
The Eisenhower administration conceived the plan in February of 1960. Rodríguez’s unit was groomed to slip into the country and work with the resistance in the Escambray Mountains, training recruits with an eye toward creating a guerrilla force big enough to hold territory. Once the rebel state was created, the rest of the brigade would land with a ready-made provisional government. The United States would immediately recognize the new government.
But President Kennedy scrapped the plan soon after his 1960 election. He preferred a full-on invasion, starting with the city of Trinidad and expanding afterward to the Escambray Mountains. But invasions are too obvious, and America wanted the world to think Cubans themselves were orchestrating the takeover on their own. The Trinidad plan was scrapped, too, and the planners turned their eyes toward a swampy backwater called the Bay of Pigs.
From there the exiles could control the air, secure the area, and bring in the provisional government. But when Adlai Stevenson, the American ambassador to the United Nations, learned that U.S. pilots would be responsible for the air strike—not defecting Cubans—he told the administration to either stop the air strike or he would resign. Air support was critical to the plan, but the people in charge decided to forge ahead without any.
That decision was fatal.
Rodríguez was already in Cuba two months before the planned invasion. On April 17, 1961, he listened to radio news reports as the invasion died on the beach. He immediately sought sanctuary at the Venezuelan embassy in Havana. After five and a half months in hiding, he finally made it back to Miami. Rodríguez had worked closely with anti-Castro forces and the CIA ever since. His wife, Rosa, fully supported his activities.
On the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Rodríguez was kept on alert for days, ready to parachute into rural Cuba with a radio beacon for U.S. air-strike guidance. While her husband waited for a go-ahead in a Miami hotel room, Rosa Rodríguez waited at home by the television, wondering what part of the unfolding crisis involved her husband. Days passed, and the standoff was settled. Rodríguez’s call never came. So when the CIA called again, the expatriate wasn’t so excited.
Sternfield knew Rodríguez was qualified for the Bolivia mission, but what he wanted to know was if Rodríguez was willing to risk another disappointment.
“You might be in South America for some length of time,” Sternfield said. “You ready for that?”
Rodríguez nodded. He knew Rosa was willing to wait, and this wouldn’t be the first time he’d been called to catch an overseas flight with little notice.
Sternfield asked Rodríguez about his time in the Dominican Republic and his familiarity with radio equipment. The interview was pretty standard. Sternfield didn’t reveal any mission details until he’d almost finished.
“There’s a good possibility that Che Guevara is engaged in guerrilla activities in Bolivia,” Sternfield said. He saw Rodríguez snap to attention. “Your assignment would be to help the Bolivians track him down and capture him. If I choose you, when would you be able to travel?”
Rodríguez’s pulse jumped when he heard the revolutionary’s name. If Che was in Bolivia, he wanted to be there. He took a deep breath and tried to play cool. He didn’t want to get too excited about a mission that could be shut down at a moment’s notice.
“Well, if I have time I will go to my house say good-bye to my wife. I will pick up my luggage and we leave right now,” he said. “If we don’t have time for that, then I’ll call her and tell her I have to go.”
Sternfield smiled. Rodríguez continued.
“If you tell me we’ve only got a couple of hours, I will call her from the airport to say I’ll be away for a couple of months. And if you say ‘right now,’ then let’s get in the car. I will give you my phone number on the way to the airport, and you can call Rosa for me.”
Sternfield smiled. Rodríguez’s sense of urgency impressed him. The CIA man knew he had one member of the two-man team needed for the job. But Sternfield wasn’t going to tip his hand too soon, either.
“We’ll call you in a few days,” he told Rodríguez.
As Rodríguez drove home, he had no idea if he’d impressed Sternfield or if he’d got the job, but he packed his bag as soon as he arrived. When the call came two days later, he kissed Rosa and told her he would see her soon.
Bill, Rodríguez’s usual CIA contact
, was waiting at the CIA-rented apartment in downtown Washington, D.C. He didn’t wait for Rodríguez to sit down.
“Do you know Gustavo Villoldo?” Bill asked. “Do you mind working with him?”
“I met him at Fort Benning, at the Army School of the Americas. We were second lieutenants together,” Rodríguez said. “I have no objection to him at all.”
“Fine,” the case officer said. “Take a walk for a while. Come back in a couple of hours.”
Rodríguez put his luggage away and left the safe house.
Villoldo arrived only minutes later. He, too, was excited at the prospect of hunting Che in Bolivia, but he, too, had been disappointed in the past. Two years earlier, Villoldo had traveled to the Congo to track down the wily Argentine. After three months of listening to Che’s radio messages, he was closing in on his position. Che suddenly fell ill and fled into Tanzania. Villoldo was sent home.
When rumors began circulating that Che had resurfaced in Bolivia, his CIA contact urged Villoldo to “volunteer” for the new mission.
Meantime, Rodríguez walked the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, pausing to gaze at the U.S. Capitol at the far end of the Mall. Rodríguez loved his adopted country more than most Americans because he had felt the pain of losing his own homeland. Castro was still in power in Cuba, and here Rodríguez was, living comfortably in the United States. The soaring monuments only made the pain worse.
The CIA gave him chances to pay Castro back. While waiting in Havana for the Bay of Pigs invasion, Rodríguez had three times volunteered to assassinate Castro with a sniper rifle. If he couldn’t take out Castro, Che would be as big a prize. Che commanded the revolutionaries who’d rolled over the Las Villas Province, where Rodríguez was born, where his house and land would be if the Marxists hadn’t seized it all. Che held a special place in the hearts of romantic leftists around the world, and a different spot in the hearts of Cuban exiles. Che was a thug, a killer, and “the butcher of La Cabaña.”