by Mitch Weiss
Rodríguez was more than ready get off the plane. They’d started in Miami, flying first to Panama City and Lima, Peru, before arriving in La Paz. Rodríguez’s new passport listed him as “Félix Ramos Medina.” Villoldo, in a nearby seat, was now “Eduardo Gonzalez.”
They hit the ground running. Bill, their CIA contact from the United States, and a Bolivian immigration officer met them at the gate. “He’ll take your papers and luggage and get everything stamped,” Bill said. “You can pick up your suitcases at the hotel. We’ve got a meeting right away at the president’s house.”
On the highway into the city, Rodríguez and Villoldo met John Tilton, head of the CIA station in La Paz. Rodríguez noticed an electric blanket folded neatly on the seat beside Tilton.
Rodríguez was curious.
“What do you need an electric blanket for?” Rodríguez asked.
“You’ll see soon,” Tilton said.
The president’s house stood in a splendid plaza in downtown La Paz. The colonial home had rows of windows and columns in front of the main doors.
Rodríguez and Villoldo were escorted inside. The cold hit Rodríguez like a shot. The house, like most of La Paz, was freezing cold inside—it was the altitude and the thick walls, Tilton told them. They were ushered into a small office and introduced to Barrientos. Tilton handed the electric blanket to the president, who smiled and accepted it graciously. It was for his wife, he explained. Her feet were always cold.
The men sat down around a table. Coffee was delivered on a tray.
Like a good CIA operative, Rodríguez had learned everything he could about the Bolivian government. He knew Barrientos had only been president for a year and was extremely close with Ovando, the leader of the Bolivian armed forces.
Despite the current crisis, Barrientos touted Bolivia’s economic turnaround. He said Comibol, the state-run tin mining company, had turned a profit in 1966. His regime was encouraging foreign investment, and Gulf Oil Company was signing on for rights to export petroleum and natural gas from Bolivia.
But Rodríguez knew Barrientos’s government was in trouble. The miners hated him. The unions despised him. He faced a relentless guerrilla movement—one so strong that Cuban-trained fighters went shopping in Samaipata. It was a huge psychological blow. If that wasn’t enough, Barrientos was under increasing pressure to release Debray. He would never attract foreign investment under such unstable circumstances. If he didn’t gain control soon, Barrientos would be gone.
The president had also done his homework. He’d seen dossiers on the two CIA operatives: Rodríguez and Villoldo were veterans of the 2506 Brigade, the exile invasion force at the Bay of Pigs and other Cuba missions. These men could hunt down the Communist agitator. But first, he wanted to know about their other battles with Castro and Che. Barrientos, like most old soldiers, loved a good war story.
Rodríguez went first. Sitting back in his chair, he let himself unwind. It was February 1961 and he was part of the second seven-man advance team sent to Cuba from Florida to prepare the invasion.
They set off in a twenty-five-foot-long boat loaded with weapons and explosives. Crossing from Key West to Cuba in heavy seas, the four-hour journey punished the men. Rodríguez felt better as soon as he saw his homeland on the horizon. He saw fishermen on the pier and couples and families picnicking on the sand.
The two-man crew motored parallel to shore, waiting for the signal—three flashes of light—for the team to start toward the beach. Rodríguez shepherded the team’s equipment. Once they were on land, a dozen farmers and workers from a local sugar mill helped them unload the weapons on the isolated, rocky beach.
Anti-Castro groups were running up and down the Matanzas-Havana Highway at fifteen-minute intervals waiting for Rodríguez and his team to arrive. Soon the first of several cars pulled up. The men were shocked to see Rodríguez wearing fatigues, but he quickly changed. The CIA had told the team to hide in the jungle and wait for the invasion, but they soon learned that the anti-Castro resistance had safe houses and a network of messengers set up already. Theirs was a civilized country.
Rodríguez made contact with the resistance. The invasion plan was to open up two fronts, force Castro to split his troops, and divide the island.
But on April 17, 1961, Rodríguez woke to aircraft overhead and news of the invasion on the radio. Cuba’s radio network was broadcasting emergency messages, ordering soldiers to report to their bases. Rodríguez called other resistance fighters, but none of them answered. Castro’s security forces had already arrested most of them.
Villoldo then told what he did that day—the luckiest day of his life, and the most heartbreaking. A pilot from boyhood, Villoldo flew a B-26 bomber over the beach at the Bay of Pigs, but the napalm bomb on his wing refused to drop. For several minutes he and his copilot tried to wiggle the aircraft’s wings to dislodge it. No luck. On the ground the invasion was falling to pieces. Up above, the pilots had to figure out what to do next. They could sacrifice the plane and parachute to the ground, or make a risky landing with the bomb on the wing. They chose the latter and headed back to “Happy Valley,” the unit’s Nicaraguan base.
Like Rodríguez, Villoldo had escaped to Miami a few months after the revolution and was recruited by anti-Castro Cuban exiles. The CIA soon offered him a job flying bombing missions to support the invasion.
Villoldo circled the dirt runway, preparing to land. The wheels hit the ground first, and then the bomb, which skidded down the runway with sparks flying from underneath. Villoldo braced for the explosion. The airplane rolled to a halt. Villoldo scrambled from the plane, staggered to the edge of the runway, and cried.
The bomb never exploded, but Villoldo was distraught. He believed he had failed his mission, and his family that was still in Cuba.
Meanwhile, Rodríguez laid low for three days in his safe house. From the window he glimpsed trucks full of soldiers, and on the television he watched his comrades, the men he’d trained with, driven away to prison. They looked beaten.
When Castro’s forces started house-to-house searches, Rodríguez scurried to the Spanish embassy seeking asylum. All over Havana, diplomats from Spain and Latin America were offering asylum for infiltrators and resistance fighters. After some coordination, Rodríguez was finally able to earn asylum from the Venezuelans, but only if he could make it to their embassy. Alejandro Vergara, a Spanish diplomat, set it all up.
“We’ll take the ambassador’s car,” he said. “The chauffeur will take us right up to the Venezuelan embassy. You’ll be sitting in the back with me. Don’t look left or right. Don’t pay any attention to the Cuban soldiers out front. Just act like a diplomat.”
Rodríguez wasn’t convinced the plan would work. He hadn’t shaved in days, and his hair was long and wild. He didn’t look anything like a diplomat.
“You won’t be safe until you are actually inside the embassy building itself,” Vergara explained. “We will drive through the Cuban guardhouse, up the driveway, and along the side of the embassy, right next to the kitchen door. I’ll get out and go inside. You’ll wait for me in the car. As long as you stay in the car you’re under the protection of the Spanish embassy, so don’t move, even if the Cuban militia starts pounding on the doors or breaks the windows. Then, when I open the kitchen door and signal, you run like hell to me.”
Sitting in the bright-green vintage Mercedes flying a Spanish flag, Rodríguez couldn’t reconcile in his mind how he’d slipped into Cuba at dusk on a boat and now was leaving Cuba by car, in broad daylight, right in front of Cuban soldiers.
The ride took a few minutes. The whole time, Rodríguez plotted different escape scenarios. Could he jump in the front and rush off in the car? Maybe he could grab a soldier’s rifle. Rodríguez’s mind was in survival mode. Vergara shook him out of his plotting, his hand on the door handle. They were there. “Just wait, Félix,” he said. “Don’t run anywhe
re but the door. And not until I signal.”
Félix sweated. Time stood still. Cuban soldiers were standing nearby, watching the car.
And then he heard the shout: “Félix! Run!”
Rodríguez dashed from the car and into the kitchen, almost smashing into Manuel Urrutia Lléo, the former president of Cuba, who’d been installed and then ousted by Castro.
“Good morning, Mr. President,” Rodríguez said, catching his breath.
Five months later, the paperwork was done, and Félix returned to Miami. Villoldo spent two weeks in Happy Valley before going back. They met a few months later at Fort Benning, where they became army second lieutenants at the same time. Once back in Miami, Rodríguez and Villoldo started working the CIA’s Cuba infiltration plan. Villoldo volunteered to hunt for Che in the Congo. Now they were here in Bolivia, looking for some payback.
After the meeting, Barrientos presented Rodríguez and Villoldo with personally signed cards addressed to all military and civilian personnel. The message was clear: Bolivians must cooperate with Rodríguez and Villoldo.
A formal meeting with Ovando followed soon after, where the agents were given the rank of captain and issued official military identification. For a day or two they rested and adjusted to the altitude, then they headed for their deployments.
Villoldo headed to “the red zone,” the guerrilla-controlled area surrounded by Bolivian troops. Rodríguez stayed in Santa Cruz, to work with Major Arnaldo Saucedo, the Bolivian officer in charge of intelligence, and several other Bolivian commanders. At first they kept to the rules issued from Washington, meeting secretly and only wearing civilian clothes. But between meetings in Santa Cruz, Rodríguez commuted to La Esperanza in military vehicles. His civilian clothes made him stand out there. So soon, when in the company of soldiers, both Rodríguez and Villoldo donned Bolivian Army fatigues with no rank or insignia attached.
One of Rodríguez’s first suggestions to Saucedo, a thin man with a neat mustache, was to consolidate and share the scraps of intelligence they gleaned in the field. The guerrillas’ camp was on the south side of the Rio Grande, in the Fourth Division’s area of operations. But so far the insurgent attacks had taken place on the other side of the river, on Eighth Division turf. Che knew how commanders compete, jealously guarding tips and intelligence lest the wrong man take credit. Guerrilla movements worldwide used this against them. American commanders were seeing the same thing in Vietnam.
When Rodríguez asked the Fourth Division commander about guerrilla activities in his area, the response was what he expected. “We don’t have a guerrilla problem here,” the man said.
Right, pal, thought Rodríguez.
He had to convince the Bolivians to work together.
Rodríguez left at seven each morning for the division headquarters, where he spent hours combing through every scrap of paper captured from the guerrillas. He read intelligence reports and interrogation transcripts. He started a file for each of the known guerrillas, with name, nicknames, rank, age, and citizenship. The files detailed the traits that gave Rodríguez insight into each man. He knew which ones smoked, what kind of weapons they carried, what they wore, how they spoke.
Rodríguez wanted to know the cliques, the quirks. He needed to find the seams in the guerrilla band. Who liked whom? Did they like Che? If he ever got his hands on any of the men, he needed to know as much as he could to plot every move. The one he wanted most was Paco, the young Bolivian fighter tricked into joining Che’s group with the promises of a university education.
When Rodríguez wasn’t studying guerrillas, he worked on radios. His goal was to network the Bolivian soldiers so they could simply coordinate their operations. A critical piece of the puzzle was the spotter-plane pilots—they had no way to tell the men on the ground what they saw from above. Rodríguez improvised an antenna that allowed the pilots to use a PRC-10 radio to talk with ground troops. He also set up a radio network for the CIA station in La Paz.
For weeks, both CIA men slowly built networks of informants and listened up for any scrap of intelligence. Occasionally they were summoned to La Paz, where the president often asked them to tell more tales of their dashing adventures. Late one evening over dinner, Villoldo told the tale of his father’s death.
The Villoldo family was part of Havana’s high society. By the time Villoldo was born in 1936, his family owned a General Motors plant and a thirty-thousand-acre farm in northwest Cuba.
When Villoldo was eleven, his father taught him how to fly an airplane, and like Rodríguez, the boy was sent to school in the United States. Villoldo thrived there but returned to Havana in 1952. He started working at the family’s GM dealerships and took business classes at the University of Havana.
After the revolution in 1959, Castro’s forces started confiscating property and shaking down wealthy landowners. Villoldo’s father was on the list. Bearded guerrillas surrounded the family home one afternoon and took Villoldo Junior into custody.
After three days of trying to get the young man to call his father a traitor, the guerrillas let him go. But that didn’t stop the harassment. For weeks, guerrillas came to interrogate Villoldo’s father. Che came twice to the house. The second visit was in February 1959. Villoldo Junior was at the family’s business headquarters in downtown Havana when Che met with his father.
That night, father and son took a walk together to discuss the meeting with Che. The old man was shaken. During the meeting, Che had given him a choice: Either Villoldo Senior would conveniently die and leave the family’s assets to the state, or his two sons would go before a firing squad.
The next morning, Villoldo found his father dead in a spare bedroom. Next to him was an empty bottle of sleeping pills. Villoldo promised to avenge his father. Che would die. Castro would pay.
Silence fell on the room. “I am sorry for your family,” Barrientos said.
Villoldo turned to the president.
“If you tell me that you are planning to return Che to Cuba after you capture him, I am boarding the next plane back to Miami,” he said.
Barrientos was quiet for a moment and then answered. “You have my word, as the president of Bolivia, that if we capture Guevara, he will not leave Bolivia alive.”
CHAPTER 15
Holy Hand
Shelton sat inside the operations center, feeling keyed up. A rickety fan shoved the hot air around but did little to relieve the sticky heat of August. For weeks, he’d been hearing about the two CIA operatives collecting intelligence on Che, and now he was going to meet them.
He did not envy them their job.
U.S. Intelligence had been tracking Che Guevara for years, and if the man was here leading the Bolivian guerrillas, their decades of work had been proved a total failure. In the Cold War days of spy vs. spy, how could the spooks not know where their man was, or if he was even alive? How could Che have slipped so cleanly away for so long? It didn’t make sense.
Newspapers seemed to have more of a grasp on Che than the CIA. Reporters were sneaking into the fields, talking to campesinos, and printing their wild stories about the guerrillas. The U.S. newspapers speculated more and more about Che’s possible presence in Bolivia. In a July 23 article, Jack Anderson and Drew Pearson wrote:
When President Rene Barrientos of Bolivia announced that the mystery man of Cuba, Che Guevara, was directing guerrilla forces in the Bolivian mountains, the story was discounted. However, United States military intelligence has now reported that Fidel Castro’s right-hand man is in the Bolivian mountains leading about 100 well-equipped, highly trained troops.
The significance of this operation has not been lost on various Latin American presidents. Bolivia is the most mountainous country in the Western Hemisphere and the easiest in which to hide out. Equally important, it is surrounded by the poorest sections of Brazil, Peru, Paraguay, Argentina and Chile.
If a successful re
volt can be organized in Bolivia, it could spread to poor sections of these neighboring countries, possibly on to their capitals. Presumably, this is Castro’s strategy.
By now, Shelton had no doubts that Che was leading the rebel band. But he knew the intelligence community still wasn’t as convinced—even after the daring raid in Samaipata. His thoughts were interrupted when two men dressed in Bolivian Army uniforms walked into the room. He jumped up from his chair.
“Pappy Shelton?” one of the men asked.
“That’s me. Who are you?”
“Félix Rodríguez.”
Villoldo introduced himself and they sat down to chat. At first, they made small talk. Shelton asked them about their journey and their meeting with Barrientos. Then they talked about their pasts. Shelton told him about his long career, including his time in Korea and Laos. Rodríguez and Villoldo filled in their backstories. The three of them hit it off. The Cubans respected Shelton because he had fought Communists in Korea, Laos, and the Dominican Republic. He was a soldier’s soldier. And in Shelton’s eyes, Rodríguez and Villoldo were patriots, doing their part to overthrow Castro and his repressive regime.
The CIA men told Shelton their plans. Villoldo would stay at La Esperanza to help train the Rangers intelligence unit. Once trained, the unit would dress in civilian clothes and work the villages, searching out information on guerrilla locations. They would be the Rangers’ eyes and ears. Rodríguez, meanwhile, would work in Santa Cruz with the Eighth Division.
To Shelton, the CIA mission made sense. Intelligence was critical. Without it you were open to ambush like those poor Bolivians. They had had no clue guerrillas were even in their country until the shooting started.
Shelton told Rodríguez and Villoldo that the Ranger training was going as planned but that he wished things were different. His team could easily sneak into the jungles and take out Che in no time. Rodríguez agreed. The United States was handcuffed by rules. In guerrilla wars, you had to use your own tactics. Yes, counterinsurgency worked. But there were times you just had to go in after the bad guys and kill them.