Hunting Che

by Mitch Weiss

  He was a tank crewman in Japan and was there when the Korean War broke out in 1950. Shelton was one of the first U.S. soldiers on the scene. Two weeks into combat, shrapnel injured him. He returned to battle three months later and was awarded a Silver Star—the army’s third-highest award for combat valor—for destroying an enemy machine-gun nest. After four more months of combat he was wounded again—this time by a hand grenade—and was shipped back to the United States.

  He married and soon had two children. When his enlistment ended in 1953, Shelton went back to Mississippi to try farming. His father had a little land, and Shelton poured most of his savings into cotton and corn seed. He didn’t take long to change his mind. Drought withered his crops as soon as they pushed up from the ground. Shelton realized he missed the army.

  Soldiers who left the service could return to the same rank if they did so within ninety days. Shelton reenlisted on Day 87. During the next five years, he served on bases in Georgia, Germany, and South Carolina. Always looking to advance his career, Shelton went to school for noncommissioned officers, graduating first in his class. Then he applied to Officer Candidate School. At first his wife was skeptical—she was already pushing for him to leave the military. But Shelton was admitted just before his twenty-eighth birthday, the cutoff age. He seemed to be an old man to his younger classmates, and they gave him an affectionate nickname: “Pappy.”

  He graduated as a second lieutenant in 1958 and then went through strenuous Ranger training, returned to Korea, and then joined Special Forces in late 1961. It was a time when a young president and war hero, John F. Kennedy, turned to the Green Berets to help stop the spread of Communism. A hard-liner, Kennedy was elected in 1960 in part because of his Cold War stance. He was a student of military affairs and had developed an interest in counterinsurgency—the art and method of defeating guerrilla movements. Special Forces were the ideal anti-guerrilla weapons, and Kennedy began sending his Green Berets to troubled areas to train foreign troops.

  With that, Shelton soon deployed to hot spots. In 1962, he went to Laos with a training team. He returned to a failing marriage. Three more babies did not solve their problems.

  Meanwhile, Shelton told military career planning that he wanted to attend an intensive Spanish-language training class. If he was going to spend time in Latin America, he wanted to speak the language—he didn’t want anything lost in translation. Soon, Shelton was fluent in Spanish, a real plus when he traveled in 1965 with another training team to the Dominican Republic. The team was part of twenty-three thousand U.S. troops sent to the island to help protect U.S. interests during an insurrection.

  Fearing another Cuba, President Johnson ordered the troops there to restore order during a coup. Shelton stayed in the Dominican Republic for eight months and then was posted to Fort Gulick, Panama. Now it was Bolivia.

  After that, the screen was blank.

  He didn’t have time to worry about his future. His team had to train these troops quickly, and his commanders were pushing him to get started. He had his location and his team in place. The heat was on.

  Like Harry S. Truman once said: If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

  Shelton was ready to jump into the fire.

  * * *

  The Bolivian Army had been chasing ghosts for weeks in the Nancahuazu wilderness and had nothing to show for it but cuts, fevers, and insect bites.

  Every step the three companies took was sown with thorns, vines, spiders, and scrub, and much of that on steep hillsides. There were few paths in these twisting valleys, as there was nothing here to attract human or even animal visitors. The tops of the hills were largely barren, the valleys choked with dense vegetation that demanded strong arms and machetes to pass through.

  A Company commander Major Ruben Sanchez was charged with finding guerrilla encampments in this morass. He and his men had been hiking the valleys for days looking for clues, but they’d found nothing. It was as if the guerrillas had simply disappeared.

  Worse, many of the conscripts in his unit were out of shape. They had to stop often to catch their breath in the rugged terrain, and several had fallen ill. Maybe it’s better if we don’t engage the guerrillas, Sanchez thought. The outcome was far from certain.

  Their plan was simple.

  Sanchez’s team, along with the other companies, would set up three bases, and each one would carry out reconnaissance in a different direction. They would spread out across the Rio Nancahuazu valley, find insurgents, and destroy them. They had more than a hundred soldiers on the hunt, but Sanchez wasn’t sure they could accomplish the mission with even a thousand. With dusk settling over the valley, the companies set up camp. Sanchez stayed awake that night. Something felt wrong.

  At dawn on April 10, A Company sent three patrols up the Rio Nancahuazu. Second Lieutenant Luis Saavedra Arambel’s team of fifteen men was to follow the course of the river northward. About noon the men reached the confluence of the Iripiti River, a tributary stream. Suddenly, someone started shooting at them.

  The soldiers panicked and ran. Saavedra fell dead, and two more soldiers fell alongside him. Another was seriously injured. Seven were captured, and the remaining four managed to escape along the riverbed. They frantically retraced their steps back to the patrol base. Sticky with sweat, dirt, and blood, the soldiers recounted the ambush. Sanchez listened, then quickly organized his sixty men and marched toward the ambush site. Jorge Ayala and Carlos Martins, both second lieutenants, were among the soldiers.

  It was another shameful ambush, but they’d found the guerrillas at last. Sanchez prayed he could get there in time. Expecting normal guerrilla hit-and-run tactics, he advanced without taking many precautions. He thought that the guerrillas would be long gone. But as he and his men approached the ambush site, a burst of gunfire echoed in the valley.

  They drew closer and heard the crack of a few rounds, followed by the steady beat of machine-gun fire. Sanchez’s squad was under attack. The guerrillas had been waiting for them, hiding in the brush and trees.

  Sanchez yelled for his men to take cover and return fire. But the bursts seemed to come from every direction, kicking up dirt and shredding leaves. Ayala barked orders but was suddenly silenced by a shot in the head.

  Sanchez was stuck.

  The terrain allowed no escape. Probably dozens—if not hundreds—of enemy soldiers surrounded them. Sanchez quickly did the battlefield calculus: They could keep fighting and die, or surrender and perhaps be spared.

  He ordered his men to give up.

  Martins’s soldiers, meanwhile, had been trailing Sanchez’s unit. When the firing began, they retreated. At the same time, a patrol led by Lieutenant Remberto Lafuente heard the firefight and immediately headed along the riverbed in the direction of the fighting. His patrol was unaware of the ambushes. They had no radio.

  As Lafuente’s men approached the ambush site, they found terrified soldiers falling back in disorder. Lafuente spotted Martins, and they decided to regroup. Dusk was falling, and soon it would be too dark to see. The officers didn’t want to walk into another trap. They stumbled back to the patrol base and spent a tense night worrying about their comrades and fearing for their own lives. How close were the guerrillas? What would happen if they were captured? Would they ever see their families again?

  As the sun burned away the morning mist, Lafuente’s men were ready to begin tracking the guerrillas. But as they rose to leave, they were surprised by the sounds of limbs cracking along the pathway to the riverbank, footfalls, a sneeze. It was men, walking in their direction. The soldiers took up position and waited. Lafuente looked for the first sign of the guerrillas. His men raised their rifles around him, but stopped when Sanchez and the other Bolivian soldiers suddenly appeared in a clearing with their hands folded behind their heads. Just behind the prisoners walked ten guerrillas, leading the Bolivian soldiers along the riverbed.

&
nbsp; When the guerrillas realized they were surrounded, they pointed their guns at Sanchez and told him to order the soldiers to fall back. If he didn’t, the guerrillas would shoot him and all their prisoners.

  It was a standoff. For a moment, no one moved a muscle.

  The Bolivians aimed their rifles at the guerrillas, and the guerrillas’ guns pointed at the Bolivian prisoners. The prisoners sweated and sobbed. Sanchez blinked, tried to stay in control. He knew that one wrong move and he would be dead.

  Sanchez shouted to Lafuente: “Go back. They are setting us free.”

  He said it twice before his men truly understood the message. Reluctantly, his soldiers lowered their weapons and drew back. When they were out of sight, the guerrillas melted away into the brush.

  Humiliated, Sanchez and his soldiers regrouped with the others. They were safe, but everyone was shaken. It was one thing to fire a weapon in training; another to stay composed enough in combat.

  At nightfall, a team headed out gingerly to recover the dead. It was a gruesome task. Their bodies were torn, their uniforms stiff with blood. Some were missing chunks of skull where rounds had hit, and wild animals and birds had begun their work. In all, eight soldiers had been killed in the two ambushes, including two officers. Eight others were wounded. Twenty-eight soldiers were captured and released, and the enemy ended up with a fine cache of weapons: twenty-one M1 Garand rifles, twelve M1 carbines, nine Mausers, four M3 submachine guns, and one Browning automatic rifle.

  Sanchez brooded all the way through the march back to a base near Camiri. The guerrillas had given him a letter for release to the media, but he was too upset to read it. His men were ill prepared for battle. They were campesinos, not soldiers. Look at how they behaved under fire, he thought. Some fought, but most ran like cowards. He shook his head in disgust.

  “My God. What’s next?” he mumbled.

  * * *

  The April 10 attacks triggered widespread panic. News of the ambushes spread quickly through the streets of Bolivian cities as people received the grisly details from newspapers and radio. Even conservative pro-Barrientos media reported that the military was in tatters, unprepared to fight. The nation was helpless against foreign invaders. It was just a matter of time, the reporters thought, before La Paz came under siege.

  The government found itself with a new problem: spin control. The authorities usually could deal with Bolivian media. A few well-placed phone calls to publishers or threats of violence usually worked to silence anti-Barrientos publications, but those tactics were useless with foreign journalists who operated under a different set of rules. Reporters had been snooping around the country for weeks, trying to find “fixers” to take them into the jungles to look for Che and his guerrilla fighters. Though Che might cringe at the thought, he had become an international media star. Articulate, handsome, mysterious, Che was hip. Students at privileged college campuses in the United States read insurgent doctrine to one another from his 1960 book Guerrilla Warfare: “The guerrilla struggle is a mass struggle, it is the struggle of the people,” they intoned. Che was the symbol of rebellion, willing to challenge authority and fight for his vision of social justice. He was a romantic revolutionary—ready to sacrifice his life for a noble cause: “In the arduous profession of the revolutionary, death is a frequent occurrence,” he said.

  That he had not been seen for years only added to his mystique. And so journalists from posts all over the world were tripping over one another in Bolivia. An interview with a live, cigar-chomping Che in the Bolivian jungle would be the scoop of a lifetime.

  For Barrientos and his government, the guerrilla attacks were more than just embarrassing: They threatened the nation’s stability. In less than a month, dozens of Bolivian soldiers had been killed or wounded—or humiliatingly captured and released by the guerrillas. It had to stop. Barrientos had warned the United States about the Communist threat. His country, their ally, faced an organized and experienced enemy with deep ties to Cuba, the Soviet Union, and possibly China. He asked for more weapons, but every time he broached the issue with Ambassador Henderson, he was told no. The threat wasn’t serious enough. The ambassador believed that Bolivia’s military could handle the crisis on its own.

  The American didn’t understand Bolivia, Barrientos thought. It wasn’t just the guerrillas. Miners in the northern part of the nation were protesting for better working and living conditions. Many of the students and the educated class in La Paz still despised Barrientos for his mixed blood and for the 1964 coup. They thought the overthrow had undermined all the Democratic principles and reforms born out of the bloody 1952 Bolivian revolution. If the guerrillas tapped into that discontent, Barrientos’s hold on power would be seriously threatened. He had worked too long and hard to let that go easily.

  Barrientos recalled the words that young Captain Prado had blurted out at that dinner party: The army needed new tactics to fight an elusive enemy. Yes, the United States was going to train the Second Ranger Battalion, but it would take time to get them in the field. Barrientos was a military man; he had rebuilt his country’s military from scratch since seizing power in 1964, and it still wasn’t much. There was a dearth of experienced leadership. His standing army comprised 6,200 conscripts—raw recruits—supplemented by 1,500 soldiers who had served more than two years. And what troops he had were badly demoralized.

  The soldiers who survived the skirmishes passed along astonishing tales of guerrilla prowess to new units arriving to replace them. They described large groups of guerrillas and how their fellow soldiers had panicked under fire. The new units knew what to expect: long days in the hot tropical climate, searching for an enemy that blended into the rugged terrain. There were no roads, few supplies, and obsolete weapons. The president felt desperate. He explored every option as it occurred to him, and turned to his high command for answers. General Alfredo Ovando Candía, commander in chief of the armed forces, was in Europe when the guerrillas first struck in March. He had returned to Bolivia and had helped calm the president.

  One of his first steps was organizing an anti-guerrilla operations command in Camiri and establishing a military zone. Ovando wanted to confine the guerrillas to one area, to make it easier for the army to track them down. He contacted the intelligence services of other countries, including the United States, Brazil, and Argentina, to determine if Che Guevara was alive and behind the trouble in Bolivia.

  Ovando didn’t stop there. He courted military cooperation from neighboring countries. If Che was indeed in Bolivia, he was a threat to its neighbors, too. Argentina sent arms and ammunition to replace Bolivia’s Chaco War–vintage Mauser rifles. Brazil promised a major shipment of combat rations, which would help solve the troops’ supply problems in the operations area. Intelligence agencies agreed to increase surveillance on the common borders to detect and track guerrilla movements.

  And to stop the incessant rumors, Ovando decreed that only the military high command could make statements about the insurgency. All news would come through official communiqués. No other information was to be released.

  Barrientos made another bold move: He declared military law. He outlawed the Communist Party of Bolivia and the Revolutionary Workers’ Party and arrested forty-one of their leaders. Barrientos wasn’t going to allow them to support the guerrillas. He also took the opportunity to crack down on labor unions. He kept track of the information flowing from the notebooks found in the parked Jeep—police had rounded up anyone whose name was listed there, and the interrogation transcripts were delivered to the president’s office every day. Bolivia suddenly seemed to teem with Communists.

  The president next considered forming a military “hit squad”—a group of forty or fifty young officers charged with sneaking into the jungles on a top-secret mission to kill guerrilla fighters. But U.S. officials in La Paz feared the group might morph into a palace guard, a private army dedicated to keeping Barrientos in powe
r. They rejected the plan, saying the Second Ranger Battalion was being trained for that very reason: to destroy the guerrillas.

  Then Barrientos seized on another solution: napalm. Inquiries went to Argentina, saying the Bolivian government might buy enough of the incendiary bombs to defoliate the forest along the Rio Nancahuazu. An appalled Henderson quashed that plan and told Barrientos it was “unacceptable.” As another American diplomat told the London Times: “We are certainly not going to supply means for Bolivian hotheads to start bombing and napalming villages or even suspected guerrilla hideaways. Civilians would inevitably be killed, and we have a long experience that this inevitably produces a stream of recruits for the guerrillas.”

  Barrientos was embarrassed and angry with Henderson, and called him to a meeting at the presidential palace in La Paz. Henderson stood his ground. He believed in speaking his mind—even if it meant offending high-ranking officials of host nations or members of the U.S. diplomatic corps.

  Henderson was tall and thin with a square jaw, silver hair, and high cheekbones. In his tailored Brooks Brothers suits he looked like a powerful business executive. He was born in Weston, Massachusetts, his father a hardworking carpenter and military man who served in the Philippines insurrection (1899–1902), the Mexican border campaign of 1916, and later World War I. He infused his son with stories of war and travel in foreign lands. Henderson’s uncle spent years as a mining engineer in Latin America, and filled the boy’s head with similar tales of adventure.

  Like Shelton, Henderson attended public schools and worked odds jobs to get by. When one of his high school teachers saw him working at a gas station, he helped the bright young man get a scholarship to Boston University. That was the beginning of Henderson’s career. After graduating, he attended the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He was twenty-seven when he took the Foreign Service examination in 1941. He learned he had passed on the day before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.