by Gerard Colby
“We live in a poor country,” she answered.
“But the government officials and the generals have Mercedes cars and plenty of things.… Verdad? That’s what we are fighting against.”
“You have come a long way to fight in Bolivia.”
“I am a revolutionary and I’ve been in a lot of places.”
“You have come to kill our soldiers.”
“You know, a war is either won or lost,” he said with a gaze she later described as “unbearable. Piercing … and so tranquil.”35
A helicopter arrived bearing high-ranking officers. The mayor of the village later insisted that junta members tried to interrogate Che and that Che spat in their faces. He knew that the decision to kill him had already been made, and he refused to give them any moral victory.
The mayor also remembered an American.
The CIA’s Felix Rodriguez had reached Bolivia in August. Rodriguez had spent the last two months improving communications between army units on the ground and the air force surveillance planes overhead. More important, he stressed the necessity of coordination among intelligence agencies for the success of a counterinsurgency operation. Rodriguez and Gonzales built up psychological profiles on the guerrillas that were designed to help the Bolivian commanders identify individuals in the command structure and anticipate how the guerrillas would act under a situation and where they would move.
When Rodriguez arrived with Colonel Zenteno at La Higuera, the Bolivians had already killed El Chino. A survivor of Héctor Béjar’s National Liberation Army, El Chino would never lead a revived Peruvian guerrilla movement. Another of Che’s wounded companions was brought in, shot in the face, and placed next to El Chino’s body. After Zenteno gave up trying to get Che to answer his questions and left, Rodriguez began photographing Che’s diary and other documents. Then he set up his R5-48 portable communications system, made radio contact with the CIA, and began pounding the keyboards, sending out his cipher groups, oblivious to all but his coded report. At 10 A.M. he received a phone message allegedly from the Bolivian command at Vallegrande: “You are authorized by the Superior Command to conduct operation Five Hundred and Six Hundred.”36 Five hundred was the code for “Che,” and six hundred was the code for “dead.”
Rodriguez later claimed that he begged Colonel Zenteno to try to get Barrientos to change his mind. The CIA wanted Che alive for interrogation in Panama, he explained. “But if you cannot get the counterorder, I give you my word as a man that at two P.M. I will bring you back the dead body of Che Guevara.”37
Rodriguez had talked with Guevara and surprised himself by coming to respect not only Che’s refusal to discuss his specific operations, but his courage as he faced certain death. Che had already heard two of his companions being shot in the next room. “He did not say anything about the shooting, but his face reflected sadness and he shook his head slowly from left to right several times.”38
Rodriguez left the actual murder to a lower-ranking Bolivian soldier whose courage had to be fortified by alcohol. “Sit down!” the soldier ordered Che. The prisoner refused. “Why bother? You are going to kill me.” The soldier turned as if to leave, then spun about, firing off a burst of his automatic rifle. Che crumpled to the floor, still alive. Only then did the Rangers enter the room and fire into the body, carefully avoiding Che’s face. Rodriguez had left strict orders that there must be no question about Che’s identity for the world press.
Che’s body was strapped to the runner of a helicopter. The chopper looked like a giant wasp carrying prey in its feet when it descended on Vallegrande’s airport. The eerie scene created chaos among the throng of waiting reporters and soldiers. Rodriguez turned the body over to a CIA partner. He left with two souvenirs: Che’s Rolex watch and a chronic shortness of breath. Rodriguez would see Che’s ghost for the rest of his life. “Che may have been dead, but somehow his asthma—a condition I had never had in my life—had attached itself to me. To this day, my chronic shortness of breath is a constant reminder of Che and his last hours alive in the tiny town of La Higuera.”39
News of Che’s death, repeating the regime’s claim that he had been killed in combat, swept across Latin America. General Barrientos and the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, General Alfredo Ovando, obsessed with being able to prove that Che was indeed dead, ordered Che’s hands cut off and preserved in alcohol before having the body burned. The ferocious Ovando actually wanted Che’s head, Rodriguez later admitted. “Fortunately, he was subsequently convinced that such an act would go beyond propriety.”40 The man who oversaw the disposal of Che’s remains, Barrientos’s Minister of Interior, Antonio Argueadas Mendieta, eventually was so moved by guilt—and fear of the Bolivian fascists around him—that he fled Bolivia, made a public confession of his CIA ties, and defected to Cuba, bringing with him Che’s diary, his death mask, and his hands.
As for Barrientos, in April 1968 the Gulf Oil helicopter he was riding exploded. Within six months, his vice president was deposed by General Ovando.
Meanwhile, the repression of Indian miners continued, and the legend of Che Guevara grew to saintly proportions, his face a picture of martyrdom often seen propped on the dashboards of buses throughout the Andes, right next to the portrait of a bleeding, enthroned Christ. Che Guevara, atheist, had been absorbed like so many gods of the past into the religious cosmos of Indian need.
THE BIRTH OF DISSENT
Felix Rodriguez’s work did not end with the death of Che in Bolivia. His next CIA assignments led him to Peru via Ecuador in 1968. In Ecuador, he spent several months training military personnel in secure communications and interrogation techniques.
The Ecuadorians listened eagerly. They were part of the new breed of junior officers who had been trained in the United States or through military aid and FBI programs for leadership—in the civilian sector, as well as the military.41 A little over a year would pass before their ambitions would be given official U.S. sanction by presidential envoy Nelson Rockefeller, champion of “the new military” in Latin America.
Rodriguez moved on to the Campa Indian region of Peru to accomplish the same ends. One of the CIA officers who had overseen the operation against Che in Bolivia had also been transferred to Peru.42 Something big was about to happen, but not an antiguerrilla campaign. With the MIR and Héctor Béjar’s National Liberation Army destroyed and El Chino dead, there was no immediate guerrilla threat left.
Rodriguez was assigned to train the same unit that the CIA and the Special Forces had set up to hunt down the MIR. The unit, now called Los Sinchis, although officially under Peru’s national police, was actually part of the CIA-trained network controlled by the chief of national intelligence, General Armando Artola.
The nature of their training by U.S. Special Forces instructors gave clues to the Sinchis’ future use: parachute jumping. Rodriguez, a communications and intelligence officer, was, of course, no paratrooper, but King’s new ANDCO director, Dee Williams, the former Green Beret in Vietnam, was. Williams helped Artola’s troops master the art.
The purpose beneath all this training exploded to the surface in October 1968. In a series of coordinated lightning moves, including the mobilization of the Sinchis, the military overthrew President Belaúnde Terry. Belaúnde had been worried about the CIA force, preventing it from visiting Lima and eventually moving to dismantle it.43 But he had moved too late. With the installation of a military junta, the Sinchis fell under the control of the new minister of the interior, General Artola.
The new regime, seeking to consolidate its base of popular support, immediately moved to nationalize Standard Oil’s holdings.
Later, when trying to account for Peru’s nationalization of Standard Oil and the subsequent “drift to the left” that would lead to Artola’s dismissal as minister of the interior, some would blame liberals like Senator Robert Kennedy, who tolerated dissent and rebelliousness in the provinces. Artola’s loss as a CIA asset was a blow to the conservative wing of the Agenc
y that had been identified with King. They never forgot that it had been Kennedy’s comments during a tour in Peru in 1965 that gave the Peruvians their first ally among prominent Americans over the most fundamental challenge to their national sovereignty—Standard Oil. To Agency veterans like King, the danger posed to vital American interests like Standard Oil by men such as Kennedy was unthinkable. The enemy was not just outside. Bobby Kennedy had said it himself: The enemy was also within.
34
THE ENEMY WITHIN
THE SECRET ALLIANCE
Robert Kennedy was everything Nelson Rockefeller was fast not becoming: young, energetic, and liberal, the professed champion of the disaffected, the poor, and the angry. Above all, despite his family’s wealth, his political banner’s egalitarian message was persuasive. His scrappy concern for the forgotten was more believable to millions than was any lofty Rockefeller sincerity about the rights of the poor. Yet there were two sides to Robert Kennedy’s personality: a compassionate side, earnestly searching for justice and equal rights, and a competitive side, sometimes so ruthless that it could stun the unsuspecting.
It was the strength of character in both sides that made Robert Kennedy attractive to some and dangerous to others.
By 1967, his popular following was obvious, especially to Kennedy’s arch foes in the political arena: President Lyndon Johnson and Johnson’s major Republican rivals for the American presidency, Richard Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller. The aura of the Kennedy name hung like a pall over the presidential aspirations of each man.
By early 1965, having emerged from mourning his brother, Robert Kennedy was carrying on with his life as senator from New York. He had turned into something of an iconoclast, speaking for those who disapproved of U.S. government policy at home and abroad. Years later, it would be revealed that the CIA considered spying on Senator Kennedy almost as important as gathering intelligence on the Soviet Union.1
The move toward open criticism of “Johnson’s war” was difficult for Kennedy. Yet it was only the last of a number of disputes he had with Johnson and Rockefeller, both of whom had opposed Kennedy’s decision in 1964 to unseat New York’s Republican senator, Kenneth Keating. Keating was an ally of Nelson and the Cuban exile community and had been a sharp critic of President Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Robert Kennedy had played a key role in urging the negotiated settlement. Both Rockefeller and Johnson also knew that Kennedy’s bid for a seat in the U.S. Senate was really the beginning of his campaign for the White House. Robert Kennedy, like Richard Nixon, became their common political foe, creating a surreptitious political alliance that soon deepened into personal friendship.
Outside Johnson’s and Rockefeller’s families and closest aides, no one knew that this bond existed. Johnson had too much to fear from his own party if word got out. Nelson’s 1966 reelection as governor had made him a viable contender for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination. But the 1964 disaster had left him gun-shy, a behavior so uncharacteristic of him that Johnson could not have missed it. Nelson was less of a threat to the president than was Robert Kennedy, and would remain so as long as Nelson had Kennedy to worry about in his own backyard. Kennedy was now a contender for Nelson’s own base among downstate minorities and the upstate poor, the latter still following a Republican rural tradition at the polls.
The political war for that base had begun almost as soon as Kennedy took office. Kennedy’s first speech on the Senate floor offered an amendment to the Appalachian aid bill to include thirteen upstate New York counties in the War on Poverty that his brother had planned. Those counties had been overlooked by “shortsighted,” state officials, he said, in a stinging criticism of the governor. Nelson reacted angrily, claiming that twelve of the thirteen counties had no need for federal aid to their poor and that the thirteenth would have benefited more from a federal highway to open it up to more industry and commerce for business investors. But even Nelson’s ally, Republican Senator Jacob Javits, saw Nelson’s excuses as politically lame and signed on to Kennedy’s amendment, voting with the majority to pass it.
Kennedy’s pronouncements about U.S. policy toward the Third World likewise were tinged with sympathy for the poor. Following the April 1965 U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic, Kennedy had questioned the unilateral character of Johnson’s decision to intervene and the message that it sent to Third World people who were suffering under repressive regimes. “Our determination to stop Communist revolution in the Hemisphere must not be construed as opposition to popular uprisings against injustice and oppression just because the targets of such popular uprisings say they are Communist-inspired or Communist-led or even because known Communists take part in them.”2 Johnson had justified sending in more than 22,000 “neutral” troops on the basis of CIA reports alleging that local Communist party members were involved in the popular revolt that demanded the return of former President Juan Bosch, a victim of a military coup in 1963. Kennedy was not impressed by the CIA’s claims or by the election staged the following year to ratify the regime that was in power.
Nelson, on the other hand, was impressed, along with his ally in the Liberal party, Adolf Berle,* and gave support to the grateful President Johnson.
BACKDROP TO TRAGEDY: EATING ROCKEFELLERS FOR BREAKFAST
Two months later, during a trip to Latin America, Kennedy’s differences with Rockefeller on foreign affairs became more direct. Kennedy had a bitter argument with the U.S. deputy chargé d’affaires in Peru over Standard Oil’s and the embassy’s equating Standard Oil’s interest with those of the United States.3 Fortunately, the explosive Standard Oil controversy did not specifically come up at Kennedy’s press conference. “He did receive [a] general question on nationalization,” Ambassador J. Wesley Jones reported to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “to which he responded that [the] question of nationalization [was] to be decided by [the] country concerned and would be respected by us so long as there is just and fair compensation.”4
If Kennedy’s comment gave oil executives and embassy officials the jitters, it was still only official U.S. policy and probably the best that could be expected from the liberal senator. As Kennedy left Lima for Santiago, the capital of Chile, and a tour of conditions in American-owned mines, the embassy was relieved it had been spared controversy.
However, Kennedy had had a “frank and free” discussion that did not get reported to the ambassador, or to Rusk, until a story appeared in the local press. He had met with Peruvian artists and intellectuals, who immediately asked about Standard Oil. “Are you aware of the problem of IPC [International Petroleum Company, Standard’s subsidiary in Peru]?” one of the artists asked.
“I understand President Belaúnde is trying to get an acceptable solution from the company,” said Kennedy.
“Perhaps. But first it should be established what is understood as acceptable and then, what is more serious, that such [a] solution will not be accepted by IPC.”5
The Peruvians were only repeating what was commonly understood in both Lima and Washington. Johnson had already sent to Peru fellow Texan Robert B. Anderson, Eisenhower’s former deputy defense secretary and treasury secretary and a man who knew the Rockefellers, having worked with Nelson in the Special Group and having been involved in subsequent business ties between Texas oil interests and Nelson’s International Basic Economy Corporation. Anderson had called on President Belaúnde in mid-July “to explain to him that his demands [were] beyond anything an international oil company could accept.”6
Then David Rockefeller made a trip to Lima, arriving a week ahead of Kennedy, to persuade the Belaúnde government to back down. Belaúnde’s officials listened closely, for here was an unparalleled combination of financial and political power in the flesh of one man. David was not just the brother of one of the best-known Americans in Latin America, and not just president of the Chase bank. He also represented the Council for Latin America, the enlarged offspring of the Business Group, which now numbered over 200 companies,
85 percent of all American firms conducting business in Latin America.7 Furthermore, as if to make the change of fortune since Dallas absolutely clear, David Rockefeller now had official status in the Johnson administration as chairman of the finance committee of the U.S. Business Advisory Council of the Alliance for Progress.
But whatever Rockefeller gained for Standard Oil was undermined when Senator Kennedy arrived. Kennedy’s comments about Standard Oil’s recalcitrance were published in the Peruvian press.
“So then, why don’t you act?” Kennedy reportedly asked the Peruvians.
“Because pressures exist which involve the power of IPC and the problems of credit badly needed by the country,” one of them replied. “In some way, if you will pardon the expression, it could be said to be blackmail.”
Kennedy stayed on the offensive, challenging the Peruvians to act for themselves:
In the conversation I had with the students at the Peruvian-American Cultural Institute, I heard many complaints and criticisms, but not once was I told about what they thought or what they supposed should be done in this or that problem. I think that the action is up to you people. President Kennedy had to act against some large American firms; Argentina has cancelled its oil contracts; years ago Mexico nationalized its oil, and what happened? It is up to you not to get overwhelmed and to act according to your interests and according with what you consider is more convenient. And nothing can happen, as nothing happened before.
Kennedy then asked for views on “the most difficult and urgent problem that your country is facing”: assimilation of the Indians into the rest of the population. Kennedy had touched on a central dynamic in the hemisphere’s history. But he had not grasped that if it was left to private entrepreneurs allied to U.S. corporations, development would continue to take place at a cost to Indian peoples that far outweighed any benefits. Kennedy saw the problem in the traditional sense—“integration” of the indigenous population—which could be addressed as a civil rights issue. Indian rights was a cause that would hold his interest to his last days, in the United States, in Peru, and later, during this tour, in Brazil, where he would slog through Amazonian mud stripped to his waist to push a dugout canoe through the backwaters to visit the Hixkaryána Indians, a tribe already “occupied” by missionaries from the Summer Institute of Linguistics. But Kennedy’s interpretation of the problem was basically a legal one of ensuring civil rights for non-whites. His failure to address more fundamental questions about a society that perpetuated institutionalized inequities rang hollow in the ears of his listeners.
