Shadow Warrior

I can’t believe I haven’t done a blog on this, but apparently I haven’t.  So here you go.

Shadow Warrior is the now out-of-print memoirs of Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban-born CIA operative responsible for hunting down and capturing Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967.   It was fascinating, and not just for the Che Guevara angle.

He was born in Cuba, of all places – whereas Guevara is Argentinian.  The CIA sent him back for the Bay of Pigs operation.   Rodriguez was in Havana at the time, and if the invasion managed to get off the beach and reach that far, he would have coordinated with the invasion forces in the city itself.  Obviously things didn’t reach that level.

Rodriguez later went to Bolivia to help the Bolivian Army track down Che Guevara.   Oddly, Castro had given the Bolivian Communist Party explicit instructions NOT to give Guevara any help whatsoever.  Almost none of Che’s team in the forests of Bolivia were native Bolivians.  He had an East German woman with cancer, and a Bolivian named Paco, who would rather have studied Marxism in Moscow than have a gun shoved in his hands and told to traipse through the forest with no clue what he was doing.

Guevara separated his group into a vanguard, a rearguard, and a main group in the middle, which contained Guevara himself.   Rodriguez’ counter-insurgency team of Bolivian Army soldiers captured the vanguard team, who happily spilled the beans about the whole thing.  That included Paco.  Now Rodriguez knew Guevara would be arriving – but Guevara had no clue he’d be walking into an ambush.  Sure enough, he was captured.

The two of them talked at length, very friendly.  Che gave him his Rolex, which is now on display at CIA headquarters.  If it were up to Rodriguez, he’d have had Che sent to Panama to be interrogated by the CIA and who knows what else.  But it was the Bolivians who decided what to do, and they decided to shoot him.   Too bad.

Vietnam.  After Cuba, Rodriguez went to Vietnam.  There he turned a female NVA officer.  She was in love with the son of her NVA commander (Colonel Tu Ton), but he thought his son was too good for her, and forbid the relationship.  The colonel reassigned his son to a combat unit, and the boy was killed in a B52 raid.  She blamed Tu Ton for not only breaking up the relationship but also getting the boy killed.   So she helped the CIA arrange highly effective operations against him.  And there was much rejoicing.

Nicaragua.  By the 1980s, Rodriguez went to Nicaragua to help out with the Contras, who were trying to overthrow the communist Sandinista regime then in power.  Despite the notoriety back in Washington of some guy named Oliver North, Rodriguez said the Contras had no idea who North was.   Rodriguez considered North to be an arrogant idiot who had no idea what he was doing, nor that Secord and the rest of the Iran-Contra operation were making money behind his back, overall a pompous, incompetent assclown with a grossly inflated image of his importance.

If you’re interested in CIA covert ops, or in Che Guevara, by all means check this out.  His background is extensive and his stories are compelling.