RE APPEARANCE OF GUEVARA AND PROBABLE ARRIVAL IN BOLIVIA
b. POSSIBLE ESTABLISHMENT OF COVERT ASA INTERCEPT STATION(S) WITHIN BOLIVIA.
c. RANGIO WILL INFORM MAJOR JULIO ZAMMORO OF BOLIVIAN ARMY OF THE DEATH OF HIS CUBAN RELATION. UNDERSIGNED HAS DEFERRED TO RANGIO’ S VERY STRONG FEELINGS IN THIS REGARD.
G.W. LUNSFORD, MAJ INF
TOP SECRET
[ TEN ]
La Paz International Airport
La Paz, Bolivia
1530 3 November 1966
“That has to be him,” Lieutenant Colonel Guillermo Rangio said, pointing through the one-way glass in the wall overlooking the Immigration Desk toward a middle-aged man wearing a snap brim fedora.
He spoke in English, out of courtesy to Major George Washington Lunsford and Warrant Officer (j.g.) William E. Thomas, whose Spanish was not very fluent.
All three were in uniform, Rangio because he was performing an official visit to the security division of the Bolivian Army, and Lunsford because he’d decided that he and Thomas would really attract less attention as army officers than as black men in business suits.
“You sure, Colonel?” Thomas asked, seeking confirmation, not a challenge.
“That man meets the description I have,” Rangio replied, just a little coldly. “You have seen Dr. Guevara before, Mr. Thomas?”
“The last time I saw the sonofabitch, sir,” Thomas said. “He was getting into a boat on the shore of Lake Tanganyika.”
He made a cross of his index fingers and held it over his forehead. Rangio understood the gesture to mean Thomas had had Guevara in the crosshairs of his sight, and chuckled.
“And he didn’t look like that, Mr. Thomas?” Rangio asked.
“Not much,” Thomas said.
“That’s him, Thomas,” Julio Zammoro said. He was wearing the uniform of a Bolivian major of infantry.
“Well, then, I’m impressed as hell,” Thomas said. “As they say, he could have fooled me.”
“I don’t really understand the disguise,” Rangio said thoughtfully. “Castro has something like thirty-five hundred men in his Anti-Counterrevolutionary police. They obviously suspect— know—we have agents, who know what’s happening and when. Who does he think he’s fooling, even with hair plucked out?”
“I noticed that word in the heads-up,” Thomas said. “He really ‘plucked’ his hair out? It’s not just shaved?”
“Plucked,” Rangio confirmed. “I understand it was rather painful.”
“Ego, Julio,” Lunsford said. “He’s right on the edge of being an egomaniac. He’s the only one in disguise, because the others are anonymous, and he, on the other hand, is famous.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a photograph of him without his beard,” Lieutenant Colonel Enrico Cupull of the Bolivian Army said.
“I have,” Rangio said. “He’s a rather good-looking young man.”
“Who only you, Willy, of this group would recognize on the street—or passing through immigration,” Lunsford said. “Making my point. He sees himself as a world-famous guerrilla; he therefore needs to be disguised.”
“I would,” Zammoro said, “recognize him, I mean, with a beard or without, in a suit, in fatigues—”
“Well, he’s through,” Cupull said. “Give me a moment to make sure he’s left the terminal, and then we’ll go have our lunch at the club.”
Cupull left the room with the one-way mirror overlooking the line of Immigration stations, and returned several minutes later to report that the bald-headed man they’d seen was carrying a Uruguayan passport issued to Adolfo Mena González, who told the Immigration officer that he was on a fact-finding mission for the Organization of American States, and had the documents to prove it.
“I’d love to know if they’re real, or not,” Cupull said. “And if real, who issued them.”
“They are probably genuine,” Zammoro said. “And the passport, too. In my experience, bureaucrats tend to do favors for both sides, in the logical presumption that one side or the other will win, and they can then claim to have been on their side all along.”
“I’m sure you’re right, Julio,” Cupull said, and then smiled. “And now let us go for our lunch. As the beef in Argentina, as everyone knows, is next to inedible, I have arranged for what I think is known in the U.S. as a barbecue.”
As they were having their coffee in the officers’ club, an officer reported to Cupull, who listened carefully, thanked him, and then offered the report to the others.
“Dr. Guevara is at this moment,” he related, “conversing with your fellow Argentine, Willy—Señora Laura Gutierrez de Bauer, formerly known as Haydee Tamara Bunke, and sometimes as ‘Tania’—in suite 316 of the Hotel Copacabana on Prado Boulevard. The Bolivian Communists with him are pretending they do not know he is Guevara, although last night, when arranging tomorrow’s transport, they used the phrase ‘to transport Che Guevara to the farm in Ñancahazú several times.”