My Washington Times Review Of 'Hunting Che: How A U.S. Special Forces Team Helped Capture The World's Most Famous Revolutionary'

My review of Mitch Weiss and Kevin Maurer's book  Hunting Che: How a U.S. Special Forces Team Helped Capture the World's Most Famous Revolutionary appeared in the Washington Times today.

Long before the worldwide hunt and takedown of America’s public enemy No. 1, Osama bin Laden, there was another global manhunt for another famous enemy of America: Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

In Kevin Maurer and Mitch Weiss' new book, “Hunting Che: How a U.S. Special Forces Team Helped Capture the World’s Most Famous Revolutionary,” the authors tell the story of the Green Beret team that traveled to Boliva in 1967 to train the raw Bolivian soldiers who would, in due course, hunt down and capture Che Guevara.

The United States had been trying to keep track of Guevara for years prior to the 1967 Bolivian campaign, the authors note, chasing his ghost across Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia as intelligence analysts built up an extensive profile of him. The CIA knew everything about him, except where he was.

... “The bearded icon took the international stage when Castro rose to power in Cuba. Che and Castro were as close as brothers and shared a missionary zeal for Cuban-supported revolution,” write the authors. “Che  was a Communist evangelist, and his disdain for the United States and its economic hegemony was part of his appeal in an era of youthful rebellion and Cold War paranoia.”

.... In “Hunting Che,” the authors concentrate on the hunt for Guevara in Boliva, offering a snapshot of the Bolivian and American campaign.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/aug/6/book-review-hunting-che/?page=all#pagebreak

You can also read my interview with author Mitch Weiss on the hunt for Che Guevara in Counterterrorism magazine via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2013/11/my-piece-on-look-back-at-hunt-and.html 

 

The above photo shows the captured Che Guevara with CIA agent Felix Rodriguez prior to his execution. The photo appears courtesy of Felix Rodriguez. 

The below photo of Che Guevara is in the public domain:

 

 

The Below U.S. Army photo is of Major Ralph "Pappy" Shelton, the man who trained the Bolivian Rangers who hunted and captured Che Guevara. 

 

 

The below photo is of Major Shelton's Green Beret team in Bolivia. 

 



 

The below photo is of Captain Gary Prado, the Bolivian Ranger who captured Che Guevara. 

 

 

United Nations Organization Honors Communist Guerrilla Leader Ernesto 'Che' Guevara

Adam Kredo at the Washington Free Beacon offers a piece on the United Nations honoring Communist guerrilla leader and leftist cultural icon Ernesto 'Che' Guevara.

The United Nations’ cultural body is facing a backlash after it decided to honor the “life and works” of the Marxist Argentinian militant Che Guevara, a controversial figure long viewed as a hero of the left.

The U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) announced earlier this week that it would include Guevara’s “life and works” in its 2013 “Memory of the World Register," which codifies historical material that has a “world significance and outstanding universal value.”

Guevara’s works were submitted to the register by Bolivia and Cuba in 2012. They were accepted earlier this week and endorsed by the director-general of UNESCO.

The announcement sparked an outcry from Cuban-American members of Congress and former U.S. officials who said the United Nations is sullying its reputation by honoring a revolutionary figure who murdered many innocent civilians.

“This cretin described himself as a ‘killing machine,’ and he worked in the service of a totalitarian regime,” Roger Noriega, a former State Department official and U.S. ambassador to the Organization for American States, told the Washington Free Beacon.  

You can read the rest of the story via the below link:

http://freebeacon.com/united-nations-organization-honors-che-guevara/

You can also read an earlier post on Guevara via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2009/12/che-part-one-and-che-part-two-films.html

Che, Part One And Che, Part Two: The Films That Celebrate A Murderer And Communist Thug

 

I have long been interested in Che Guevara, although I am hardly an admirer, and I’ve read scores of books about him, including his Bolivia war diary and his other works.

So as a student of history, as well as a film buff, I forced myself to sit through the two long films about Che Guevara last week on the IFC cable channel.

Directed by Steven Soderbergh with Benicio Del Toro as Guevara, the film was made in two parts with the first part dealing with Guevara’s participation in the Cuban revolution, while the second part jumps ahead to Guevara’s vain and failed attempt to bring violent Communist revolution to Bolivia.

The film smartly skips right over Guevara’s role as the bloody chief executioner of scores of Cubans after the revolution, and his subsequent disastrous handling of the Cuban economy as the minister of finance.

I say smartly, as Del Toro, who produced the films, and director Soderbergh are great admirers of the late revolutionary. Rather, they are admirers of Guevara’s phony iconic reputation. The reality is quite another matter.

The films show Guevara in his best light, with numerous scenes of him healing the sick and wounded (Guevara was a doctor before he was a murderer), but they only offer one scene of him executing people. And those men were Cuban deserters, rapists and murderers. There were no scenes of him putting bullets through prisoners’ heads, or gleefully overseeing mass executions in Cuba.

Humbert Fontova, like me, does not share the romantic view of Guevara.

He wrote an interesting piece for http://www.newsmax.com/ that offers another point of view.

I interviewed Fontova for Counterterrorism magazine. I'm a contributing editor to the quarterly magazine for law enforcement, government and military people worldwide.

You can read the Fontova interview via the links below:

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