Dead Ché Day 2007!

And bad cess to him. 

Yes, I just mentioned his capture and demise in yesterday's Today in SF History post. So? He was captured on the 8th and capped on the 9th. He's still dead and I'm still glad, and doubly so that my regiment had a hand in it.  

Apparently I'm not the only one (apart from the survivors of some 10,000 murdered Cubans) that wishes the shade of Ché ill. Here's a splendid splenetic splash on the libertarian magazine Reason's weblog. 

And cited therein, back in 2002, Reason reviews Ché's long-suppressed diary from the Cubans' inept attempt to foment revolution in the Congo, an even more spectacular failure than Bolivia (and one in the thwarting of which, I am proud to say, my regiment also took part).

Overleaf, my comments on his Bolivian diary, and two Ché mysteries.

Ché's Diary Exposes a Traitor -- with a KGB Assist

After Ché was killed, one of the more interesting properties in our hands was his diary, which told a story of a desperately ill-conducted, inept, and unsuccessful insurgency. Ché in fact showed no signs of having read his own book on guerilla warfare (which, after all, he probably didn't write, either). The diary was made in a handful of copies for the members of the Bolivian Cabinet. Several pages were missing from the diary, and no one at the time knew why. It's unclear whether the US agents involved kept a copy or the original. 

One of the Bolivian politicians quickly provided his copy of the diary to Cuban intelligence. Within days it had made it through KGB channels to the clandestinely KGB-sponsored communist magazine in the USA, Ramparts. The magazine published excerpts from the diary and rushed it into print as a book, and it became an instant best seller. 

About this time, the Bolivian traitor discovered what only the Agency and a handful of rock-solid Bolivian patriots had known: the whole diary had been captured, intact. In a cunning counterintelligence operation, each Cabinet member had received a copy with a slightly different set of missing pages. Unfortunately, he was out of the country at the time the Communists published the telltale diary, so Bolivian justice never got its hands on him; he escaped, if that's the word, to Cuba. (Kind of like escaping to prison, isn't it?)

Two Ché Mysteries

I wonder who really has Ché's pen? You see, it once was on a plaque in the 7th SFG(A) conference room. The pen there in the 1980s was already a US Army issue, "Skilcraft quality blind made products," ballpoint. It seems like every staff duty officer and NCO would nick "Ché's pen" and slip a "quality blind made" ballpoint (or in redundant Army terminology, "ink pen"), onto the plaque as a substitute. Who got the real pen, and when?

The second mystery, of course, concerns Ché's hands. When his worm-eaten body was exhumed and dragged to Cuba to be put in a sort of bizarro version of Napoleon's Tomb a few years ago, they didn't have all of it. (I've also heard that the hands and the head are missing, but the Cubans deny that). Where are Ché's hands? Presumably the Agency took them for ID purposes. With any luck they then did something creatively degrading with them.