The Fall of Che Guevara: A Story of Soldiers, Spies and Diplomats.

• Author: Page, Joseph A.

Over the past three decades, the end game played out by Che Guevara, the Bolivian army, and its U.S. mentors has been a source of inspiration for writers and filmmakers alike. The results have ranged from a first-rate novel by Jay Cantor (The Death of Che Guevara) to a beyond-dreadful Hollywood film with Omar Sharif in the title role ("Che").

The 30th anniversary of Guevara's death has sparked a renewal of interest, a spate of books, and a "she chic" phenomenon exploited by memorabilia merchants and entrepreneurs who bring starry-eyed tourists to the remote backlands where a Bolivian Ranger battalion cornered, captured, and summarily executed the Argentine-born revolutionary on October 9, 1967.

The romantic figure of Che Guevara has remained as dominant during this revival as it was in his heyday as the paladin of Fidel Castro-style revolutionary communism. But there is another, hitherto-untold side to the story of his demise. The Fall of Che Guevara, a brisk monograph by retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer Henry Ryan, peers through the lenses of Guevara's pursuers--American diplomats, military men, and intelligence operatives, and to a lesser extent their Bolivian counterparts. The result is a case study of perhaps the most successful counterinsurgency effort ever launched by the U.S. government.

Utilizing official documents and interviews with many of the participants, Ryan reconstructs the responses of the State Department, Pentagon, and Central Intelligence Agency as they played lead roles, at times in concert and at times discordantly, in the hunt for Guevara and his band of mostly Cuban guerrillas.

Guevara, Ryan argues, was carrying out Cuban foreign policy as encapsulated in the slogan that "The duty of all revolutionaries is to make revolution" His goal was to trigger an armed conflict that would convert South America into another Vietnam, and he chose mountainous Bolivia because of its strategic location. The original idea was to use it as a staging area and supply center for insurgencies in adjacent countries. Later, the plan shifted and Bolivia itself became the target.

Washington had responded to the Cuban Revolution by creating the Army's so-called Green Berets to fight low-intensity conflicts, by training and equipping local military and police; and by using economic and social aid to strengthen their internal security. "In Bolivia," Ryan notes, "the American theory of counterinsurgency and the Cuban theory of revolution met...