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

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 head-on."

The specter of Vietnam was everywhere. The White House was determined not to let the conflict in Bolivia escalate and become Americanized. Early on the decision was made to keep the direct U.S. presence in Bolivia to an absolute minimum and to provide the Bolivian army with only the support it actually needed to defeat the guerrillas. The Viet Cong's use of weapons captured from U.S. troops influenced the decision not to give the Bolivian army the up-to-date hardware its generals were requesting. Finally, the setting of a limited, achievable goal--the destruction of Guevara's guerrilla band--reflected a lesson learned from the open-ended involvement that was producing a quagmire for U.S. forces in southeast Asia.

Ryan offers a thoughtful critique of both the operational and intelligence-gathering aspects of the U.S. intervention against the Cuban intervention in Bolivia. He demonstrates how slow the Americans were to recognize that Che was actually in Bolivia by 1966, as well as their failure to grasp that the lack of support he was getting from the Bolivian Communist Party was seriously hampering his efforts. Ryan also describes the CIA's success in putting together an intelligence system for the Bolivians and the blundering by one of its field agents, whose overzealousness led to erroneous reports that agency operatives had killed Guevara. These accounts suggest that the agency may be able to perform information-gathering tasks more effectively than high-profile action projects whose covertness can easily be shed, hence the book is relevant to the current debate over the proper role of the CIA in the post-Cold War era.

Ryan enlivens his narrative with vivid portraits of the two American officials who played key parts in the hunt for Guevara: Ambassador Douglas Henderson, whose sang-froid helped keep the U.S. from overreacting to the guerrilla threat; and Ralph "Pappy" Shelton, who led the Green Beret contingent that trained the Bolivian Rangers and developed a much warmer rapport with local peasants than the Cubans who came to "liberate" them.

However, he fails to give the Bolivians the attention they merit, which is ironic in light of the on-the-mark criticism he levels at some American officials for their condescending attitude toward the South Americans. President Rene Barrientos Ortuno is a major player in the story Ryan tells, but we learn nothing about his background that might shed light on his actions, despite the fact that he was a larger-than-life character, an embodiment of Latin American machismo and Bolivia's best pilot. (When three airmen were killed in a parachute jump at an air show while he was commander in chief of the air force, the press suggested the accident was caused by faulty equipment; whereupon Barrientos asked journalists to choose one of the three chutes used by the dead men, took the parachute that was selected and made a successful jump with it.) Moreover, the Bolivian military's eagerness to obtain modern armaments would have been made more comprehensible by an explanation of the continuing national obsession with regaining the corridor to the Pacific Ocean that Bolivia had lost during a 19th century war with Chile.

These are minor shortcomings that do not seriously detract from this engrossing book. It is a welcome addition to the literature on both Che Guevara and U.S. intervention in Latin America.

Joseph A. Page, author of The Brazilians and Peron: A Biography, is a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center