Hunting Che: How a U.S. Special Forces Team Helped Capture the World s Most Famous Revolution ary - Hardcover

Weiss, Mitch; Maurer, Kevin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0425257460 ISBN 13: 9780425257463

Publisher: Berkley, 2013

Synopsis

The hunt for Ernesto “Che” Guevera was one of the first successful U.S. Special Forces missions in history. Using government reports and documents, as well as eyewitness accounts, Hunting Che tells the untold story of how the infamous revolutionary was captured—a mission later duplicated in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As one of the architects of the Cuban Revolution, Guevera had become famous for supporting and organizing similar insurgencies in Africa and Latin America. When he turned his attention to Bolivia in 1967, the Pentagon made a decision: Che had to be stopped.

Major Ralph “Pappy” Shelton was called upon to lead the mission. Much was unknown about Che’s force in Bolivia, and the stakes were high. With a handpicked team of Green Berets, Shelton turned Bolivian peasants into a trained fighting and intelligence-gathering force.

Hunting Che follows Shelton’s American team and the newly formed Bolivian Rangers through the hunt to Che’s eventual capture and execution. With the White House and the Pentagon monitoring every move, Shelton and his team helped prevent another Communist threat from taking root in the West.

INCLUDES PHOTOS

About this title

About the Author

Mitch Weiss is a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist for the Associated Press. In 2003, he was assigned to a series that uncovered the longest string of atrocities carried out by a U.S. fighting unit in the Vietnam War. In recognition of the series “Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths,” which led to an investigation by the Pentagon, he was awarded the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. A series he wrote about corrupt real estate appraisers won several national awards in 2009. He also was part of a team of AP reporters that won a George Polk Award in 2010 for their coverage of the British Petroleum oil-spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
 
Kevin Maurer is the author and coauthor of several books, including No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden. Covering special operations forces for nearly a decade, he has been embedded with the U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan numerous times and spent ten weeks with a team of Green Berets in Afghanistan in 2010. He has been embedded with American soldiers in Iraq, East Africa, and Haiti.
 

Reviews

This revealing account of Che Guevara’s ill-fated guerrilla campaign in Bolivia in 1967 and his capture and excecution by U.S.-aided Bolivian forces offers a new perspective on the iconic revolutionary’s last days. Weiss is an investigative journalist for the Associated Press, and Maurer is the coauthor of No Easy Day (2013), which described the mission to track and kill Osama bin Laden. Their description of the molding of the Bolivian units into an effective fighting force by U.S. Green Berets is engrossing, and they provide a detailed account of the final hours of Che’s life. In particular, his interrogation by the admirable Bolivian officer Gary Prado is strangely sad and moving, as Che is both reflective and intransigent. --Jay Freeman

Edition details

• Publisher: Berkley
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0425257460
• ISBN 13: 9780425257463
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 320