Killing Che Book

Former Navy SEAL, Chuck Pfarrer, has produced a beautifully written and exhaustively researched historical novel that follows a barely fictional CIA contract agent, Paul Hoyle, on his mission to engineer the killing of Cuban revolutionary hero, Che Guevara, during his 1967 insurgency against the American backed regime of President Rene Barrientos in Bolivia.
After being disciplined for his complicity in the murder of a British journalist in Vietnam, Hoyle (the infamous "Larry S" of other historical accounts) impulsively resigns from the CIA. In order to "rehabilitate" his image inside the Company, Hoyle signs on as a "contract agent," a "nomenclature…used for assassins, poisoners, and prostitutes: dispensable people with objectionable skills."
In Hoyle, Pfarrer has written a noir character worthy of Hammett or Chandler, a good soldier with scant ethical compunctions who, as his time in Bolivia unfolds, learns that the United States is backing a corrupt government and that he has been sent to kill perhaps the most decent man there.
Hoyle's education is initiated by his affair with Maria Agular, mistress to Bolivia's secretary of information. Hoyle's attraction to Maria is, as it were, love at first flight. "When [Hoyle:] first looked at her, he'd felt the exact sensation he had when he parachuted from an airplane." When Maria jumps, however, it is without a parachute. She becomes, in her own estimation, "a rare and wanton thing: a mistress who takes a lover." In the world of espionage, however, every pairing is duplicitous. "[Hoyle:] knew he had compromised Maria by becoming her lover; in the trade, this was his handle, the means by which he could control her."

Falling in love with Maria is the portal through which Hoyle confronts the tremendous conflict between what he is observing and the nature of his job. We watch as a farmer and his son are executed by drunken Bolivian policeman who don't have anything better to do, causing Hoyle to commit an act of violence that Pfarrer describes in page turning detail. On the other hand, Hoyle encounters another farmer and his family that Che, a physician, had treated, inoculating one of the farmer's children against small pox. "…Evidence of the little girl's inoculation and the surgical scar on her forearm," Pfarrer writes, "were as unlikely as Truth and Justice."
Pfarrer portrays Che as a man for whom revolution is the highest calling. "Some might have pitied him over the obligation of this work, the austerity of the reward, but in his heart, Guevara was happy. This life had come to him because he chose it."
While his heart resided in Cuba with his wife, Aleida, Che allowed himself the pleasure of "Tania" (Hayde Tamara Buknke Bider), an apparently devoted revolutionary, but also a Soviet double agent. Here Pfarrer portrays, in heartbreaking fashion, Che's fatal flaw: his naiveté, his inability to discern how the Cubans, Soviets, and even the Bolivian Communist Party, had forsaken the revolution for "greed and the joyless quest for power."
By the end of Pfarrer's novel, we are left with Hoyle, a man changed by his love of a woman and his admiration for a man who sacrificed his life for an impossible ideal. We can only hope that there are people like Hoyle who have learned the terrible lessons of our foreign policy blunders and who will use that knowledge to steer our country along more humane and self-preservative paths. Perhaps we have met such a person, however indirectly, in the author of Killing Che.