Barbie 'boasted of hunting down Che'
The CIA made use of a Nazi war criminal's anti-guerrilla skills

David Smith
Sunday December 23, 2007
The Observer

Oscar-winning British director Kevin Macdonald has raised the intriguing possibility that Che Guevara's capture by the CIA in the forests of Bolivia 40 years ago was orchestrated by Klaus Barbie, the Nazi war criminal called the 'Butcher of Lyon'.
Guevara was the Marxist guerrilla who helped Fidel Castro seize power in Cuba. Barbie was the Gestapo chief in Lyon whose crimes included the murder of 44 Jewish children, taken from an orphanage and sent to Auschwitz. Improbably, the men's paths crossed in Bolivia. My Enemy's Enemy, a documentary directed by Macdonald, whose previous films include Touching the Void and The Last King of Scotland, examines how Barbie's record was disregarded when he was recruited by US intelligence after the Second World War as a useful tool against communism. He evaded French justice by fleeing to Bolivia where, living under the alias Klaus Altmann, he was welcomed by fascist sympathisers. Meanwhile, in 1966 a disguised Guevara arrived in Bolivia to organise the overthrow of its military dictatorship.

The Americans had been hunting Guevara and, according to the film, turned to Barbie for his first-hand knowledge of counter-guerrilla warfare: he had attempted to crush the French Resistance and was responsible for the death of its celebrated leader, Jean Moulin. Alvaro de Castro, a longtime confidant of Barbie interviewed for the film, says: 'He met Major Shelton, the commander of the unit from the US. Altmann no doubt gave him advice on how to fight this guerrilla war. He used the expertise gained doing this kind of work in World War Two. They made the most of the fact that he had this experience.'
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Kai Hermann, a journalist, tells the film-makers: 'He always boasted - though I cannot prove it - that it was he who devised the strategy for murdering Che Guevara.'

The evidence appears inconclusive, but Macdonald, who won an Academy Award for One Day in September, about the killing of Israeli athletes by the Palestinian group Black September at the 1972 Munich Olympics, told The Observer: 'The Che claim came from several sources. I think it makes total sense when you understand what Barbie was doing and who he was working for in the Bolivian military, and how they admired him as a Nazi officer and what he had done in the war. Jean Moulin was an infamous episode, and he would trade on it and use that as part of his calling card.'...[Open in new window]