Published for the first time are the U.S. secret police files on the legendary revolutionary Ernesto Guevara, showing how the FBI and CIA monitored his movements and activity in the United States, Mexico, Cuba, Africa and Latin America.

A Freedom of Information Act request succeeded in obtaining the FBI file on Guevara, containing a wide selection of CIA and other secret documents.

With an introduction by the editors, U.S. attorneys Michael Ratner and Michael Steven Smith, this book poses the obvious question: why did the FBI have such a dossier?

'Che is fairly intellectual for a Latino,' reads a 1958 CIA document on Guevara during the period of the guerrilla war in Cuba. Watched closely after the 1959 revolution, Guevara's every public word was recorded and transmitted to the FBI and CIA, with particular note taken of his anti-U.S. statements.

Later documents concern Guevara's disappearance from Cuba in 1965 and his resurfacing in Africa and Bolivia as a guerrilla leader.

The sensational materials included in these secret files add to suspicions that U.S. spy agencies were plotting to assassinate Guevara when he was a Cuban government leader in the early 1960s and suggest that they were involved in the pursuit and murder of Guevara in Bolivia in 1967.

For all those interested in Che Guevara, Washington's relationship with Latin America and the workings of the U.S. spy agencies, this book is a significant new contribution.

• jacket