Che Guevara
In early 1965, Guevara went to Africa to offer his knowledge and experience as a guerrilla to the ongoing conflict in the Congo. According to Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella, Guevara thought that Africa was imperialism's weak link and so had enormous revolutionary potential. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had fraternal relations with Che since his 1959 visit, saw Guevara's plan to fight in Congo as "unwise" and warned that he would become a "Tarzan" figure, doomed to failure. Despite the warning, Guevara traveled to Congo using the alias Ramón Benítez. He led the Cuban operation in support of the Marxist Simba movement, which had emerged from the ongoing Congo crisis. Guevara, his second-in-command Víctor Dreke, and 12 other Cuban expeditionaries arrived in Congo on April 24, 1965, and a contingent of approximately 100 Afro-Cubans joined them soon afterward. For a time, they collaborated with guerrilla leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who had helped supporters of the overthrown president Patrice Lumumba to lead an unsuccessful revolt months earlier. As an admirer of the late Lumumba, Guevara declared that his "murder should be a lesson for all of us". Guevara, with limited knowledge of Swahili and the local languages, was assigned a teenage interpreter, Freddy Ilanga. Over the course of seven months, Ilanga grew to "admire the hard-working Guevara", who "showed the same respect to black people as he did to whites". However, Guevara soon became disillusioned with the poor discipline of Kabila's troops and later dismissed him, stating "nothing leads me to believe he is the man of the hour".
Operation Kufire
Operation Kufire was a program that sought to identify and track all communist party members who had flocked to Guatemala during the Arbenz regime. "Via Kufire, the CIA was intent on charting their movements and monitoring or frustrating their machinations." This operation introduced the CIA to Ernesto "Che" Guevara and one member of the CIA team was unsure as to whether it was even necessary to open a file and track Guevara's movements. Ultimately, operation Kufire signified the fear that communism would spread throughout Latin American. Furthermore, it feared a domino effect, whereby if one nation in America were to fall to communism, then it was likely that others would follow. Operation Kufire was intended to safeguard against any further communist uprisings and to track the activities of known communists throughout all America.