Battles in a Personal War : SHADOW WARRIOR <i> by Felix I. Rodriguez and John Weisman (Simon & Schuster: $19.95; 283 pp., illustrated; 0-671-66721-1). </i>

After half a lifetime spent doing things he assumed no one would ever know about, former CIA agent Felix Rodriguez is best known for two things he says he never did. As recently as last spring, during the confirmation hearings of his friend and ambassador-designate Donald Gregg, Rodriguez was accused of briefing then-Vice President George Bush on Oliver North’s covert resupply effort for the Nicaraguan Contras--accusations the author and Bush deny.

He also was accused by sources close to Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) of soliciting drug money for the Contras--accusations the author denies and Kerry himself eventually repudiated. Of all the deadly battles Rodriguez and his co-author, journalist John Weisman, describe in “Shadow Warrior,” it is evident that most disillusioning were the ones fought in the shadowless glare of publicity. “I believed that those elected to the U.S. Congress would put truth and the national good ahead of partisan politics,” he writes. “The 11-month ordeal I was about to begin (at the hands of Kerry’s leak-prone Senate subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations) would abuse me of my innocence for good.”

That he kept his innocence as long as he did, in view of all he has seen and done, seems a miracle. During an era of American history when questions of right and wrong in international affairs seem more complicated and the answers sometimes utterly elusive, Felix Rodriguez has rarely if ever been bothered by second thoughts. He has lived a simple, extraordinary life based on the pursuit of basic principles.

Now 48, he has been an anti-Communist freedom fighter since he was a teen-ager, when Castro came to power and his family fled its homeland. The son of a prosperous merchant from Sancti Spiritus, Rodriguez proudly traces his line back to those who fought for his country’s liberation from Spain almost a century ago. “If I am a freedom fighter,” he writes, “I come by it honestly.” He has fought against communism in Cuba, Bolivia--where he assisted in the capture of Che Guevara in 1967--Vietnam, El Salvador and Nicaragua.

Unapologetic about being dedicated even now to Castro’s demise, he told the Iran-Contra special prosecutor, who asked if he’d been part of the CIA’s Keystone Kops scenario for killing the dictator with an exploding cigar, “No, sir, I (was) not. But I did volunteer to kill that son of a bitch in 1961 with a telescopic rifle.” But he spurns the pro-Batista label his critics sometimes have attached to him. He writes, “It seems to me that the press takes on a racist edge when it stereotypes Cuban exiles as right-wing fanatics. We are lawyers and architects, doctors, politicians and, yes, freedom fighters . . . Many of us have achieved the American dream. We cherish American values--and have died defending them.”

Rodriguez himself has done without many of the American dream’s material blessings. Instead of taking his place as a freshman architecture student at the University of Miami in the fall of 1960, he joined what later became known as the 2506 Brigade--the covert, CIA-backed organization of anti-Castro Cubans that John F. Kennedy claimed (during the 1960 election) did not exist and that his opponent, Richard Nixon, could not dare responsibly discuss.

Later, the CIA’s sudden and unpredictable assignments did not permit Rodriguez to pursue a public career. His long-suffering wife Rosa, a childhood friend from Cuba, saw him off to work in the morning mindful that by nightfall he might have been dispatched to some war zone and that she would not hear from him again for weeks, if ever. Now officially retired on an agency pension, he probably will be burdened for the rest of his life by recapitulations in the press of Kerry’s unproven drug charges.

If there is anything the reader expects in this memoir but does not find, it is a passage in which the author asks himself whether it was all worth it. But introspection and equivocation do not seem to suit him. The fire lit in the young exile by the enemy who drove his family and friends from Cuba is still bright enough to light his way in middle age. One also comes to suspect that, politics aside, he’s been enjoying himself.

The book’s best passages are about the capture of Che Guevara, who had left Castro’s cabinet in 1965 and gone to Bolivia to try to start a revolution. Rodriguez, still employed by the CIA but attached to the Bolivian military, spearheaded the effort by analyzing intelligence and gently interrogating a reluctant guerrilla the Bolivians had captured and would have preferred just to shoot. (In the most heavily qualified sentence in the book and perhaps of the year, Rodriguez writes, “Often, (Bolivian) troops were ordered not to take prisoners; summary executions, while largely uncommon, were not unknown.”)

After Che was wounded and captured in a tiny mountain village called La Higuera, Rodriguez came face to face with a man he had hated for years. Che behaved as defiantly as any reader of spy thrillers would expect. He even joked that he became president of the Cuban national bank after Castro asked in a meeting for a dedicated economista and Che raised his hand. “I misheard him,” Che told Rodriguez. “I thought he was asking for a dedicated Comunista. . . .”

The two men talked for two hours, but then the predictable instruction came through from the Supreme Bolivian Command. After protesting briefly and fruitlessly--he was working for Bolivia, not the United States--Rodriguez gave the order, and Che was shot dead by an army sergeant. Rodriguez got Che’s Rolex, the Bolivian regime was safe from external enemies (so that it could continue to be toppled seemingly fortnightly by internal ones), and the CIA lost what would have been one of the greatest intelligence coups of the decade.

Such has been the pattern for much of Rodriguez’s career. He has served honorably and done what he felt he had to do in one losing cause after another. In 1959, at age 18, he joined the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean, based in the Dominican Republic. Plans for an invasion of Cuba were soon under way, but one senses that this particular covert operation was hopeless as soon as Rodriguez describes hearing this announcement over the PA system of his hotel in Ciudad Trujillo: “Will all the volunteers who are willing to fight for the liberation of Cuba please meet . . . at the front desk.” At the last minute, Rodriguez was dropped from the advance party, which was wiped out by Castro’s forces.

During the early 1960s, other American-backed efforts did not fare much better. Rodriguez found the CIA “curiously uneducated about Cuba and about us Cuban freedom fighters. . . . (It) had no Cubans working in high-ranking staff positions during the planning of these complex anti-Castro operations. . . . (This) and American naivete were two elements that many of us who were there felt doomed the U.S.’ anti-Castro program from the very start.”

Infiltration teams were expected to enter Cuba wearing either army fatigues or American-made clothes, both of which certainly would have doomed the operatives if they had not been savvy enough to sneak into Miami from their training bases and borrow Cuban clothes from relatives and friends.

Rodriguez was inside Cuba at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion, ready to assist in the liberation of the island. When the invasion was bungled, the CIA sent him and other freedom fighters a laughable instruction: “Get yourselves jobs. Reestablish yourselves in Cuba. Then, when you’ve built successful lives, contact us again.” Instead, while Castro used the Bay of Pigs as a lever for crippling the resistance and solidifying his power, Rodriguez escaped with the help of Spanish diplomats.

In 1969, he became a U.S. citizen and registered to vote as a Republican, and in 1970 he volunteered for Vietnam, where he served for two years. One of his CIA superiors was William Buckley, a skilled agent with “an empathy for the situation in Vietnam” who “never became cynical or indifferent to its people, something that couldn’t be said for many other Americans.” Buckley was kidnapped and tortured to death by terrorists in Lebanon in 1985. Rodriguez himself advised South Vietnamese Army reconnaissance units, using the same methods to track down Viet Cong units that had worked so well against Guevara’s guerrilla bands. So Rodriguez’s Vietnam experience was fruitful and rewarding, though ours ultimately was not.

He also served with distinction in El Salvador and Nicaragua, but by the time his narrative reaches the Reagan era, one wonders whether our destiny is to muff every opportunity to roll back a Communist beachhead. In El Salvador, Rodriguez’s efforts to develop a helicopter-borne reconnaissance capability against the FMLN guerrillas were hampered by foolish congressionally-mandated interruptions in the flow of aircraft that, Rodriguez asserts, cost Salvadoran lives.

In Nicaragua, he writes that North’s Contra-resupply effort was inefficient and wasteful. North “had grandiose ideas about himself,” was naive about covert operations and “was sorely misled by many he mistakenly trusted”--such as Richard Secord, who Rodriguez implies was motivated primarily by profit.

A soldier would call the author “mission-oriented,” since he goes wherever he is sent and always does his best, and yet most of the efforts to which he has contributed have failed. At a time when Communism is manifestly a spent force in Eastern Europe, it still clings stubbornly to power in Third World nations such as Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua and Afghanistan, and even now threatens weak regimes in El Salvador and Peru. Too often, communism has won by default, because those who opposed it, including the United States, either miscalculated or gave up.

Rodriguez does not dwell on such issues, except to say that the lesson of Vietnam was that “if we pledge to help, then we must carry through and not abandon those who fight and die alongside us.” For him, the war in Vietnam, the Marxist-Leninist revolution in Nicaragua and the insurgency still threatening El Salvador were just battles in a personal war that began in 1959 when he was a 17-year-old high school student.

If communism cannot be dislodged in Cuba and elsewhere by force of arms, one can only hope Rodriguez lives long enough to see it dislodged--as is happening in Poland, Hungary and East Germany--by a slower but ultimately irresistible force: the ideal of freedom. Then at least Felix Rodriguez finally will be able to go home again--holding a visa instead of a rifle.