Fifty years ago, on October 9, 1967, Ernesto "Che" Guevara - Argentine-born doctor and Cuban revolutionary hero - was executed in Bolivia as part of a US-orchestrated plot to rid the world of his pernicious anti-imperialist influence.
Given that Guevara is as popular and symbolic as ever half a century later, it seems that the US government can safely file that project under the category "Oops".
Of course, the Americans have long denied responsibility for the killing - a claim neatly dismantled by American lawyers Michael Ratner and Michael Steven Smith in their book "Who Killed Che? How the CIA Got Away with Murder".
Cuban-American CIA agent Felix Rodriguez, present at Guevara's demise in the Bolivian hamlet of La Higuera, has helped promote the US line that the fatal decision was all the Bolivians' doing.
Rodriguez has, furthermore, vociferously objected to the romanticisation of a man he says was nothing more than "an assassin" who "enjoyed killing people" - a pretty rich allegation coming from someone who also volunteered to assassinate Fidel Castro and who, Ratner and Smith note, has referred to the Dominican Republic's former blood-drenched dictator Rafael Trujillo as a "so-called tyrant". READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.