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near the beautiful old central plaza, with its fountains and its flowers and its whispers of the cruel ballads of the old conquistadores. Once he said to me in a low voice, "You are lucky. You are going to see someone important." I nodded. I still assumed I was simply going to see some of the Communist students.
    Then we got into a car with a driver and rode a few blocks.
    Then we got out of the car and walked around the block precisely three times and waited under a tree.
    Then we got into a station wagon and drove for two hours around the city, gradually easing our way to the outskirts. I had lost my sense of direction and bearings completely by now.
    Then we drove down dirt roads and stopped several times. When no cars came, we drove on.
    As this dramatic ballet continued, I became more and more fascinated. I didn't feel afraid, which in retrospect was quite foolish. Instead, I felt intensely alive, with nerves whizzing and singing and blood flowing. Indeed the process in itself became so interesting to me that I very nearly forgot the purpose and end of our odyssey.
    Two and a half hours after Humberto had picked me up at the hotel, we walked into an unfinished, creaking modern house some where in the suburbs and sat down on a simple cot and some stools. Almost immediately two very young, very eager, and almost merry young men swept in, doors banging behind them, with all the casualness of a neighbor dropping in on a summer afternoon in Wisconsin. It was as if the wind had suddenly dropped some brightly colored leaves at my feet, instead of the dark wraiths of history they actually were.
    There was the notorious Luis Turcios, a lithe, liquid figure wearing a stylish black sweater, black pants, and white shirt and tie. A handsome young man, he carried about him a distinct joie de vivre. With him was the slight, blond, intense Cesar Montes, who had the pitiless air of "the revolution" engraved on his every action, instilled in his cold eyes and in each taut answer.
    Montes, indeed, struck me as so thoroughly different from Turcios that I had to wonder -- and this question has recurred to me constantly in nearly two decades of interviewing "revolutionaries" -- what they had in common besides revolution. Montes was only about five feet tall, with high cheekbones and moody, sulky eyes. He occasionally wore glasses and then he looked scholarly and deceptively young. But after a few hours with him I realized he had a certain forcefulness as a leader.
    Turcios, on the other hand, was full of the very devil, in love with being a "revolutionary" and in love with life. His ideology was fuzzy, and he called himself a "Communist without a party." There was no such relativity about Montes or his ideas. He knew exactly where he was going. He was a member of the central committee of the Guatemalan Communist Party, even at his young age; and although his family background was shrouded in a mystery that he most definitely encouraged, it was believed that his parents were originally Mexican Communists.
    He and Montes began by explaining their classical "three-stage" movement. "Now we are only entering the first stage," said Montes. "We are teaching the peasants and preparing for the moment when we can fight the army and take power. The second stage will be to transform the guerrilla war to a regular war, and the third stage is the general offensive when the whole people will rise in regular and irregular fashion."
    Turcios, who, with so many other Third World revolutionaries, had studied as a Guatemalan soldier at Fort Benning (and insisted that the experience taught him a good deal), explained that they were already building "focos" or centers of resistance in the rough, barren Sierra de las Minas area east of Guatemala City. From there, the dream went, their "peasant army" would sweep down eventually upon Guatemala City just as Castro's army had ostensibly swept onto Havana in 1959.
    In years to come I was to infiltrate and write about