ANGOLA 1975 to 1980s

The Great Powers Poker Game

from the book

Killing Hope

by William Blum

It is spring 1975. Saigon has just fallen. The last of the Americans are fleeing for their lives.

Fallout from Watergate hangs heavy in the air in the United States. The morning papers bring

fresh revelations about CIA and FBI misdeeds. The Pike Committee of the House of

Representatives is investigating CIA foreign covert activities. On the Senate side, the Church

Committee is doing the same. And the Rockefeller Commission has set about investigating the

Agency's domestic activities.

The CIA and its influential supporters warn that the crescendo of disclosures will inhibit the

Agency from carrying out the functions necessary for national security.

At CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, they are busy preparing for their next secret

adventure: Angola.

To undertake a military operation at such a moment, the reasons, one would imagine, must

have been both compelling and urgent. Yet, in the long history of American interventions it would

be difficult to find one more pointless or with less to gain for the United States or the foreign

people involved.

The origin of our story dates back to the beginning of the 1960s when two political movements in

Angola began to oppose by force the Portuguese colonial government: the MPLA, led by

Agostinho Neto, and the FNLA, led by Holden Roberto. (The latter group was known by other

names in its early years, but for simplicity will be referred to here only as FNLA.)

The United States, not normally in the business of supporting "liberation" movements, decided

that inasmuch as Portugal would probably be unable to hold on to its colony forever, establishing

contact with a possible successor regime might prove beneficial. For reasons lost in the mists of

history, the United States, or at least someone in the CIA, decided that Roberto was their man and

around 1961 or '62 onto the Agency payroll he went.{1}

At the same time, and during the ensuing years, Washington provided their NATO ally, the

Salazar dictatorship in Lisbon, with the military aid and counter-insurgency training needed to

suppress the rebellion. John Marcum, an American scholar who walked 800 miles through Angola

into the FNLA guerrilla camps in the early 1960s, has written:

By January 1962 outside observers could watch Portuguese planes bomb and strafe

African villages, visit the charred remains of towns like Mbanza M'Pangu and

M'Pangala, and copy the data from 750-point napalm bomb casings from which the

Portuguese had not removed the labels marked "Property U.S. Air Force".{2}

The Soviet Union, which had also given some support to Roberto, embraced Neto instead in

1964, arguing that Roberto had helped the discredited Moise Tshombe in the Congo and curtailed

his own guerrilla operations in Angola under pressure from Washington.{3} Before long, another

movement, UNITA by name, entered the picture and China dealt itself into The Great Powers

Poker Game, lending support to UNITA and FNLA.

Although MPLA may have been somewhat more genuine in its leftist convictions than FNLA or

UNITA, there was little to distinguish any of the three groups from each other ideologically. When

the press made any distinction amongst them it was usually to refer to MPLA as "Marxist", but this

was ill-defined, if defined at all, and simply took on a media life of its own. Each of the groups

spoke of socialism and employed Marxist rhetoric when the occasion called for it, and genuflected

to other gods when it did not. In the 1960s, each of them was perfectly willing to accept support

from any country willing to give it without excessive strings attached. Neto, for example, went to

Washington in December 1962 to put his case before the American government and press and to

emphasize the fallacy of categorizing the MPLA as communist. During the following two years,

Roberto appealed for aid to the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, Algeria, and Nasser's Egypt. Later,

Jonas Savimbi, the leader of UNITA, approached the same countries (with the exception perhaps

of the Soviet Union) as well as North Vietnam, and accepted military training for his men from

North Korea.

Each group was composed predominantly of members of a particular tribe; each tried to

discourage aid or recognition being given to the others; they each suffered from serious internal

splits and spent as much time fighting each other as they did the Portuguese army. The Vietcong

they were not.{4}

Author Jonathan Kwitny has observed that the three tribal nations had a long history of fighting

each other ...

It was not until the latter part of the twentieth century, however, that Dr. Henry

Kissinger and other political scientists discovered that the real reason the Mbundu,

the Ovimbundu, and the Kongo had been fighting off and on for the past 500 years

was that the Mbundu were "Marxist" and the Ovimbundu and Kongo were

"pro-Western".{5}

That the CIA's choosing of its ally was largely an arbitrary process is further underlined by a

State Department cable to its African Embassies in 1963 which stated: "U.S. policy is not, repeat

not, to discourage [an] MPLA ... move toward West and not to choose between these two

movements."{6}

Even in 1975, when the head of the CIA, William Colby, was asked by a congressional

committee what the differences were between the three contesting factions, he responded:

They are all independents. They are all for black Africa. They are all for some fuzzy

kind of social system, you know, without really much articulation, but some sort of

let's not be exploited by the capitalist nations.

And when asked why the Chinese were backing the FNLA or UNITA, he stated: "Because the

Soviets are backing the MPLA is the simplest answer."

"It sounds," said Congressman Aspin, "like that is why we are doing it."

"It is," replied Colby.{7}

Nonetheless, the committee, in its later report, asserted that in view of Colby's statement, "The

U.S.'s expressed opposition to the MPLA is puzzling".{8}

Finally, it is instructive to note that all three groups were denounced by the Portuguese as

communists and terrorists.

Before April 1974, when a coup in Portugal ousted the dictatorship, the aid given to the

Angolan resistance movements by their various foreign patrons was sporadic and insignificant,

essentially a matter of the patrons keeping their hands in the game. The coup, however, raised

the stakes, for the new Portuguese government soon declared its willingness to grant

independence to its African colonies.

In an agreement announced on 15 January 1975, the three movements formed a transitional

government with elections to be held in October and formal independence to take place the

following month.

Since 1969, Roberto had been on a $10,000-a-year retainer from the CIA.{9} On 22 January,

the Forty Committee of the National Security Council in Washington authorized the CIA to pass

$300,000 to Roberto and the FNLA for "various political action activities, restricted to non-military

objectives."{10} Such funds of course can always free up other funds for military uses.

In March, the FNLA, historically the most warlike of the groups, attacked MPLA headquarters

and later gunned down 51 unarmed, young MPLA recruits.{11} These incidents served to spark

what was to be a full-scale civil war, with UNITA aligning itself with FNLA against MPLA. The

scheduled elections would never take place.

Also in March, the first large shipment of arms reportedly arrived from the Soviet Union for the

MPLA.{12} The House investigating committee subsequently stated that "Later events have

suggested that this infusion of US aid [the $300,000], unprecedented and massive in the

underdeveloped colony, may have panicked the Soviets into arming their MPLA clients".{13}

The Soviets may have been as much influenced by the fact that China had sent a huge arms

package to the FNLA the previous September and had dispatched over one hundred military

advisers to neighboring Zaire to train Roberto's soldiers only a month after the coup in

Portugal.{14}

The CIA made its first major weapons shipment to the FNLA in July 1975. Thus, like the

Russians and the Chinese, the United States was giving aid to one side of the Angolan civil war

on a level far greater than it had ever provided during the struggle against Portuguese

colonialism.

The United States was directly involved in the civil war to a marked degree. In addition to

training Angolan combat units, US personnel did considerable flying between Zaire and Angola

carrying out reconnaissance and supply missions,{15} and the CIA spent over a million dollars on

an ambitious mercenary program.{16} Several reports appeared in the US press stating that

many American mercenaries were fighting in Angola against the MPLA -- from "scores" to "300" --

and that many others were being recruited and trained in the United States to join them. But John

Stockwell, the head of the CIA's Angola task force, puts the number of American mercenaries who

actually made it to Angola at only 24.{17} However, Holden Roberto was using CIA money, with

the Agency's tacit approval, to recruit many other mercenaries -- over 100 British plus a scattering

of French and Portuguese.{18} The CIA was also directly financing the arming of British

mercenaries.{19} (The mercenaries included amongst their number the well-known Englishman

and psychopath George Cullen who lined up 14 of his fellow soldiers-of-fortune and shot them all

dead because they had mistakenly attacked the wrong side.){20}

Subsequently, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger informed the Senate that "the CIA is not

involved" in the recruitment of mercenaries for Angola.{21}

There were also well over a hundred CIA officers and American military advisers scurrying

about Angola, Zaire, Zambia and South Africa helping to direct the military operations and

practicing their propaganda skills.{22} Through recruited journalists representing major news

services, the Agency was able to generate international coverage for false reports of Soviet

advisers in Angola. One CIA story, announced to the press by UNITA, was that 20 Russians and

35 Cubans had been captured. Another fabrication concerned alleged rapes committed by Cuban

soldiers in Angola; this was elaborated to include their capture, trial, and execution, complete

with photos of the young women killing the Cubans who had raped them.{23}

Both stories were reported widely in the American and British press and elsewhere. Some of

the major newspapers, such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Guardian of

London, were careful to point out that the only source of the information was UNITA and their

articles did not attempt to ascribe any special credence to the reports.{24} But this could not of

course prevent the placing of seeds of belief in the minds of readers already conditioned to

believe the worst about communists.

The disinformation campaign took place within the United States as well. FNLA delegates

came to New York in September to lobby for support at the UN and with the New York press,

distributing as they went copies of a "white paper" on the Angolan conflict prepared at CIA

headquarters but made to look like it was produced in Zaire, French and all.{25} John Stockwell

described the paper as sometimes "false to the point of being ludicrous" and other times "simply

inaccurate".{26}

Afterward, representatives of UNITA went to Washington and presented to members of

Congress, the State Department, the White House and the media, verbal reports about the

situation in Angola which were the product of briefings given them by their CIA case officers.{27}

In January 1976, William Colby sat before the Senate investigating committee and solemnly

assured the Senators:

We have taken particular caution to ensure that our operations are focused abroad

and not at the United States to influence the opinion of the American people about

things from the CIA point of view.{28}

There was virtually no important aspect of the Angolan intervention which Colby, Kissinger,

and other high officials did not misrepresent to Congress and the media.

The odds never favored a military victory for the US-backed forces in Angola, particularly in the

absence of a relatively large-scale American commitment which, given the political atmosphere,

was not in the cards. The MPLA was the most organized and best led of the three factions and

early on controlled the capital city of Luanda, which housed almost the entire governmental

machinery. Yet, for no reason, apparently, other than anti-Soviet spite, the United States was

unwilling to allow a negotiated settlement. When Savimbi of UNITA sent out feelers to the MPLA

in September 1975 to discuss a peaceful solution he was admonished by the CIA. Similarly, the

following month when an MPLA delegation went to Washington to once again express their

potential friendliness to the United States, they received a cool reception, being seen only by a

low-level State Department official.{29}

In November MPLA representatives came to Washington to plead for the release of two Boeing

jet airliners which their government had paid for but which the State Department would not allow

to be exported. John Stockwell relates the unusual development that the MPLA men were

accompanied by Bob Temmons, who until shortly before had been the head of the CIA station in

Luanda, as well as by the president of Boeing. While the two Angolans and the man from Boeing

petitioned the State Department, the CIA man made known to Agency headquarters that he had

come to share the view of the US Consul General in Luanda "that the MPLA was best qualified to

run the country, that it was not demonstrably hostile to the United States, and that the United

States should make peace with it as quickly as possible."

The State Department's response to the MPLA representatives was simple: the price for any

American co-operation with the Angolan government was Soviet influence out, US influence

in.{30} go to notes

At one time or another almost two dozen countries, East and West, felt the urge to intervene in the

conflict. Principal amongst these were the United States, China, South Africa and Zaire on the

side of FNLA/UNITA, and the Soviet Union, Cuba, the Congo Republic and Katangese troops

(Zairian rebels) supporting MPLA. The presence of South African forces on their side cost the

United States and its Angolan allies dearly in support from other countries, particularly in Africa.

Yet, South Africa's participation in the war had been directly solicited by the United States.{31}

In sharp contrast to stated American policy, the CIA and the National Security Agency had been

collaborating with Pretoria's intelligence service since the 1960s and continued to do so in

regard to Angola. One of the principal focuses of the intelligence provided by the US to South

Africa was the African National Congress, the leading anti-apartheid organization which had been

banned and exiled.{32} In 1962, the South African police arrested ANC leader Nelson Mandela

based on information as to his whereabouts and disguise provided them by CIA officer Donald

Rickard. Mandela spent almost 28 years in prison.{33}

In 1977, the Carter administration banned the sharing of intelligence with South Africa, but

this was largely ignored by the American intelligence agencies. Two years earlier, the CIA had

set up a covert mechanism whereby arms were delivered to the South Africans; this practice, in

violation of US law, continued until at least 1978, and a portion of the arms were more than likely

put to use in Angola.{34} South Africa in turn helped to ferry American military aid from Zaire into

Angola.{35}

In fairness to the CIA, it must be pointed out that its people were not entirely oblivious or

insensitive to what South Africa represented. The Agency was very careful about letting its black

officers into the Angola program.{36}

A congressional cutoff of aid to the FNLA/UNITA, enacted in January 1976, hammered a decisive

nail into their coffin. Congressmen did not yet know the full truth about the American operation,

but enough of the public dumbshow had been exposed to make them incensed at how Kissinger,

Colby, et al. had lied to their faces. The consequence was one of the infrequent occasions in

modern times that the US Congress has exercised a direct and pivotal influence upon American

foreign policy. In the process, it avoided the slippery slope to another Vietnam, on top of which

stood Henry Kissinger and the CIA with shoes waxed.{37}

By February, the MPLA, with indispensable help from Cuban troops and Soviet military

equipment, had all but routed their opponents. The Cuban presence in Angola was primarily a

direct response to South African attacks against the MPLA. Wayne Smith, director of the State

Department's Office of Cuban Affairs from 1977 to 1979, has written that "in August and October

[1975] South African troops invaded Angola with full U.S. knowledge. No Cuban troops were in

Angola prior to this intervention."{38}

Savimbi at this time again considered reaching an understanding with the MPLA. The

response from Washington was: Keep fighting. Kissinger personally promised UNITA continued

support if they maintained their resistance, knowing full well that there was no more support to

give. During the two weeks that Savimbi waited for his answer, he lost 600 men in a single

battlefield.{39} Yet, incredibly, less than two months before, the Secretary of State had stated:

"We are not opposed to the MPLA as such ... We can live with any of the factions in Angola."{40}

The man was wholly obsessed with countering Soviet moves anywhere on the planet -- significant

or trivial, real or imagined, fait accompli or anticipated. He was perhaps particularly driven in

this case, for as he later wrote: "Angola represents the first time that the Soviets have moved

militarily at long distance to impose a regime of their choice."{41}

If this seems far removed from how the academics tell us American foreign policy is made, it's

still more plausible than the other explanation commonly advanced for the policy in Angola, viz: it

was done to please Sese Seko Mobutu, the head of Zaire, characterized as America's most

important ally/client in Africa, if not in the Third World.{42} (Zaire was home to the CIA's largest

station in Africa.) Mobutu desired an Angolan government he could sway, primarily to prevent

Angola being used as a sanctuary by his arch foes, the rebels from Katanga province in Zaire.

Accordingly, the Zairian leader committed his US-equipped armed forces into combat in Angola,

on the side of the FNLA, for Holden Roberto happened to be a relation of his, although Roberto

and the FNLA had little else going for them. As Professor Gerald Bender, a leading American

authority on Angola, testified before Congress in 1978:

Although the United States has supported the FNLA in Angola for 17 years, it is

virtually impossible to find an American official, scholar or journalist, who is familiar

with that party, who will testify positively about its organization or leadership. After a

debate with a senior State Department official at the end of the Angolan civil war, I

asked him why the United States ever bet on the FNLA. He replied, "I'll be damned if

I know; I have never seen a single report or memo which suggests that the FNLA has

any organization, solid leaders, or an ideology which we could count on." Even

foreign leaders who have supported Holden Roberto, such as General Mobutu, agree

with that assessment. When asked by a visiting U.S. Senator if he thought Roberto

would make a good leader for Angola, Mobutu replied, "Hell no!"{43}

Kissinger himself told the House investigating committee that promoting the stability of Mobutu

was one of the prime reasons for the American policy in Angola.{44} Yet, even if this were one of

Kissinger's rare truthful remarks about the Angola situation, and even if this could be a valid

justification for serious intervention in a civil war in a third country, his statement challenges, if it

does not defeat, comprehension; for in June 1975, a month before the United States shipped its

first major arms package to the FNLA, Mobutu had accused the US of plotting his overthrow and

assassination, whereupon he expelled the American ambassador (see Zaire chapter).

The Secretary of State, never at a loss for the glib line custom-made for his immediate

audience, also told Israeli officials that failure to stop the Russians in Angola "could encourage

Arab countries such as Syria to run risks that could lead to a new attack on Israel, backed up by

the Russians."{45}

The American ambassador to the United Nations, Daniel Moynihan, did not greatly enhance

the level of discussion when he declared that if the United States did not step in "the Communists

would take over Angola and will thereby considerably control the oil shipping lanes from the

Persian Gulf to Europe. They will be next to Brazil. They will have a large chunk of Africa, and the

world will be different in the aftermath if they succeed."{46} A truly baroque train of thought, and

another example of what cold- war conditioning could do to an otherwise intelligent and educated

person.

With only a change in place names, similar geo-political- domino theories have been put forth

to give a veneer of rationality to so many American interventions. In this case, as in the others

where the "communists" won, nothing of the sort ensued.

"In all respect to Kissinger," Jonathan Kwitny has written, "one really has to question the sanity

of someone who looks at an ancient tribal dispute over control of distant coffee fields and sees in

it a Soviet threat to the security of the United States."{47}

The MPLA in power was restricted by the same domestic and international economic realities

which the FNLA or UNITA would have faced. Accordingly, it discouraged union militancy, dealt

sternly with strikes, exhorted the workers to produce more, entered into commercial contracts with

several multinationals, and did not raise the hammer and sickle over the president's palace.{48}

The MPLA urged Gulf Oil Co. to continue its exclusive operation in Cabinda province and

guaranteed the safety of the American corporation's employees while the fighting was still heavy.

Gulf was completely amenable to this offer, but the CIA and the State Department put pressure on

the company to discontinue its royalty payments to the MPLA, thus jeopardizing the entire oil

venture in a way that the "Marxist" government never did. One aspect of this pressure was a threat

by Kissinger to open an investigation of international bribery by the company. Gulf compromised

by putting its payments into an escrow bank account until the civil war came to an end of sorts a

few months later, at which time payments to the MPLA were resumed.{49}

Contrary to accepted Western belief, Cuba did not enter the Angolan war as a Soviet surrogate.

John Stockwell has noted that after the war the CIA "learned that Cuba had not been ordered into

action by the Soviet Union" but that "the Cuban leaders felt compelled to intervene for their own

ideological reasons."{50} In 1977, the New York magazine Africa Report stated that "The

Cubans have supported [MPLA leader Neto's] pragmatic approach toward Western investment

and his attempts to maintain a foreign policy of non-alignment." The magazine also reported that

on 27 May the Angolan government had announced that, aided by Cuban troops, it had crushed a

rebellion by a faction of the MPLA whose leader claimed to have Soviet support.{51}

The civil war in Angola did not actually come to an end in 1976 as it appeared to, for the fighting

lingered on intermittently, sometimes moderately, sometimes ferociously.

In 1984 a confidential memorandum smuggled out of Zaire revealed that the United Statesand

South Africa had met in November 1983 to discuss destabilization of the Angola government.

Plans were drawn up to supply more military aid to UNITA (the FNLA was now defunct) and

discussions were held on ways to implement a wide range of tactics: unify the anti-government

movements, stir up popular feeling against the government, sabotage factories and transport

systems, seize strategic points, disrupt joint Angola-Soviet projects, undermine relations between

the government and the Soviet Union and Cuba, bring pressure to bear on Cuba to withdraw its

troops, sow divisions in the ranks of the MPLA leadership, infiltrate agents into the Angolan army,

and apply pressure to stem the flow of foreign investments into Angola.

The United States branded the document a forgery, but UNITA's representative in Washington

would neither confirm nor deny that the meeting took place. He stated, however, that UNITA had

"contacts with US officials at all levels on a regular basis".

The aim of the operation, according to the memorandum, was to force part of the Angolan

leadership to negotiate with UNITA, precisely what Washington had successfully discouraged

years earlier.{52}

A month after the reported US-South Africa meeting, the UN Security Council censured South

Africa for its military operations in Angola, and endorsed Luanda's right to reparations. Only the

United States, abstaining, did not support the resolution.{53}

In August 1985, after a three-year battle with Congress, the Reagan administration won a

repeal of the 1976 prohibition against US military aid to rebel forces in Angola. Military

assistance began to flow to UNITA overtly as well as covertly. In January 1987, Washington

announced that it was providing the rebels with Stinger missiles and other anti-aircraft weaponry.

Three months earlier, Jonas Savimbi had spoken before the European Parliament in Strasbourg,

France in an appeal for support. Following his talk, however, a plenary session of the Parliament

criticized American support for the guerrilla leader and passed a resolution which described

UNITA as a "terrorist organization which supports South Africa."{54}

Finally, in September 1992, elections were held, but when it became apparent that the MPLA

would be the winner in a run-off -- in polling which the UN certified to be free and fair -- Savimbi

refused to accept the result. He ended a year-old cease-fire and launched one of UNITA's largest,

most sustained offensives of the war, still being supplied by South Africa, and, in recent years, by

American "private" airlines and "relief" organizations with interesting histories such as previous

contacts to the Nicaraguan contras.{55}

In May 1993, Washington finally recognized the Angolan government. In January, just before

the Clinton administration took over, a senior State Department official had declared: "Unita is

exactly like the Khmer Rouge: elections and negotiations are just one more method of fighting a

war; power is all."{56}

The war -- which had taken more than 300,000 lives -- was still raging in 1994, continuing to

produce widespread hunger and what is said to be the highest amputee rate in the world, caused

by the innumerable land mines.

return to mid-text

NOTES

1. New York Times, 25 September 1975; 19 December 1975.

2. John A. Marcum, The Angolan Revolution, Vol. I, 1950-1962 (MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.,

1969) pp. 229-30.

3. New York Times, 17 December 1964, p. 14.

4. Comparison of the three groups:

a) Jonathan Kwitny, Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World (New York, 1984)

chapter 9;

b) Marcum, Vol. II, 1962-1976 (1978) pp. 14-15, 132, 172 and elsewhere;

c) Basil Davidson, In the Eye of the Storm: Angola's People (London, 1972) passim;

d) Ernest Harsch and Tony Thomas, Angola: The Hidden History of Washington's War (New York,

1976) passim.

International appeals for support made by Roberto and Savimbi: see also New York Times, 4

January 1964, p. 15; Kwitny, p. 136; Declassified Documents Reference System, 1977 volume,

document 210D (cable, 17 July 1964, US embassy Congo to State Department).

5. Kwitny, pp. 132-3.

6. State Department Circular 92, 16 July 1963, cited in Marcum II, p. 16.

7. Hearings before the House Select Committee on Intelligence (The Pike Committee) published

in CIA - The Pike Report (Nottingham, England, 1977) p. 218; hereafter referred to as Pike Report.

(See Notes: Iraq for further information.)

8. Ibid., p. 201.

9. New York Times, 25 September 1975; 19 December.

10. Pike Report, p. 199, the words in quotes are those of the Pike Committee; the date comes from

John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies (New York, 1978) p. 67. Stockwell was a CIA officer and

head of the Agency's Angola task force.

11. Stockwell, pp. 67-8; Marcum II, pp. 257-8 (he cites several international press accounts).

12. New York Times, 25 September 1975

13. Pike Report, p. 199.

14. Stockwell, p. 67.

15. New York Times, 12 December 1975; Harsch and Thomas, p. 100, citing CBS-TV News, 17

December 1975, and Senator John Tunney, 6 January 1976.

16. New York Times, 16 July 1978, p. 1

17. Interview of Stockwell by author.

18. Stockwell, pp. 223-4; see also Harsch and Thomas, pp. 99-100.

19. Chapman Pincher, Inside Story: A Documentary of the Pursuit of Power (London, 1978) p. 20

20. Stockwell, p. 225.

21. New York Times, 16 July 1978, referring to Kissinger's statement of 29 January 1976.

22. Stockwell, pp. 162, 177-8

23. Ibid., pp. 194-5, plus interview of Stockwell by author.

24. The capture of Russians and Cubans story appeared in the press 22 November 1975; the rape

story, 12 March 1976.

25. Stockwell, p. 196.

26. San Francisco Chronicle, 9 May 1978.

27. Stockwell, pp. 196-8.

28. Foreign and Military Intelligence, Book 1, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study

Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (US Senate), 26 April 1976, p.

129.

29. Stockwell, p. 193.

30. Ibid., pp. 205-6 ("Bob Temmons" is probably a pseudonym); after the war ended, the State

Department did release the planes to Angola.

31. Newsweek (International Edition), 17 May 1976, p. 23, implicitly admitted to by South African

Prime Minister Balthazar Johannes Vorster.

32. New York Times, 16 July 1978, p. 1; 23 July 1986, p. 1; Stockwell, pp. 208, 218; Stephen

Talbot, "The CIA and BOSS: Thick as Thieves" in Ellen Ray, et al., eds., Dirty Work 2: The CIA in

Africa (New Jersey, 1979) pp. 266-75 (BOSS is the South African Bureau of State Security); Bob

Woodward, VEIL: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987 (New York, 1987), p. 269.

33. The Guardian (London), 15 August 1986; The Times (London) 4 August 1986, p. 10.

34. New York Times, 25 March 1982, p. 7, citing a report of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

35. Stockwell, p. 209.

36. Ibid., p. 75.

37. Stockwell, pp. 216-17 discusses how this came about.

38. Wayne S. Smith, "Dateline Havana: Myopic Diplomacy", Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.)

Fall 1982, p. 170.

39. Stockwell, pp. 234-5.

40. New York Times, 24 December 1975, p 7.

41. Henry Kissinger, American Foreign Policy (New York, 1977, third edition), p. 317.

42. See, for example, New York Times, 25 September 1975.

43. Hearings before the Subcommittee on Africa of the House Committee on International

Relations, 25 May 1978, p. 7.

44. Pike Report, p. 200.

45. New York Times, 9 January 1976, p. 3.

46. Washington Post, 18 December 1975, p. A23.

47. Kwitny, p. 148.

48. Harsch and Thomas, pp. 82-91; New York Times, 8 February 1981, IV, p. 5.

49. Stockwell, pp. 203-4, 241; plus interview of Stockwell by author.

50. Stockwell, p. 172.

51. Galen Hull, "Internationalizing the Shaba Conflict", Africa Report (New York) July-August

1977, p. 9. For further discussion of possible Soviet connection to the rebellion and the Russian

attitude toward Angola, see Jonathan Steele, "Soviet Relations with Angola and Mozambique" in

Robert Cassen, ed., Soviet Interests in the Third World (Published by Sage for the Royal Institute

of International Affairs, London, 1985), p. 290.

52. The Observer (London), 22 January 1984.

53. The Guardian (London), 21 December 1983.

54. The Times (London), 23 October 1986, p. 8; the vote in the European Parliament was

152-150.

55. The Guardian (London), 25 June 1990, p. 10; Sharon Beaulaurier, "Profiteers Fuel War in

Angola", Covert Action Quarterly (Washington, DC), No. 45, Summer 1993, pp. 61-65.

56. New York Times, 17 January 1993, IV, p. 5.

This is a chapter from Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II by

William Blum

Killing Hope