3 November 1989, C-SPAN: American University: John Stockwell: Secret Wars of the CIA
May 1978, John Stockwell: In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story (PDF)
MARCH 31, 2002
From Old Files, a New Story Of U.S. Role in Angolan War
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
In the summer of 1975, with the cold war raging and the memory of Saigon's fall terribly fresh, the United States sponsored a covert operation to prevent another Communist takeover, this time across the world, in Angola.
The effort failed to keep a Marxist government from taking power but ushered in a long and chaotic civil war, involving American, Chinese and Russian interests, and Cuban and South African soldiers.
Now, coinciding with the death last month of Washington's longtime rebel ally in Angola, Jonas Savimbi, a trove of recently declassified American documents seem to overturn conventional explanations of the war's origins.
Historians and former diplomats who have studied the documents say they show conclusively that the United States intervened in Angola weeks before the arrival of any Cubans, not afterward as Washington claimed. Moreover, though a connection between Washington and South Africa, which was then ruled by a white government under the apartheid policy, was strongly denied at the time, the documents appear to demonstrate their broad collaboration.
''When the United States decided to launch the covert intervention, in June and July, not only were there no Cubans in Angola, but the U.S. government and the C.I.A. were not even thinking about any Cuban presence in Angola,'' said Piero Gleijeses, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University, who used the Freedom of Information Act to uncover the documents. Similarly, cables of the time have now been published by the National Security Archive, a private research group.
''If you look at the C.I.A. reports which were done at the time, the Cubans were totally out of the picture,'' Dr. Gleijeses said. But in reports presented to the Senate in December 1975, ''what you find is really nothing less than the rewriting of history.''
Cuba eventually poured 50,000 troops into Angola in support of a Marxist independence group, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola. The group held the capital in the months just before independence from Portugal, declared in August 1975.
But Dr. Gleijeses's research shows that the Cuban intervention came in response to a C.I.A.-financed covert invasion via neighboring Zaire, now known as Congo, and South Africa's simultaneous drive on the capital, using troops who posed as Western mercenaries.
The United States gradually switched its support to Mr. Savimbi's movement, Unita, and continued to support it intermittently during nearly two decades of warfare.
Dr. Gleijeses's research documents significant coordination between the United States and South Africa, from joint training missions to airlifts, and bluntly contradicts the Congressional testimony of the era and the memoirs of Henry A. Kissinger, the former secretary of state.
The work draws heavily on White House, State Department and National Security Council memorandums, as well as extensive interviews and archival research in Cuba, Angola, Germany and elsewhere. It was carried out in preparation of Dr. Gleijeses's recently published history of the conflict, ''Conflicting Missions, Havana, Washington and Africa, 1959-1976'' (Chapel Hill).
The book strongly challenges common perceptions of Cuban behavior in Africa. In the 1960's and 1970's, when Havana and Washington clashed repeatedly in central and southern Africa, Cuban troops in the continent were typically seen as foot soldiers for Soviet imperialism.
In fact, Dr. Gleijeses writes, Cuba intervened in Angola without seeking Soviet permission. Eager not to derail an easing of tension with Washington, the Soviets limited themselves to providing 10 charter flights to transport Cubans to Angola in January 1976. The next year, Havana and Moscow supported opposite sides in an attempted coup in Angola, in which the Marxist government, Cuba's ally, prevailed.
After reviewing Dr. Gleijeses's work, several former senior United States diplomats who were involved in making policy toward Angola broadly endorsed its conclusions.
''Considering that things came to a head over covert action in the U.S. government in mid-July, there is no reason to believe we were responding to Cuban involvement in Angola,'' said Nathaniel Davis, who resigned as Mr. Kissinger's assistant secretary of state for African affairs in July 1975 over the Angola intervention.
Mr. Davis said he could find no fault with Mr. Gleijeses's scholarship. Asked why the story of America responding to Cuban intervention in Angola had persisted for so long, Mr. Davis said: ''Life is funny. What catches on in terms of public debate is hard to predict.''
The United States denied collaboration with South Africa during the Angolan war, but it was quickly discovered by China, an erstwhile American ally against the Marxists in Angola, and was suspected and deeply resented by Washington's main African partners.