Word: savimbi
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Three years ago, Neto's Moscow-backed Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (M.P.L.A.) appeared to have won control of the former Portuguese territory in a bloody civil war against two Western-supported independence groups: Holden Roberto's National Front for the Liberation of Angola (F.N.L.A.) and Jonas Savimbi's National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). In fact, the civil war never really ended, and Neto's Popular Movement government, even with Cuban assistance, has not been able to establish jurisdiction over a country that is larger than Britain, France, Portugal and West Germany combined...
...Three years ago, the Cubans helped the Marxist faction of President Agostinho Neto win a civil war in Angola against two other nationalist groups. The Cubans stayed on to shore up Neto's Popular Movement government and to carry on the fighting against the pesky UNITA guerrillas of Jonas Savimbi in the southern part of the country. Last year the Cubans moved into Ethiopia in a big way. Reinforced by huge supplies of Soviet equipment, they helped the unstable Marxist junta in Addis Ababa drive Somali insurgents out of Ethiopia's Ogaden desert region. Now the Ethiopians, with the reluctant...
...provinces, and see that it had some competition in the pre-independence elections. The CIA decided to shore up two other guerrilla groups, the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) under Holden Roberto and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) led by Jonas Savimbi. But before long, says Stockwell, the looking-glass warriors at Langley began to view Angola as "our war," and the goal became victory for the pro-Western groups. To that end, Stockwell says, the agency not only got directly involved in the spreading fighting, which soon swept the elections away...
...beginning. Eventually, he says, a "dualism" about the operation developed: "The people in the field were going all out. But back home, people gradually got timid." When the agency finally decided to pull out, it sent a final payment of $1,376,700 in conscience money to Roberto and Savimbi through Kinshasa. The cash, Stockwell claims, was pocketed by Zaire President Mobutu Sese Seko...
...rarely heard about), and Stockwell's broadside is overdrawn in important respects. For instance, others who are familiar with the Angolan drama maintain it was not U.S. activity that provoked the heavy Soviet-Cuban response but South Africa's early move to send troops to support Savimbi. The South African forces moved in so swiftly that they almost captured Angola's capital, Luanda, before independence came. As for the CIA itself, Stockwell ridicules it as a bungling old-boy outfit fraught with favoritism and burdened with middle-grade mediocrities. He calls William Colby, who was CIA director...