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| Kissinger Watch #3 - 02 | |
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| Angola II - Old files contradict U.S. account of war | |
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| Howard W. French The New York Times (source: International Herald Tribune) Tuesday, April 2, 2002 | |
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| 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 U.S., Chinese and Russian interests, and Cuban and South African soldiers. Now, coinciding with the death in February of Washington's longtime rebel ally in Angola, Jonas Savimbi, a trove of recently declassified U.S. documents seems 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 CIA 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 CIA reports which were done at the time, the Cubans were totally out of the picture," 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 Gleijeses' research shows that the Cuban intervention came in response to a CIA-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 Marxist party quickly defeated the United States' first ally in the war, the National Front for the Liberation of Angola, based in Zaire. Then, in a decisive but little known battle at the village of Ebo in November 1975, 1,300 Cuban troops battled a much larger South African column, halting its advance. The United States gradually switched its support to Savimbi's movement, UNITA, and continued to support it intermittently during nearly two decades of devastating warfare. Gleijeses' research documents significant coordination between the United States and South Africa, from joint training missions to airlifts, and bluntly contradicts the official congressional testimony of the era, as well as the memoirs of Henry 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 Gleijeses' recently published history of the conflict, "Conflicting Missions, Havana, Washington and Africa, 1959-1976" (Chapel Hill). "The book does seem to have nailed Henry quite specifically on this question," said Thomas Hughes, a former director of intelligence for the State Department during that period. The book, Hughes said, "is an impressive account; a sad story that seems to be written almost out of a feeling that it might be lost. "It is an amazing story of Cuban resourcefulness and persistence." But in the end, Hughes said, the Cubans' commitment meant little. "Angola, where they won, has been a disaster for 30 years; so you can hardly speak of a triumph." The book strongly challenges common perceptions of Cuban behavior in Africa. In the 1960s and 1970s, when Havana and Washington clashed repeatedly in central and southern Africa, Cuban troops in the continent were typically seen as Soviet foot soldiers. In fact, Gleijeses writes, Cuba intervened in Angola without seeking Soviet permission and persisted in the face of balky support from Moscow. 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 Gleijeses' work, several former senior U.S. diplomats who were involved in making Angola policy 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 Kissinger's assistant secretary of state for African affairs in July 1975 over the Angola intervention. He is now a humanities professor at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. Davis said he could find no fault with Gleijeses' scholarship. Asked why the story of America responding to Cuban intervention in Angola had persisted for so long, he 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. In a White House meeting Dec. 3, 1975, Kissinger repeatedly urged the Chinese to resume training of anti-government forces in Angola, but they demurred, citing U.S. collaboration with South Africa. "Please understand this with regard to African countries, even the small ones," said the Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping. "They are extremely sensitive on matters involving national pride." | |
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