Castro's secret war exposed

[hist2004]

How Washington Lost its Nerve and how the Cubans subdued Angola
by Robert Moss

How Fidel Castro's 15,000 Cuban invaders of Angola, armed by Russia, won a victory by default over the anti-Communist forces is told in detail for the first time in an exhaustive study, which begins on this page today, of this largely secret war.
The author, Robert Moss, shows that the United States, having begged South Africa to put troops in to offset the Communist intervention, lost its nerve and failed to stop the great build-up of men, guns and aircraft from across the seas, which had started, trucked right across the African continent, way back in 1964.
The Russians' motives were far from ideological. They were after oil, diamonds, minerals - and naval bases.
Only now, when the war is nominally over but guerrilla resistance continues, does the truth of this extraordinary adventure begin to emerge.
The pro-Communist forces outnumbered the anti-Communists by 10 to 1 in weaponry. Ten times as many Cubans as South Africans went in. But it was failure of will which determined the issue in the end.
New details gathered in South Africa, Washington, Barbados, Lisbon, Paris, Madrid, Jerusalem and the States neighbouring Angola show how the plot was hatched, the war fought and the political capitulation of the West ensured. The captured diary of a Cuban soldier vividly recreates what it was like for these interlopers in a black civil war.

On the morning of October 7, 1975, a company of teenage soldiers from Jonas Savimbi's anti- Soviet UNITA movement was heading west through central Angola. The men belonged to one of three black guerrilla movements which had been promised a share in Angola's independence from Portugal, then only a month away. Their mission was to intercept a column of pro-Soviet MPLA forces that was reported to be striking east towards Nova Lisboa, Angola's second biggest city.

The UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) column had started out from its base in Silva Porto with two old Panhard armoured cars (a gift from President Mobutu of Zaire) but one had broken down along the way. Its other weaponry was not impressive: three jeep-mounted anti-tank missile launchers, two 106mm recoilless guns, and four .50 Browning machine-guns. But at this stage that was virtually the full inventory of UNITA's hardware.

The column included 14 South African infantry instructors acting as advisers, led by a major. They were tough professionals who had volunteered to go to the aid of UNITA in what had so far been a losing battle against superior Soviet-supplied weapons. They wore UNITA uniforms.

Some four-and-a-half miles outside the village of Norton de Matos, the little column reached a bridge. Scouts were sent forward, and reported that the enemy was not in sight. But then a spotter plane appeared overhead, and one of the black soldiers opened up on it with a machine-gun. This was the signal for all hell to break loose. From over the brow of the hills beyond the river the concealed MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) forces opened up with recoilless guns, light artillery, air-burst mortars - and five Soviet-built T-34 tanks with Cuban crews joined in.

The South African major's jeep was knocked out from under him by an armour-piercing projectile from one of the tanks, but he escaped uninjured. UNITA's young soldiers - who had had only two weeks to prepare them for war - scattered in confusion. But UNITA's solitary armoured car, commanded by a South African lieutenant, swung forward and lobbed a 90mm shell into one of the Soviet tanks, which disappeared in flames. The South Africans managed to knock out a second tank with one of UNITA's 106mm guns. After this the other three Soviet tanks pulled back.

While the enemy mortars kept up an intensive fire, the South Africans, ducking and weaving, slammed six anti-tank missiles towards the hidden positions, without any certainty of hitting anything. But a UNITA patrol subsequently claimed that 116 of the enemy had been killed. There were no South African casualties.

This skirmish at an obscure spot in central Angola (never before reported) was the first armed confrontation between the Cubans and the South Africans, the prelude to an extraordinary war in which one of the most brazen land-grabs that the Russians and their satellites have attempted proved to be successful - not because of victory on the battlefield, but because of the political failure of the United States to deliver sufficient support to the anti-Soviet guerrillas.

The Communist invasion of Angola is one of the most decisive, and most sombre, turning- points in the whole period since 1945. It is the story of how more than 15,000 troops from a sugar-cane republic in the Caribbean were transported 6,000 miles across the Atlantic to serve as the Gurkhas of the Soviet Empire, and how a pro-Communist Government in Lisbon, and a number of Third World Governments, smoothed the way for that invasion.

It is also the story of how the South Africans - supposedly pariahs - were begged by the United States and by moderate black African leaders to put troops into Angola to offset the Communist intervention. By the end of a lightning armoured offensive the South Africans came within a hair's breadth of securing a total military victory for the anti-Communist black movements of Angola. Why that victory was thrown away is the most complex story of all. But the most damning factor was the failure of nerve in Washington.

In an age of televised battles, the war for Angola was a remarkably secret war, and the truth of what happened is only slowly beginning to seep out. The Cubans have just produced their authorised version, in the form of a book-length article published by the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the Mexican magazine Progreso. In the midst of a wealth of factual detail, his account is littered with distortions and plain untruths.

For example, Garcia Marquez states that the decision to send Cuban combat soldiers into Angola was taken on November 5, 1975. But Cuban troops were on the battlefield months before then. He gives the impression of a triumphal Cuban march to the south in the early months of 1976, but does not mention that it took the Cubans more than two months to occupy the territory that the South Africans vacated after they took the political decision to withdraw.

But there are two basic truths in the Garcia Marquez account. The first is that the Cuban invasion was encouraged by the belief that the Americans, after Vietnam, Watergate and the witch-hunt against the CIA, were in no shape to respond effectively to Communist aggression. The second is that the Cubans were confident that, if they ran into real trouble, their Russian sponsors would not allow them to fail.

Plundering Tiger and her savage cubs

It was a war of camouflage. Both the Cubans and the South Africans went into Angola at the outset wearing civilian clothes or other people's uniforms. Cuban volunteers (such as the three wounded prisoners who were taken to South Africa for medical treatment) were told that they were being sent to work on a building project, or to undergo a a political training course in Russia. The first South African instructors with UNITA were ordered to talk only in English and to describe themselves, if asked, as English.

I cannot profess to write the secret history of the Angola war in full, but this narrative (based on authoritative sources in several non-Communist countries) will tell a great deal that has never been told before. First, there is the Communist invasion of Angola and how it was achieved; then the course of the war, including the battle for Luanda, the capital; and then the United States' capitulation, which has brought, in President Kaunda's chilling phrase, a "plundering tiger and her savage cubs" to the gates of Rhodesia, South Africa, and the moderate black African States.

The Russians had been deeply involved in Angola since the early 1960s. In 1956 the rigidly pro-Soviet Portuguese Communist Party had helped to found the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, in which Dr. Agostinho Neto - a mulatto who had helped to set up a clandestine Communist group during his student days in Oporto - emerged as the dominant figure. In the early 1960s the MPLA established its first contacts with the Cubans, who were helping to run a training camp for African guerrillas at Dolisie in Congo-Brazzaville. A number of MPLA cadres also received training in Cuba during this period.

In 1964 the Portuguese Communist leader Alvaro Cunhal set up a meeting for Agostinho Neto with the Soviet leaders in Moscow. This was the trigger for a more ambitious Soviet support programme. The Russians began shipping consignments of arms and food to Dar-es- Salaam, from where they were trucked to the MPLA via Zambia. Soviet merchant vessels laden with small arms, AK-47 rifles, RPG-7 rocket launchers, and mortars became a familiar sight in Tanzanian waters. The Russians also began doling out a cash subsidy ranging between $150,000 and $300,000 a year.

Most significant, perhaps, the Russians began to receive a regular intake of MPLA recruits for training at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism (for aspiring commissars), at the army camp at Simferopol in the Ukraine (for rank-and-file soldiers), and at the Frunzi military college (for officer material). One of the graduates of Frunzi was Iko Carreira who, as the MPLA's Minister of Defence, was to play a critical role in the secret talks that led to the Cuban invasion of Angola.

Soviet aid to the MPLA diminished between 1972 and 1974, apparently as a result of the movement's miserable performance in guerrilla operations against the Portuguese. There was a sharp renewal of interest in the MPLA, however, just before the coup in Lisbon on April 25, 1974, that set the scene for the decolonisation of Portuguese Africa.

The Portuguese Communists were deeply involved in the coup, and the Russians had at least six weeks' forewarning of it. But for the Russians the key strategic objective was not Portugal itself, but Portugal's African possessions - above all Angola, rich in oil, diamonds and other minerals, and occupying a vital geopolitical position. UNITA sources have claimed that as early as 1969 the Russians concluded a secret treaty with the MPLA leader Neto under which they undertook to guarantee continued support in return for a pledge that, if the MPLA succeeded, it would allow Russia to set up naval bases in Angola.

The Portuguese announced their plans for decolonisation in August, 1974. In the second half of that year, the Russians shipped arms valued at $6 million to the MPLA via Dar-es-Salaam. They also opened up a new route for arms deliveries via Congo-Brazzaville. Weapons were either shipped to the Congolese port of Pointe Noire, and then smuggled into the Cabinda enclave by truck, or flown into the Maya Maya air base, outside Brazzaville, and ferried into Angola by small vessels plying the deserted north-western coast or by small cargo planes.

At this stage, the Portuguese High Commissioner in Angola was Admiral Rosa Coutinho, the "Red Admiral", notorious for his pro-MPLA sympathies. Sources close to the leaders of the rival National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) claimed that the bitter hostility that Rosa Coutinho displayed towards the FNLA and its leader, Holden Roberto, was connected with the indignities inflicted on him when, as a young colonial army officer based at Santo Antonio de Zaire, he was captured by FNLA troops and imprisoned in Kinshasa for six months. Holden Roberto's brother-in-law is President Mobutu of Zaire.



Rocket Launchers for the MPLA

Whatever the explanation, Rosa Coutinho made no attempt to curb the delivery of Soviet-bloc weapons to the MPLA after he was appointed High Commissioner in 1974. His immediate successor, Air Force General Silva Cardoso, was less partisan. In April, 1975, he stopped a Yugoslav vessel from unloading its full cargo of arms in Luanda harbour, but the rest of the cargo got through, smuggled by fishing vessels and Soviet-made landing craft from Pointe Noire.

It fell to General Silva Cardoso (who was abruptly sacked in July, on the pretext of "physical and psychological exhaustion") to preside over the disintegration of the political formula for Angola's future that had been agreed on at a conference at Alvor in Portugal and signed on January 15, 1975. The three Angolan guerrilla movements were to have striven in a transitional Government to prepare for a general election on October 30, and independence on November 11. They were also supposed to provide 8,000 men each for a national defence force.



But the MPLA and its backers had no intention of sharing power with anyone, still less of holding general elections in which UNITA - because of its political base among the Ovimbundu peoples, the largest ethnic group in the country - would almost certainly have swept the board. Between April and August, 1975, Soviet-bloc arms flowed in through the ports of Luanda, Dar-es-Salaam and Pointe Noire, and the Russians also embarked on a major airlift of arms by Soviet military transports landing in Brazzaville.




The MPLA was being equipped for conventional war with rocket-launchers and with T-54 and T-34 tanks and field artillery. In contrast the FNLA and UNITA were still equipped with sidearms and little else. Although the CIA was authorised to spend $300,000 in covert support for the FNLA in January, 1975, supplies started to trickle through in significant quantities only in July - partly the result of holdups in Kinshasa, where the local officials are not famed for their efficiency or incorruptibility.



But it was no good supplying weapons without teaching the MPLA how to use them. In December, 1974, a large contingent of MPLA officers and NCOs had been flown to Russia for intensive training. But early in 1975 a more momentous decision was taken: to put Cuban instructors into Angola.



Cuba's Deputy Foreign Minister, Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, publicly admitted (in a speech in December, 1975) that there were already 230 Cuban military instructors in the MPLA in the spring of 1975. Some may have been transferred around this time to the fort of Massangano. On July 25 another 50 Cubans arrived by plane in Brazzaville to help assemble arms stocked at Pointe Noire.

Left-wing Portuguese officers who had visited Havana in July had undertaken (according to the Garcia Marquez version) to secure formal Portuguese approval for Cuban aid to the MPLA. In August the MPLA Defence Minister, Iko Carreira, visited Moscow and asked for Soviet troops to support his movement. The Russians immediately rejected his request, no doubt fearing American intervention, but it was suggested to Carreira that he should put the same request to the Cubans. Soon afterwards Carreira met three senior Cuban advisers in Luanda, and it became their task to sound out Castro.

Despite the involvement of the Cubans in other parts of Africa, the Middle East and the Caribbean, some well-placed Western sources believe that Castro did not immediately become fired with enthusiasm for this new prospect of ideological derring-do. His main fear was that the Americans would retaliate - possibly by direct action, or at least by a blockade, against Cuba. The pitiful state of the Cuban economy and the slender defence budget (a nominal $300 million a year) might have been another disincentive. But the Russians made it clear that they would be footing the bills, and are said to have offered secret assurances that they would enter the Angolan conflict directly in the event of American intervention.

At the same time, a series of radical black African Governments, including Guinea-Bissau, Guinea-Conakry, Mozambique, and the Congo-Brazzaville, plus Algeria, pressed Castro to send in troops.

First move made by the Cubans

Western intelligence sources believe that Castro had already decided on the full-scale invasion before Oscar Oramas, one of the Cuban advisers who had been to Luanda, met him in Havana in the last week of August to warn him of the possibility that the South Africans - who had kept closely in touch with both the FNLA and UNITA behind the scenes - might eventually step in on the side of the rival movements. In any event, the fact that the decision to commit Cuban troops to a combat role was taken long before November 5 (the date given by Garcia Marquez) is demonstrated by the course of events over the following weeks. Cuban troops went into battle in Angola two months in advance of the South Africans.

On August 16, 200 more Cuban instructors reached Luanda, where the MPLA was now in uncontested control. During August UNITA sources reported that some of the Cubans transferred south to Lobito and Benguela, where the Cubans established a training camp and a supply base. In the bitter fighting in which the MPLA seized control of Lobito, a traditional UNITA stronghold, that same month, "yellow-faced men who spoke Spanish" are said to have fought with the MPLA. In September, on the northern front, the FNLA found the bodies of two Cubans in a burned-out armoured car.

From late September, the arrival of Cuban troops steadily accelerated. As with the arms shipments, Congo-Brazzaville was the key transhipment point. President Marien Ngouabi was promised his reward for services rendered when he visited Havana in mid-September. Fidel Castro promised him some expensive military assistance, including the gift of six Soviet-built patrol boats (the Congo republic had only two), Soviet MiG fighters, and training in Cuba for Congolese commandos.

Pilots for the Soviet fighters

At Pointe Noire, war supplies were already being landed, stored and trans-shipped. On September 25 the Cuban vessel Vietnam Heroico docked at Pointe Noire with 20 armoured vehicles, 30 army trucks and 120 Cuban soldiers. On October 5 another Cuban ship, the Cerro Palado, docked with another 350 troops, who were taken by plane to the northern front.

Then La Playa de Habana docked on October 12 with another 500 troops. The previous day 270 Cubans, including pilots, had reached Brazzaville by air. On October 14 a Cuban Communist Party delegation turned up in Brazzaville and assured the MPLA that Cuba would provide the pilots to fly the MiG-21s and MiG-17s that were being supplied by Russia. That was the day that a South African armoured column crossed the Angolan border from its base headquarters at Runtu.

On October 16, Russian transport aircraft landed another 800 Cuban soldiers at Brazzaville. These and subsequent Soviet flights made use of landing rights at Algiers and Conakry. On October 18 and 19 the 500 Cubans who had sailed in La Playa de Habana were flown to Angola in Soviet military planes. The following day another 750 Cubans were landed at Novo Redondo, south of Luanda, by coastal vessels. On October 26, 160 Cubans landed at the Maya Maya air base and left the same day for Angola.

As Castro's men continued to arrive, the quantity and quality of the Soviet war material shipped to Pointe Noire increased spectacularly: MiG-21 jet fighters in parts (to be assembled in Congo-Brazzaville), tanks, armoured vehicles, rocket launchers and small arms. Many of these weapons were transferred to huge arms depots set up inside Angola, at Porto Amboin and Quicama, ready to be used by the Cuban reinforcements as they came in.

By Angola's independence day, November 11, there were at least 4,000 Cuban troops based in Angola. Some 2,500 of them were stationed in Luanda and on the Quifangondo front, where their presence enabled the MPLA to fight off the FNLA's drive towards the capital. Hence it is nonsense to make out that Cuba's decision to send in major combat units was taken only in early November, after South Africa's intervention.

In the two months after independence the strength of the Cuban forces in Angola was increased to over 15,000. Some of the troops came from the special infantry of the Interior Ministry (the equivalent of the KGB's special troops, who are experts in internal repression), but more were "volunteers", drawn from the ranks of former national servicemen, who were offered substantial pay increases to make the trip. Not everyone was told that he was going to war.

Sergeant Esequiel Mustelier, a 23-year old small farmer from Oriente province, who was captured by the South Africans in the Cariango area on December 10, claimed that he had left Angola on what he believed to be a peaceful mission, to build schools in Angola.

Carlos Maru Mesa, and Roberto Morales Bellma, taken prisoner on December 12, claimed they had left Cuba believing that they were being sent on a political course in Russia.

The Barbadian Connection

How did the Cuban troop-planes get to Angola? The favourite refuelling point for the Russian-made Ilyushins and British-built Britannias leaving Jose Marti airport between october and mid-December, 1975, was Barbados. Security at Seawell airport was slack, it was a long way outside the capital, Bridgetown, and few people seemed to have noticed the night flights in the first few weeks. Barbados is one of the few places in the Caribbean where there is still a largely carefree mood, and where officials are apt to think the best rather than the worst of all comings and goings.

It is not clear whether the Barbadian Government gave the green light. But the then Prime Minister, Mr. Errol Barrow, conceded in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph that there may have been as many as 50 flights before he was forced to lodge a formal protest with the Cubans on December 17. Other observers say that at the height of the airlift there were between 10 and 15 flights a week, and as many as five in a single night. It is impossible to believe that Mr. Barrow's Government did not know from very early on about these mysterious planes.

American pressure finallt stopped the flights, although there was a wrangle within the American Embassy at the time over how much pressure should be applied. The black American Ambassador, Theodore Britton, was accused by the head of his political section of trying to "ingratiate" himself with Barrow.

This official, William Diedrich, has claimed that Mr. Britton failed to take a firm line on the troop movements. Diedrich was moved from Barbados after what he calls "a difference of opinion" with the Ambassador.

He maintains that it was clearly a military airlift, but the Barbadian authorities prevaricated by telling the Americans they were investigating. Diedrich also says that the Ambassador was "not taken in" but rather than show greater firmness he appeared to accept what Barrow told him.

Barrow told The Sunday Telegraph that he was unaware of the true nature of the Cubana flights. He also insisted that the Cubans had never made any kind of approach to him seeking permission to send their troop planes through Barbados.

What does not seem to be in dispute is that each plane carried about 100 men. They were wearing civilian clothing but were carrying briefcases containing weapons. The baggage holds of the aircraft reportedly carried loads of small arms, light artillery, small cannons and mortars.

After the Barbados connection was cut off, the Cubans turned to Eric Williams, the Prime Minister of Trinidad, for the same facilities. But he refused, on the ground that he was not ready to back foreign intervention in Angola. However, the Cubans soon found more amenable countries.

The Portuguese played a key part in getting the Cubans to Angola around Christmas, 1975. Britannia-31s flown by Cubana de Aviacion were allowed refuelling facilities at the airbase on the island of Santa Maria in the Azores. The pattern was the same with five flights in the last days of December: the Cubans would land at night with their internal lights dimmed, and without declaring their cargo. No passengers would disembark.

But Portuguese military intelligence officers established that the flight from Havana on December 20 contained 94 passengers en route to Guinea-Bissau. Another 259 passengers were on four succeeding flights.

Senior Portuguese officers say that American pressure finally persuaded the Portuguese to cut off refuelling facilities, which had been initially granted on the personal authority of the then President, General Costa Gomes.

The tremendous logistical exercise that was mounted to get the Cubans and their equipment to Angola went virtually unreported at the time, and Western intelligence services were sometimes slow to pick up definite news of some of the key items that were being smuggled in. But the Cubans ran into plenty of snags along the way. Some of the small coasters used to trans-ship arms and men from the Congo republic into northern Angola were sabotaged: two were blown up by Portuguese agents in contact with the French intelligence service, and at least three more were blown up by South African commandos.

What was life like at the front for a Cuban gunner or rifleman - typically, a farm labourer or textile worker of 22 or 23 who had started his national service at the age of 16? The diary of a young soldier who was posted to an area near Quibala, the scene of the biggest battles that took place in Angola in December 1975, gave some insights.

He left Havana on "a huge plane" on November 4 (the day before Castro - according to his apologists - gave the order to invade Angola) and his flight took 28 hours. "They forbid us to take any documents or any proof of our identity," he noted in the first entry in the diary, "but everyone knows that there are Cubans in Angola."
One of the first things that struck him was the quantity of arms and ammunition stockpiled for the invading force. "I was fascinated with all the weapons that were lying around there, without belonging to anyone. It's just unreal, the amount of money which is wasted in war, and just for peanuts." Unlike many of his colleagues, it seems that he was a Christian, since he was shocked by the discovery in "a small deserted church which was abandoned by the Portuguese" of "a lot of English magazines with naked women."

Within a week or two of his arrival, he was complaining about the poor fighting quality of his MPLA allies. On November 21 he noted that "this morning, two of our armoured cars and a truck were unexpectedly destroyed by the enemy, while they were on patrol. These Angolans are really careless."

Two days later he was complaining that the blacks were unwilling to dig foxholes at night, even though the enemy guns were dug in nearby. The following day, the Cuban/MPLA forces suffered heavy losses: "38 killed, hundreds of prisoners, eight armoured cars destroyed and many people wounded."

As the campaign progressed, food, hygiene and wild rumours about the savagery of the enemy became nagging preoccupations. "These past few days, the food has not been sufficient for us, but thanks to God there are a lot of cattle around here. I found a bow and arrow, so I used it to hunt just like the primitive tribes used to do." Since UNITA controlled the richest agricultural lands in Angola throughout most of the campaign, the MPLA and its Cuban allies often went hungry - although the fact that the Cubans received airlifts of such delicacies as Hungarian sausage and East German pickles was a constant irritant for their black comrades.

Like any front-line soldier, the Cuban was soon worrying about hygiene. On December 1 he noted, "While in bed I killed 52 fleas. Yes, I counted them because they are like wild beasts, and they bit." By this stage, he had at least acquired a black girl to bring him coffee and other comforts.

On November 29 he was worrying about rumours that 18 Cuban prisoners had been eaten alive by black soldiers on the other side. "The news came from two or three of our troops who managed to escape." Similar stories had currency on both sides throughout the war. As the Cuban's diary indicates later on, the Cubans found it expedient to circulate rumours about enemy savagery in order to prevent their black auxiliaries from running away.

It was a war in which there were few creature-comforts, apart from the occasional cache of Angolan wine put away by some white settler who had taken flight. But the Cubans, officer and man, had one luxury: a weekly ration of 20 Havana cigars or cigarettes if they preferred.

The Cubans took some very hard knocks. At the Battle of Bridge 14, in the area north of Santa Comba on December 9, they lost 90 men. At a battle near Quibala on December 14 another 50 Cubans were killed. The seriously wounded Cuban soldiers were flown out to East Germany for treatment - apparently in order not to demoralise the people at home. Stories were current among the men in the field of refrigerator ships that were sent to take away the bodies of Cuban dead.

The Cubans' combat performance in Angola did little to create a Vietcong-type of myth of invincibility - at least among those who know what the fighting was really like. Nor did the propaganda talk about "revolutionary solidarity" or Castro's efforts to make out that there was some special affinity between the Angolan and Cuban peoples ("African blood runs in our veins") enable the expeditionary force to avoid friction with the people it was supposedly helping. Cuban prisoners were forthright in their views about their Angolan allies.

Standard complaints were that the MPLA were poorly trained and "a band of cowards." MPLA prisoners said many Cubans were "racists" who insisted on privileges denied to the black troops and who ruthlessly shot any black soldier who tried to retreat after his officers had already fled. Such tensions are still simmering. There was a report earlier this month of a clash in a barracks in southern Angola in which 10 Cubans were killed by the MPLA.

Castro's African safari has not ended with Angola. He made that plain in a speech on July 26, 1976, in which he declared that "Cuban military units and the necessary weapons have remained in Angola... This will continue as long as necessary...And Cuban soldiers will fight shoulder to shoulder with the Angolan people again." In Rhodesia? In South West Africa? In South Africa, the primary target of Communist aggression in the African continent?

A fresh effort is now under way - through articles, books and films - to depict the Cuban troops in Angola as conquering heroes fired with love of the cause, before whom the enemy lines opened up like the Red Sea.



The truth, as succeeding articles will show, was somewhat different. The Cubans outnumbered the South African forces in Angola by 10 to one. Thanks to Soviet largesse, the pro-Moscow forces outgunned the anti-Communist forces by more than 10 to one, and had MiG fighters available to boot. Yet the Cubans "won" only in the sense that South Africa felt politically obliged to withdraw, while black anti-Communist guerrillas fight on.



It was a victory nonetheless. It taught us that in the great world conflict for which Angola was only one of the battlefields, victory or defeat depends on political will.



HOW SOUTH AFRICA TOOK ON CASTRO'S INVADERS

by Robert Moss

The Communist invasion of Angola posed a challenge to the West. Would anyone take it up? Or would Cuban troops and Soviet guns enable a Marxist movement with only minority backing in the northern part of the country to set up a dictatorship?

The prospect was far from palatable to most of black Africa. Moderate or pro-Western leaders like Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Mobutu of Zaire or Senghor of Senegal had no desire to see a new Soviet puppet regime set up in Angola. Zambia and Zaire, both dependent on the Benguela railway, feared that the Communists would then use economic pressure to change their own policies, and that Angola would be turned into a base for subversion.



Equally, Angola's mineral wealth (especially in diamonds, iron ore and the oil from Cabinda) and its strategic position made it of vital concern to Western Governments. But Angola mattered in a deeper sense, as a place where the Russians had set out the capacity of post- Vietnam America to respond to Communist aggression in far-flung places. Before the end of the conflict, most Western nations - America, Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, Spain and Israel - had contributed their mite to the anti-Soviet forces in Angola.



There was a CIA operations officer in Silva Porto, UNITA's headquarters, throughout the war. British Intelligence and private interests - especially Tanganyika Concessions and Lonrho, which loaned UNITA its pilots - remained in close liaison with UNITA and arranged delivery of smaller items such as radio equipment. UNITA leaders frequently came to London for medical treatment and to lobby British MPs. When the South Africans withdrew their instructors from Silva Porto, French "mercenaries" working for SDECE (the French MI6) took over; in many ways, the French were more adventurous than any other Western power. The Spanish provided a safe base in Europe for the white Portuguese fighting with the FNLA, who were given false papers by the police.



Intelligence officers from all these countries met - sometimes at remote airstrips - to compare their inventories, and to check that they were not duplicating arms supplies.

It was left to South Africa to shoulder the heaviest burden, by providing instructors, advisers and finally an armoured column in a desperate bid to lower the odds against the black nationalists, who were fighting a losing battle against Cuban troops and big guns from Russia. No one thanked the South Africans for what they tried to do. On the contrary, it earned them a smack in the teeth from the UN Security Council on March 31, 1976, months after their combat troops had withdrawn.

Guarantees from the Americans

Yet, as South Africa's Defence Minister, Mr. Botha, pointed out in a speech to Parliament, his country was at least a part of Africa, unlike Cuba, and presumably had some right to concern itself with events across its borders.

But the key fact about South Africa's intervention was one that neither Mr. Botha nor any other senior official in Pretoria has ever been prepared to discuss. It is that when South Africans went into Angola, they went in with the private blessing of many Western and black African Governments, and at the urgent invitation of the black nationalist movements in Angola. At one stage, for example, President Mobutu of Zaire actually implored the South Africans to bomb northern MPLA positions. The UNITA leader, Jonas Savimbi, flew to Pretoria at a critical stage in the war to beg Mr. Vorster to keep his troops in Angola. The South Africans also went in with the encouragement of Dr. Kissinger, who offered American guarantees that, in the event, he was unable to fulfil.

How did the South Africans get sucked into a black civil war? The story begins in March, 1975, when a senior South African intelligence officer met Jonas Savimbi in a European capital. At a meeting in Lusaka on April 14 Savimbi asked for small arms and cash to enable his movement to contribute to the joint black army that was supposed to be set up under independence, and so help to establish a military balance that could force the pro-Soviet MPLA to agree to hold elections.

The South Africans - like other Western Governments - were worried by the jealousies between UNITA and its rivals of FNLA, the third black faction in Angola, and urged Savimbi to establish a formal alliance with Holden Roberto, its leader. Savimbi was reluctant, complaining of gangsterish behaviour and "anti-white" attitudes among the FNLA chiefs. The South Africans rejected his request and allowed contact to lapse for several months. (Savimbi found other backers in the meantime - including the Chinese, who supplied seven tons of arms in the first half of 1975.)

The South Africans had also been approached by Holden Roberto, through Portuguese intermediaries such as Colonel Santos e Castro, a respected former counter-insurgency fighter who had been a provincial governor in Angola and was to become a key figure in the anti- Communist movement in both Portugal and Angola. Their first meeting with Roberto took place in Kinshasa in July. On the strength of Roberto's undertaking to consolidate an alliance with Savimbi the South Africans agreed to give the FNLA a shipment of mostly second-hand light machine-guns, rifles and mortars, which arrived in August.

A third meeting towards the end of August, in UNITA-held territory inside Angola, when a senior South African army general was present, set the scene for South Africa's entry into the war. The South African Army agreed to provide instructors. Two training camps were set up: one for UNITA at Calombo, south of Silva Porto, another for the FNLA forces loyal to Daniel Chipenda at Mpupa, in southern Angola. Crash courses at these camps enabled the anti-Soviet movements to put 6,000 trained (or at least partly trained) men into the field in six weeks.

A platoon of South African soldiers had already been deployed inside Angola, around the Calueque hydro-electric works on the Cunene River on August 9. But this was a purely defensive exercise, intended to guard the Cunene Dam and hydro-electric scheme, which supplied energy to the major towns of southern Angola, from marauding gangs. The South Africans later claimed that their intervention here had had the tacit approval of the Portuguese.

Dr. Hilgard Muller, the South African Foreign Minister, later said that South Africa's entry on to the battlefield had had "a limited objective" - that of gaining time for the rival forces in Angola, with the catalyst of diplomatic pressure from black Africa, to achieve a political settlement.

The army's instructions were to assist Savimbi's and Roberto's forces to regain control of the areas of southern and central Angola where they enjoyed traditional ethnic support, and above all to help UNITA to hold on to its capital, Nova Lisbon, which was threatened by the Cuban and MPLA forces. The hope was that, if the anti-Soviet forces were seen to be in a position of strength on November 11, the day of independence, the MPLA and its sponsors would be forced to make a treaty with them and abandon their plan for outright conquest.

'Brothers' for the UNITA troops

As it turned out, the astonishing military success of the tiny South African column in Angola offered the chance of something more: an outright military victory over the Communists. But the chance was rejected.

Even for a black leader who was as consummate a politician as Jonas Savimbi, the relationship with the South Africans was uneasy at first. After all, he had been fighting the Portuguese in the bush for years, only to end up with the country whose apartheid policy was the focus for the hatred and resentment of black nationalists everywhere as his ally. But he soon found a close friend and confidant in the young fair-haired paratroop colonel who landed in Silva Porto on September 21, 1975.

The South African was no newcomer to Angola. He had served as a military attache with the South African embassy in Luanda between 1970 and 1973, and spoke fluent Portuguese. Savimbi's men took to calling the South African Commandant Kaas (which means "Commander Cheese") because of his fair complexion and the fact that he came from a Dutch family, and Kaas called Savimbi "the Docter" or simply "Doc".

The major had arrived with a team of 18 infantry corps instructors, who were soon described in the UNITA camps simply as "the brothers". Their orders were to provide training in conventional warfare for UNITA troops, and to help UNITA establish a holding position in central Angola.

The South African team arrived at a moment when the pro-Soviet forces had seized control of all the major towns in Angola except Nova Lisboa, Silva Porto, Luso and Holden Roberto's capital, Carmona, in the north, and Daniel Chipenda's capital, Serpa Pinto, in the south-east. The Communists held all major ports, and were driving deep into the Ovimbundu tribal areas traditionally controlled by UNITA.

Commandant Kaas found himself in charge of a disused Portuguese gaol and 1000-odd enthusiastic UNITA recruits, mostly aged between 14 and 20. He set up a two weeks' training course, working the recruits day and night. His personal headquarters were at the airfield outside Silva Porto.

UNITA was desperately short of weapons, and the shortage was made worse by sheer disorganisation. It was not until after independence day, for example, that Commandant Kaas discovered a cache of 600 light machine guns that someone had hidden away in the bush and then forgotten. All UNITA's weapons and explosives were piled up together in a few mud huts in Silva Porto, and UNITA commanders as far away as Pereira d'Eca would have to trek north to be resupplied. The explanation was political. Savimbi was well aware that one way to prevent remote subordinates from developing into unruly warlords was to leave them in no doubt about where their next bullets would come from.

UNITA had other foreign helpers, although they were of uneven value. Agents from most Western Powers bobbed up in Silva Porto throughout the campaign, and were put up in relatively palatial former Portuguese residences, or in the former monastery. President Mobutu of Zaire not only sent six old Panhard armoured cars (whose electric clutch defeated inexperienced drivers) but 120 smartly turned out soldiers as well.

Pretoria's Order: 'Hold Back'

Their appearance, however, was no guide to their combat potential. They spent most of their time preying on the local girls, and when real fighting was in the offing, they took to removing the steering wheels from the armoured cars overnight in order to prevent any offensive being launched. Savimbi and Commandant Kaas managed to stop this practice by making it plain to the Zairean major in charge that his men were not expected to do any actual fighting. Although Savimbi was pressed to send the Zaireans back, he prevaricated, unwilling to offend Mobutu. However, UNITA took great care to lock up abandoned shops and warehouses and guard them against possible looters.

The crucial mission of the South African advisers with Savimbi was to stop the Communist forces from advancing on Nova Lisboa down one of the three main roads that were open to them: from Luanda to the north, and from Benguela and Lobito to the west. A UNITA column under Savimbi's command set out on October 4 to ward off a reported Communist thrust from the west, and clashed with the Cubans and the MPLA three days later.

After the battle the UNITA forces set up defensive positions to the west of Nova Lisboa and Commandant Kaas radioed an urgent request for reinforcements. He was sent a squadron of 22 armoured cars, airlifted to Silva Porto on big C-130 transports. It was tempting to strike north to the Cuanza River with this new force, but the orders from Pretoria were to hold back. Word had already come of the arrival of another South African force in the south of the country.

One evening in late October, Major Chindondo, the UNITA Chief-of-Staff, arrived breathless and excited at the training camp. He had come to alert Commandant Kaas, to reports that the enemy was advancing towards Nova Lisboa in great strength from the north, and was massed in the Quibala area.

Commandant Kaas assembled most of his armoured cars and a UNITA battalion in a column, code-named Foxbat, which struck north and eventually took up defensive positions in the Cela area. It was here, on November 7, that the UNITA forces bagged one of their biggest quarries. The MPLA advance was being led by a senior Cuban officer, driving a black Citroen. A South African gunner fired at his car with a 106mm gun, and he was killed.
The Foxbat column was ordered to hold a line about 30km north of Nova Lisboa until independence day - although in military terms it would have had little difficulty in advancing to the line of the Cuanza River, 270km further north. The political directive was that the South Africans should not go beyond traditional UNITA territory, and should be ready to withdraw on November 11.

Meanwhile, another South African column drove over the border of South West Africa into Angola on October 14. The code-name given to it by the South African high command was Operation Zulu, which apparently confused the Cubans. There were, indeed, more black South Africans than white in the columns, but there were certainly no Zulus.

The officer in command was a stocky colonel in his early forties, an Afrikaner from the Cape Province who had graduated from the military academy in Saldanha Bay and had volunteered to serve in Angola at the beginning of the month. He was to earn the nickname "Rommel" from his comrades because of the extraordinary speed of the column's advance.

He was alerted at 9.30 p.m. on October 9 that he should get ready to leave Pretoria for the operational headquarters at Rundu, on the Angolan border, on a 7 a.m. flight the following morning. At Rundu he discovered that his force was to consist of two battalions: a Bushman battalion, mainly recruited from the Caprivi strip, and including many Bushmen who had fought for the Portuguese as skirmishers and trackers, together with Portuguese ex-army officers; and a black FNLA battalion consisting of about 1,000 men divided into three companies and commanded by a mulatto, Commandant Businha.

The FNLA men were followers of Daniel Chipenda, the warlord whose headquarters was at Serpa Pinto. Chipenda had broken away from the MPLA a year before and his loyalty could never entirely be taken for granted by his new allies.

"Rommel" had only six South African officers and seven N.C.O.s to help him command his force. From the outset they had a language problem. Half the Bushmen spoke Portuguese; the other half (recruited in South West Africa) spoke Afrikaans. So orders would be issued to their Afrikaner commanding officer in Afrikaans. He would then repeat them in English to the Portuguese officers, who in turn would translate them into Portuguese. It was a process that would have been merely tedious on the parade-ground, but on the battlefield it presented the risk of fatal confusion and delay.

"Rommel’s" orders were to capture all the important centres along the coast that he could reach before independence day on November 11, within the ethnic areas where support for the UNITA and the FNLA was strongest. He was to make it clear to the civilian population that his was a UNITA/FNLA column; some Portuguese settlers wrongly imagined that they had come to restore the old order.

A shoot-out in the bar

When the column crossed the border at Cuangar on October 14 it included only civilian vehicles - lorries, vegetable trucks, private cars and a few Land-Rovers. The first target was the southern town of Pereira d’Eca, which had already changed hands several times. The column ran into light resistance from MPLA ambush parties using RPG-7 anti-tank rockets along the road (and also from UNITA foragers who had not yet been notified of Operation Zulu) but when it got to the town, most of the defenders fled into the bush.

This was to become the pattern throughout much of the campaign. MPLA soldiers took to wearing civilian clothes under their uniforms so that, once driven out of their positions, they could drop their rifles, whip off their military gear, and merge into the civilian population.

The column occupied Pereira d’Eca so quickly that MPLA troops on the outskirts were not immediately aware that the town had changed owners. Commandant Businha was having a celebratory drink in a local bar when two MPLA soldiers came in. He whirled around, took one look at them, and gave the MPLA salute (two fingers up). When they responded, he fired from the hip with his F.N., killing both.

The condition of Pereira d’Eca gave a glimpse of what the South Africans were to find in the bigger towns, gutted by a black civil war. Most of the buildings had been sacked; the shops looted down to the floorboards. Local UNITA forces were brought in to restore basic services.

From Pereira d’Eca the column swung north-west towards Rocadas where it was joined on October 20 by four troops of armoured cars (about 20 in all) and half a platoon of 81mm. mortars, sent over the border from South- West Africa. The column also gained some more exotic recruits at Rocadas. It was met by a band of 47 Portuguese led by a small dapper captain with a twirled moustache called Aparicio, who proudly announced that he and his followers were members of the Portuguese Liberation Army (ELP) and that they intended to drive the Communists out of Angola before carrying the crusade to Portugal itself. Aparicio quickly acquired the nickname "Garibaldi" with the South Africans. Unfortunately his group proved to be bolder in promises than in deeds, and never went further than Sa da Bandeira.

Two days later, the strengthened column, now led by a Land-Rover with a machine-gun mounted on top, swept into the town of Joao de Almeida. This was more vigorously defended; it had been used as a major MPLA storage depot, and large quantities of food, equipment and propaganda materials were captured.

Now the road was clear for the assault on Sa da Bandeira, the capital of Huila province, which was still believed to contain a sizeable white population. "Rommel’s" main worry now was that the MPLA would pull back inside the town, putting the civilians at risk, but the defences turned out to be concentrated at outlying positions, especially a hill called Monte Cristo Rei because of the large statue of Christ on its summit.

The Zulu forces struck first at the airfield (standard procedure throughout the offensive since the column was basically air-supplied) and then sent troops to scale the Monte Cristo Rei by stealth on the night of October 24. They found that the MPLA had already withdrawn, together with their big guns. This again was part of the pattern of the campaign so that as Zulu drove farther north it ran into even heavier firepower.

Ambush from rocket-launchers

It was left to Captain Garibaldi and his Liberators to clear Sa da Bandeira. Joined by another troop of Panhard armoured cars and another half-platoon of 81mm. mortars, the South Africans’ next target was the major southern port of Mocamedes. On the way the column came under fire from 122mm. single-tube rocket-launchers, an ideal weapon for ambush, very light, easy to handle, and capable of being fired from an ordinary car.

The column managed to fight its way through and occupied the harbour of Mocamedes on the evening of October 27. There was an interesting variety of shipping bobbing at anchor, including a Portuguese navy corvette and Portuguese, Greek and Italian merchant vessels. The South Africans believed that these ships had been bringing arms - and probably Cuban troops as well - to Mocamedes, and were now being loaded up for a mass evacuation. They also knew that Nord-Atlas aircraft, allegedly owned by Frelimo in Mozambique, had been flying troops and equipment out of Mocamedes in advance of the Zulu offensive.

As the sun set over the harbour roads, a red Fiat coupe with a white flag fluttering from its bonnet drove out of the town towards "Rommel’s" improvised command post. It had two occupants: the Portuguese captain in command of the 150 paratroops in the town, and a naval officer from the corvette. They requested that the ships in the harbour should be allowed to leave, on the grounds that they were evacuating refugees. The captain also insisted that his paratroops wanted to have nothing to do with the war. "We are neutrals," he insisted. "My role here is to guard the lives and property of the refugees."

It was later discovered that he was not telling the whole truth. Unknown to the Zulu force, the communications centre at Silva Porto had already picked up an urgent radio signal from the Portuguese command in Mocamedes to Luanda, requesting that MPLA reinforcements should be sent at once. It was also confirmed later that at the time Zulu arrived, a Soviet vessel had been waiting outside the harbour, bearing more arms and ammunition.

Pulling out without a fight

Although he could see barges laden with MPLA men plying back and forth between the harbour and the ships at anchor, "Rommel" decided to grant the vessels permission to leave. He also told the navy officer that if the corvette had not left by dawn it would be blown out of the water - pure bluff, since the South Africans had no means of blowing it up.

By first light on October 28 the corvette had gone. Although there had been intensive fire the previous night, when MPLA and Cuban forces occupied a ridge outside the town and kept up an intensive and accurate fire with 122mm. rockets, there was little resistance inside the town itself. Advance units reached the airport (south of the city) too late to prevent the take-off of a Nord-Atlas carrying MPLA leaders, Cuban advisers and some heavy weapons. Although no Cubans were actually sighted during the fighting around Mocamedes, the precision firing was the clue to their presence.

After local UNITA forces were established in control of Mocamedes, the column turned back to Sa da Bandeira to regroup for the main assault on the north. There were reports that the MPLA was probing south from its positions at Benguela and Lobito - a primary objective for the South African operation as the country’s second port and its most important railhead.
The rainy season was beginning, flooding rivers and turning the lowland areas farther north into swamp. From now on, the campaign was to centre on bridges and river-crossings. Control of all-weather roads became the key to victory or defeat.

On the road from Sa da Bandeira to Benguela, the Zulu column ran into a series of extremely well-prepared MPLA positions. The influence of the Cubans - who showed themselves in the war to be well-trained in preparing and holding static positions, although inept fighters when things failed to go according to plan - was now obvious at every stage along the way.

The first major clash on the road to Benguela took place at Caporolo at the end of October. Here the Cubans and MPLA had set up their guns on a hill overlooking a bridge. "Rommel" sent his Bushmen westward along the river to look for a ford they could cross in order to take the enemy by surprise from behind. The Bushmen went too far, missing the ford. In the meantime, one of the Panhards nosed too far forward along the main road, disclosing the column’s position.

To the South Africans’ astonishment, the enemy forces simply picked up their equipment and ran - but not before trying to blow up the bridge. The explosive charges had all been set, but the last man who had checked the circuit on the detonator had forgotten to reconnect the wire. The South Africans drove on across the bridge, and pushed on to Catengue, where the roads from Benguela and Nova Lisboa intersect. It was time to take stock and find out where the enemy was.
A party was sent eastward on the Nova Lisboa road, where MPLA units were reported to be advancing towards Catengue. A South African lieutenant called Jan, blackened from many months in the bushveld along the South-West African border, and with flowing hair and beard, drove in the leading Land-Rover. He drove straight into an advancing MPLA convoy, led by officers using Mercedes-Benz and Citroen cars "borrowed" from the Portuguese.
He was saved by the fact that the MPLA took one look at him and imagined he was a Cuban. "Donde estan los companeros?" someone asked. Jan grunted, waved behind him down the road, and put two fingers up in the approved MPLA style. The MPLA grinned and drove by - and Jan opened up on them with a .50 Browning machine-gun.

He subsequently set up an ambush post on the road from which he was able to knock off no fewer than seven MPLA cars in succession with a 90mm. gun. They just kept coming on like moths into the flames, without any prior reconnaissance.

Three MPLA men were captured and made to strip and dig graves for the next victims of the ambush. Jan bore the nickname of "the Cuban" for the rest of the campaign.

Meanwhile, reconnaissance parties established that a major Cuban/MPLA force had dug in a few kilometres farther up the Benguela road, with 15 or 20 mortars. The mortars sowed terror among the troops when the Zulu column tried to break through on November 2. The black troops refused to face the mortars, and the column was pinned down for six hours, under a ferocious concentration of fire. The black FNLA gunners, for their part, returned the MPLA barrage by firing off their own mortars so rapidly (25 rounds a minute instead of the normal two) that their guns burned out and the barrels grew so hot that when a round was inserted, it would ignite immediately. There were many severe burns. The road was finally cleared after scouts from the Zulu force found a trail winding round the south of the enemy position. An advance group was sent to try to cut off the MPLA line of retreat but, as before, the enemy beat a hasty retreat.

Once again, luck saved the bridge for the Zulu column. Cuban engineers had run a wire back from the bridge for some 2,000 metres to the detonator. Everything was set for demolition, and the South Africans were astonished that the bridge did not go up in flames. By a fluke, one of their mortar rounds had cut the wire.

At the Catengue battlefield, the South Africans picked up another clue to the Cuban presence: an intelligence map marked in Spanish. They captured seven prisoners, who told them that there was a large camp outside Benguela with some 350 Cubans.

After Catengue, the MPLA and their Cuban friends bolted north, leaving neatly-dug trenches and even big ammunition dumps in their wake.

Just south of Benguela, the column found another camp, which turned out to have been the main Cuban base in the area.

The Zulu force was now ready for the assault on Benguela. It numbered about 150 white South Africans with their Panhards, together with the loyal Bushmen and the FNLA battalion, reduced to some 450 blacks and 80 white Portuguese. The attack began on November 4, just a week before independence day, and the airfield to the south-east of the town was seized without resistance.

But now something happened that the South Africans had feared all along: the MPLA and the Cubans pulled their forces back into the city itself. Simultaneously, they opened up a murderous barrage with half-a-dozen rocket launchers, dug in on the other side of Benguela, as well as intensive small-arms fire from the native huts on the outskirts of the town. The column was pinned down at the airport for 26 hours.



For the first time during his almost uninterrupted advance, "Rommel" was faced with a dilemma. His mortars had a maximum range of only about five kilometres, while the enemy batteries were at least 7-8km. away, and the Soviet-made 122s had a range of up to 14km. He could not risk firing into the town, nor could he advance with his armoured cars and allow the enemy to snipe at them from close range. Meanwhile, the deafening thud of the enemy rockets was terrifying his men.



From his command post in the airport control tower "Rommel" finally hit on a solution. He sent his mortars round the eastern outskirts of the town, gambling on getting them within striking distance of the enemy positions before the Cuban rangefinders could get a fix on them.



He succeeded because the enemy imagined that he had: when the South African mortars opened up, they were still several hundred metres too far away from their targets. However, the enemy commander must have concluded that the South Africans were merely ranging in, because the Cubans and their rocket-launchers pulled out immediately. The mortar companies inside Benguela followed suit.

The battle for Benguela had offered a warning: good soldiering could not always make up for the disadvantages of being outgunned, least of all in a war where the black troops on both sides showed a marked preference for fighting as far away as possible from the enemy lines. "Rommel" radioed back to Rundu with an urgent request for field artillery to match the MPLA’s longer-range weapons.

On November 7 the Zulu force drove on to Lobito. The population was largely pro-UNITA, and the Cubans and the MPLA pulled out without fighting. After Lobito had been seized by the pro-Soviet forces, UNITA had been able to keep in close contact with its cadres inside the town by telephone; no steps had been taken to cut off the most obvious form of communication.



The Zulu force stayed at Lobito until independence day. "Rommel" expected to be recalled on November 11, in accordance with his original orders. But the orders were changed. Bloodier fighting lay ahead.

Battle of Death Road

by Robert Moss

The last representative of the Portuguese empire in Africa, Admiral Leonel Cardoso, the High Commissioner of Angola, decided not to stay for the country’s independence celebrations on November 11, 1975. He watched the Portuguese flag being lowered over the 16th-century fort of Sao Miguel in Luanda, declared that "Portugal is departing without a feeling of guilt or shame" - and scuttled to the safety of the frigate riding at anchor in the harbour.

Five centuries of colonial rule ended as MPLA troops swarmed into the admiral’s palace. Portugal, he said, had handed over power to "the six million Angolan people."

While the Marxists in Luanda hailed Agostinho Neto as Angola’s first black president, the supporters of the two anti-Soviet movements, UNITA and the FNLA, danced in the streets of Nova Lisboa (renamed Huambo) and Ambriz. The MPLA was quickly able to boast the diplomatic recognition of the Soviet bloc, the Marxist African states and capitalist Brazil. Meanwhile UNITA and FNLA proclaimed their own State, the "Peoples’ Democratic Republic," and claimed that they controlled 11 of Angola’s 16 provinces.

With the South African column code-named Zulu waiting at Lobito for its marching orders and with FNLA forces threatening Luanda from positions less than 19 miles to its north, the anti-Communist forces enjoyed clear military superiority. But their advantage was rapidly eroded after November 11 by the continued build-up of Cuban combat forces and Soviet weaponry, and the failure of the Western Powers to respond to it.

One glittering opportunity had been lost on the very eve of independence, in a savage battle for the capital. While South Africa’s "Rommel," the colonel commanding Operation Zulu, was striking north to Benguela and Lobito, the FNLA was pushing south in a desperate attempt to seize Luanda before independence day. The FNLA had been driven out of the capital in July, when the MPLA launched a surprise attack, in which Portuguese pilots - flying civilian airplanes of the Portuguese-Angolan airline, TAAG - had flown reconnaissance missions. But by early November, the Marxists’ position in Luanda was no longer secure.

Fighting around Dondo to the south, where the hydro-electric plant that supplied the capital’s electicity is located, resulted in blackouts. Luanda’s water supply was also cut off for days. Further, the anti-Soviet forces had managed to isolate the capital from its food supplies; the richest farming lands were securely in UNITA hands. There seemed to be a chance that the defenders of Luanda could be starved into submission.

Meanwhile by November 6 a column of some 800 black FNLA troops, reinforced by 130 white Portuguese led by Colonel Gilberto Santos e Castro and Major Cardoso - a brilliant irregular fighter and a former officer of Salazar’s secret police, the PIDE - and three Zairean battalions led by a Zairean colonel had advanced as far as Caxito, a strategic crossroads 31 miles north of Luanda. Holden Roberto, the mulatto leader of the FNLA, his eyes permanently masked by dark glasses, had taken personal charge of the column and was poised for an assault on Luanda. It was timed for November 10, the eve of independence.

But from the start of the attack things went wrong. The FNLA column had advanced to the area of the Bengo river, and was supposed to strike across the bridge over it at first light on November 10. But the orders got garbled, officers overslept, and the attack did not start until 7.45 a.m.

It was the direction of the attack rather than its timing that doomed it from the start. Facing Holden Roberto’s men, on the other side of the Bengo river, was a force of some 800 Cubans. The MPLA soldiers with them were commanded by Cubans right down to section level.

The Cubans were we

[hist2004]

The Cubans were well-armed. They had jeep-mounted rocket-launchers, heavy mortars, the huge 40-barrelled "Stalin organs" that terrified black troops, and plenty of machine-guns and anti-tank guns. They had dug themselves in on hilltops at Quifangondo with their guns commanding the only road to Luanda from the north, now bordered by swamp because of the rainy season.

When the Portuguese commanders suggested that the main offensive down the exposed road should be supported by flanking movements on foot through the swamp, the black FNLA officers refused to send their men out, complaining that the swamp was full of crocodiles and "man-eating snakes." The South African and American advisers with FNLA were alarmed by the planned offensive, and it was suggested that Roberto should attempt a broad encircling movement from the east. But Roberto, burning with impatience to plant his flag in the capital before independence day, insisted on taking the direct route, down Death Road.

The South African brigadier who had arrived at the little port of Ambriz to act as liaison officer with Roberto’s forces afterwards complained of another reason for failure. In the days before the attack on Luanda, the C.I.A. had organised an emergency airlift of weapons for the FNLA. Mortars and light infantry weapons were flown into Zaire in big C-141 transports and ferried on to Ambriz by Zairean air force planes and the FNLA’s own Fokker Friendships, expropriated from the old civilian airline.

The weapons included 10 new 120mm. mortars and some 106mm. recoilless guns. But according to the South African brigadier, the weapons arrived without handling instructions or sighting equipment. There was no time to prepare the FNLA or Santos e Castro’s Portuguese to use them.

This account is disputed by American sources, who claim that there was no failure on the side of the suppliers and that there must have been a mix-up on the ground. This, in turn, might well have been related to the political climate in Washington. Because of the legal requirements that had been imposed on the CIA to report its operations to Congress the officers assigned to liaise with Holden Roberto were pulled in and out of Angola like yoyos. Although the Americans were the principle armourers for the FNLA (which had, however, benefited from many other sources, including China, which had earlier provided several hundred instructors to train FNLA troops at Kinkuzu in Zaire) they failed to provide continuous or effective tactical advice and logistical supervision on the ground.

American instructors for the 120mm. mortars and the 106mm. recoilless guns turned up in the end - after the battle for Luanda had been fought and lost. Even when they did turn up, they came without the range tables for the guns.

FNLA troops bogged down in marshes

So the column that rolled forward at breakfast-time on November 10 was in no way matched to the enemy in waiting. While the Cubans were bristling with brand-new Soviet hardware, all that the FNLA could boast were second-hand rejects from its Western (primarily American) sources, together with odds and ends picked up from black market arms dealers. Holden Roberto had only one gun that was capable of ranging in on the Cuban positions, a 130mm. Korean artillery piece. His men carried sidearms of almost every conceivable origin, including Russian-made weapons (mostly supplied by Rumania in August, 1974). Their only armoured vehicles were a few old Panhards manned by Portuguese whites.

The outcome of the battle on Death Road was a foregone conclusion. The Cubans sent up a tremendous barrage of rocket and artillery fire as Roberto’s troops approached the Bengo river bridge. Then some of the Cubans drove forward in jeeps from which they fired off Soviet-built rockets at the exposed FNLA troops, by now bogged down in the marshes. Most of Roberto’s Panhards were knocked out within an hour. The FNLA abandoned the field within three hours. Five of the Portuguese whites had been killed; black casualties may have run into hundreds.

Some of those present still feel very bitter. Colonel Santos e Castro and the South African brigadier maintain that Luanda would have fallen to the FNLA if the Americans - or other Western sources - had supplied a bit more hardware, and the know-how to put it into the field.

If the South Africans had been able to despatch a second Zulu column to northern Angola, they could easily have forced their way through to Luanda. Indeed, the Foxbat column could have penetrated the natural defences of Luanda from the south before November 11 by swooping across the Cuanza river - if it had been given the order to do so. But how would it look to the world if pink-faced young Afrikaners were photographed driving into a black African capital in their armoured cars?

It was the desire not to get too far out on a limb that had led to the initial decision in Pretoria that South African troops in Angola would be withdrawn immediately after independence day, November 11. The decision was reversed. One reason has been kept deeply secret until now.

Jonas Savimbi, the UNITA leader, flew to Pretoria on November 10. He met Mr. Vorster, South Africa’s Prime Minister, and implored him to keep his troops in Angola at least until the summit meeting of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), then due to convene in Addis Ababa on December 9. He told Mr. Vorster that moderate black African leaders - including Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda, who was regularly meeting Savimbi - were deeply concerned that the anti-Soviet forces should sustain their position in the field until a vote on Angola could be taken by the OAU.

The other former Portuguese colonies, all under Marxist control, were about to recognise the MPLA Government in Luanda, together with the rest of Russia’s friends in Africa: Guinea- Conakry, Somalia, Algeria, Congo-Brazzaville, Mali and Mauritius. But most of black Africa was sympathetic to the MPLA’s rivals, especially UNITA, despite Russian diplomatic pressure.

Amin’s rage at Soviet ambassador

One target for the Soviet diplomatic offensive was the unpredictable Idi Amin, that year’s chairman of the OAU. The Russians had given him a squadron of MiG-21 jet fighters, but the hamfisted Soviet ambassador in Kampala, Alexei Zakharov, pushed Amin too hard for support in recognising the MPLA. Amin exploded, accusing the ambassador of acting "as if he were vice-president of Uganda," and Zakharov was hastilly recalled. The Russians followed up by withdrawing all their embassy, military and technical personnel. Although this finally induced Amin to make a mollifying statement, he remained neutral for the time being on Angola’s civil war.

So the point that Jonas Savimbi had to make in Pretoria was a highly pertinent one. He told Mr. Vorster, in effect, that if South Africa could ensure that the anti-Soviet forces could at least hold their own in the major towns outside Luanda, it might be possible to get a majority vote at the OAU in favour of a tripartite settlement in Angola. Similar pleas were reaching Pretoria from other sources.

The South Africans were later begged by the Zaireans and the FNLA, for example, to lend air support to a renewed assault on Luanda from the north. The discreet liaison maintained by the Bureau for State Security (BOSS) with black African leaders was producing similar appeals for the South Africans to hang on in Angola. The same request was coming from senior American officials, although Dr. Kissinger - who was a hawk on Angola but was extremely nervous of Press and Congressional efforts to expose American connections with South Africa - had taken steps to isolate himself from direct contacts with South Africans.



Secrecy was still all-important, both to the South Africans (who had maintained a total blackout at home on Press reports of their involvement) and to the Governments and black nationalist leaders who now depended on them but could not afford to admit it. At Silva Porto, which had begun to be visited by journalists invited by UNITA, as well as by a wide range of African delegates, secrecy was an obsession from the start.



But the South Africans assigned to UNITA were more worried about running into SWAPO guerrillas than reporters. SWAPO (South-West Africa People’s Organisation) is one of South Africa’s deadliest enemies. It had also collaborated with UNITA over a long period, and had used UNITA-controlled areas of Angola as bases for its raids into South-West Africa. Now, without SWAPO’s knowledge UNITA had called in the South Africans as its allies. The South African advisers had spent years of their lives fighting the SWAPO guerrillas and had no wish to meet them socially on neutral ground - where they might easily find themselves greatly outnumbered.

There was a narrow escape just before Savimbi’s secret visit to Pretoria, when the South African advisers in Silva Porto were asked to leave town in haste in order to avoid being spotted by a big OAU delegation that was due in. The UNITA commander said he would send for them as soon as the OAU dignitaries left. But after a couple of days no message had arrived.
Commandant Kaas, itching to get back to the war, decided to drive back to town. He arrived at the UNITA headquarters at six o’clock, and ordered a bleary guard to send for the commander at once. He turned up badly hung-over and wide-eyed with alarm. "Don’t you know they haven’t left?" he hissed. Fortunately the OAU delegates were all sleeping off the last night’s revels in the former monastery used as a UNITA guest-house - which gave Commandant Kaas plenty of time to beat an orderly retreat back into the bush.

Sketchy Press reports about the South African presence had begun to appear, but they were sufficiently vague to be ignored. No journalist had been anywhere near the zones where the South Africans were fighting. But when the Cubans managed to take some South African prisoners, their presence could no longer be shrugged off - and the Communists, lobbying for black African support, made full propaganda use of their captives, the undeniable proof that the "racists" had "invaded" Angola.



Both the military and the political war escalated after November 11. On independence day, "Rommel" received orders to push further north from Lobito. His new orders were to advance to Novo Redondo and other towns around the line of the Queve river - Porto Amboim, Gabela, Quibala.



Reinforcements for ‘Rommel’

The South Africans suffered their first heavy casualties (heavy, that is, in relation to the tiny size of the Zulu column) on November 12, when Cuban gunners dug in six miles south of Novo Redondo dropped a mortar bomb in the midst of the column as it was crossing an exposed stretch of muddy road between flooded marshes. Eighteen South Africans were wounded, and the fact that only one died was due solely to the speed with which they were got to an airstrip under cover of darkness and whisked back to a field hospital at Rundu.

But "Rommel" was about to receive vital reinforcements; a battery of 25-pounders was dropped at Benguela the same day, and the guns were brought forward overnight and placed in new positions. The surprise factor was enough to win the battle. The Cuban gunners on the other side started firing their rockets into the positions the South Africans had occupied the previous day when "Rommel’s" guns opened up at first light. Then they withdrew, unable to blow the bridge behind them because the flooded river had risen so high that they were unable to fix explosives to the pylons.



Novo Redondo was occupied on November 14. Here the Zulu column halted, although units were sent out to link up with the Foxbat column farther east, in the area of Santa Comba. "Rommel" sent out patrols to reconnoitre the roads farther north, and found that the Cubans and MPLA had blown all the bridges over the Queve river and set up formidable defences on the other side.



The road to Porto Amboin looked like another Death Road. It was impossible to get within four-and-a-half miles of the town cross-country because of the flooded swamps. For the same reason, it was impossible to get off the road. The road to Gabela looked easier, but scouts reported that the positions on the other side were "all manned by whites." The prospect of trying to rebuild a bridge under intensive fire from the Cubans’ "Stalin Organs" was not exactly appetising.

"Rommel" radioed back to Rundu requesting that a paratroop company should be dropped behind the enemy positions at Gabela. His request was refused. Frustrated by his relative lack of firepower and the lack of any means to get across the Queve river, he then asked for permission to pull back to Lobito. He was told to wait. At last, he was told to move east and establish a new headquarters near Cela, in an area where the Foxbat column had run into formidable opposition.

"Rommel" was recalled on November 26. He could console himself for the disappointment at the Queve river with the thought that, during the 33 days the Zulu column was no the move, it covered 1,974 miles - an average of some 60 miles a day.

The bloodiest battles of the war remained to be fought. On the central front, near Quibala, the Cubans were massing. The South Africans were compelled to move in 140mm. guns and to form yet another battle group, code-named "Orange."

Cubans hurled into combat

It was in no-man’s land north of Santa Comba that the celebrated “Battle of Bridge 14” took place. It raged for three days, from December 9 to December 12, and an entire battalion of Cuban troops were hurled into the combat. By the end of the battle, four South Africans and an estimated 200 Cubans had been killed on the eastern front, where the South Africans had responded to a UNITA request to help them to recapture Luso and to clear the Benguela railway right up to the Zambian border. Savimbi’s calculation was that if UNITA could establish its control over the whole length of the railway line it would guarantee the permanent support of land-locked Zambia by offering it a secure outlet to the sea for its copper and other exports.

By this stage there was, of course, no secret about the extent of Kaunda’s commitment to UNITA. Like other visitors to UNITA who travelled via Lusaka, I had found myself received by Jorge Sangumba, UNITA’s ubiquitous Foreign Minister, on the airport tarmac at the end of October, whisked through immigration and customs formalities, and subsequently put on to Savimbi’s personal Learjet (flown by Lonrho pilots) at the Zambian mining company’s airstrip for the flight to Silva Porto.

But Savimbi’s accurate calculation was that the mood could easily change, and that control of the railway would ensure that UNITA’s most vital black African friend would stay friendly.

As it turned out, UNITA never gained control of the entire railway. Luso, which had changed hands several times in the course of the fighting, was taken by a column, code-named "X- Ray," on December 11. This column had been stiffened by another two troops of South African armoured cars, but the advance father east was halted about 12 ½ miles short of Teixeira da Sousa, up against the Zambian border. The problem, once again, was the state of the bridge. A very large bridge had been blown, and South African engineers estimated that it could take up to three months to repair. Savimbi was told that at that stage it was not worth taking.

Before December 9, the day the OAU was supposed to meet, the Cubans had a stroke of luck which they were to turn into a major psychological warfare victory: they captured four South African mechanics who had been sent forward to repair a vehicle north of Cela and accidentally drove on too far into enemy-held territory. They were subsequently displayed in Luanda. The attention of the world media was now rivetted on the South Africans. The Cubans did not admit their own involvement in Angola until December 22.

The South Africans were by now intensely worried about the danger of fighting a lone battle against Communism in Angola. The heavy weapons that they had expected the Americans to supply were not arriving. The power of the U.S. Congress - and notably, of the House of Representatives Committee on Intelligence - to demand and get information CIA operations had led to the disclosure, and subsequent leakage to the Press, of five separate programmes, all of which had to be at least partially abandoned. And now South African prisoners were being posed for the cameramen in Luanda.

A secret war had become embarrassingly public, and there were now strong pressures within the Government for an immediate withdrawal. The date had already been fixed: it was to coincide with the OAU summit. But the OAU meeting was suddenly set back; it would now take place on December 18. Should the South Africans wait? The question became acute after December 18. On the last day that Congress met before the Christmas recess, the Senate voted to cut off all further covert assistance to UNITA and the FNLA.

The vote followed the revelation through Congressional hearings of the full extent of covert support for the anti-Soviet movements in Angola, including details of the airlift of light infantry weapons and rocket launchers to Zaire, and the provision of five Zaire-based spotter planes piloted by Americans. After the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 7-0 against military aid to any faction in Angola, an extraordinary coalition of liberals and conservatives voted in the Senate to impose a total ban.

The ghost of Vietnam was stalking Capitol Hill. The distrust of Government secrecy and the fear of embroilment in a potential Third World quagmire now ran so deep that even some of the Senate’s most notable hawks voted for the ban.

The news came to Pretoria as damning evidence of South Africa’s growing isolation in the struggle to determine Angola’s future. The mood of doubt deepened as news came in of heavy casualties around Quibala - and of a further postponement of the OAU meeting until January 9.

Demands of diplomacy

Some frenzied backroom diplomacy took place, involving numerous trips back and forth between black African capitals - notably Lusaka - and Pretoria. There were renewed pleas for South Africa to hold the ring for a bit longer. But Kaunda expressed his concern, on New Year’s eve, that the South Africans should leave before the OAU meeting opened or, at the latest, before it wound up. The British and French Governments both expressed concern that the South Africans should withdraw before the UN Security Council meeting scheduled for early January. While it was understood that the military position of the anti-Soviet forces in Angola could rapidly become untenable if the South Africans left, the Governments that had been discreetly sympathetic were now alarmed by the political and diplomatic situation.

South Africa’s ambassador to the UN, Mr. Pik Botha, darted home for urgent consultations, and met with the Prime Minister, senior Cabinet ministers and defence chiefs at Oubosstrand at the end of December. It may have been at this meeting that the decision on the final withdrawal was taken. The stage was set for the final denouement. On the eve of the OAU’s weekend summit in Addis Ababa, the MPLA paraded another three South African prisoners for the benefit of the world media. (The MPLA is still holding all seven South African captives.) The only thing that the black African leaders who assembled in Addis Ababa were able to agree on was a blanket condemnation of South Africa.

But the depth of black African distrust for the Angolan Marxists and their friends was made plain by the fact that, instead of voting overwhelmingly for a pro-MPLA resolution, the conference split right down the middle. A total of 22 states supported a document drawn up by Senegal’s President Senghor, calling for a "government of national reconciliation" in Angola. The same number supported an alternative text produced by Nigeria’s Brigadier Murtala Muhammed, which called on the OAU to recognise the MPLA as the legitimate Government of Angola.

This was the end of the road for the South Africans. To have stayed on in Angola would have required a new injection of men and material, with no assurance of adequate backing from any major power, but with the certainty that a continued South African presence would be used by the Marxist lobby in the OAU in the bid to get a new vote that would commit the organisation to the MPLA, and in accelerated efforts to isolate South Africa within international bodies like the U.N.

Their losses had been remarkably light - 33 South Africans killed, as against an estimated 2,000-plus Cubans.

The withdrawal of South African forces came on January 22. They pulled back to a line just north of the Cunene river. It is significant, in view of the Cubans’ propaganda claims of heroic victories in Angola, that it took them more than two months to occupy the vacuum left behind by the departing South Africans.

UNITA forces held on to the Salazar bridge, over the south-eastern bend in the Cuanza river, for weeks after the South Africans had gone. When the Cubans finally came inching south, Soviet-made spotter planes were sent ahead to check for any signs of remaining South African forces. The Cubans and the MPLA did not finally reach the border with South-West Africa until April 1, 1976, a week after the South Africans withdrew from their last remaining positions defending the Cunene hydro-electric scheme.

Mr. Vorster said at the time the withdrawal began that the fact "that an acceptable government of unity has not been established in Angola is not the Republic of South Africa’s fault. The Republic was not prepared to sacrifice its last man in a war on behalf of the Free World." I cannot quarrel with that statement.

South Africa was fighting many other people’s battles in Angola. The background will probably never be fully explained by the South Africans themselves for fear of destroying their remaining hopes of detente with black Africa.

Their refusal to go it alone was influenced by other factors. The most crucial was the possibility that the Communists might escalate the war by putting MiG fighters into the air. French intelligence sources (who maintained an excellent listening-post in Brazzaville throughout the war) reported that 12 MiG-21 fighters were uncrated in Pointe Noire in October, 1975, and assembled by Cuban technicians. American aerial surveillance subsequently established that these planes and a further 10 MiG-17s, were brought to airfields inside Angola in December. Big aircraft fuel dumps were established at the eastern diamond mining town of Henrique de Carvalho, which remained in MPLA hands throughout the war.

These planes were not used during the course of the South African campaign, nor (to the best of my knowledge) was there ever a direct threat from the Russians to intervene if the South Africans pushed farther north, or refused to depart. But the presence of the MiGs was a silent threat.

Their deployment would have presented the South Africans with the choice of committing their own Mirage fighters to an aerial battle over Angola - which might in turn have produced a further Communist escalation - or of watching superior hardware win the war for the Cubans. Even without planes, the Cubans (whose strength was up to 15,000 by mid-January) were exploiting their colossal superiority in armaments. No one intervened to stop the shipment of arms and men to Luanda during the campaign.



If there had ever been hopes that the Americans might attempt a blockade, they collapsed after the Senate vote on December 18. Meanwhile, the Soviet navy showed the flag by shadowing East European merchantmen en route to Angola.



Then there was the manpower problem. There were never more than 2,000 South Africans in Angola, as against almost 10 times as many Cubans by the end of the campaign. The troops South Africa deployed in Angola were the national servicemen who could be spared after security requirements in South-West Africa had been fulfilled, led by professional officers and N.C.O.s.



To increase the South African presence, it would have been necessary to to mobilise citizen forces, and that would have meant going to Parliament, with consequent publicity.



Marked lack of solidarity

Iko Carreira, the MPLA Defence Minister whose special contacts with Moscow were discussed in the first article, remarked in an interview in May last year that the victory for his movement in Angola was "in no way extraordinary, since proletarian internationalism exists." He was saying if effect that there will be more Angolas.

One thing the West did not take into account, he added, was "the militant solidarity of our friends, and in particular the Cubans." Sadly, the West showed precious little solidarity when it came to the crunch, let alone "militant" solidarity. How much confidence can Africa or Third World countries that are also targets for Soviet aggression feel after Angola - especially now that Mr. Carter’s newly-appointed ambassador to the U.N., Mr. Andy Young, has said that he does not view Communism as a danger in Africa, and that the Cubans are a force for stability in Angola? Angola’s shadow may prove to be as long as Vietnam’s.



MOSCOW’S NEXT TARGET IN AFRICA

by Robert Moss

Paying the price for Angola

Can the West learn from Angola’s tragedy, or are we condemned to relive the experience? What the Russians learned from Angola is that war by proxy pays off. They will be strongly tempted to use the same technique in other places - and almost certainly in the assault on Rhodesia and South-West Africa.

The Cubans are Moscow’s all-purpose mercenaries, but they are not the only proxy soldiers who are being deployed in the widening war for southern Africa.



The Nigerians are said to be heavily involved in Angola. Western intelligence sources report that Nigerian troops were present at battalion strength when the MPLA and the Cubans pushed south last year. According to UNITA sources in Paris, the Nigerian strength has since been reinforced.



UNITA sources have tapes of radio intercepts showing that at least 5,000 Nigerian troops have been deployed in Angola. They are operating as far south as Mocamedes, and are also based in Lobito, Luanda and the eastern diamond mining town of Henrique de Carvalho. UNITA claims to have intercepted radio communications in English (the common language between the Nigerians, the Cubans and the MPLA), in the Ibo, Hausa and Yoruba dialects, and in a form of pidgin Creole that could indicate the presence of forces from Sierra Leone as well.



An intriguing sidelight is that UNITA also claims that a British shipping line played a key role in ferrying Nigerian troops and military supplies to Angola. Nigeria, rich in oil and boasting an army of some 210,000 men, can clearly afford to be more than rhetorical in its backing for the guerrilla movements of southern Africa.



The Tanzanians have also moved into the region. President Nyerere has put 1,400 of his troops into northern Mozambique to help the FRELIMO Government to suppress the major revolt of the Makonde tribes led by Lazaro Kavandame. Mozambique’s army is largely recruited from the warlike Makonde.



Yet another African army is reported to have sent units south: Somali troops are said to be quietly moving into Mozambique. Rhodesian guerrillas in Maputo have bragged to Portuguese correspondents that Somali tanks will be used in future operations against Ian Smith’s forces. The story may not be as bizarre as it sounds. Somalia, like Cuba, is a Soviet satellite whose armed forces and intelligence services operate under the direct supervision of Russian officers. Although the Somali army is small (some 25,000 men), it is well-endowed with Soviet armour and has performed well in border skirmishes with the Ethiopians. The Somalis have 200 Soviet-made T-34 tanks and about 50 T-54s.



The black expeditionary forces' task may be to free the Cubans for a future offensive against Rhodesia, South-West Africa - or Zaire, which is also a prime target for the Russians. But the Cubans in Angola still have their hands full coping with the continuing guerrilla war, and the total number there has probably increased since the end of the South African campaign; some estimates range as high as 22,000.



There are more than 1,000 Cuban advisers and "technicians" in Mozambique, nominally assigned to the Senna sugar plantations or to the port of Beira. Many are believed to be military instructors for the ZIPA guerrillas from Rhodesia and the FRELIMO forces.



In Somalia, at least 600 Cuban instructors are attached to the Somali army and the pro-Somali guerrillas from Djibouti - the French-controlled port on the Red Sea that is expected to become independent later this year. The Cubans are also active in Equatorial Guinea, where President Macias has established one of the bloodiest dictatorships in black Africa. Some 200 Cuban instructors train his paramilitary forces and his personal bodyguard. There are another 300 Cuban advisers in Sekou Toure’s Guinea.



In Sierra Leone, Cubans are training an internal security unit, and Cuban "technicians" have also been sent to the strategically-placed former Portuguese possessions in West Africa: Guinea-Bissau, the Cape Verde Islands, and Sao Tome e Principe.



The Cubans are particularly well-entrenched in Congo-Brazzaville, the main staging-point in their invasion of Angola. They maintain at least 400 men at the Pointe Noire docks and the Maya Maya air base, and there are reports that reinforcements have recently been moved in from Angola in preparation for an attempt to put renewed pressure on Zaire’s President Mobutu, whose supply of routes to the Atlantic are now endangered. In Tanzania there are at least 150 advisers and "technicians," some of them attached to the Tanzanian People’s Defence Force.



All in all, it is not a bad effort for a Caribbean sugar-cane republic of eight million people. Of course, someone else is picking up the tabs. The Russians have not only been subsidising the Cuban economy to the tune of more than $1 million a day; they invested over $500 million in the Angolan campaign, and are believed to have supplied weaponry and equipment to Angola worth more than $350 million since the South Africans pulled out.



But Cuba’s role as a Soviet proxy is even more striking if you take account of the Cuban presence in the Caribbean (where Castro’s men are training Jamaican police) and in the Middle East (where 150 Cuban instructors are training international terrorists in Iraqi camps), not to mention the Cubans’ efforts to take control of the non-aligned countries’ news pool and the role of the Cuban intelligence service, the DGI, in orchestrating the activities of Latin American exile groups and transnational terrorists in Western Europe. Is it possible to imagine an anti-Communist country of the same size acting on the same scale today?



The strategic effect of the loss of Angola is summed up by two statements that oddly coincide: one from the Soviet paper Izvestia, in a major article last August; the other from South Africa’s Prime Minister, Mr. Vorster, in his New Year’s message. Izvestia said that "revolutionary events have seized southern Africa - the last strong bulwark of colonialism and racism - and the speed of the spread of the flame attests to the huge supplies of ‘explosive material’ accumulating there." Mr. Vorster, in simple but chilling words, showed that the message had not been lost on him: "The storm has not struck yet. We are only experiencing the whirlwind that goes before it."



Were the effects of the Cuban victory foreseen by the men who sat down in the American Senate on December 17, 1975, to debate whether or not they should vote to cut off all United States support to the anti-Soviet movements in Angola? With a few honourable exceptions, it seemed that the Senators were talking about another war. Senator after Senator recalled the anguish of Vietnam, the peril of getting sucked into another quagmire, the hopelessness of trying to shape events in a far-off place of which Americans knew nothing.



Continuing fight against Marxists

Hubert Humphrey caught the prevailing mood: "The United States better start taking care of things it knows how to take care of. We know so little of Africa, the 800 and some tribes that make up Africa... I say it is like a different world."

Senator McGovern jumped up to argue that it made no difference which of the black movements won anyway. Senator Tunney thought the rival Angolan movements were only nominally pro-Soviet or pro-American. At heart, all of them were "basically pro-Angolan, Socialist and highly nationalistic." Most of the senators who spoke that day found it difficult to believe that the Russians would be able to establish a secure foothold in Angola, and some suggested that Angola could prove to be Russia’s Vietnam.



It was not a wholly absurd idea. To this day, three anti-Soviet guerrilla movements are continuing the struggle in Angola: UNITA in the south and centre of the country, the FNLA in the north, and the secessionists of FLEC in the Cabinda enclave. Unlike left-wing revolutionaries from other countries who fly off to university sinecures or their Swiss bank accounts after suffering defeat on their home ground, Jonas Savimbi is carrying on the battle deep inside Angola.



He has claimed that UNITA has 22,000 armed supporters, although Western intelligence sources believe that the figure is probably no more than 6,000. It is virtually impossible to get reliable information on the guerrillas’ military capacities, but one index of UNITA’s ability to harass the regime is the fact that no train has been able to cover the whole length of the Benguela railway - from the Zambian border to the coast - since the beginning of the war. UNITA’s political base is still largely intact, and the MPLA has had little success in building up support among the Ovimbundu peoples, traditional UNITA sympathisers.



This means that it might well be possible for UNITA and the other anti-Soviet groups to inflict a serious humiliation on the Cubans and the MPLA - if they could count on effective outside support. But no Western Power is disposed to play the part of armourer and adviser to UNITA in the way that the Russians and Chinese played it for the Vietcong.



South Africans maintain contacts

Now that the MPLA regime has been admitted to the United Nations, backing UNITA has become diplomatically tricky - although some Western Governments are more strait-laced than others. The French were ahead of the stampede to recognise the MPLA back in February, 1976 (much to the annoyance of their EEC partners, who had expected to be consulted) but this did not inhibit them from remaining deeply involved with UNITA and the FNLA.

Zambia’s President Kaunda has come under intense pressure from his "frontline" colleagues to sever all links with UNITA, and finally had to ask Jorge Sangumba, UNITA’s chief foreign spokesman, to leave his customary haunt, the Intercontinental Hotel in Lusaka. Jorge now gives his patronage to the Intercontinental Hotel in Kinshasa.



The South Africans maintain contact with the anti-Soviet movements, and there is a large colony of white Angolan refugees. But they are inhibited by their desire not to provide a pretext for a Communist-backed invasion of South-West Africa.



Ironically, if any outside power is ready to adopt a "forward policy" in Angola, it could still prove to be China. The Chinese have backed both the FNLA and UNITA in the past. Many UNITA leaders, including Savimbi’s number two, Miguel Nzau Puna, have received training in China. Puna complained to me when I last saw him about the rigours of the Chinese training schedule (which continued into the night with political indoctrination sessions). The Chinese cut off support to UNITA at the end of 1975, when hard evidence of South Africa’s involvement seeped out.



But the Chinese are angry that they have lost nearly every point to the Russians in the contest for power in black Africa - despite the fact that they have spent considerably more in economic aid. So renewed contact with UNITA is a possibility, if a remote one.



With or without outside backing, UNITA’s proven survival capacity worries the Russians. The Soviet ambassador in Luanda, Boris Vorobyev, is said to have been instructed to press the MPLA to do a deal with UNITA. President Neto and the Cubans are reluctant, but the biggest stumbling-block is that neither Savimbi nor any other of the top-ranking UNITA leaders has been ready to accept the idea of a deal with the MPLA - which, in current circumstances would amount at best to a conditional surrender. KGB agents have therefore been trying to sound out UNITA representatives abroad to discover whether it is possible to create a rift between Savimbi and lower-level cadres, so far without notable success.



Angola today cannot be objectively described as an independent country. Control of its armed forces, its secret police, its economy, its civil administration and its educational system is in the hands of Russians, Cubans and East Europeans, and the MPLA itself is being remoulded into an orthodox Communist party. The Cuban garrisons are the basic guarantee that the regime will not only survive but toe the line.



The Cubans have divided Angola into six military regions, with garrisons in the major towns. Five major mopping-up operations have been launched against the anti-Communist forces since the South Africans withdrew, but despite the savagery with which the Cubans and the MPLA have dealt with the civil population large swathes of Angola are still contested zones.



The continued flight of refugees over the 1200-mile border of South-West Africa is an eloquent comment on the way the people of southern Angola regard their new masters. Some 10,000 have been absorbed into South-West Africa.



A conservative intelligence estimate has 3,700 Cuban troops currently in the central-western region, embracing Lobito, Huambo (formerly Nova Lisboa) and Bie (formerly Silva Porto); 2,000 in each of the northern, eastern and southern regions; and 3,000 in the Cabinda enclave, where some of the fiercest fighting is taking place. There are at least 1,500 Cuban troops in Luanda.



This gives a total of about 14,000, of whom 6,000 are infantry. The Cuban forces include an armoured regiment with 120 T-54 and T-34 tanks and 1,900 men, an armoured car regiment with 70 Soviet-made BRDM vehicles and 1,600 men, an anti-aircraft battalion and five regiments equipped with multi-barrelled rocket-launchers.



The Cubans are also the key element in the new Angolan air force. They pilot all of the MPLA’s Soviet-supplied planes, which include a dozen MiG-21s, 10 MiG-17s, helicopters and Antonov-2 light transport planes. They also pilot some of the scores of light aircraft that were bequeathed by the Portuguese forces. Cubans command the air bases throughout Angola, and are supervising the construction of new air bases at Huambo, Mocamedes and Cabo Lindo and the extension of existing airfields. This could be the prelude to a Soviet attempt to use Angola as the base for a major offensive against South-West Africa.



But Cuba’s involvement is not restricted to troops. The Cuban ambassador in Luanda is Oscar Oramas, one of the architects of Cuba’s invasion, a senior figure in the Cuban Communist party, an old Africa hand (who was formerly ambassador in Conakry) and, most important of all, a key operative of the Cuban intelligence service, or DGI, a satellite of the KGB directly supervised by a KGB general and his Soviet staff. The new Angolan intelligence service, the DISA, is directly controlled by the DGI.



Cubans training union leaders

Similarly, Cuban advisers have assumed key positions throughout the civil service, and notably in the Interior Ministry, the Education Ministry, and in the supervision of the MPLA’s programme of "political mobilisation," which is supposed to drum up support for a "mass Marxist-Leninist party." The Cubans are training Angolan trade union leaders, and the syllabus on offer at the Lazaro Pena trade union college in Marianao includes Marxist philosophy and Cuban history. The Cubans are strongly represented on President Neto's staff, and he is said to have entrusted his personal security to them. They share control of the Finance Ministry and the Bank of Angola with the Russians. The recent measures to establish a new Angolan currency, the kwanza, set an example to any other government that might wish to wipe out its middle class at a stroke. Angolan families are allowed (on a one-for-one basis) to exchange the old Portuguese escudos for kwanzas, but only up to the limit of 20,000 kwanzas. Anybody who has more than that stashed away has to accept that his savings have been turned into worthless paper.

Last July, Angola became the first African country to join the Soviet-controlled Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CEMA). Since Neto's visit to Moscow in October, the trickle of East European technicians, agricultural scientists and managers has become a flood.



Between them, the Cubans and the Russians now decide who can enter and leave Angola, what civil liberties (if any) individuals and organisations will be allowed, what the country will export and import, and how much money will be printed. On the coffee plantations, Cuban supervisors are said to operate a system of forced labour: workers are shifted from one place to another, without notice or appeal.



These are examples of what "satellisation" means. But foreign troops and advisers can be shown the door.



The Russians remember what happened in Egypt in 1972, when Sadat turned against them, just as the Cubans remember the eviction of their mission from Brazzaville in 1968, before Marien Ngouabi seized power. So an effort is being made in Angola, as in Mozambique, to transform the ruling movement into an orthodox Communist party.



Soviet writers have described in detail how this effort should proceed. The classical text is a book entitled "Political Parties of Africa," published in Moscow in 1970. Its main editor is Vassily Solodovnikov, now Soviet Ambassador in Lusaka.



Solodovnikov accepts that it is unrealistic to expect to create a Communist society in Africa overnight It will be necessary to begin by working through "revolutionary democratic parties," like the movements that came to power in Guinea, Congo and Tanzania, and like the MPLA in Angola. These movements may start out as a mish-mash of nationalism, Marxism and tribalism, but they include activists "who are inspired by the ideas of scientific Socialism" - in plain words, Communists.



Solodovnikov's thesis is working out in Angola. During his visit to Moscow last October, Agostinho Neto signed a 20-year friendship treaty with Russia that provided for regular exchanges between the MPLA and the Soviet Communist party. Soon after his return, the MPLA announced that Angola was going to be described officially as a "Marxist-Leninist republic."



It is perhaps a toss-up whether the MPLA in Angola or FRELIMO in Mozambique has gone further towards achieving Sovietisation. The MPLA does not seem, as yet, to have matched FRELIMO’s regulations that dictate the maximum thickness of the soles (and the heels) of shoes, according to the age and sex of the wearer.



Both President Podgorny and Leonid Brezhnev are expected to visit Africa this year. Their main ports of call will be Maputo and (probably) Dar-es Salaam. The message could be that the West is on the retreat and that Russia is becoming the dominant power in Africa. Their strength is that they are acting according to a global strategy - while Western leaders are not.



The ring of naval and air facilities that the Russians have acquired around the African coast, and the deep-water harbours where they now have the opportunity to create new naval bases, including Luanda and four excellent ports in Mozambique: Maputo, Beira, Nacala and Porto Amelia. Somalia, Congo and all of what used to be Portuguese Africa now have Governments that can be called Marxist, and Soviet-bloc military advisers, troops and intelligence officers are present throughout most of the continent..



But the most important thing to grasp about the Soviet design for southern Africa is that it is essentially negative; it has been accurately described, in an admirable paper from the Institute for the Study of Conflict* as "a strategy of denial" - denial, that is, of raw materials and communications.



Threat to Cape route

A leading Soviet Africanist, E. Tarabrin, predicts that the West’s dependence on African raw materials will increase rapidly over the rest of the decade, and that imports of chromites (from Rhodesia and South Africa) will double. Soviet experts also stress that much of Africa’s mineral wealth lies in the southern half. The gold, diamonds, platinum, copper and other industrial metals are rich stakes to play for.

Geography is just as important as natural resources. If the Cape route - which carries about 70 per cent of the strategic materials required by NATO countries - could be denied to the West, the world could be cut in half vertically by the closing of the Suez Canal as well. There is no alternative to the Cape route, not just because the Suez Canal can be closed overnight and Western Europe is so dependent on Middle Eastern oil, but because technology has bypassed the Canal: the supertankers cannot get through it.



The Communist invasion of Angola was a step towards the fulfilment of Russia’s grand design: the domination of the whole of southern Africa.



By giving up in Angola, the Western Powers threw away a unique opportunity to hold the line against Soviet expansion in southern Africa. Why unique? Because in Angola, the reality of the Soviet threat was not obscured by racial sentiment - at any rate, not until Marxist propagandists set about trying to turn the South Africans into the villain of the piece.



The war in Angola was not a war of black men versus white men. It was a war between rival black guerrilla movements and their foreign helpers. It presented a clear-cut choice between a pro-Soviet group that promised to turn Angola into a Marxist-Leninist republic and its pro- Western opponents who promised democratic elections and guarantees for private investment.



Learning from Angola, the Russians are determined to ensure that if they can engineer the removal of white Government in Salisbury, there will not be a subsequent battle for the spoils between pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet blacks, which might again divide black Africa. How can they ensure that? The spade-work has already been done. The bulk of the black guerrilla forces have been united by the Nkomo-Mugabe alliance, under the umbrella of the Patriotic Front.



The five neighbouring African Governments - which were at loggerheads during the Angolan war - have been persuaded to give their support to Nkomo and Mugabe. Britain and America say they will refuse to accept any settlement that is rejected by these two, even though they patently cannot claim to speak for the majority of black Rhodesians and the only hope of a civilised solution lies in an agreement between Ian Smith and more representative black leaders such as Bishop Muzorewa.



The Soviet calculation - which seems to be paying off so far - is that the assault on southern Africa will be tolerated, if not aided and abetted, by the West, so long as it is carried out in the name of "majority rule." The fact that, for most of black Africa, "majority rule" means one-party dictatorship or primitive despotism is conveniently ignored.



The West’s lost chance

But what is still less excusable is the neglect by Western politicians of one of the abiding lessons of Angola: that if "majority rule" means government with the consent of the people, then it can only survive in Africa if it is defended against Communist aggression.

Now Britain and America say that they will not accept a settlement worked out between blacks and whites inside Rhodesia - or, for that matter, South-West Africa. The Marxist guerrilla leaders must be included; it seems that it does not matter overmuch to either Western government if the whites have any say.

If Angola is any guide - and I am convinced that it is - this is a prescription for another Marxist dictatorship, imposed by force of arms, which would provide the base for black guerrillas and Soviet proxy troops to attack the ultimate target: South Africa.



The End

Regards,
Hist2004

[1Cie GevGn]

One of those big "small-conflicts" in Africa, nice to have some info on it

[Loco]

If you´re interested in cubans adventures in Africa, in this site and in this forum you can read and talk with former cuban veterans in Africa, good information and many pics. Some cuban vets forum members are exiliated in USA or in Europe, others are in Cuba, but the dialogue there is civilizated and USA visitors are welcome,
www.militar.org.ua

Btw, I wouldn´t say that cubans subdued to comunism Angola. In fact, Angola is today a democracy, in part due to castristas cubans, even if this sounds absurd. And cubans were decisive in defeating the white southafrican forces of the apartheid, while occident did nothing. Regards.

[Abolith]

I would have NEVER thought that Cubans moved in on africa!

[hist2004]

I would have NEVER thought that Cubans moved in on africa!

Yes, if this part of Cuba's history is unknown to someone, it's difficult
to image that they had as many as 16,000 combat troops with as
many as 4,000 advisors and technicians in Angola by 1980. Cuba
had also supplied medical personnel, teachers, and industrial
technicians who were effectively in command of the day-to-day
operations and key functioning of the country. Cuba's image is
always one of being isolated by the United States. This exposition
obviously dispels that notion.

Regards,
Hist2004

[Loco]

I think if USA let all his tourists fly to Cuba like are doing canadians and europeans since many years ago, with thousands and thousands of americans walking down the Malecon in La Habana, chatting with cubans and spending the dollars they have would be the most effective anti-castrista weapon that Pentagon could design, but it´s only my opinion. I was there, and cubans are nationalists over all, they always were, but are very pragmatic too, and in fact Castro´s image is erasing every day more inside the island, all what cubans want is a peaceful change, and with a little pull it could be possible soon.

[DANJANOU]

Hist2004, good post. I've had the priveledge of talking with several Cuban vets from this war, and one even took me to the memorial to their fallen in Santiago de Cuba, very similar to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington in both design and overall feeling while there.

Loco, let me guess you spent a whole week or two in La Habana and Varadero on a package tour right. You were shuttled around on air con mini buses to all the sites on official Cubanacan, Gaiviotta, or Rhumbos tours and fed all the standard Socialism or Death sripted pap from the indoctrinated tour guides.

[Loco]

I spent a week in La Habana and an inner flight to Santiago, in the eastern point, we spent the second week. Yes, I wanted a package hollyday including Varadero, after a hard year working I thought thats what I deserved, a beach under palms ;) I hadn´t any special interest in political tourism, what I saw is what I imagined before, but the wishes of my girlfriend of visiting some distant relatives of her in Santiago weighted more over my willing. Even so, both hotels in La Habana and in Santiago were fantastic. We did few swimming poole but we walked a lot, La Habana is funny, and we made many friends, both cubans and spanish.

[DANJANOU]

Hey I'm not dissing the fact that you earned the right to laze on the beach after a hard year of working and saving for it. What I mean is those on packages like that get to see what Fidel wants them to see and that's it.

Next time get off the bus, leave the guarded all inclusive resort, and ditch the DGI and MINIT minders and discover the real Cuba. It's an eye opening experience.

[Loco]

uh? No problem, Danjou, I didn´t feel recriminated, I´m an undeceived admiror of that revolution, turned may be since before I was born into a real crap. Perhaps I mistranslated, because I DID want only having sun baths under palms, and I hadn´t it :( . As I said, we spent 1 week in La Habana, we walked up and down the city, we escaped of La Bodeguita del Medio and other tourist crowded places, we didn´t go with any of the official guided trips, although the hotel we stayed, of an spanish company, organized its own excursions, so we saw and talked with cubans in their own element so to speak, but we had contacts from Spain. And the second week we flew to Santiago(I was "oblied" by my girl friend), for meeting with the descendants of the brother of her grand-grandfather or so, who had emigrated to Cuba from Spain a century ago, but the visit turned to be the best part of the trip, we even went to a private party there with our cubans relatives and friends, and Santiago is too a beautiful city, although shadowed by La Habana, but Santiago is the musical source of the island, and in the party we had I listened amateur musics that many people here would pay for listenign. Like MacArthur said: I WILL COME BACK. ;)

[DANJANOU]

Actually he said "I shall return" but then again my Spanish isn't perfect so I shouldn't make comments on your English.

Next time you're in Santiago take a look at Moncada, excellent museum there on the revolution. There's another in the small town ofSiboney down the coast. Also as I said, and to get back on topic, vist the memorial to the Cubans who died in Angola in the main cemetary.

I may not agree with the cause they fought for, but they were tough soldiers and deserving of my respect.

[OldRecon]

Who won in Angola?
Well, the MPLA guys seems to be in power still, and Savimbi is dead.
Yet nowdays the former commies don't seem all too concerned about making money the capitalist way from the oil industry etc.
And the present government in Angola also don't seem to be any less corrupt than any other government in the region.
Foreign companines investing in Angola must f.ex sign a clause stating they may not disclose to outsiders how much they pay the Angolan government for their bussines rights in the country.
Just another case of an Orwelian pig farm.
Same story with Mocambique. In the old days East block instructors, nowdays ex-SAS instructors.

As for Angola what about the story of "major" Calahan?

[DANJANOU]

Calahan, I'd almost forgot about him. Ex Pte in the Paras, crazy idiot who was in the right place at the right time.

What was the name of the book written by one of the mercenary contingent in Northern Angola that gives detai