Conflicting Missions by Piero Gleijeses

Author:Piero Gleijeses [Gleijeses, Piero]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780807826478
Publisher: UNC Press
Published: 2002-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

FRIENDS

The United States was in the lead, flanked by Zaire and South Africa. England and France took up the rear. This was the coalition that was forming in the summer of 1975 behind UNITA and the FNLA. “They are the same, those who yesterday . . . supported Salazar and Caetano, and today are against the MPLA,” Neto remarked.101

By July, Crocker asserts, the British and the French governments had begun “their own clandestine assistance programs.” British companies joined in to help UNITA. When Stockwell flew from Lusaka to Silva Porto in Angola’s central highlands to meet Savimbi in August 1975, he flew in a small Lear jet with a British crew on loan from the British commercial conglomerate Lonrho. Lonrho “was betting on Savimbi to win the war,” Stockwell remarked. “Special access to Angolan minerals would be prize aplenty.”102

France coveted Cabinda’s oil. “The Cabindan affair puzzles Paris,” Le Monde explained in August 1975, “because Brazzaville and Kinshasa, both special friends of France, have contradictory views about the future of the enclave.”103 Paris, however, had already decided to back Kinshasa.104 Not only was Zaire, with all its mineral riches, a far more attractive partner than the Congo, but its friends, too, were more attractive: South Africa, the United States, Roberto, and Savimbi.

Paris, therefore, helped the FNLA and UNITA. When the Portuguese empire collapsed, “though we were helpless to prevent Mozambique falling victim to Marxism and famine, the least we could do was to try to counter the Soviet and Cuban ascendancy in Angola,” the director of French intelligence, Alexandre de Marenches, wrote. So France sent weapons to Savimbi and, through Mobutu, to Roberto. “I am sorry to say,” Marenches added, “that there was no coordination between American services and our own.” There was, in fact, a one-sided partnership. “The CIA briefed the French intelligence service in detail about its Angola program,” Stockwell complained, “while the French listened carefully but told the CIA nothing about their own activities in Angola and Cabinda.” In September 1975 Neto told Le Monde, “It appears that it is France’s destiny to help the reactionary forces in Africa.”105

The odd men in this company were the Chinese, who had about 200 military instructors training the FNLA in Zaire by the end of 1974. “The Chinese recently agreed to continue this assistance until the end of 1975,” the Davis task force noted in June 1975. The following month, Beijing, which had already supplied arms to the FNLA (and, to a lesser degree, to UNITA), acceded to a new request from Roberto and went “out of its way to make sure the supplies were received quickly.”106 China’s assistance was welcomed by U.S. officials, but there was no consultation or coordination between the two governments. Relations between Washington and Beijing, which had blossomed in 1971–72, had lost momentum by 1973–74, and “a certain immobilism and cooling of atmosphere” had set in because of domestic difficulties in both countries, Chinese dissatisfaction with continuing U.S. ties with Taiwan, and Beijing’s fears that the United States was playing the China card in its pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union.

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