Fw: US Role in Angolan War Revealed

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From: "Dan Clore" <clore at columbia-center.org>
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Sent: Monday, April 01, 2002 12:14 AM
Subject: US Role in Angolan War Revealed


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 Published on Sunday, March 31, 2002 in the New York Times

 From Old Files, a New Story of U.S. Role in Angolan War

 by Howard W. French

 In the summer of 1975, with the cold war raging and the
 memory of Saigon's fall terribly fresh, the United States
 sponsored a covert operation to prevent another Communist
 takeover, this time across the world, in Angola.

 The effort failed to keep a Marxist government from taking
 power but ushered in a long and chaotic civil war, involving
 American, Chinese and Russian interests, and Cuban and South
 African soldiers.

 Now, coinciding with the death last month of Washington's
 longtime rebel ally in Angola, Jonas Savimbi, a trove of
 recently declassified American documents seem to overturn
 conventional explanations of the war's origins.

 Historians and former diplomats who have studied the
 documents say they show conclusively that the United States
 intervened in Angola weeks before the arrival of any Cubans,
 not afterward as Washington claimed. Moreover, though a
 connection between Washington and South Africa, which was
 then ruled by a white government under the apartheid policy,
 was strongly denied at the time, the documents appear to
 demonstrate their broad collaboration.

 "When the United States decided to launch the covert
 intervention, in June and July, not only were there no
 Cubans in Angola, but the U.S. government and the C.I.A.
 were not even thinking about any Cuban presence in Angola,"
 said Piero Gleijeses, a history professor at Johns Hopkins
 University, who used the Freedom of Information Act to
 uncover the documents. Similarly, cables of the time have
 now been published by the National Security Archive, a
 private research group.

 "If you look at the C.I.A. reports which were done at the
 time, the Cubans were totally out of the picture," Dr.
 Gleijeses said. But in reports presented to the Senate in
 December 1975, "what you find is really nothing less than
 the rewriting of history."

 Cuba eventually poured 50,000 troops into Angola in support
 of a Marxist independence group, the Popular Movement for
 the Liberation of Angola. The group held the capital in the
 months just before independence from Portugal, declared in
 August 1975.

 But Dr. Gleijeses's research shows that the Cuban
 intervention came in response to a C.I.A.-financed covert
 invasion via neighboring Zaire, now known as Congo, and
 South Africa's simultaneous drive on the capital, using
 troops who posed as Western mercenaries.

 The United States gradually switched its support to Mr.
 Savimbi's movement, Unita, and continued to support it
 intermittently during nearly two decades of warfare.

 Dr. Gleijeses's research documents significant coordination
 between the United States and South Africa, from joint
 training missions to airlifts, and bluntly contradicts the
 Congressional testimony of the era and the memoirs of Henry
 A. Kissinger, the former secretary of state.

 The work draws heavily on White House, State Department and
 National Security Council memorandums, as well as extensive
 interviews and archival research in Cuba, Angola, Germany
 and elsewhere. It was carried out in preparation of Dr.
 Gleijeses's recently published history of the conflict,
 "Conflicting Missions, Havana, Washington and Africa,
 1959-1976" (Chapel Hill).

 The book strongly challenges common perceptions of Cuban
 behavior in Africa. In the 1960s and 1970s, when Havana and
 Washington clashed repeatedly in central and southern
 Africa, Cuban troops in the continent were typically seen as
 foot soldiers for Soviet imperialism.

 In fact, Dr. Gleijeses writes, Cuba intervened in Angola
 without seeking Soviet permission. Eager not to derail an
 easing of tension with Washington, the Soviets limited
 themselves to providing 10 charter flights to transport
 Cubans to Angola in January 1976. The next year, Havana and
 Moscow supported opposite sides in an attempted coup in
 Angola, in which the Marxist government, Cuba's ally,
 prevailed.

 After reviewing Dr. Gleijeses's work, several former senior
 United States diplomats who were involved in making policy
 toward Angola broadly endorsed its conclusions.

 "Considering that things came to a head over covert action
 in the U.S. government in mid-July, there is no reason to
 believe we were responding to Cuban involvement in Angola,"
 said Nathaniel Davis, who resigned as Mr. Kissinger's
 assistant secretary of state for African affairs in July
 1975 over the Angola intervention.

 Mr. Davis said he could find no fault with Mr. Gleijeses's
 scholarship. Asked why the story of America responding to
 Cuban intervention in Angola had persisted for so long, Mr.
 Davis said: "Life is funny. What catches on in terms of
 public debate is hard to predict."

 The United States denied collaboration with South Africa
 during the Angolan war, but it was quickly discovered by
 China, an erstwhile American ally against the Marxists in
 Angola, and was suspected and deeply resented by
 Washington's main African partners.

 --
 Dan Clore
 mailto:clore at columbia-center.org

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