The Stakes in Angola

...The Bakongo tribesmen living there were friendly, so Cao, before sailing further south, despatched four seamen up-river on foot with gifts for the Africans' king...

...Roberto, moreover, was constantly struggling to hold his movement together, and in 1968 quarrels had split the UPA once more: A third group, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) was organized under Jonas Savimbi...

...He chortled and then whistled in admiration...

...Born Andreo Roberto, he had taken the name of the American Protestant missionary who had educated him...

...By independence day, the FNLA and UN1TA had formed an uneasy alliance, with headquarters at Huambo (formerly Nova Lisbon), and were moving on the MPLA-controlled capital...

...Angola's own economy was built on coffee and cocoa, until the discovery of diamonds and a flood of other minerals changed its fortunes...

...The consul general subsequently told me he had nothing but sympathy for the crowd that sank his car...

...But the Cape Verde islands, with a population that is 95 per cent mulatto, opposes mainland African links, and its present pro-Soviet attitude may be tempered in time...

...The KGB started financing a splinter group, the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), which, despite its name, did not belong to the people...

...The Portuguese carried their captives to Lisbon, where they were turned into gentlemen, courtiers and Catholics...

...The UPA offensive, crippled by internal divisions and unable to move out into the Angolan plains because of air attacks, had bogged down...

...What really brought nationalism home to the Angolan capital, however, was a riot in front of Luanda prison on February 12, 1961...

...The new chief of African affairs, G. Mennen Williams, a John F. Kennedy crony and former governor of Michigan, received a memo from the European desk pleading that Portugal be given time to initiate promised reforms...

...artillery and a squadron of MIG-21 ground attack planes...

...Senator Dick Clark (D.-Iowa), chairman of the Senate subcommittee on Africa, for example, has called on the United States to wash its hands of Angola, arguing that if the Russians help a minority achieve power, they will be repudiated later...

...In 1960 a prominent white Luanda lawyer risked his head to tell me that he and some other settler leaders were considering declaring the colony independent...

...Similarly, the MPLA has taken control of the islands of Sao Tome and Principe, and the oil-rich enclave of Cabinda (between Zaire and Congo-Brazzaville...

...After that, there were many years when no Portuguese ship stood at anchor off Angola, and decades would pass with no Portuguese authority stationed ashore...

...Moscow's audacity, especially in Angola, is based on three factors: the likelihood that the UN will not become involved in a major peace-keeping operation...

...The Cubans have the advantage not only of knowing the Russian equipment but of speaking a language similar enough to Portuguese to make learning that tongue relatively easy...

...Just how much of a puppet was demonstrated in Addis Ababa in 1971, at the ninth annual meeting of the Organization of African Unity (OAU...

...But the last Portuguese official had scarcely departed the former colony before the Russians began shipping in T-34 tanks, 122 mm...

...The UN Congo experience, although broadly successful, had turned sour...

...NOTWITHSTANDING the assistance from a remarkable collection of bedfellows, FNLA leader Roberto has accurately said: "This is a war of men against weapons...

...Unfortunately for everyone except the Russians and the MPLA, South Africa has sent in roughly 1,000 troops to aid UNITA...

...With headquarters in Brazzaville, the MPLA was largely a collection of mulattos and assimilados (the educated black minority), who stressed their multitribal origins...

...Weeks later he returned and, upon finding his men seized, took four tribesmen hostage...

...With a population of 90,000, Cabinda earned half a billion dollars a year in royalties from Gulf oil that went to Lisbon...

...aid-some in cash, the rest in weapons supplied through the Congolese Armed Forces...

...said the driver, accelerating in the direction of the hotel...

...Driving into Luanda from the airport in September, while the fighting was still going on in the north, I noticed that my white cab driver had slowed down to peer up from his window...

...the impotence of the OAU-particularly this year under Chairman Idi Amin Dada of Uganda...

...MEANWHILE, at the suggestion of the U.S...

...At least 3,000 Cuban regulars-many of them black-under Brigadier Julio Casas and Armando Estrado Fernandez, head of the Cuban secret police's African section, plus about 400 Russian officers, were brought in to operate the weapons...

...Helena, both British colonies with only embryonic independence movements...

...Nevertheless, by 1964, the course of events was shifting direction...

...This prospect has led strategic planners in Washington to discuss enlarging the American facility on Ascension island and perhaps developing St...

...Kennedy had been assassinated, and the U.S...

...It provided 130 mm...

...Genuine development began only after World War II, and as recently as 20 years ago the colony had about a 1 per cent literacy rate and an uncertain future...

...and the hobbled power of the State Department and CIA in the wake of Watergate...

...Although President Ford has ruled out U.S...

...Yet that summer the foreign press corps in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) learned of the existence of a political party, the Uniao des Populacoes de Angola (UPA), headquartered in the Congolese capital and led by Holden Roberto...

...If the main Soviet aim is naval bases, Bissau, Principe and Sao Tome now seem secure for Moscow...

...Ambassador Adlai Stevenson voted in favor-leading angry white mobs to sack American Protestant clinics in and near Luanda and to toss the American consul general's automobile into the harbor...

...Consulate in Luanda has been evacuated, reliable data are hard to get...

...had put Africa on the back burner...

...Back in Washington, State Department opinion was divided on what to do...

...These were squelched by the Portuguese Army, with over 100 killed...

...While the South African presence is modest compared to the Cuban force, it has contributed to the MPLA gaining official recognition from one-third of the OAU's members- including Nigeria, the largest supplier of crude oil to the U.S...

...Nigeria and Algeria also contributed arms...

...We have the men and they have the weapons...

...But by 1890, Angola was one of the few territories where European administration had penetrated beyond the coast...

...Still, it is Angola and Cabinda that are most critical...

...A few weeks after independence broke out in the Congo on June 30, 1960, Roberto's followers staged scattered uprisings against the Portuguese, mostly in northern Angola...

...Since it was a clear day and no land was in sight, this meant the vessel was near the estuary of a major river...

...UNRAVELING A CIVIL WAR The Stakes in Angola BY RUSSELL WARREN HOWE WASHINGTON IN 1483, the lookout in the crow's nest of a Portuguese ship five meridians south of the equator spotted a huge patch of brown silt in the Atlantic...

...Attempts by OAU leaders to bring about a three-party coalition failed, and the Soviet-backed MPLA succeeded in taking Luanda-its only real base of support-together with a strip of land across the center of the new nation...

...The campaign was handled by a former Army press officer, Kenneth Downs, who soon broke with Selvage and Lee and founded his own firm with Kermit Roosevelt (T.R.'s grandson), taking the $500,000-a-year Portuguese account with him...

...After entering to forestall the creation of a Communist state on the border of South West Africa (Namibia), the South Africans proceeded to destroy the Angolan bases of Namibian guerrillas and take (according to Pretoria) 1,000 Namibian prisoners...

...But the Congressional drive in December to slip a no-aid-to-Angola provision into the Pentagon budget bill reflects Capitol Hill fears of where an Angola entanglement might lead, and this may dampen the Administration's desire to help Roberto and Savimbi...

...Someone else had scribbled on it: "Portugal embarking on another 500-year plan...

...currently has an air base, could one day swing to the Left...

...and Portuguese embassies stood side by side, making a visit from the African impossible, a correspondent was persuaded to invite the two men to dinner...

...Whether it is now assisting UNITA is not clear...

...Other African countries behind Roberto and Savimbi are Senegal, the Ivory Coast and Gabon-all unstable regimes under heavy French control...

...THIS intervention, costing the Soviets approximately $100 million so far, appears to be part of a general Communist strategy...

...Ambassador Edmund Gullion was instructed to contact Roberto unofficially...

...In this way, UPA became probably the only African nationalist movement at the time to get U.S...

...But Peking soon found the FNLA ideologically unacceptable and withdrew...

...They have also helped the Huambo government to secure Benguela and Lobito...

...The U.S., for its part, has funneled as much as $50 million in military and medical aid to the FNLA and UNITA through Zaire...

...Neto won a draw to address the gathering as spokesman for all of Africa's liberation movements, and, to the consternation of his audience, proceeded to lambast not Ian Smith's Rhodesia and Johannes Vorster's South Africa but the Nixon invasion of Cambodia, a subject of considerably more importance to Moscow than to the Africans...

...Three days later, Liberia's UN ambassador, Nathan Barnes, deplored the Angolan situation in the Security Council and won passage of a resolution condemning Portuguese colonialism...

...Composed of southern Angolan tribes, it was backed by China and based in Zambia (whose main economic project, a railroad to the Tanzanian coast, was about to be built by Peking...

...The Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda, which seeks to oust the MPLA-and Angola-is supported by Zaire and probably by Zairian troops...

...The Soviet-financed nationalist parties in southern Africa vouched for it in the OAU...

...More recently, till Gulf suspended operations, this went to the MPLA, making the oil giant an unwilling co-sponsor with Moscow of the Angolan Marxists...

...When he came back this time, he found his own four crew members waiting for him with a message from the king, who wanted to send more young men to Portugal to study...

...The FNLA-UNITA's 30,000 soldiers outnumber the MPLA's troops by three to one, yet the alliance cannot match the MPLA in arms...

...Visionaries began talking of Angola-with a population of barely 5 million-becoming another Brazil...

...France, in addition, is supplying UNITA with armored cars...

...Nationalist...

...Since the U.S...

...The more ambitious blacks journeyed to the prosperous Congo to work...

...Its chairman was, and remains, Agostinho Neto, an academic Marxist and Soviet puppet...

...Moscow, incidentally, may ultimately argue that the Cuban presence is partly "justified" by the fact that in the early '60s, the CIA employed anti-Castro Cuban pilots to help the government of the neighboring Congo put down Soviet-backed rebels...

...military intervention, he is prepared to go on sending aid...

...On the other hand, the Azores, where the U.S...

...In March a major rebellion broke out in the Makongo forest-country, and hundreds of square miles of plantation country were liberated by the UPA...

...RUSSELL WARREN HOWE, a past contributor to this magazine, writes frequently on African affairs...

...Cao then brought them home, and sailed on to South Africa...

...The blacks seemed suitably docile, cut off from the Shockwave of nationalism passing through Africa...

...The latest State Department figures are 5,000 Cubans and 500 Russians, but since the U.S...

...Captain Diogo Cao swung to port, and discovered the Congo...

...Roy Innis' Congress for Racial Equality, meanwhile, is recruiting black Vietnam veterans to help Roberto, and some 300 white Americans have been enlisted by UNITA...

...Still, a more responsible, if arduous, policy would be to try to get a UN peace force into the country -preferably limited to volunteers from Africa, Asia and the Carib-bean-that could maintain order until elections were held...

...In Leopoldville, U.S...

...The FNLA-UNITA alliance, receives its strongest support from Zaire and Zambia, which are dependent on the Angolan railroad to export their copper...

...This provided Roberto with an opening, and he inaugurated escorted press tours of the liberated territories...

...It may soon hold sway in Djibouti, too, a French colony due shortly for nationhood...

...The Kennedys, though, appeared to have pretty much made up their minds...

...On the Indian Ocean side of the continent, the Soviet-supported government in Mozambique has proven less receptive to the Russians since it became independent last year, but the USSR retains a substantial foothold in Somalia, commanding the Rea Sea entrance...

...China, too, has been involved...

...When the Portuguese revolution of April 1974 produced a promise of independence for Angola, Roberto's organization-by then renamed the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA)-and its two rivals all claimed the right to rule the country...

...The MPLA never occupied much territory (only Marxist reporters were permitted to see exactly how much), but it met with significant political success...

...I looked up just in time to see a group of angry rednecks pitch an African from the roof of a building...

...guns to the FNLA and helped brief the group's anti-Communist Portuguese advisers on their use...

...And the Soviet Union, whose wide-ranging activities among various African groups had been slowed by preoccupation with the Congo, began to show its hand in the colony...

...and an OPEC nation that did not take part in the embargo of 1973...

...Embassy in Lisbon, Portugal hired a public relations firm, Selvage and Lee, to present its case in Washington...

...In Guinea-Bissau (Portuguese Guinea until 1974), the controlling African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde is traditionally pro-Soviet and, with help from Leftist Portuguese Army officers, it has also seized power in the Cape Verde islands, 600 miles away...

...Lisbon's initial association with the Bakongo lasted scarcely a century, and tribal rivalries generally prevented the Portuguese from venturing much further inland than the little port they had built at Luanda...

...Both the Attorney General and the President were sympathetic to the aspirations of the Africans, in the Portuguese colonies-Robert Kennedy, in fact, had met Eduardo Mondlane, future head of the Mozambican liberation movement, through Mondlane's American wife, Janet...

...At the UN, the Chinese have compared the Russian intervention in Angola to Nazi aggression, declaring that Soviet Communist Party Chief Leonid I. Brezhnev "will follow Hitler, Goebbels and the like into the garbage can of history.' In return, Soviet UN Representative Yakov Malik has called China "an old ally and friend of South Africa and the former fascist regime of Portugal...

...Most of the railroad, and the railheads at Benguela and Lobito, are at the moment in FNLA-UNITA hands...

...South Africa's involvement throws continent-wide suspicion on the FNLA-UNITA alliance and has considerably weakened the American position of supporting these two non-Communist factions...

...Although the press reported that the Portuguese flag was lowered in Angola for the first time in 500 years last November 10, independence day, the real history is less straightforward...

...Genuine self-determination for the Angolan people, after all, should be the overriding objective...

...He may be right...

...In Cabinda, as in Angola, Cuban soldiers may prove decisive to the final outcome, unless Zaire annexes the territory-a strong possibility...

...Little more than a decade ago, this entire situation would have been unthinkable...

...And it would seem to be fear of the South African Air Force alone that has grounded the Soviet MIGS near Luanda...

...Downs, who was given control of press visas for Angola, mistakenly decided to bar most American journalists from the colony...