Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (10 page)

By October 1964, the CIA estimated the number of mercenaries in Congo at more than one thousand. There were two hundred Belgians, forty-six Spaniards, and a handful from other European locations. More than half were whites from South Africa and Rhodesia. The CIA noted that many “are actually South African Army regulars placed on leave status for six months.” Washington was clear from the outset that there would be no U.S. citizens among the mercenaries. Without American support, however, the mercenaries would have been lame. Four U.S. C-130s with American crews transported mercenaries and their equipment across the west-east span of Congo, roughly the same distance as from Paris to Moscow. When they met resistance, the mercenaries called on the Congolese air force, which did not include a single Congolese but several T-28s and B-26s supplied by the United States and flown by Cuban exiles, as well as a squadron of seven T-6s from Italy, piloted by South African and European mercenaries. The
New York Times
reported in 1966, long after the entire operation was complete: “Guiding them into action were American ‘diplomats’ and other officials in apparently civilian positions. The sponsor, paymaster and director of all of them, however, was the Central Intelligence Agency.” The rebels had neither planes nor antiaircraft guns, and the planes “operated over insurgent territory with impunity,” the CIA noted. The Simba responded by taking American and Belgian hostages, the majority in Stanleyville, now the rebel capital, and the mercenaries and their apologists in turn cited this as justification for their own intervention.

The mercenaries signed up for money but also to defend white privilege in a rapidly decolonizing Africa. Many behaved as if they were on a hunting safari, sending photos of their exploits back home. The British weekly
The Observer
printed two of these: “The first showed two almost naked black men, their hands tied behind
their backs, ropes around their necks, being led by a white mercenary to their hanging. In the second, ‘smiling mercenaries’ fought for the privilege of doing the ‘stringing up.’ “The pictures,”
The Observer
noted, “show how mercenaries not only shoot and hang their prisoners after torturing them, but use them for target practice and gamble over the number of shots needed to kill them.” An Italian journalist described their entry into the town of Boende in late October 1964: “Occupying the town meant blowing out the doors with rounds of bazooka fire, going into the shops and taking anything they wanted that was movable…. After the looting came the killing. The shooting lasted for three days. Three days of executions, of lynchings, of tortures, of screams, and of terror.”

The American press, however, was loathe to report any of this. Piero Gleijeses gives several examples of “the patriotic press.” The
Washington Post
said that, led by the “intelligent, poetry-reading colonel Mike Hoare,” mercenaries were doing an essential service, saving Congo. The
New York Times
, which provided more intensive coverage of the Congo crisis than any other American paper, devoted a two-part series to a South African mercenary who confided that he had enlisted “because he believed that Premier Moise Tshombe was sincerely trying to establish a multiracial society in the Congo. I thought that if I could help in this creation, the Congo might offer some hope, some symbol in contrast to the segregation in my own country.” The
New York Times
’s version of the sensitive mercenary was flatly contradicted by a two-part article in the South African
Cape Times
, in which a returning South African mercenary wrote of the “senseless, coldblooded killings,” of never taking a prisoner “except for the odd one for questioning, after which they were executed,” and of their thievery; he pleaded with his government “not to allow decent young South Africans” to become “senseless killers.”

The crisis in Congo was America’s baptism in independent Africa. It was also, in retrospect, America’s tentative embrace of terror for reasons of power, and the government, particularly the CIA, seemed aware of this. The U.S. ambassador described the mercenaries as “an uncontrollable lot of toughs … who consider looting or safe-cracking within their prerogatives.” The CIA listed “robbery, rape, murder and beatings” among their “serious excesses.” The Simba rebellion ended with the U.S.-Belgian mercenary drop on Kisangani on November 24, 1965. That same day, Joseph Mobutu seized power in Kinshasa. No longer of use, mercenaries were gradually phased out. Down to 230 from more than 1,000, they rebelled on July 5, 1967, taking about one thousand Congolese troops with them. Mobutu appealed to Washington. “We must keep Mobutu in power because there is no acceptable alternative to him,” Undersecretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach told a July 13 National Security Council meeting. Since no one disagreed, Washington returned Cuban exiles to Congo, this time to strafe mercenaries, who withdrew into Rwanda. Mobutu wanted them to be returned to Congo to stand trial. The
New York Times
said the mercenaries had fought for the West against the Simba and, in the process, had saved “innocent lives—mostly white lives.”
Le Monde
was more honest: “Western public opinion is more sensitive, one must acknowledge, to the death of one European than to the deaths of twenty blacks.” However, as Piero Gleijeses notes, their trial would have offended more than just Western sensibilities; it “could have led to embarrassing revelations about their contacts with the CIA.” So Washington adopted a dual solution. Whereas their Congolese auxiliaries were handed back to an understanding ally, Mobutu—who proceeded to slaughter them in spite of a promise of amnesty—the mercenaries were flown to Europe in two planes chartered by the International Red Cross.

The Angolan Disaster

When the American government turned to Africa a decade later, the opposition to the war in Vietnam had radically changed the atmosphere in the States. President Nixon was disgraced in August 1974, and three months later, a Democratic Congress was re-elected. Deeply suspicious of the Cold War legacy of a cloak-and-dagger foreign policy conducted in secret by the executive branch, many antiwar congressmen and -women were eager to establish legislative control over foreign policy. In December 1974, Congress passed the Hughes-Ryan Amendment, requiring the CIA to report the “description and scope” of covert operations “in a timely fashion” to eight congressional committees.

These developments shaped the setting in which the post-Nixon administration, led by Gerald Ford, who had never before been elected to any major public office, set about defining its African options in the face of a rapidly disintegrating Portuguese empire. Washington was determined to block any possibility of the MPLA coming to power, having identified it as a Soviet proxy. In pursuit of this goal, it explored different options, comprehensively documented by Piero Gleijeses.

Washington’s preferred option was to give covert support to the two movements that were opposed to MPLA: the Front for National Liberation of Angola (FNLA), which operated more or less as a surrogate of Congo’s General Mobutu, and the Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita), which had few external contacts apart from fledgling ones with apartheid South Africa. But more funds had to be approved by Congress since the assistance soon used up the CIA Contingency Reserve Fund for 1975. When Ford asked for $28 million for covert support of FNLA and Unita, Congress flatly declined, the Senate by a vote of 54-22,
and the House by 323-99. By that time, MPLA was already receiving military aid, matériel, training, and advisers from Cuba, though there was as yet no large-scale entry of Cuban troops. Kissinger devised a second option in this rapidly changing situation: “in response to the arrival of the Cubans, the administration tried to raise a mercenary army, just as Johnson had done in Zaire [Congo] in 1964.” But the mercenaries were few, less than 250, mainly English, and many rapidly graying veterans of a decade earlier. The result was a debacle. They were inferior, some “literally lured from London pubs with the offer of easy money and high living,” and they were unable to stop the Cubans. Mutual recriminations followed “the execution of 14 of the mercenaries,” while forty-five “limped home [to London] on crutches and wheelchairs.” Seeing the writing on the wall, Mobutu deported twenty-two who just had arrived from London. Meanwhile, instead of fighting MPLA, FNLA and Unita took to fighting each other. Faced with an ignominious end, Kissinger opted to back a proxy invasion by regular South African forces. Gleijeses has summarized the internal debates between hawks and doves in both Pretoria and Washington and the contacts between the two capitals. In Pretoria, the debate pitted the Foreign Office against hawks in the defense establishment. In Washington, it pitted CIA director William Colby against Kissinger.

One of the sharpest disagreements was recorded in the minutes of the National Security Council meeting of April 9, 1975. Three weeks before the fall of Saigon, Colby warned of the dangers of overreaction:

Mr. President, there is the question of how these recent events [in Vietnam] may affect the attitudes of other nations towards us. In general, the current debacle is seen not as a turning point, but as the final step on a particular path that most governments had long seen coming…. Adjustments were already being made…. Soviet, Chinese and other Communist leaders, for their part, will not automatically conclude that other U.S. commitments are placed in question, unless U.S. public reaction points to a repudiation of other foreign involvement, or internal U.S. recriminations are so divisive as to raise doubts of the U.S. ability to develop any consensus on foreign policy in the near future.

Kissinger disagreed, sharply and immediately:

I want to take issue with the estimate of the Director of Central Intelligence regarding the impact on our worldwide position of a collapse in Vietnam. It was his judgment that the world reaction would be negligible, based on the fact that everybody would be anticipating what would happen. Let me say that … no country expected so rapid a collapse…. Especially in Asia, this rapid collapse and our impotent reaction will not go unnoticed. I believe that we will see the consequences although they may not come quickly or in any predictable manner…. I believe that even in Western Europe, this will have a fallout.

Having failed to defend the line in Vietnam, Kissinger was now determined to draw the line in Angola. South African troops entered Angola in mid-October 1975, and Cuban troops followed in early November.

The irony is that as soon as the South African invasion became public knowledge, it turned into a massive liability for its
U.S. sponsors. Most observers believe that a quid pro quo—a withdrawal of South African troops in exchange for a guarantee of U.S. economic interests in Angola—was agreed to during Kissinger’s January 21-24 meeting with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow. Gulf Oil Cabinda began operations on February 21, and the U.S. diamond-mining monopoly, CFB, continued exploitation without threat of nationalization. In the years that followed, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, would remind his audiences that Moscow may have made inroads into the Angolan state apparatus, but the Angolan economy remained very much in the Western orbit.

On February 10, 1976, the U.S. Congress passed the Clark Amendment, prohibiting any covert aid to any side in the Angolan civil war. The next month, on March 31, the UN Security Council branded South Africa the aggressor and demanded that it compensate Angola for war damages. The vote was 9-0, with the United States, France, Britain, Italy, and Japan abstaining. The die was cast. South Africa was both bruised by the Cubans in combat and cold-shouldered by the West precisely in the hour of its need. “Angola may well be regarded as South Africa’s Bay of Pigs,” a retired South African general lamented the day South African troops withdrew from Angola. “Next to us they have been the most discredited in Angola,” Kissinger told Ford. The events in Angola were to have a far-reaching impact on both sides of the Atlantic. It brought hope to children in the streets of Soweto, who burst on the political scene with a remarkable uprising only a few months after South African troops were disgraced in Angola, and it also lent courage and reason to those in the U.S. Congress determined to curb the excesses of the Cold War.

The Clark Amendment

The Angolan fiasco reinforced the lessons of Vietnam, but those lessons provoked contradictory interpretations by the executive branch and by Congress, each asserting a different influence on post-Vietnam U.S. foreign policy. The Vietnam experience led to a determined executive search for regional proxies, particularly in parts of the world considered strategic to the conduct of the Cold War. It also reinforced popular distrust of a free hand for the executive branch in foreign affairs. Public resistance to Vietnam-type overseas involvement was echoed in Congress with the election of a host of antiwar legislators and led to a number of changes: the draft was abolished; the Pentagon’s budget for special operations was cut; the CIA’s paramilitary capabilities were reduced and its activities subjected to congressional oversight; and the president was required by the War Powers Act to seek congressional approval before any extended commitment of U.S. troops overseas. “The lesson of Vietnam is that we must throw off the cumbersome mantle of world policeman,” said Senator Edward Kennedy, summing up the antiwar mood in Congress. The clearest expression of this surge in antiwar sentiment was the amendment of the Freedom of Information Act and the passage of the Clark Amendment.

The two years and three months between the passage of the 1973 War Powers Act and the 1976 Clark Amendment (and the Tunney Amendment that preceded it) marked the high point of the antiwar movement that swept the United States. The War Powers Act was the first brake on growing executive power, an institutional legacy of the Cold War; it fortified Congress’s constitutional role on issues related to war making and treaty making. The Tunney Amendment was attached to the Department of Defense
appropriations bill that the U.S. Senate passed on December 20, 1975: it terminated covert assistance to anti-Communist forces in Angola, but only for that fiscal year. Before the fiscal year ended, however, Congress had passed the Clark Amendment, which extended the ban and made it permanent and categorical: