Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (11 page)

That, notwithstanding any other provision of law, no security assistance may be furnished, and no assistance may be furnished for military or paramilitary operations, or to provide police training, assistance, or advice, in connection with such operations in, to, or on behalf of Angola or any individual, group, organization, or movement therein, unless such assistance is specifically authorized under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961.

Not since the start of the Cold War had Congress asserted its control over the intelligence community in such strong terms.

A generational gulf separated the architects of the Tunney and Clark amendments from the framers of the War Powers Act. For Senator Jacob Javits, a key sponsor of the War Powers Act, the objective of the act was to restore a “partnership” between the executive branch of government and Congress. But not so for John Tunney and Dick Clark, who had been elected as junior senators in 1970 and 1972 respectively, riding the crest of a nationwide antiwar wave. Tunney had been in the House of Representatives and had “regularly voted to check executive authority and to back a more reform-minded foreign policy.” Questioning the assumptions behind the Cold War consensus, he repeated former senator Robert Taft’s earlier warnings against giving “the military adventurists what they wanted,” for the policy “has gotten us repressive right-wing dictatorships as allies all over the world.” Dick Clark, a
former political science professor and congressional staffer who had scored an upset victory on an antiwar platform to win a seat from Iowa in 1972, was known to question “the way things have always been done” from the time he entered the Senate. Clark was convinced that Congress would have to go beyond passing the War Powers Act and fully reevaluate foreign policy “to reassert itself as an equal branch of government.” His sentiments were shared by other Democratic freshmen, such as Harold Hughes, Tunney, Thomas Eagleton, and James Abourezk. Soon after Clark became chair of the African Affairs Subcommittee of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1974, he organized public hearings on the brewing Angolan fiasco and then followed with an Angolan tour. On return, Clark announced that the United States needed to atone for not supporting the Angolan people’s struggle against colonialism and that the best way to do so was to respect Angola’s right to self-determination, an act that would also have the virtue of ending years of neglect in congressional oversight of the CIA. Following the passage of the amendment that bore his name, Clark “outlined an ambitious African agenda for 1976, calling for assistance to the liberation struggles elsewhere in colonial Africa, opposition to South Africa’s continued occupation of Namibia, and considerations of economic sanctions against the South African regime.” He expected these initiatives to end American “political and military interference in the internal affairs of other countries.” If the United States intended to occupy a higher moral ground than its adversaries, it would have to affirm that in the foreign policy of a democracy “openness should be the rule, secretiveness the exception—not the other way around.”

Enacted in 1976, the Clark Amendment was repealed in 1985. More than just a return to business as usual, its declining significance mirrored a larger development in the making of American
foreign policy: the more the winning of the Cold War became central to the making of foreign policy, the more it dashed hopes of reforming U.S. foreign policy in line with the anticolonial solidarity that had driven the antiwar movement.

Proxy Wars and the Safari Club

The executive branch in Washington also drew a lesson from the Angolan debacle: no matter its military strength and geopolitical importance, apartheid South Africa was confirmed to be a political liability. The recognition only aggravated the search for proxies. Its first success was a regional alliance called the Safari Club, put together with the blessing of Henry Kissinger.

The existence of the club came to light after the 1979 Iranian Revolution when Mohamed Heikal, a highly respected Egyptian journalist and onetime adviser to President Nasser, was given permission by the new Khomeini government to go through the deposed shah’s archives. Heikal came upon an agreement setting up a formal association, dated September 1, 1976, and signed by heads of several intelligence agencies, all strategic allies of the United States in the Cold War. The brainchild of Comte Claude Alexandre de Marenches, the head of the French secret service, the emphasis of the Safari Club was Africa; its members—France, Egypt, Iran, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia—had plenty to lose as the focal point of the Cold War moved to Africa. The African focus was clear from the very first sentence of the agreement: “Recent events in Angola and other parts of Africa have demonstrated the continent’s role as a theatre for revolutionary wars prompted and conducted by the Soviet Union, which utilizes individuals or organizations sympathetic to, or controlled by, Marxist ideology.” To
face a common Soviet danger in Africa, they agreed to set up their main center in Cairo, with a secretariat, a planning section, and an operations branch. The chair was to rotate, but France was to be in charge of security and communication.

The Safari Club was responsible for three notable developments in Africa: in Congo, Egypt, and Somalia. Taken together, they underscored both the possibilities and the limits of a club formed by key American Cold War allies with interests of their own in Africa. The club’s first success was in Congo. Faced with a rebellion in mineral-rich Katanga (now Shaba) province in April 1977 and a plea for help from French and Belgian mining interests conveyed through their close ally Mobutu, the club combined French air transport with logistical support from diverse sources to bring Moroccan and Egyptian troops to fight the rebellion. The operation was an unqualified success. The club registered an even greater success when it helped bring about the historic rapprochement between two strategic American allies, Egypt and Israel, laying the ground for Anwar al-Sadat’s pathbreaking November 1977 visit to Jerusalem. The suggestion for the meeting was first made in a letter from Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to President Sadat, carried by the Moroccan representative in the club. There followed a secret meeting between General Moshe Dayan of Israel and Egypt’s Deputy Prime Minister Hassan Tuhamy under the auspices of King Hassan II of Morocco. “When Itzhak Rabin later claimed that the breakthrough with Egypt had started before Mr. Begin came to power he was speaking no more than the truth,” Heikal concluded in his examination of the club’s papers.

The least successful of the club’s initiatives was the Somali operation, which highlighted the limits that a syndicate of regional proxies would have to observe when its interests did not dovetail with those of its superpower patron. The Somali operation followed
on the heels of the Ethiopian Revolution in 1974. The crisis of the monarchy and the revolution that ensued signaled historic possibilities for the leadership of both Somalia and the Soviet Union, even if the aspirations of one later contradicted those of the other. For Siad Barre of Somalia, there could be no better opportunity than the Ethiopian Revolution to realize the dream of creating a pan-Somali state by launching a war to incorporate the Ogaden, inhabited by Somalis but claimed by Ethiopia, into Somalia. For the Soviet Union—hitherto a Somali ally against the Ethiopian monarchy—the same revolution presented an opportunity to win over a strategic country in the region as a major ally. The Soviet initiative had disastrous consequences for Somali ambitions: when Somalia invaded the Ogaden in 1977 and its troops advanced over the next few months, the Soviet Union switched sides. As eighteen thousand Cuban troops poured into the Ogaden, the result of an operation “strictly coordinated with and supported by the Soviet Union,” Somali forces retreated in disarray.

When the turn left Siad Barre standing high and dry on the battlefield, the Safari Club stepped in: “Members told Siad Barre that if he would get rid of the Russians they would supply the arms he needed.” As Barre followed Sadat’s example and expelled the Soviets, the shah of Iran pressed the United States to extend to Somalia the support promised Egypt. But the United States was not prepared to do so for a simple reason: Egypt was a strategic ally, and Somalia was not, as the shah was accordingly informed. “I have had three messages from President Carter,” wrote the shah, who in turn summoned the Somali ambassador three times in one month. “You Somalis are threatening to upset the balance of world power.” Barre had little choice but to conclude that he had been the naïve victim of a superpower deal, in which the Russians had agreed to keep out of Rhodesia’s transition from white rule, provided the Americans stayed out of the Ogaden.

“Kissinger,” Heikal noted, “was more than happy to see his aims in Africa implemented by proxy”: what could be better than “a syndicate over which Congress had no control, and one which, moreover, was prepared to be self-financing”?

Southern Africa

The Safari Club vindicated the essence of the Kissinger perspective: the constraints of democracy at home required that the United States work through proxies in the international arena. In the search for proxies, South Africa continued to have a special place. The lesson of Angola in 1975 was that the place was restricted to covert operations. As U.S. operatives worked around the Clark Amendment, they continued “constructive engagement” with South Africa. The Clark Amendment was formally repealed at the start of Reagan’s second term, in 1985, but even its decade-long duration had failed to forestall the Cold Warriors, because they were able to redirect public attention from one global reality, the movement for decolonization, to another, the Cold War. As they looked for ways to bypass legislative restrictions on the freedom of executive action, these ideologues embraced proxy wars enthusiastically and terrorism gradually. CIA chief William J. Casey eventually took the lead in orchestrating support for terrorist and prototerrorist movements around the world—from Renamo in Mozambique to Unita in Angola, and from contras in Nicaragua to the mujahideen in Afghanistan—through third and fourth parties. In a nutshell, after defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal at home, the U.S. government decided to harness and even to cultivate terrorists in the struggle against guerrillas who had come to power and regimes it considered pro-Soviet.

If southern Africa is where the United States provided a protective umbrella for South Africans to practice the art of proxy
war, Central America is where it took the lead in applying the lessons it had learned from its own proxies. A more theoretical influence came from counterinsurgency specialists, including General Magnus Malan, chief of the South African Defense Forces and minister of defense from 1980. Interestingly, as the postapartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission acknowledged in its report, Malan was introduced to the art of counterinsurgency in the United States when he went there for an officer-training course in 1962-1963. Malan’s tenure as chief of army (1973-1976) was noted for the application of counterinsurgency warfare to South West Africa. He was well-known for insisting that counterinsurgency specialists study famous texts on guerrilla war, particularly those by Mao Zedong. The mixture of practice and theory resulted in a key tenet of low-intensity conflict: if guerrilla war involved a focus on “soft targets,” such as local political representatives of unpopular governments, counterinsurgency must also target political supporters of left-wing governments. The shift from targeting the armed forces of a government to its political representatives and then its civilians blurred the distinction between military and civilian targets. This blurring led to political terror—the targeting of civilians for political purposes—as a sustained strategy in peacetime combat. Practiced consistently, terrorism consciously distinguished between targets and victims. Victims may as well be anonymous, as if their fate had been determined by lottery, for the point was simply to bleed the target in as many ways as available, so as to weaken and expose it for a final showdown. In the language of low-intensity conflict, victims, as distinct from targets, came to be known as “collateral damage.”

Renamo: Africa’s First Genuine Terrorist Movement

The partnership between the United States and apartheid South Africa bolstered two key movements that practiced a varying mixture of terrorism and politics at different points in their history: Renamo in Mozambique and Unita in Angola. This similarity should in no way blur important differences between Renamo and Unita: whereas Renamo began as no more than a counterinsurgency operation, one that was compelled to learn the art of political organization as a survival strategy, Unita began as a political movement that learned the practice of counterinsurgency along the way.

Renamo was created as a terrorist outfit by the Rhodesian army in the early 1970s and was patronized by the South African Defense Forces after the fall of Rhodesia in 1980, when entire sections of white Rhodesian military and security fled to South Africa and were integrated in its military and intelligence apparatuses. Even if Renamo learned over time to turn the mistakes of the ruling Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo) into opportunities for mobilizing political support, it never ceased to use terror with abandon. In contrast, Unita began as a movement with a local political base, though not one strong enough to have survived the beginning of civil war in 1975 without sustained external assistance. The resulting alliance with apartheid South Africa opened it to learning the tactics of terrorism by example. Unita was a contender for power in Angola, even if a weak one, whereas Renamo was not really one in Mozambique. In sharp contrast to its unabashed support for Unita, the U.S. government never openly supported Renamo. But this did not rule out collaboration between the political right in the United States and representatives of Renamo: “Renamo’s Washington office shared an
address with the Heritage Foundation” and, by 1987, right-wing pressure “brought Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole into the pro-Renamo camp.” Because the 1975 debacle in Angola showed that South Africa could not be used as a direct link for U.S. assistance and because the Clark Amendment barred U.S. covert aid in Angola, the CIA took the initiative to find fourth parties through which to fund, train, and support Unita. Congressional testimony documented at least one instance of a $15 million payment to Unita through Morocco in 1983. Undermining democratic accountability was the most important domestic cost of supporting terrorism overseas. In a candid remark to journalists, Jonas Savimbi, the Unita chief, acknowledged the ineffectiveness of the Clark Amendment in the face of an uncooperative executive power: “A great country like the United States has other channels…. [T]he Clark Amendment means nothing.”