"Our War" in Angola

Another ex-spook tattles on the CIA

Among CIA staffers it was known as IA-FEATURE; the letters IA being the agency's designation for the target country, Angola, and FEATURE the code word for a special covert operation. When the IAFEATURE task force was assembled in late summer 1975, on the eve of Angola's independence from Portugal, it was handed a mission nearly impossible: to help two Angolan leaders who would presumably remain friendly to the West when the big, troubled former colony went off on its own. The IAFEATURE directors, who worked out of a "vaulted" (super-secure) office at the CIA'S headquarters in Langley, Va., were given an initial $14 million to achieve this assignment.

So begins an "inside" tale of how a CIA operation grew--and failed--from one who was intimately involved with it: John Stockwell, 40, an ex-Marine lieutenant who, before he quit the intelligence agency, not only was a CIA agent for twelve years but served as the "case officer" in charge of the Angolan venture. Stockwell's book, In Search of Enemies, is a narrative of IAFEATURE'S short, six-month history. Like Decent Interval, the highly critical account of CIA operations in Viet Nam by ex-Analyst Frank Snepp--who happens to be a friend of Stockwell's--In Search was published without CIA permission. It thus becomes the latest entry in what may become a full-blown literary genre: spy-and-tell books by disaffected former intelligence operatives who profess to be turning to their typewriters much more for principle than for profit.

As Stockwell tells it, the CIA's aim in Angola was modest at first: merely to slow the progress of Agostinho Neto's pro-Moscow Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), which in mid-1975 already controlled twelve of the country's 15 provinces, and see that it had some competition in the pre-independence elections. The CIA decided to shore up two other guerrilla groups, the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) under Holden Roberto and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) led by Jonas Savimbi. But before long, says Stockwell, the looking-glass warriors at Langley began to view Angola as "our war," and the goal became victory for the pro-Western groups. To that end, Stockwell says, the agency not only got directly involved in the spreading fighting, which soon swept the elections away, but also lied about its activities to Congress and to the so-called 40 Committee, the White House-Pentagon-State Department group charged with overseeing U.S. intelligence operations.

As the ambitions for IAFEATURE grew, so did its cost--to a total of $31.7 million. The money was used mostly for military supplies for UNITA and FNLA, which were channeled through Zaire. Stockwell had a staff of about 26, plus an additional 83 operatives "in the field." The CIA also recruited a number of mercenaries, called "foreign military advisers" in deference to African sensitivities, to fight with UNITA and FNLA units. But instead of stopping the MPLA, Stockwell maintains, these efforts only spurred the Soviet and Cuban assistance that enabled Neto to win the war.

When IAFEATURE was launched, Stockwell insists, the civil war was so low-key that two C-47 gunships crammed with Gatling guns--Viet Nam's "Puff the Magic Dragon"--could have turned the tide for the moderates. But they would also have exposed the U.S. involvement, so instead it was decided to arm the guerrillas clandestinely. Says Stockwell: "We had tons of weapons shipped in, some of it 'sanitized' stuff [unmarked as to origin], and lots of World War II arms which the agency figured anybody could acquire anywhere in the world." The equipment was flown to Kinshasa, Zaire's capital, aboard C-141s belonging to the U.S. Air Force (which billed the CIA for $80,000 for each 25-ton delivery). The supplies were then reshipped to Angolan bases aboard C-130s belonging to Zaire and South Africa. The guerrillas were so careless with the unfamiliar equipment that the CIA decided to dispatch paramilitary experts--officially described as intelligence gatherers--to help them out.

Before long, says Stockwell, Moscow decided to counter by supplying Neto's MPLA with sophisticated Soviet equipment, including 122-mm rockets and MiG fighters. Cuban troop movements into Angola increased sharply at the same time. To deal with the MiGs, in a "sanitized" way, the CIA traded 50 U.S. Redeye ground-to-air missiles to Israel for 50 captured Soviet missiles, but the Angolans did not use them effectively.

Stockwell argues that the agency should have stayed out of Angola altogether or moved in much more forcefully in the beginning. Eventually, he says, a "dualism" about the operation developed: "The people in the field were going all out. But back home, people gradually got timid." When the agency finally decided to pull out, it sent a final payment of $1,376,700 in conscience money to Roberto and Savimbi through Kinshasa. The cash, Stockwell claims, was pocketed by Zaire President Mobutu Sese Seko.

Stockwell was born in Texas but grew up in Africa after his engineer-father took a job in the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) following World War II. Stockwell says he wrestled with a nagging conscience about his agency work for much of his CIA career, but did not decide to quit until after the Angolan venture.

Knocking unsuccessful operations is always perilously easy (those that work are rarely heard about), and Stockwell's broadside is overdrawn in important respects. For instance, others who are familiar with the Angolan drama maintain it was not U.S. activity that provoked the heavy Soviet-Cuban response but South Africa's early move to send troops to support Savimbi. The South African forces moved in so swiftly that they almost captured Angola's capital, Luanda, before independence came. As for the CIA itself, Stockwell ridicules it as a bungling old-boy outfit fraught with favoritism and burdened with middle-grade mediocrities. He calls William Colby, who was CIA director in Stockwell's time, "a disciplined, amoral bureaucrat, who fawned over the politicians and game-players on [Capitol] Hill."

Colby, for his part, is equally blunt about Stockwell's treatment of his former employer: "If he says that suddenly it didn't turn out to be the Boy Scouts, I think he was asking a little much." Colby concedes that the U.S. shipped arms for Angola. But he denies that Americans were actively involved in the fighting--although "our people" sometimes went into Angola "to check up on what was going on."

While the CIA has filed a civil suit against Snepp, charging that he broke his CIA oath of secrecy in publishing his Viet Nam book, the agency has not yet decided what to do about Stockwell. As for Colby, he will go public with his views of Angola and other matters in a memoir --duly cleared by the agency--that is to be published this week.

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