In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

Kinshasa (115)
named after a missionary who baptized him Holden Carson Graham.
His mother was the eldest child of the revolutionary patriarch, Miguel
Necac;a, and his father worked for the Baptist mission. In 1925
he was taken to Kinshasa where he attended the Baptist mission
school until graduation in 1940. In 1940--1941 he attended school in
Sao Salvadore to discover his Angolan roots. Thereafter he worked
for eight years as an accountant for the Belgian colonial administration
and played soccer on local clubs where he established lasting
friendships with future Congolese politicians. During a visit to
Angola in 1951 he witnessed the brutalization of an old man by a
callous Portuguese chefe de posto and was shocked into political
activism.
In 1958 he was elected to represent the UP A at the All-African
Peoples Conference in Accra, Ghana. Since blacks in the Belgian and
Portuguese colonies could not obtain international travel papers, he
was obliged to make his way clandestinely via the French Congo, the
Cameroons, and Nigeria. It was worth the trouble. In Accra,
Roberto met the cream of the African revolution-Patrice
Lumumba, Kenneth Kaunda, Tom Mboya, Franz Fanon, and many
others. He was well launched. He rejected Marxist advances, but did
espouse Maoist lines, writing friends that "without bloodshed revolution
is impossible.,,
Before returning home he obtained a Guinean passport and visited
the United Nations General Assembly in New York where
he managed to foment a debate about Angola. He also visited
Tunisia, where he gained the sympathy of President Habib Bourguiba.
Back in Kinshasa in 1959, he established control of
Bakongo revolutionary activities and took credit for the March
1961 offensive in Angola.
Thereafter he formed the Exile Revolutionary Government of
Angola (GRAE), drawing in the Ovimbundu activist, Jonas Savimbi,
as his foreign minister. His alliance with the Zairians held fast,
transcending several upheavals and changes of government.
Roberto's relationship with the ultimate Zairian strongman, Joseph
Desire Mobutu* was sealed when he dropped his Mukongo wife and
married Mobutu's sister-in-law.
Roberto had continuously resisted a standing MPLA petition for
*Mobutu later changed his name to Mobutu Sese Seko.