In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

Roberto
watching the forest below and listening to their grumbling about
their Zairian employers, "They are monkeys, I tell you, monkeys."*
The pilots had not been paid for five months and they were about
to quit.
We had been given a hasty tour of Carmona, the capital of the
northern province of Angola, by three young FNLA politicians who
coldly refused to answer questions and soon dropped us back at the
airport, thirsty and unfed. I wondered if we were putting our best
foot forward. St. Martin had insisted that I play a journalist cover
role, at least until Roberto joined us the next day.
Carmona, on the other hand, only merited a hasty tour. It was a
ghost town, its shops and houses locked and chained shut, waiting
as a prize for the winners of the Angolan civil war. At the airport
Carmona's last hundred Portuguese awaited evacuation to Luanda.
Their faces showed the despair of all refugees, whether the Belgians
I had seen fleeing the Congo in 1960, or, more recently, the frantic
mobs leaving Vietnam.
Eventually a small plane ferried us to Ambriz, a smaller abandoned
town on the coast. Our arrival at the tiny dirt airstrip was
something of a diplomatic failure. The FNLA command had not
been told we were coming, and was skeptical of my journalistic
credentials. Perhaps the fifteen boxes of radio equipment threw them
off. Or my camera may have threatened them.
An African commander in new utilities, with a web belt, a new
Browning 9 mm. pistol, and canvas ammunition pouches, drove up
in a jeep and marched directly to me. He was flanked by two Portuguese
commandos whose machine guns were held level, the big
muzzles pointing at my empty stomach.
The black spoke to me harshly in Portuguese.
"I beg your pardon?" I said in English.
"You are under arrest," one of the Portuguese said. "Give him
your camera."
"I beg your pardon?" I repeated
"This is a war zone! We do not allow photographs. We do not
allow reporters. You are under arrest. You will give him your camera
*This term, "macaque" in French, was commonly used by the whites in colonial
Africa. Since independence it is tabu. Had Makala, sitting behind me in the plane,
heard and reported the two pilots, they might have been expelled from Zaire.