In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

Roberto (123]
tighten. It was pitch black on the veranda and I was in the darkest
corner near some climbing honeysuckle. How did he know where I
was sitting? Had he been watching me from across the street before
the lights went out? I waited silently while he approached, unable to
suppress the melodramatic thought that I was in the middle of a
bloody civil war. Did the FNLA command include infiltrators who
would be only too happy to embarrass Roberto by having Dr. Kissinger's
representative turn up missing, or dead? My visitor stopped
two feet away and reached towards me, both hands close together.
As I drew back, my muscles quivering with adrenalin, a dim flashlight
snapped on in one hand, its light directed at a bit of paper in
the other, which he pushed down into my lap, where they couldn't
be seen from inside the house.
On the paper was scrawled in pencil, "Please come and see me.
This man will show you the way. Castro."
The light clicked off and the man receded. I rose, picking up my
travel bag, and followed him out the gate, thinking that in the spook
business one takes a lot on faith. He led me silently two blocks
toward the circle, a block toward the sea, and down an alley into
what appeared to be servants' quarters behind a small house.
Seated at a small wooden table was Colonel Castro, his round face
and grey hair caught in a candle's flickering light He motioned to
a second chair. My guide disappeared as quietly as he had come.
"Good evening," he said. "Thank you for coming to see me. It is
important that you and I talk seriously, here. Those others," he
waved his hand, throwing a broad shadow against the wall, "They
are idiots. They want Angola, but they don't know how to get
Angola. I know how. I have the key ... I am sorry I cannot offer
you a drink. We have nothing here.''
I thrust a hand deep into my bag and pulled out a flask of Scotch
that I carried for such occasions. Castro smiled as I set it on the table,
"Your Dr. Kissinger provides well." I produced two small tumblers
and poured. Santos Castro was a third-generation white Angolan,
whose grandfather had established himself in northern Angola before
the turn of the century, when there were only ten thousand
whites in the entire country. Educated in Luanda and in Lisbon, he
had done twenty years fo the Portuguese colonial army, rising to the
rank of colonel. For years he had been governor of the northern Uige
province, among those responsible for the Portuguese army's harsh