In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

Roberto
that Roberto didn't know what he was doing, didn't take advice, ·and
was creating as many problems as he solved.
It was difficult from all this to judge the scope of fighting, but a
picture was emerging. Roberto had claimed two thousand troops in
the area. He claimed they were pushing back four thousand MPLA.
He spoke of heavy fighting and shelling, especially on the Barro do
Dande battlefield, where he proudly showed me a disabled Russian
BDRM-2 armored car. But I counted only a couple of mortar craters
and the bullet marks on buildings from a few magazines of smallarms
fire. Falstaff, like a Roberto truth squad, whispered that the
BDRM-2 had been abandoned before it was hit by the FNLA bazooka
round. Barro do Dande was the scene of a small skirmish, not
a battlefield. Roberto did not know the difference; before last week
he had never put his own body on the line.
We encountered a truck which was returning from the front with
a half-dozen prisoners in the back. Roberto questioned the guards
while I took photographs of the grim, ashen-faced men it held.
Roberto volunteered that they would be well treated, but I reflected
that I could not blame them for their anxiety, considering the
FNLA,s tradition of butchering any MPLA it captured.
About 4:00 P.M. we broke into a clearing and the Sassalemba road
junction. There were no buildings. Just a paved intersection and a
concrete post which read "LUANDA, 32 KMS." A comical baobab tree
loomed over the junction, one of its limbs splintered by a 106 round.
There were no troops to be seen and no sound of fighting. Cornman·
dant Lukenge directed us to the left and we proceeded cautiously
down the road.
After a few hundred yards we came upon the FNLA fighting force
clustered together in a shallow dirt pit off to one side of the road.
There were about eighty men in the dirt pit, which was large enough
to shelter perhaps a tenth that many safely-one large caliber mortar
round would have eliminated much of the FNLA fighting force on
the Sassalemba front.
The soldiers stood on the asphalt and pointed down the road to
where the MPLA had "counterattacked" that afternoon. A few
MPLA soldiers, approaching from a half-mile away, had fled when
the 106 leveled a round against them. That was counted as another
battle. The prisoners we had encountered earlier had been taken
when an errant MPLA jeep drove into an FNLA position.