In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

Sa vim bi
heavily on the overloaded shackles and the tires folding over on
themselves. Incredibly, the vehicles groaned forward, down a sandy
track out the backside of the compound and onto the brushy plain.
Chi wale, Savimbi, and I crowded against the driver in the cab of the
lead truck.
After thirty minutes we stopped a kilometer short of Luso. Most
of the soldiers remained on the trucks. Savimbi and Chi wale walked
a few yards to one side, to a clearing where the grass and leaves of
the short trees had been burned off. Kneeling, they drew diagrams
on the ground like sandlot quarterbacks mapping out plays. A halfdozen
soldiers moved smartly to points a few yards out, to provide
security from attack, but turned inward to face Savimbi and Chiwale,
instead of outward to the potential attacking enemy. Chiwale stood
and ordered the rest of his troops off the trucks. Savimbi turned to
me.
"Now we go back."
I remonstrated, wanting to see UNIT A in action, but he was firm.
Chiwale would run this battle. We barely had time to get safely back
to Silva Porto before dark, and Savimbi was concerned the plane
would leave Cangomba without us. Tomorrow he wanted to concentrate
on preparations to attack Lobito.
"The MPLA is no problem to us,,, he said, habitually pronouncing
it with an extra syllable--"M.P.L. ee ah!" "They run away. But in
Luso we are fighting the gendarmes from the Katanga. They are very
strong and they don't run away."
The Katangese gendarmes, "KA TGENS" we called them back at
headquarters, were refugees of Moise Tshombe's attempt to wrest
Katanga province from Zaire in the early sixties. At President
Kennedy's instigation, a United Nations force had crushed that
secession and instead of yielding to Mobutu's dominion, the secessionist
army had fled into Angola where they joined their Lunda
tribal brothers and remained a menacing force of three to four thousand
men, perennially poised against Zaire's exposed underbelly.
Now they were automatically opposed to Mobutu and his allies, the
FNLA and UNIT A, whom they would implacably challenge
throughout the duration of the war.
I had seen no whites with UNIT A's troops, anywhere.
"No Portuguese!" Savimbi said with the only hostility I ever saw
in him. "We need help, but not from any Portuguese! My men will