In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

Advisors, Technicians, and Foreign Troops
query ECCOI, but the response was so slow as to amount to rejection.
Supporting black liberation movements inside Angola on shortterm
CIA contracts in a controversial, clandestine program was not
attractive to the Filipinos. Possibly they remembered the evacuation
of Vietnam a few months before: the CIA had left 250 of its Filipino
employees behind at the mercy of the communists.
South Africa was a different matter. It came into the conflict
cautiously at first, watching the expanding U.S. program and timing
their steps to the CIA's. In September the South Africans began to
provide arms and training to UNIT A and FNLA soldiers at Run tu
on the Angolan/ South-West African border. First two, then twelve,
then forty advisors appeared with UNIT A forces near Silva Porto.
Eventually the South African armored column-regular soldiers, far
better than mercenaries-teamed with UNIT A to make the most
effective military strike force ever seen in black Africa, exploding
through the MPLA/ Cuban ranks in a blitzkreig, which in November
almost won the war.
South Africa in 1975 was in a dangerously beleaguered position.
Its blacks were increasingly restive, its whites emigrating, the white
buffer states of Rhodesia, Mozambique, and Angola were threatened,
and its economy was sagging. The Arab states' oil embargo had
pushed up the cost of fuel despite continued supplies from Iran.
South Africa's policies of sharing economic and technical resources
with its northern neighbors, had seemed enlightened and effective.
By 1975, however, it was clear they had not stemmed the tide of
resentment against the white redoubt's apartheid policies.*
The 1974 coup in Portugal had exposed South Africa to fresh, chill
winds of black nationalism, as Mozambique and Angola threatened
to succumb to Soviet-sponsored, radical, black movements, which
promised increased pressure on Rhodesia, Namibia, and South
Africa itself. The white buffer concept was no longer viable. The
South African fall-back position was to attempt to create in Mozambique
and Angola moderate states which, like Malawi and Botswana,
would be friendly or at least not hostile to South Africa.
The South African government attacked the threat in Mozambique
with impeccably correct diplomacy and generous economic
•see "South Africa: Up against the World," by John de St. Jorre, Foreign Policy,
No. 28 (Fall 1977).