In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

IN SEARCH OF ENEMIES
Congo (Brazzaville), but the size of their program made it impossible
to conceal. And of course, the CIA launched a major propaganda
effort to expose the Soviet arms shipments.
Propaganda experts in the CIA station in Kinshasa busily planted
articles in the Kinshasa newspapers, Elimo and Salongo. These were
recopied into agency cables and sent on to European, Asian, and
South American stations, where they were secretly passed to recruited
journalists representing major news services who saw to it
that many were replayed in the world press. Similarly, the Lusaka
station placed a steady flow of stories in Zambian newspapers and
then relayed them to major European newspapers.
In Kinshasa, Ray Chiles's prolific pen and fertile imagination
produced a stream of punchy articles and clever operations to spearhead
the agency's propaganda effort. For example, he procured a
mimeograph machine for FNLA headquarters in Kinshasa and produced
leaflets, which were dropped from airplanes over Luanda
itself. The first such leaflet was unaccountably read verbatim over the
MPLA's Radio Luanda the next morning, provoking a ripple of
laughter in CIA stations throughout Europe and Africa, when they
heard of it.
The propaganda output from Lusaka was voluminous and imaginative,
if occasionally beyond credibility. In late September, Lusaka
news stories began to charge that Soviets were advising MPLA forces
inside Angola. This was at first a plausible line and Lusaka kept it
going. Certainly Soviet advisors might have been inside Angola,
although we had no evidence to that effect. The world press dutifully
picked up Lusaka's stories of Soviet advisors, while we at headquarters
watched nervously, preferring that propaganda ploys have at
least some basis in fact. Then, two months later, Lusaka reported
that twenty Soviet advisors and thirty-five Cubans had been captured
when UNIT A took Malanje. UNIT A spokesmen gave this information
to David Ottoway, who was visiting Lusaka, and it was published
in the November 22 edition of the Washington Post. The Post
also printed the TASS denial the same day, carrying stories from the
world's two largest intelligence services in the same issue; unwitting
that the first story came from the CIA and that it was false; aware
that TASS was the Soviet's propaganda arm, but not sure that this
time it was telling the truth.
UNIT A had captured no Soviet advisors nor had it taken Malanje.