In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

The Angola Program [49]
later wrote an intelligence report about the camp, which headquarters
reports officers refused to disseminate to the intelligence users
in Washington. The chief of station, Kinshasa, sent me a note in the
classified pouch advising that the agency wasn't interested in Angolan
revolutionary movements, and that my visit was unfortunate
because it could have been misconstrued. We didn't support the
black fighters and we didn't want our NATO ally, Portugal, picking
up reports that we were visiting Angolan rebel base camps.
Since then I had casually monitored our Angolan policy, which
was unchanged as late as 1974. It is part of the business to keep an
eye on your areas of special interest. You do it casually, instinctively,
over coffee with friends, or when you pass in the halls: "Whafs the
hurry? . .. Oh? ... What's Roberto up to these days? . . . Why hasn't
anyone ever gotten us a line into the other group, the MPLA?"
For many years the Portuguese had claimed exemplary success in
assimilating blacks into a colonial society which was allegedly free
of racial barriers. Until 1974 they appeared to believe they enjoyed
a permanent relationship with their colonies.
In the cJandestine services of the CIA, we were inclined to accept
the Portuguese claims of a racially open-minded society in Angola,
and it was tacitly agreed that communist agitation was largely responsible
for the blacks' continued resistance to Portuguese rule. The
reason was basic. Essentially a conservative organization, the CIA
maintains secret liaison with local security services wherever it operates.
Its stations are universally part of the official communities of
the host countries. Case officers live comfortable lives among the
economic elite; even "outside" or "deep cover" case officers are part
of that elite. They become conditioned to the mentality of the authoritarian
figures, the police chiefs, with whom they work and socialize,
and eventually share their resentment of revolutionaries who
threaten the status quo. They are ill at ease with democracies and
popular movements-too fickle and hard to predict.
Thus CIA case officers sympathized with the whites of South
Africa, brushing aside evidence of oppression with shallow cliches
such as, "The only reason anyone gets upset about South Africa is
because whites are controlling blacks. If blacks murder blacks in
Uganda, nobody cares .. . " and "The blacks in South Africa are
better off than blacks anywhere else in Africa, better schools, better
jobs, better hospitals . . . "
About Angola we commonly declared, "The Portuguese have