In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

The Angola Program
Atlantic area, and began striking back with indiscriminate wrath,
even bombing and strafing areas that had not been affected by the
nationalist uprising. Portuguese police seized nationalists, Protestants,
communists, and systematically eliminated black leaders by
execution and terrorism. By overreacting and flaying out indiscriminately,
the Portuguese helped to insure the insurrection would not
be localized or quashed.
President Kennedy made a tentative gesture of support to the
revolutionaries by voting with the majority of 73 to 2 (South Africa
and Spain opposing) on United Nations General Assembly Resolution
1514, April 20, 1961, which called for reforms in Angola. The
United States also cut a planned military assistance program from
s25 million to s3 million and imposed a ban on the commercial sale
of arms to Portugal.
But the Portuguese held a very high card-the Azores air bases
that refueled up to forty U.S. Air Force transports a day. We could
not do without them and our agreement for their use was due to
expire December 31, 1962, only eighteen months away. By renegotiating
the agreement on a year-by-year basis, the Portuguese were able
to stymie further pressure from Washington and obtain extensive
military loans and financial credits.
Even as American bombs and napalm fell on the Angolan nationalists,
and the U.S. voted the conservative line at the UN, Portugal's
air force chief of staff, General Tiago Mina Delgado, was honored
in Washington, receiving the American Legion of Merit from the
U.S. Air Force chief of staff, Curtis Lemay, and a citation from
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara for his contribution to U.S.­
Portuguese friendship. Strategic realities dominated policy.
Lisbon attributed the war in northern Angola to Congolese "invaders"
and "outside agitators" acting with a rabble of hemp-smoking
indigenas and for years thereafter, while the rebellion sputtered
and flared, the United States ignored Angolan revolutionary movements.
With the advent of the Nixon administration in 1969, a major
review of American policy toward Southern Africa, the "tar baby"
report (NSSM 39), concluded that African insurgent movements
were ineffectual, not "realistic or supportable" alternatives to continued
colonial rule. The interdepartmental policy review, commissioned
by then White House advisor, Henry Kissinger, questioned
"the depth and permanence of black resolve" and "ruled out a black