In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

The Angola Program [53]
mit them to achieve a military balance which would avoid a cheap
Neto victory (Agostinho Neto was president of the MPLA).
I paused to reflect a moment. This memo did indeed state a no-win
policy-we would be seeking from the outset only to avoid a "cheap
Neto victory." I wondered what "cheap" meant. Would it be measured
in dollars or in African lives?
The Soviets would certainly learn ·what the agency was doing and
they knew very well the limitations which would be imposed on
Kissinger and Ford by the American Congress and press so soon
after Vietnam. Fourteen million dollars doesn't stake you to a very
big war. The Congo covert action cost American taxpayers a million
dollars a day for a sustained period. The CIA claimed to have won
that one, although it was by no means clear ten years later what we
had won- Mobutu was energetically running the country into the
ground and he had turned on his American benefactors.
The fourth paragraph of the memorandum to the director stated
that the CIA understood: (a) that Secretary Kissinger favored a
s14-million commitment with emphasis on material; (b) that the
assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Nathaniel Davis, opposed
any covert program in Angola, because he doubted that such
an operation could be kept secret;• and (c) that Ambassador Sheldon
Vance (career ambassador and special assistant to the secretary of
state) was interested in the operation because it would ease our
relations with Mobutu.
Kissinger favors . .. I wondered if Kissinger or any of the others
who were pushing us into this program were already planning its
escalation. Bantam had said they got s6 million and then immediately
s8 million more. Did they expect that to suffice, or were they
already thinking of another ten, twenty, one hundred million once
they had the American government committed?
Assistant Secretary Davis opposed the program. Bantam and I
*Davis resigned in August 1975 after Secretary Kissinger rejected his recommendation
that the United States seek a diplomatic solution in Angola and play no active
role in the country's civil war. Davis had argued that we must mount a diplomatic
effort- a multinational effort-to get a settlement. He said we must trumpet it to
the world that this is not the right kind of activity for any great power.
And he told them it wouldn't work. "Neither Savimbi nor Roberto are good
fighters. It's the wrong game and the players we've got are losers .. (Seymour Hersh,
from officials directly involved, New York Times, December 14, 1975).