In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

IN SEARCH OF ENEMIES
of January 1975 to fund the FNLA. He believed the MPLA was best
qualified to run Angola and that its leaders sincerely wanted a peaceful
relationship with the United States. SWISH had worked with all
three movements and found the MPLA better organized and easier
for him to see. They were the best educated up and down the line,
from leaders who had taken dQctorates at European universities to
cadres of urban dwellers, civil servants, and technicians. By comparison
the FNLA, Holden Roberto's crowd, had few educated men at
the top--no intellectuals-and had spent much of its history in the
cocktail parties of Kinshasa. The FNLA soldiers had been slathering
animals when they came into Luanda that spring, 1975. UNIT A was
about the same except for Savimbi, who was a good man by any
standard.
Scoffing at my notion that MPLA ]eaders were hostile to the
United States, MacElhinney went on. It was only the CIA's historic
relationship with Roberto that had us :so close to the FNLA, and
even he, despite many years of association, wouldn't tell us much.
For example, the Chinese had publicly announced their FNLA advisor
program and we knew they were at Kinkuza, Zaire, but Roberto
wouldn't talk to the CIA about them. We knew even less about
Savimbi-our alliance with him was based solely on his opposition
to the MPLA. .
The MPLA was rooted in the Mbundu people which the Portuguese
had overwhelmed in the sixteenth century. The Portuguese
had "transformed the Mbundu homeland in central Angola into
what has be,en called the first black African nation to be subjected
to European rule."*
Mbundu resistance erupted periodically during the next 350 years.
In 1907-1910 a Mbundu leader, Cazuangongo, organized attacks on
the railroads and fought a prenationalist guerrilla war from the
Dembos hills.
Geographic location gave the Mbundu greater access to the Portuguese
in Central Angola, and they became the domestic servants,
the assistants, the black semiskilled labor force living in the
muceques (slums) of Luanda. A handful managed to obtain advanced
educations by pursuing the politically safe fields of clergy and
medicine. As they studied and traveled in Europe they found that
*Marcum, The Angolan Revolution. Vol. I.