In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

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IN SEARCH OF ENEMIES
and a plan to dispatch an agent to Luanda to find one to engineer
the coup.
Under other circumstances, with aggressive case officering and
luck, IASALACIOUS might have worked. Certainly, the agency has
engineered similar coups. But IASALACIOUS's first flaw was that the
agency wasn't entrenched in Luanda. When successful, such coups
are generally engineered by agency operatives who have been in the
country for long periods and have deve]oped an infrastructure of
good contacts in the military establishment. Its second weakness was
that not enough CIA personnel, including the Luanda chief of station,
believed in it. Such a coup would put Portuguese troops in
armed confrontation with the MPLA armies, whites fighting blacks,
touching the fuse of racial violence. IASALAc1ous never got off the
ground.
The propaganda of the Angola civil war was to be as important
as the fighting. For that effort, Bubba Sanders was chosen, a senior
GS 15, a short, cherubic, and energetic officer whose mission in life
was to apply his irrepressible mind toward the harassment of the
Soviets throughout Africa. Unfortunately, Hubba, while a fountain
of schemes and plots, was not blessed with infallible judgement. His
presence on the task force would be a mixed blessing, I thought,
remembering a mailing other CIA propagandists had made to
Burundi while I was there in 1970.
As COS, I had had approval of that operation, and I gave it, when
I received the proposal from headquarters for a propaganda mailing
designed to embarrass the Soviets. I assumed the mailing would be
subtle and that I would see the suggested format before anything was
posted. But neither I nor any other knowledgeable operations officer
saw anything until posters began appearing in people's mail boxes in
the capital, Bujumbura. They were about twelve by eighteen inches,
printed in stark black and red, portraying a sharp military boot heel
crushing hundreds of small figures. Across the top in bold French
was printed, "A BAS MICOMBERO DICTATEUR!"-Down with
Micombero, Dictator! Written across the bottom, as sponsor of the
poster, was the cachet of a world youth congress, well known to be
supported by the Soviets. The mailing worked so well that the Soviet
ambassador was subsequently asked not to return from home leave
in the Soviet Union.