In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

Our Little·Known Allies
FNLA inside Angola. Mobutu's army and air force hauled enough
arms for two infantry battalions and nine Pan hard armored cars to
the FNLA base at Ambriz, seventy miles north of Luanda.
Senator Dick Clark, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, and his staff aide, Dick Moose, were briefed by Colby
on the eve of their departure for Central Africa on a fact-finding
mission. The CIA continued briefing congressional committees
about the Angola program. Another 40 Committee meeting was held
on August 8.
The situation in Angola was deteriorating rapidly. The MPLA
controlled twelve of fifteen provinces and was gaining momentum.
A radio station in Luanda boomed MPLA propaganda. The FNLA
was trying to mount an offensive. Roberto and President Mobutu
were pressuring the Kinshasa station. The Kinshasa, Lusaka, and
Luanda stations bombarded headquarters with requirements and
reports.
Every CIA activity, no matter how trivial, eventually crystalizes
onto paper in the form of a cable or memorandum. In the Angola
program the flow of paper was staggering. None of us had ever seen
so many high-priority cables, or memoranda to the director, the
State Department, the Department of Defense, and the 40 Commit ..
tee. One cable would arrive from the field urgently requiring an
answer, only to be superceded by another more critical, and that by
yet another. The cable system worked much faster than we did,
which frustrated me at times, but also renewed my appreciation for
the CIA's worldwide communications system, its heartbeat.
Cabled messages arrive at the CIA headquarters building, from
radio relay stations around the world. While in the air, these messages
are protected by a code which the agency hopes the Soviets
cannot read. Machines at the transmitting field station automatically
encode the messages, and computers on the first floor of headquarters
decode them. Operators sit before the coding machines and
guide them by typing signals into a keyboard. On receipt, incoming
cables are reproduced automatically-some with several hundred
copies, others with as few as one or two, depending on the classifica ..
tion and controls. Inside headquarters the cables travel by pneumatic
tube to the registry section in each division, where the designating
"slugs" are hastily read to determine which branch has action responsibility
for each cable. The cables are then sorted into vertical