Laughter in the Shadows

by Stuart Methven

  Bongo could also be disarmingly warm and friendly and often invited me to dinner with his family. During one such dinner, I was seated near the end of a long table along with a dozen or more members of Bongo’s extended family. A chicken bone became lodged in my throat, and I couldn’t breathe. All my efforts to dislodge the bone with heaping mouthfuls of rice and glasses of beer were unsuccessful. I began to choke, and with my eyes watering, it suddenly occurred to me that this is how it would end, expiring at Le Guide’s table with a chicken bone lodged in my throat.

  Fortunately, Bongo’s wife, Anne Marie, who was sitting at the other end of the table, noticed my predicament. She got up and came over, and standing behind my chair, banged on my back between the shoulder blades. She hit me hard several times until the bone popped out of my mouth and dropped onto the plate. Anne Marie then returned to her seat beside the president, who was still recounting an anecdote about the tribal warfare in Belgium between the Flemish and Walloons and hadn’t noticed the near expiration of the station chief.

  The day after the cable arrived about the proposed program, I telephoned Bongo’s aide to arrange a meeting. The president’s sixth sense probably alerted him that something important was in the wind, because his aide immediately called back to say that he would see me right away.

  I began by passing greetings from the American president, who Bongo had met during one of his visits to Washington. I also passed him regards from the other senior officials, whom Bongo had also met on his visits to Washington. I then briefed Bongo on Washington’s concerns about recent Soviet moves in Africa and particularly Angafula and the alarming prospect of a Soviet puppet state across the border from Buwana.

  The president nodded and asked me to continue. I told him I had come to discuss a program to thwart Soviet ambitions in Angafula. The program, which would provide support for the FLA and UTIA independence groups, would, if the president agreed, have its logistics base in Buwana. I asked President Bongo if he would provide cover for the operation as part of his regular military assistance program and logistical support to include quartermaster personnel, warehouses, and special access to the Bintang airport and Katapi harbor.

  Bongo replied that he would be glad “to help his friends in Washington” and provide whatever assistance was needed. I told him he would incidentally be receiving additional M-16 rifles and other items to augment his military assistance program. Potentates are usually pleased when their status and power are recognized, and Bongo was no exception. He smiled, tapping his ivory cane on the floor and reiterating his assurances about being happy to help his friends in Washington. As I was leaving, he asked when he could expect the additional M-16s.

  Rebello and Sanchez

  Having gotten Bongo’s approval to support the program, I went to discuss it with the two Angafulan leaders.

  Rebello, the FLA leader, was born in 1923 in the Angafulan province of Sao Salvador, across the Buwanan border. Raised by missionaries, he attended Baptist mission schools until 1940. He joined several independence groups and became president of the largest one, the Front for the Liberation of Angafula. The movement was supported from its base in Buwana across the river from Rebello’s Angafula. The movement’s first foreign minister was Juan Sanchez, who later broke from the FLA to form his own group.

  Rebello was dour, ascetic, and uncompromising. Although he was a staunch anticommunist, he hadn’t hesitated to turn to Red China for aid in arming and training two companies of his FLA partisans. His rationale for accepting aid from Communist China was “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and Red China, at the time, was the enemy of the Soviet Union.

  Juan Sanchez founded UTIA shortly after he left Rebello’s FLA. Born in 1934, Sanchez was an Ovimbundu, the largest tribal group in Angafula. Like Rebello, Sanchez was the product of missionary schools. In his early twenties he went to Europe to study political science and medicine before returning to Angafula to organize the UTIA.

  Sanchez was as charismatic as Rebello was dour. He had been a champion soccer player and was a spellbinding speaker. His beard, green fatigues, and oratorical skills invited comparison to Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader who would one day send troops to fight him.

  While Rebello drew his support from the region bordering Buwana, Sanchez’ tribal base was in the interior of Angafula, where most of the rubber and coffee plantations as well as diamond mines were located. It was also in the region through which the important Benguela railroad ran linking Angafula with the rest of Africa.

  Sanchez mistrusted Rebello because of the FLA leader’s close ties to President Bongo, but he saved his real contempt for Sappho, the “Red Poet,” whose verses Sanchez called nothing more than “toilet-stall graffiti.”

  I had no trouble selling our program to the two leaders. Both were pleased to learn the United States was going to provide support to their respective movements, but they were less than pleased when they learned President Bongo would have his fingers in the logistics pot.

  Operation Uhuru

  For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.

  —Gospel of Luke, XII

  The Last Covert Action was christened Uhuru, Swahili for “freedom.” The high-sounding objectives of the project were variations on familiar themes: supporting freedom and democracy, foiling Soviet subversion, and neutralizing the communist-supported PMFA.

  The program had its genesis in Charleston, South Carolina, where arms, ammunition, and armored personnel carriers were loaded into the hold of a U.S. Victory ship. At the same time, forklifts loaded giant C-141 transport planes, their tailgates open like hungry mouths, with crates of M-16s, mortars, ammunition, and other supplies.

  Paramilitary officers, many of them former colleagues from Southeast Asia operations, were rousted out on short notice and sent to Bintang. They stepped off the plane with tired and disbelieving eyes that asked why, so soon after Cham and Vietnam.

  Technicians arrived with trunks full of pyrotechnic displays, demolition experts with suitcases crammed with plastic explosives, and an underwater demolition team (UDT) with limpets to blow open seams of Russian freighters. A special plane flew in loaded with portable printing presses and a mobile radio station. Last to arrive were the finance officers, their satchels stuffed with Portuguese escudos, Buwanan bank notes, and U.S. dollars to bankroll the FLA and UTIA and keep President Bongo’s war chest replenished. Customs officials waved them all through, no questions asked.

  To accommodate the influx of personnel, we went house hunting. There was a surplus of empty colonial villas, and their new Buwanan landlords were happy to accommodate dollar-paying tenants. A compound of four of these villas was leased for Uhuru’s base of operations. The villas were soon furnished with desks, tables, chairs, and topographic sand tables. The walls of the briefing room were covered with maps and charts.

  “Ft. Apache,” with its clusters of roof antennas, wasn’t hard to spot.

  Heinzleman had made it clear he wanted “no smoking gun” in the Angafula operation. Uhuru was to be run as a covert operation, regardless of the large sums of money and number of personnel involved. Case officers had to be “sheep-dipped” (documented as foreign nationals) and weapons “sterilized” (non-U.S. origin). “Fig-leafed” covert actors had to perform on mobile operational stages, which could be easily dismantled if a press posse was spotted.

  Sterilization and plausible denial. Good in theory, a nightmare to implement.

  Uhuru had begun to take shape. The American Chariot docked at Katapi, and its cargo was immediately loaded onto freight cars lined up on a railroad spur. The railroad between Katapi and Bintang had deteriorated since the Belgians left in 1960, and it took three days instead of twelve hours to make the hundred-mile trip.

  Outside Bintang the cargo was off-loaded f
rom the train onto trucks and driven to an army quartermaster depot. The crates of M-16s, except for those set aside for the Presidential Guard, were turned over to the Buwanan army quartermaster to be exchanged for “sterile” fusils, bolt-action rifles that were standard issue for the Buwanan army.

  It was hardly a fair exchange, and it almost spelled finis to Uhuru.

  First, trying to hide the origin of the thousands of weapons in the hands of the FLA and UTIA was impractical, if not impossible. Angafula and Buwana were both leaky security sieves.

  Also, the subterfuge was ill advised and unnecessary. M-16s could be bought on the black market anywhere in Africa or imported from Europe using doctored shipping manifests. Besides, since the Soviets were openly arming the PMFA with Russian Kalashnikovs, the submachine gun of choice of terrorists around the world, arming the FLA and UTIA with American M-16s shouldn’t have raised any outcry.

  Nevertheless, we had been ordered to turn over the new M-16s to the Buwanan quartermaster, who checked them off and then sent them by truck to a special warehouse guarded by Bongo’s Presidential Guard. He then turned an equal number of their bolt-action rifles to the FLA and UTIA.

  When Rebello and Sanchez saw the Buwanans carrying off shiny new M-16s and leaving rusty bolt-action rifles for the FLA and UTIA, the two leaders exploded. In a surprising show of unity, both began yelling at the Uhuru logistics officer, Tolbert. Rebello cried out that the fusils were so old and rusty and the barrels so pitted, they would either explode or backfire. Sanchez supported Rebello, yelling at Tolbert, “Give these rusting relics to those bastards in the PMFA so they’ll blow up in their faces, not ours!”

  Tolbert tried to calm the two incensed leaders, saying, “Faites-moi confiance! Trust me!”

  I knew something had gone wrong when the easygoing Tolbert burst into my office and started banging on my desk and said, “Quel bordel! A real cock-up! Uhuru is about to go down the tubes with this stupid shell game of switching new M-16s for rusted Belgian muskets. We might as well give them muzzle loaders and be done with it! I told Rebello and Sanchez I’d talk to you about stopping this ‘castration, sterilization,’ or whatever you want to call it. Both of them are so steamed up they are ready to say to hell with Uhuru unless something is done to that farce out at the warehouse!”

  Uhuru was foundering before it even got started. I asked Tolbert to sit down and together we would draft a message requesting a waiver in the Uhuru weapons sterilization requirement and ask for authorization to issue the M-16s directly to Rebello and Sanchez or their representatives, pointing out that the Soviets were arming the PMFA with Kalashnikovs. Issuing M-l6s to the FLA and UTIA would level the playing field.

  Bongo would obviously not be happy with the change, and we recommended offering him fifty M-16s for his presidential honor guard in Ladolite, the location of his summer palace, and a “slush fund” for the quartermaster and his crew.

  Headquarters must have done some arm-twisting, because within twenty-four hours, “sterilization” had been excised from the Uhuru lexicon. Bongo protested the change as predicted but came around with the sweetener of the M-16s for his honor guard.

  “Sterilization” and “plausible denial” had taken a hit, but Uhuru was back on track.

  Stark

  Stark’s qualification for coordinating the task force was that he had spent part of his childhood in Africa as the son of missionary parents and had a smattering of Swahili, a language spoken in a remote corner of Angafula.

  When Stark arrived in my office, he was wearing a black safari suit and black boots. A silver Maltese cross dangled from his neck, glinting as he introduced himself and asked for immediate transportation to “the front.” I arranged for a chartered Air Buwana Fokker to take him to Rebello’s headquarters in Ambrizio and later on to Sanchez’s base in the interior. I told Stark the plane would pick him up when he was ready to return to Bintang.

  Two weeks after he left, Stark was back in my office. His safari suit was still unrumpled and spotless. He handed me the report he had prepared for the task force and an envelope containing Polaroid snapshots of his trip. I looked at the snapshots: Stark and Rebello standing next to a bullet-riddled sign pointing toward Lunda; Stark standing with Sanchez on top of a burned-out half-track, the red PMFA star still visible; Stark looking at PMFA prisoners; and Stark talking to UTIA guerrillas.

  Stark said he had been impressed by both Rebello and Sanchez. He was convinced that with additional training and weapons, their combined forces would soon control most of Angafula. He said it was all in his report, and he would appreciate being able to add my comments.

  I hastily read the report and then handed it back to Stark. I said I wouldn’t add any comments because the report was Stark’s personal assessment and should stand on its own. I did say that I found his report somewhat optimistic, probably because it hadn’t taken into account the African Equation. Stark looked puzzled, and I explained.

  As Stark was aware, Africa was unfathomable and unpredictable. Elephant droppings and tribal drumbeats were as reliable in predicting the future as intelligence estimates and projections. Angafula was a witches’ brew that was currently being stirred by tribal shamans, village chiefs, guerrillas, and foreign interlopers. The brew was simmering but one day it would boil over.

  For the first time Stark stopped fingering his Maltese cross. He was probably wondering whether I was pulling his leg with African mumbo jumbo.

  He reached over and took back his report, and the following day he left for Washington.

  In fairness to Stark, he didn’t know the cauldron was about to boil over, and when it did, ten thousand Cuban volunteers spilled out—and rendered his report worthless.

  The Flying Circus

  Je vous querir un grand peut-etre,

  irez le rideau, la farce est jouee.

  -FRANÇOIS RABELAIS

  Supplying Uhuru forces inside Angafula was dangerous and difficult. It was pointless to ferry supplies across the river because there were no roads on the other side to truck them into the interior. Portaging the heavy crates for long treks through the jungle was impractical, slow, and dangerous. As a result, crates of supplies from the American Chariot were stacked in Bintang warehouses. Supplies flown in by C-141 and C-130 cargo planes had to be off-loaded in Bintang because American aircraft were forbidden to fly into Angafulan air space.

  Uhuru desperately needed an air bridge into Angafula. We had tried chartering Air Buwana planes, but the airline was unreliable, with crews showing up late or not at all, and the planes frequently down for repairs, hors de service, for weeks at a time. The supply pipeline had slowed to a trickle, and the project was grinding to a halt.

  Then fortune smiled on Uhuru.

  With Angafula drifting into civil war, Portuguese expatriates began leaving the country. When a leftist government came to power in Lisbon and announced its support for Sappho’s PMFA, more Portuguese joined the exodus out of Angafula. Some Portuguese, however remained in Angafula, and from among these emerged Uhuru’s first foreign “volunteers.”

  Obie, the Uhuru air operations officer, woke me at midnight. An Air Angafula plane with a Portuguese crew had landed at Bintang’s international airport. Obie said the pilot was waiting outside. I told Obie to bring the pilot in and offered him a cold beer before asking him to sit down and tell us his story.

  Carlos said he was a Fokker pilot for Air Angafula, the Portuguese charter airline serving the colony. Carlos had filed a flight plan in Lunda for Carmona, a regular destination. The tower cleared his flight, and Carlos took off, but about fifty kilometers north of Lunda, he altered course for Buwana. Approaching Bintang, Carlos radioed the tower, requesting permission to land. The flight was unscheduled, but the tower operator authorized the plane to land, ordering Carlos to taxi to an unmarked hangar at the far end of the runway.

  When the plane taxied up to the hangar, one of the guards immediately called Obie, who instructed the guard to open the hangar and ha
ve the pilot park the plane inside. Obie had immediately gone out to the airport and talked to Captain Carlos. The two men had then come directly to my house.

  Carlos’s story was that he had heard on the Portuguese grapevine that the Americans were supporting Angafula anticommunist movements. Carlos and his crew were fed up with the leftist colonial government in Lunda and had decided to come to Bintang to offer their services.

  Leaving Carlos to nurse his beer, Obie and I went into my study, where we discussed the various options open to us regarding the Air Angafula plane and its crew and finally narrowed them down to three: The first option was to turn the crew and plane over to the Buwanans. This wouldn’t endear us to the Buwanan Security Service, which would not want to get its president involved in a diplomatic row with a foreign government. The second option was to notify the Portuguese embassy. The Portuguese ambassador would immediately inform his government and demand that the Buwanan authorities impound the plane and send the crew to Lunda to face charges. This was another course of action that would not sit well with President Bongo, who had little use for the Portuguese and would have to resist any attempts at extradition, but would not like getting involved. The third option, and the one we settled on, was to hide the plane, stash the crew, and then decide on a plan of action. Obie said he already had a plan. All he needed to implement it was a special hangar, plenty of paint, a few technicians, and approval to put Captain Carlos and his crew on the Uhuru payroll.

  When Obie advised Carlos, the pilot thanked him on behalf of all the crew. He said more “volunteers” would come soon, which was borne out when a second Air Angafula plane arrived the following week. The third plane landed three days later, the last “defector” plane before the Portuguese authorities grounded the rest of the Air Angafula fleet.