Buying the Night Flight

by Georgie Anne Geyer

  Perhaps, even after this most recent war, there is still some hope because there are such men as these. Perhaps, as a result of this conflict, the Arabs will lose some of their self-contempt and the Israelis will lose some of their over-assurance. Perhaps, then, the Israelis and the Arabs -- the Churs and the Nassers -- can look upon each other with awareness that they must live together, like the mountain and the sea. Perhaps, then, for the first time, they will see hope.

  XIV.

  You Are Not in Our Plans

  "Mystery alone is at the root of fear."

  --Antoine De Sain-Exupéry

  In retrospect it seems ironic that I should have been so pleased that spring day in 1976 when I was notified from Luanda that the new "revolutionary" government of Angola had awarded me a visa. Since the revolution in 1975, when the MPLA or Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola had caught in its Marxist hands an exhausted Portuguese colony that was virtually abandoned by the Portuguese colonialists, the country had been harder for a journalist to get into than the White House bedroom at three in the morning.

  My delight was only slightly cut short by the knowledge, which came by the way, that the "new Angolans" were allowing in a large group of journalists so they would cover the trials of the British and (a few) American mercenaries who had come in, paid by the

  CIA and others, to fight against them.

  That night in early April when I arrived in the war-wracked city of Luanda on the luxuriant coasts of the South Atlantic, I perhaps should have been aware of many indicators of trouble ahead, but in fact everything went almost too smoothly.

  "Ah, yes, Miss Geyer," the dour young woman sitting at the table to "welcome" the foreign journalists said, "you are the correspondent of the Los Angeles Times . Welcome to Angola." But she didn't smile.

  "No," I remonstrated hastily, "actually, I am not the 'correspondent'of the Times , I am a syndicated columnist with the Los Angeles Times Syndicate." This was a very delicate thing, because the correspondents belonged to the paper, and thus certainly deserved more direct attention in countries like this than I did. Belonging to the syndicate, one of the corporate bodies of the Times Mirror Company, meant only that I was an "independent contractor" and on my own, for I had left the Daily News in 1975 to become a columnist.

  She stared at me in an odd way. It was clear that she wanted me to be the correspondent of the Times , so I let it drop.

  The next morning when I phoned Dial Torgerson, the top-notch journalist who really was the Times correspondent, this always gracious man was gracious but a little restrained. And when we met for coffee in his room, I understood why.

  "It was interesting to come in the other day," Dial, a wiry Nordic soul who in another era would have skippered a great sailing ship to the New World, "and tell them I was the Times correspondent. They said, 'No, Miss Geyer is the Times correspondent.' Then they got very suspicious.... "

  It turned out that since Miss Geyer was the Times correspondent, they held Dial at the airport for eight hours before allowing him to enter the empty city of Luanda. It is really quite a wonder -- and credit to his good humor and wonderful spirit -- that we became such close friends.

  Luanda in those days (and still in these days, six years later, as I write this) was a ghost city. The beautiful pastel-colored colonial buildings that the Portuguese had built were still there, but they stood now as eerie fronts for the new emptiness of the society. Cobblestone streets wound up the hillsides to the glorious old pink, yellow, and blue buildings of the once luxuriant Portuguese overseas empire. But behind these lovely facades there was only the omnipresent emptiness. The poor black Angolans, who were supposed to gain from the revolution they were told they had "won," had prudently run away to the edges of the city. There they paused, collectively and hesitantly, in the thrown-together camps and shantytowns that spring up around all revolutions as palpable expressions of people's new freedom, and fragmentation, and fear.

  It is difficult to explain how a journalist operates and lives and continues as a (more or less) normal human being in such a gruesome place as Luanda was that peculiar spring. During the day Dial and Lee Griggs of Time and I would walk down the graceful hill to the Old Opera House, where the trials of the mercenaries were being held. There in the steamy, crowded upper balcony we sat for as long as we could bear it, watching the poor fools of mercenaries who had risked their lives for cash or adrenaline, some to see the world and some to kill their kings, being tried with all the pomp and circumstance of a simulated European court.

  The new Angolans of the MPLA "government" wanted to impress everybody with their power and with their efficiency, and so they brought handpicked, ideologically approved observers from all over the Third and socialist world and they would have been very angry indeed had these observers not supported them on every single move.

  On the way down to the trials we would often peer into a most wonderful and magical shop where one "Dr. Sambo" had his wares. Most unfortunately, it was closed at the moment. It seemed that Dr. Sambo, a black Angolan resplendent in his pictures in a black top hat and tails, had his herbs for any need, whim, or particular disability. I still have one box, which Dial was able to procure for me on the rare day Dr. Sambo opened up to the revolutionary air, which reads:

  SPECIAL TEA FROM CABINDA , ANGOLAN PLANTS NO . 5, FOR SEXUAL MASCULINE WEAKNESS AND INDIFFERENCE

  OR FEMININE FRIGIDITY .

  It then told you to take three spoonfuls in three liters of water and to abstain from eating alfalfa, fried meats, fruits, grapes, tapioca, chocolate, ginger, and any alcoholic drinks. Clearly a complicated solution to complicated problems.

  There were pathetic little dramas day after day. The second afternoon it was duly announced by the "government" that there would be demonstração grande by all the good folks crazed by the revolution. Naturally we did not intend to miss something like that, so Dial and I got to the square early and eager. It soon became clear that they were busing into the center of the city all the poor black Angolans who had been hovering out there on the dark borderlands of the city, waiting to see what the revolution would bring them.

  Dial and I climbed up the littered, broken back stairs of a once elegant apartment building in order to get to the roof. The scene was so sad it made me want to cry. Here were all these poor, good, black people, like those of my youth, now having had "the revolution," and now being massed and managed by the new rulers. They held giant signs saying DOWN WITH MERCENARYDOM (Mercenarydom?). They were against -- yea, united against -- "imperialism." They shouted when they were told to shout and sloganed when they were told to slogan and sang when they were told to sing. (Prince Sihanouk had once said wryly to me, "When I tell them to dance, they dance.") Then the black marchers -- the new revolutionary breed -- would withdraw inside themselves, just as the peasants had in Vietnam. They would be standing there, still carrying the signs, having sung and chanted, but now with their eyes covered as by a film, with their eyes now looking inward at themselves again.

  Then there were the times that Dial and I would set out in the morning (with one of the exactly six taxis still extant and working in Luanda) to find "the government." It is always a mistake to assume there is a government in these situations, but we always kept diligently trying. We went from ministry to ministry, from building to building, from hope to disappointment. No one was ever there. Where were they? Who knows? It was a ghost city with a ghost government.

  At night we sat on the roof of the Hotel Trópico, still then a pleasant place, and looked over the darkening city that once had been the pearl of the southern Atlantic. We drank up, systematically and happily, a good deal of Portuguese wine that was left behind. The nights didn't touch us -- yet -- but we knew enough to know that "out there" at night there were roving gangs of bandits and lots and lots of trouble. It was a little like the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, when the Japanese were invading and everyone sat at the bar daring the world by drinking to life.

  We of
ten complained about the toughness of the meat, and Dial later found that the revolutionary Angolans, so resourceful in everything, had raided the protected animal refuge and that we were eating the poor wildebeest!

  There were early indicators of trouble, but in truth they did not loom very large on our busy horizons. I kept having small run-ins with Luis da Almeida, the "press secretary" of "the government," who was the only person we were permitted to see. And despite my Spanish and reasonably good Portuguese he kept misunderstanding me.

  I kept saying, in Spanish, when he would ask me what I was, "Yo soy columnista" ("I am a columnist").

  For some reason da Almeida, who talked to me in a normal human manner only once -- and that because he had just stepped on my foot -- kept thinking I was saying, "Yo soy economista" ("I am an economist"). And he would answer, his eyes wary and clouded, "It is a strange time for an economist to come to Angola." And indeed it was, there being no economy!

  Nevertheless we forged ahead, covering the trials and gazing with hope ever sprung anew into Dr. Sambo's closed shop. I filed a story on the trial:

  They brought in scads of the world's press and a strange international commission of 44 people from 27 countries (whom they also peevishly won't let the press see). They even got 10,000 of the Angolans who remain in this beautiful, empty stage setting of a city to march with a marked display of lack of anger with perfectly lettered signs (all of which came out of the prosecutor's office) saying growly things like "Death to the Mercenaries." And then, oh my, and then you see the mercenaries, and you have to know the West is declining.

  Remember the days of William Morgan, the handsome, gentle American who fought with Fidel Castro, only to be finally executed by him? Remember Rolf Steiner, the Brit who led black armies in the south of the Sudan and who finally was sentenced to jail for dispensing medicine without a license and being in the country without a visa? Remember mad Mike Hoare from South Africa?

  Well, they may not all have been very nice, but at least they had a certain class. Errol Flynn and Clark Cable would not have delicately excused themselves to throw up when they saw them.

  What, on the contrary, do we have here? Since the world is growing more and more ethnocentric, we will bypass the 10 Brits on trial and focus on the Americans.

  This leaves us with Daniel Francis Gearheart of Kensington, Md., a dropout Vietnam veteran, and Gary Martin Acker of Sacramento. He flunked out of the Marine Corps and on his last job, which was getting paid piecework for putting up gutters, he ruined so many gutters he owed the contractor money....

  Certainly nobody in the press corps at the Hotel Trópico is drinking any toasts to these poor saps. But neither are most of them drinking any toasts to the Angolan Marxist regime here, which is charging them for crimes in February under a law written the first of May.

  After the parade the other day, in which the happy marchers demanded death to the mercenaries, Information Minister Luis da Almeida held a press conference accusing the foreign press of prejudging the trial. Maybe da Almeida and the government are correct in saying that imperialism itself is on trial, but if this was imperialism, one has to ask, "How did imperialism ever manage to function?"

  Mercenaries. Soldiers of fortune. Dogs of war have never been exactly the kind of clean-cut boys you'd want your daughter to marry. But there was at least a time in history when there were Janissaries and Mamelukes and Morgans and Steiners. And today we have a world where a great mercenary extravaganza is being waged on behalf of the Cearharts and Ackers. The losers. The dropout marines. The poor half-baked machos of an evermore-tasteless world.

  I don't know whether to cry for the poor Angolans or for us.

  After five days in "revolutionary Angola," I was ready to leave: ready and more than eager. Travel in Africa was awful, and in order to go south to South Africa and on to Rhodesia I had to go through Mozambique -- otherwise I would have to travel all the way back to Europe and all the way south again. But Mozambique, which is also in the post-Portuguese colonial period clutches of a "new Marxist" government, had not even responded to my visa request. When they did, months later, their message read, "You are not in our plans." By then how glad I was!

  I was getting itchy. I wanted to leave. Now "the government" told me they had "lost" my passport. I was growing downright mad. Then that Monday, da Almeida eyed me sidewise in a strange manner and, after making the usual ritual observations about what an odd time it was to have an "economist" in Angola, said, "I think you are going to leave tonight."

  We were all seated in our regular places on the roof at 11:00 P . M ., having our usual good-natured and laughing evening, when the manager of the hotel himself came up to the table. "Miss Geyer, your passport is in my office," was all he said.

  I was jubilant, and Lee insisted upon accompanying me to the lobby. "Mr. Griggs, why don't you stay here," the manager told him, and so Lee, always very much the gentleman, remained behind. Once in the manager's small office at the back of the lobby, I suddenly heard the door shut behind me, and I half-turned. Then I saw that I was trapped. Three very young, very ugly-looking black thugs stood in front of me. I immediately saw that one had my passport. I wasn't exactly frightened -- at that moment -- because I was so very surprised at all of this.

  "The government has issued an order for your deportation," one of the thugs announced grimly. I remember feeling rather pleased and thinking to myself, "Well, now I'll be able to leave, at least." But then they started to push me out the back door and it didn't all seem such a good idea after all.

  At this all, my Teutonic upbringing raced to the fore. "I have to pay my bill," I said, absurdly. This angered them -- perhaps they thought I was making fun of them -- and they growled and started to push me again. I did, however, in that moment, not miss noticing the flicker of a smile of hope pass over the manager's lips.

  Once in the car, flanked on both sides by these thugs, it all seemed even less of a good idea. "Where are we going?" I asked, hearing my voice come across in Portuguese with an anxious ring. "Al aeroporto," one answered. But we didn't go toward the airport at all, we went ninety miles an hour through the empty and hostile streets to the old Portuguese cuartel or prison on the sea. We crashed through the gate and slid to a halt in the courtyard amidst the ominous cluster of scabrous, 1876 buildings.

  It was then that I lost my taste for the whole adventure, because they opened the trunk and there were my bags. So they had gone through the room while we were at dinner! That was ominous. And then I remembered that just before going to dinner, the door to my room had suddenly opened. A young black man had started to come in but had stopped, very surprised to see me there, and backed away. I had thought at the time that he had just been a room man.

  Once inside the peeling old room, for some reason I gained heart. Once we were talking -- once I could engage in the process and the exchange, even though I was under arrest -- most of the fear left me. Fear, they tell me, is connected intimately with the unknown and once you know where you are, it takes its hesitant leave. That is to a great extent true. At least for me the truth of the matter was that I became very "interested" in the whole exchange.

  The interrogator was a young mulatto man, very Portuguese looking and obviously well educated, and he kept honing in on only one subject. "We want you to tell us whom you have spoken to in Luanda," he kept repeating. "And you are not going to leave until you do."

  Here, all of your journalistic and personal ethics -- or lack of them -- come in: that and just common sense and decency, which is of course what ethics is. So there was no way in hell or heaven that I

  was going to tell them the names of the people I had spoken to. That is probably the first area of a journalist's responsibility. But as he kept hammering in at me, I found myself basically wondering only one thing: "Why?" Why did he care? Who was he? What did he represent? Why were they doing this? Actually it was much like watching myself in a suspense movie.

  Gradually, from the tone and tenor of
his questions, the reality began to dawn on me. Revolutionary Angola was in the hands of the MPLA , whose president was Agostinho Neto. But within his "government" there was also a man named Nito Alves, the minister of the interior, and Alves was known to be on the severe "outs" with Neto. It was an obvious supposition, at first, to think that they had picked me up because I had been interviewing their Cuban visitors, but that wasn't it at all. These were Nito Alves's men, and they wanted to know whom I had interviewed because I had written -- and filed it from Luanda by public telex -- that Alves was increasingly against Neto.

  They thought someone in Luanda had given me the priceless information that they were in effect conspiring against Neto, which they were. The situation was even more dangerous than I thought. For I was not even in the hands of "the government," but in the hands of the Alves satellite group -- and that group was indeed conspiring against the government. It was a ready-made "She-died-while-trying-to-escape" type of situation, or a "But-we-never-sawher" type of situation. A few drops of sweat ran down my brow and I tried to brush them away. I didn't want my epitaph to read, "Shot By Mistake."

  I had read about the Neto-Alves feud in The Washington Post , but my Chicago street sense told me absolutely not to say this to them. They would think I was making fun of them. So what to do? I don't recall thinking about this consciously, but suddenly I saw myself, as from afar, carrying out a little drama.

  Gee Gee was hanging her head appropriately and saying, in Spanish and Portuguese, "I am truly very embarrassed to tell you this.... I really don't quite know how to tell you this ... This is very embarrassing to me, but..." They were looking suddenly interested, and Gee Gee, another person, was saying, "You know I live in Washington and ... well, you know how my government is ... and, before I left, the State Department took me aside and completely brainwashed me ... and they told me exactly what to say and ... I am truly embarrassed, but I didn't really see anyone in Luanda as you know because you've been following me and all the information and everything I wrote came straight from the State Department."