Fight for Independence

Angola was the most valuable of Portugal’s African possessions. A major producer of oil, industrial diamonds, and coffee, it was the site of significant investments by US and other Western firms. When the winds of change blew through the continent after 1945, Angolans joined activists from other countries in their demand for an end to colonial rule.

Three nationalist organizations strove for dominance: the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). The MPLA’s stronghold was in north central Angola, which included the capital city of Luanda. The FNLA was based in the northwest, while UNITA dominated the central highlands.

The three movements were distinguished by ideology as well as geography. The MPLA was avowedly Marxist, with ties to the Portuguese Communist Party and eventually with Cuba and the Soviet Union. The FNLA and UNITA used anti-communist rhetoric to win international backing but accepted support from the People’s Republic of China, which was intent on countering Soviet patronage of the MPLA. Initially UNITA adopted a Maoist ideology. However, it abandoned that identity when lobbying for US aid.

Both the FNLA and UNITA spurned the MPLA’s offer to establish a common front, attacking MPLA cadres instead. By 1972, UNITA’s leader Jonas Savimbi had signed a secret pact with Portugal in which he pledged to suspend military operations against the imperial power in exchange for Portuguese collaboration against UNITA’s rivals.

Portugal’s Allies

Although Soviet involvement in the Portuguese territories was minimal in the 1960s, Lisbon claimed that it faced a Soviet-backed communist insurgency and sought support from its NATO allies. NATO countries responded by providing hundreds of millions of dollars in military and economic aid that enabled Portugal to finance its colonial wars and bolster its failing economy.

It was through the NATO alliance that the United States first intervened. As part of the defense pact, the US provided military equipment to Portugal for European defense. Although Washington stipulated that US equipment must not be used in Lisbon’s African wars, it turned a blind eye when its ally funneled US weapons, tanks, planes, ships, helicopters, napalm, and chemical defoliants into its African colonies. Meanwhile, US military personnel trained thousands of Portuguese soldiers in counterinsurgency methods.

By 1974, the colonial wars had drained the Portuguese economy and taken a heavy toll on the lower classes, whose conscripted sons bore the brunt of the fighting. In April, young army officers overthrew the Portuguese regime. They established a government of national unity that included leaders of the Portuguese Socialist and Communist parties and promised to end the colonial wars.

In Angola, the Portuguese coup dramatically altered the lay of the land. China immediately intensified aid to both the FNLA and UNITA, and the CIA followed suit. In August, the Soviet Union announced its moral support for the MPLA but did not provide material aid. Instead, Moscow urged the three movements to resolve their differences through negotiations.

The result was an African-led peace initiative that produced the Alvor Agreement. Signed by Portugal and the three liberation movements on January 15, 1975, the agreement obliged the signatories to form a transitional government that included representatives from all three movements and to hold constituent assembly elections in October. The elected assembly would choose a president, and independence would be granted on November 11, 1975.

Kissinger’s War

The Alvor Agreement was violated almost immediately. Although the FNLA was the strongest movement militarily, the MPLA was far better established among the civilian population. It had developed a broader base and achieved greater popular mobilization than either the FNLA or UNITA. War would play to FNLA strengths, while peaceful political activism would benefit the MPLA.

Henry Kissinger, who served the Nixon and Ford administrations as both national security advisor and secretary of state, considered the MPLA to be a Soviet proxy and was determined to eradicate it. Rejecting the cautionary advice of Africa experts in the State Department, he promoted a CIA plan to undermine the organization.

With Washington’s public endorsement of the Alvor Agreement as a cover, the CIA resumed covert support for the FNLA less than a week after its signing, providing escalating amounts of military and economic aid. From March through May, the FNLA launched a series of attacks that killed MPLA activists in the capital and elsewhere in northern Angola.

More significant, Washington offered substantial military and economic support for the FNLA through Mobutu Sese Seko’s military regime in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). A few months after the Alvor Agreement was signed, more than one thousand Zairian soldiers infiltrated Angola to fight on the FNLA’s behalf.

Convinced that Africans were incapable of responsible government, Kissinger considered them easy targets for Soviet propaganda. Certain that Congress and the US public would oppose another distant war in the aftermath of the Vietnam fiasco, Kissinger hid his war from both Congress and the US citizenry, using proxies to fight for US interests.

According to the Kissinger plan, the white settler regimes in Southern Africa would serve as regional policemen, keeping African populations in check and serving as an important bulwark against Soviet expansion. Kissinger’s actions in 1975 and 1976 turned this region into yet another Cold War battleground.

Invasion

Moscow responded reluctantly to the US-led escalation. In March 1975, it shipped arms that enabled the MPLA to expel the FNLA from the capital, where the MPLA had significant public support.

With Moscow in the game, South African intelligence reported that an MPLA victory could only be thwarted if its state got involved. In July of that year, US and South African intelligence began to collaborate. Moving in tandem, Washington and Pretoria funneled weapons and vehicles valued at tens of millions of dollars to the FNLA and UNITA.

Moscow again responded, supplying the MPLA with more arms and military advisers. In September, East Germany followed suit, furnishing weapons, instructors, pilots, and doctors. By the end of the month, the MPLA was dominant in nine of Angola’s sixteen provinces, including the capital, the coastline from Luanda to Namibia, and the coastal hinterland. Angola’s five major ports, the oil-rich Cabinda Enclave, and most of the diamond-bearing Lunda district were also under MPLA control.

In October, the South African Defence Force began what was to be a massive invasion to thwart the MPLA’s ascendancy. By the end of the month, about one thousand South African soldiers were already entrenched in Angola. Another two thousand troops, along with planes, helicopters, and armored vehicles, were poised on the border. Joined by FNLA and UNITA units, Zairean troops, and European mercenaries, the South African contingent, with CIA encouragement, began to advance on the capital, rapidly winning the territory that the FNLA and UNITA had been unable to conquer on their own.

Until this point, Cuba’s response to MPLA requests had been relatively modest. It was only after the South African invasion in October that Cuba responded to the MPLA’s pleas for troops. Unwilling to upset a tenuous détente with the United States, Moscow had refused to supply Soviet troops — or to airlift Cuban soldiers — until after Independence Day on November 11. As the Alvor Agreement disintegrated, it became clear that whoever controlled the capital on that day would determine the nature of Angola’s government.

Convinced that South Africa would take Luanda before November 11 unless impeded by outside forces, Havana was unwilling to wait. On October 23, Cuban soldiers participated in the fighting for the first time. On November 10, MPLA and Cuban forces held Luanda against an onslaught of 2,000 FNLA and 1,200 Zairean soldiers, more than 100 Portuguese mercenaries, and advisers supplied by South Africa and the CIA.

Independence

On November 11, the Portuguese high commissioner granted independence to the “Angolan people,” instead of transferring power to any of the warring parties. The MPLA, which controlled the capital, announced the establishment of the People’s Republic of Angola.

After independence, thousands of foreign troops poured into the country. Having waited until November 11 to intervene directly, the Soviet Union embarked on a massive sea and airlift operation, transporting more than 12,000 Cuban soldiers between November 1975 and January 1976. Meanwhile, thousands of South African troops and hundreds of European mercenaries, recruited and funded by the CIA, arrived to assist the MPLA’s rivals.

By late November, the CIA’s secret Contingency Reserve Fund was depleted. On December 19, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story of the covert operation in the New York Times, sparking a furor in Congress. Embarrassed by the imbroglio, especially the details of US collaboration with white-ruled South Africa, Congress passed the Clark Amendment to the International Security Assistance and Arms Export Control Act of 1976, which banned further funding of covert activities in Angola. President Gerald Ford reluctantly signed the bill into law.

Abandoned by its allies, South Africa withdrew from Angola during the first few months of 1976. Without Pretoria’s backing, the FNLA and UNITA rapidly collapsed. By February 1976, the MPLA, with Cuban assistance, controlled all of northern Angola.

Disgusted by the collaboration between the MPLA’s rivals and apartheid South Africa, the Organization of African Unity and the vast majority of African nations recognized the MPLA government. By the early 1980s, only the United States and South Africa continued to withhold diplomatic recognition.

The Next Round

The Angolan war was on pause, but it had not ended. After a brief hiatus, UNITA resumed the fight. In 1985, the Reagan administration convinced Congress to repeal the Clark Amendment, and in 1986, Congress restored US military aid to UNITA, supplying the rebel force with some of the most sophisticated American weapons on the market, including heat-seeking Stinger antiaircraft missiles. The war against Angola continued until 2002, when UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi was killed in combat.

Angola has not yet recovered from the devastating destabilization of wars that lasted more than a quarter of a century — wars that destroyed the country’s infrastructure, claimed the lives of one million people, and drove four million people from their homes. With the country in tatters, corrupt, authoritarian leaders moved into the void, turning Angola into another African petrostate that takes from the many and gives to the few.

In a political environment that tends to blame the victim, the United States would do well to remember that Washington’s intervention was one of the major factors that crushed Angola’s prospects for establishing a successful democracy and a development plan that privileged the needs of the majority over those of the minority. Fifty years after Angola’s independence, the United States should acknowledge its role in subverting that dream and setting the stage for another failed state in the Global South. History again harbors a lesson that we would do well to learn.