All Along the Watchtower

[Archangel]

Originally Posted by Aracnid

I'm always pro a TvTropes page and this deserves one.

What Aracnid said!

[johnjcakos]

Originally Posted by 037771

Métiques sortir!

- Graffiti scrawled outside an Italian restaurant in Marseilles, circa 1963

I'm not quite sure what "Métiques sortir!" is supposed to mean. If it's something like "foreigners, get out", then it should be: "Les Métèques, dehors!"

This is really good stuff - so good that I was able to set aside my doubts about the potential success of a military coup against De Gaulle. I'm eagerly waiting for your next update.

[037771]

Originally Posted by johnjcakos

I'm not quite sure what "Métiques sortir!" is supposed to mean. If it's something like "foreigners, get out", then it should be: "Les Métèques, dehors!"

Edited in.

Originally Posted by johnjcakos

This is really good stuff - so good that I was able to set aside my doubts about the potential success of a military coup against De Gaulle. I'm eagerly waiting for your next update.

You might have to wait a while for XIII. Although I've hit upon a more plentiful resource for my research- Senate House library- well, let's just say I'm not famed for the frequency of my updates, and the subject of my next chapter won't undermine that reputation.

[Emperor of Scandinavia]

Are Jack and Jackie still together?

IRL their marrige was quite rocky due to Jack's affairs, and it was likely that their marrige would have been broken off had Jack not been elected in 1960. They only stayed together because it wouldn't look good for a President to get a divorce while in office.

However with Jack defeated in this TL, is he still married, or has Jackie finally gotten sick of her adulterous husband and filled for a divorce?

If you have already addressed this in you TL, then please tell me which page its on and I will find out later when I come back on.

Wishing you well, his majesty,
The Scandinavian Emperor

[037771]

Originally Posted by Emperor of Scandinavia

Are Jack and Jackie still together?

IRL their marrige was quite rocky due to Jack's affairs, and it was likely that their marrige would have been broken off had Jack not been elected in 1960. They only stayed together because it wouldn't look good for a President to get a divorce while in office.

However with Jack defeated in this TL, is he still married, or has Jackie finally gotten sick of her adulterous husband and filled for a divorce?

If you have already addressed this in you TL, then please tell me which page its on and I will find out later when I come back on.

Wishing you well, his majesty,
The Scandinavian Emperor

The short answer is no, they're not divorced; all I've really done with the Kennedy family since Chapter I is have Joe Sr. die from a stroke shortly after the election, and I haven't alluded to any divorce.

The long answer is, I really don't know. So far, in lieu of research since the Kennedy's won't be important to the plot for a fair while yet, I'm going with RogueBeaver's advice, which was pretty much 'no divorce.' There is added stress on their marriage from Jack feeling sorry for himself after losing in '60 here:

The former hope of the party meanwhile, John F. of the Kennedy clan, sank further into [a] bitter depression. The common historical interpretation of his ’60 defeat has been up to this day, bad luck; Jack Kennedy however, having literally spent the four years prior to the election preparing, ruthlessly analysed his own performance for clues as to where exactly he went wrong. The death of his father Joseph P. Kennedy in the fall of 1961 would only make things worse, as both the fortune and the burden of responsibility for the entire Kennedy family fell into his lap. While Jack would spend hours and hours reliving the campaign watching year-old newsreels during the evening with a bottle of Gordon’s Gin, it would be his younger brother Robert who would shoulder the Kennedy political ambitions for now, by moving his family to New York to eventually run for Attorney-General

but I'll stick with RB's judgement for now.

[anon_user]

Interesting update. Though I kept thinking of Carl whenever I saw the name Sagan...
***
No Concorde - huh. The American SST project might be reworked - there's not quite the same need to build the biggest & fastest SST when you can be first - but it might not. I could see Lockheed's proposal possibly being accepted over Boeing's swing-wing type... or possibly things go as OTL.
There definitely could still be a British SST project... or perhaps a British jumbo-jet project. Both were seen as possible futures for aviation, though the SST was more the 'wave of the future' than the Jumbo Jet.
There could also potentially be cooperation with other Europeans - perhaps MBB or Dornier of Germany? I'd suggest an Anglo-Canadian program, but Avro Canada was already dying in '59, with lots of Canadian engineers heading south. Still, it might not be totally out of the question - at the least, former Avro Canada engineers might be hired by a British SST program.

How badly hurt, if at all, is Dassault (both the company and the man)? I wonder if there might be cooperation on aviation technology with the Spanish.

[037771]

Originally Posted by anon_user

Interesting update. Though I kept thinking of Carl whenever I saw the name Sagan...
***
No Concorde - huh. The American SST project might be reworked - there's not quite the same need to build the biggest & fastest SST when you can be first - but it might not. I could see Lockheed's proposal possibly being accepted over Boeing's swing-wing type... or possibly things go as OTL.
There definitely could still be a British SST project... or perhaps a British jumbo-jet project. Both were seen as possible futures for aviation, though the SST was more the 'wave of the future' than the Jumbo Jet.
There could also potentially be cooperation with other Europeans - perhaps MBB or Dornier of Germany? I'd suggest an Anglo-Canadian program, but Avro Canada was already dying in '59, with lots of Canadian engineers heading south. Still, it might not be totally out of the question - at the least, former Avro Canada engineers might be hired by a British SST program.

Thank you very much, although just click on this whenever you feel the urge to think of Carl.

I would imagine, given the UK is leaning toward a European trade preference, cooperation with West Germany is more likely than with Avro Canada, especially with the company starting to die off by 1959. I try to go with the likeliest event, and so I won't manipulate events ITTL so that Canadian links are preserved, if the pattern had already been set before the point of departure (although strictly speaking, the POD is in 1959.)

Originally Posted by anon_user

How badly hurt, if at all, is Dassault (both the company and the man)? I wonder if there might be cooperation on aviation technology with the Spanish.

I'll say that he's probably back in the fold, now that the Centurions know that without men like him, France is ruined. Since he was a Gaullist, he'd probably be frozen out of his business interests from 1961 to 1963, but not purged outright like some others. I can't remember if I killed Jacques Chirac off now...

[anon_user]

Originally Posted by 037771

Thank you very much, although just click on this whenever you feel the urge to think of Carl.

Will do.
What's Carl up to, anyways?

I would imagine, given the UK is leaning toward a European trade preference, cooperation with West Germany is more likely than with Avro Canada, especially with the company starting to die off by 1959. I try to go with the likeliest event, and so I won't manipulate events ITTL so that Canadian links are preserved, if the pattern had already been set before the point of departure (although strictly speaking, the POD is in 1959.)

Makes sense.
Don't forget the Dutch, incidentally. Someone's going to have to develop a successor to the Lockheed Neptune instead of the planned Breguet Atlantique, and I wonder if a variant on a Fokker Friendship would fit that role...

I'll say that he's probably back in the fold, now that the Centurions know that without men like him, France is ruined. Since he was a Gaullist, he'd probably be frozen out of his business interests from 1961 to 1963, but not purged outright like some others. I can't remember if I killed Jacques Chirac off now...

Reasonable.
I could see French arms being even more readily sold to 'nasty' powers, if and when they emerge; the French might also try to sell arms into Latin America, to the dismay of the US (which was already unhappy with OTL British & French arms sales to the region in the '60s).
What do the Centurions think of Israel and the Arab world? And of Spain and Portugal?
Do the Mirage IIIs ordered by Israel in 1961 still go through?

The Mirage Affair may hit harder in Switzerland.
Speaking of countries on the border with France... how tight are French border crossings?

[037771]

Originally Posted by anon_user

Will do.
What's Carl up to, anyways?

Probably still doing research at Berkeley.

Originally Posted by anon_user

Makes sense.
Don't forget the Dutch, incidentally. Someone's going to have to develop a successor to the Lockheed Neptune instead of the planned Breguet Atlantique, and I wonder if a variant on a Fokker Friendship would fit that role...

I'll look into this for future updates.

Originally Posted by anon_user

Reasonable.
I could see French arms being even more readily sold to 'nasty' powers, if and when they emerge; the French might also try to sell arms into Latin America, to the dismay of the US (which was already unhappy with OTL British & French arms sales to the region in the '60s).

Well, I suppose it depends on the country. If say, a war develops on that continent that necessitates the supplying of arms to a brutal, reactionary military dictatorship fighting Communists- Paraguay perhaps- and elicits massive media interest, it might be in the interest of the US to allow the Centurions to supply the Paraguayans. Diametrically, the US might consider it regressive to sublet arms supply to the French, because Washington's influence is thus diminished.

Originally Posted by anon_user

What do the Centurions think of Israel and the Arab world? And of Spain and Portugal?

Franco and Salazar are potential trading partners, although perhaps not immediate allies, given their ties to NATO. Although the French haven't necesserily withdrawn from the Treaty, they are nevertheless alienated from the wider international community, in a way Lisbon and Madrid are not. So when the Centurions make approaches to them, they have to take into consideration US opinion on the wider relevance of Iberian interests. For Washington won't take too kindly to a public display of unity among these Fascists; it's a potential alternative to NATO, and (to generalise) it's a PR disaster. Particularly with Portugal, the US has several screws it can tighten; clandestine funding of the UPA nationalists in the north of Angola, the increasingly fragile state of the economy in light of the French isolation and possibly even the standing of the Estado Novo regime itself. The only big card the Portuguese have is the status of the Azores as a naval base in the event of WWIII; the Americans, as the records show, were quite frightened at Portuguese influence in that regard, but that influence may diminish over time.

Israel is really the one to watch, because we've averted the sale of HAWK missiles by Washington in 1962, which led to increased US-Israeli military cooperation toward the late 60s and early 70s. Before that, France was the largest supplier, and although now the Centurions don't really care about political arguments in the region, in the future this shotgun marriage could conceivably lead to vehemently pro-Israeli sympathies in Paris. There are broad similiarities already, in the prolonged occupation of Algeria.

Originally Posted by anon_user

Do the Mirage IIIs ordered by Israel in 1961 still go through?

The Mirage Affair may hit harder in Switzerland.
Speaking of countries on the border with France... how tight are French border crossings?

I don't see why the sale shouldn't go through.

As for borders, in the west naturally they'll be tighter, especially with Italy; can't let any of those PCF back in from Milan, can we...

[Faeelin]

Hah. I have to say, I am very, very pleased with how the military coup is being portrayed in France. They aren't neofascists planning to emulate Napoleon, they're a bunch of generals who are frankly out of their depth.

[037771]

Originally Posted by Faeelin

Hah. I have to say, I am very, very pleased with how the military coup is being portrayed in France. They aren't neofascists planning to emulate Napoleon, they're a bunch of generals who are frankly out of their depth.

Thank you

It's quite hard to play Napoleon outside your own country; at least I've found that's the case in Europe after 1945.

I think a lot of the Centurions would also find the term 'Fascist' quite discomforting; many of the officers who planned action against the French government thought they were justified in what they were doing because they perceived the Fourth Republic, and briefly the Fifth, as a subversion of the legacy endowed to France by the (non-Communist) Resistance during the War. At least that's the argument put forward by La Vie en Bleu and The French Army in Politics.

I'm very interested to read your interpretation of this sort of French politicking in Holding out for a Hero, which by the way, I recommend to everyone reading this timeline.

[Thande]

Just FYI, I have nominated this fine TL for 2011's Turtledove Awards.

[037771]

Originally Posted by Thande

Just FYI, I have nominated this fine TL for 2011's Turtledove Awards.

Thank you, that's very kind

I have XIII pretty much written, and will update soon. Will also try to work out how to set up a TvTropes page for all this, but that might take longer, given my ineptitude with technology.

[Plumber]

Originally Posted by 037771

Thank you, that's very kind

I have XIII pretty much written, and will update soon. Will also try to work out how to set up a TvTropes page for all this, but that might take longer, given my ineptitude with technology.

Yay, update time!

TvTropes uses an unusual format for a wiki. I'm not super familiar with it myself, but I could set up a skeleton page if you want.

[Lavanya Six]

Originally Posted by 037771

Thank you, that's very kind

I have XIII pretty much written, and will update soon. Will also try to work out how to set up a TvTropes page for all this, but that might take longer, given my ineptitude with technology.

I've started a TvTropes page for this timeline. It's very short at the moment, as it's been several weeks since I've read this thread. Anyone who wants to contribute would be greatly welcomed.

(Also, I just realized that every article I've ever started for the TvTropes wiki has begun with the letter 'A'. That's a little weird.)

[037771]

XIII

Mood Indigo

‘Mistah Kurtz- he dead’

- Extract from Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad



PRESIDENT NIXON RECOGNISES KATANGA STATE

- Taken from The New York Times, 7th March 1963

***

“[…] woke up face down on the floor of my hotel room with vomit caked round my mouth. Like…[subject demonstrates], god awful. And my fingers of my left hand were wrapped…firmly around a bottle of Canadian Rye. I’ll tell you, none of it smelled a’ roses. [Laughs]

[Laughter heard in the background]

Goddamnit. Does that matter, back there? No? Good. Now, last thing I remembered had been Bomboko snapping his goddamned camera in my face out in the hallway with Larry in the background shouting something about how in a world that could be destroyed with one press of a button he’d drink the damn moonshine, alright. New Years hadn’t changed Leopoldville, but the window I was staring out of had been changed by New Years alright, judgin’ from the smears of all that salted fish I’d…sort of dimly remember spitting the hell out the afternoon before. I’ll say now I was a mess…

THOMPSON: You’ll say now?!

HARVEY: Goddamnit, do you stop?

THOMPSON: Do you? [HST vacates the room]

HARVEY: Thinks he’s the goddamn…where…right, and the heat, that clammy sorta heat you get there, that wasn’t doing the trick neither. So I ambled gracefully down to the lobby, for afternoon breakfast. [Belches] Only got as far as the stairwell before losing my footing and going down a floor the easy way.

So there I was, groaning and squirming on the concrete floor like some goddamned dog been kicked right in the ribs, and I see a face peerin’ quizzically down toward mine: with those horn-rimmed sunglasses...had to be Larry.

“You look well,” I think I said. Could have been more of a belch.

“Likewise,” he says, “I’m not gonna help you up.”

“What, cos you’re a bastard? That’s really what it is, isn’t it, your secret identity. You don’t have a soul, is what it is,” so I did the honourable thing and hauled myself up.

“No, you’re an honorary Ngbandi. And, as an honorary Mongo, I’m just not obliged.”

Turns out, they had some breakfast left over…”

- William ‘Bill’ Harvey, CIA Deputy Chief of Station for the Republic of the Congo (Leopoldville) in 1963, interviewed for the 1976 BBC documentary America’s Secret Wars


‘As one approaches the still lower zones towards the sea at an elevation of about 1000 feet the country suddenly changes and the sun is obscured by the misty pall of cloud that usually hangs over these ramparts of the south-west coast. Here are forests of baobab trees and phalanxes of gigantic clubbed aloes spreading over a rocky country that must make a wonderful appeal to those visiting tropical Africa for the first time. Above this curious vegetation great megaliths of rock rear their heads, grey and colossal, singly and in groups, of all shapes and sizes: some resembling fools’ caps; some likened to sprawling animals; others, again, resembling human forms- an immensely interesting and arresting region over which roam many of the larger game animals…’

- T. Alexander Barnes, in The Geographical Journal, 1928[i]



‘Sightseers don’t stay long, and for good reason. Congo isn’t the place for heroics.’

- Lawrence Devlin, CIA Station Chief in Leopoldville in 1961


‘[…]roots of the recognition lie not in the current conflict engulfing the region, but in the election and later murder of Patrice Lumumba, Prime Minister of the Republic of Congo (1960-61)…’

- The Times, on US recognition of the State of Katanga, 8th March 1963

“[General commotion among the audience. Several students, late to the lecture, file in with cups of coffee to spare seats on the front row.]

Now, if you’ll permit me, I’ll get the origins out of the way so that we may concentrate on the wider picture.

[Slide switches from a map of the African continent to that of the Republic of Congo in 1960.]

This is Congo just after the Belgians ran away. And I do mean ‘ran away’; unlike say, in Nigeria or Tanganyika, there was no great effort made by the Belgians to prepare the country for independence. That included provision for the constitutional makeup of the state, which had to make do with a pastiche of the Belgian constitution,[ii] as well as failing to alter the policing or military structures of the new state. The result was of course chaos:

[Slide switches to an image of rioting, captioned ‘Leopoldville: 1959’. The slide then switches to an image of a Congolese gentleman casting a ballot]

By 1960, under increasing pressure from the UN[iii] and by a recalcitrant colonial population, Brussels had decided to leave; before they could however, in order to make sure a government existed when they left, they held elections. As the party that campaigned across all Congo, the ‘Congolese National Movement,’ or MNC, won with a quarter of the seats. The rest of the parties- the Parti Solidaire Africain of Antoine Gizenga, the Confédération des Associations Tribales du Katanga led by Moise Tshombe etcetera- largely only campaigned in the regional provinces. Lumumba formed a coalition with the leader of the second-place ‘Alliance of the BaKongo’ party, led by Joseph Kasa-Vubu, with the former set to become Prime Minister and the latter President of the independent ‘Republic of Congo.’ Arguably that title did not represent the entirety of the Congo even before independence: four days before the official handover, the region of South Kasai issued a unilateral declaration of independence.

[Slide switches to the image of Ambroise Boimbo stealing Baudoin I’s ceremonial sword]

Congo’s first day of as a sovereign state did not auger well for the future. The King of Belgium, who had flown to Leopoldville for the formal handover of power, was humiliated, both…well, the image you see above me is of a Congolese soldier dancing away with the King’s ceremonial sword…and by Lumumba, who declared to the King, ‘we are not your monkeys anymore.’ Nor did it help that the King stated in his own speech: “The independence of the Congo... is the culmination of the work conceived... by the genius of Leopold II, undertaken by him with tenacious courage... and continued with perseverance by Belgium.”[iv] Arguably worse was the following statement made by the commander of the colonial army, Lieutenant-General Emile Janssens, on a blackboard in front of the Leopoldville Garrison:

[Slide switches to the statement: ‘After Independence = Before Independence’]

As I said before, Belgium had not made much provision for the reform of their paramilitary force, the Force Publique. All of the officers were still Belgian,[v] and what Janssens statement implied to the Congolese rank and file was that that was not going to change in the immediate future. The NCO’s and common soldiery, some 24,000 men, mutinied, and attacked European targets.

[Slide switches to a map of the Congo divided into four states]

A central government that cannot control its armed forces is not an effective authority. Confidence in the Lumumba ministry evaporated, and, in light of the chaos, the province of Katanga under Moise Tshombe suddenly declared independence, supported tacitly by the United States, by Belgium and six thousand of their troops[vi] and the local mining corporations.[vii] Lumumba, not able to count on his own army, called for aid from the UN. The UN responded swiftly, both with a call for Belgium to immediately withdraw from Katanga, and by sending troops. In just as short a time, the UN immediately clashed with Leopoldville over how to use them. Lumumba wanted them to end the Katangan and South Kasai secessions by force; Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld refused. Unable to rely on them, Lumumba threatened to call on the Soviet Union for aid.’

- Extract from The Cold War: Rivalries and Aberrations lecture series, by Prof. George Rear, 2012


‘The secession of Katanga under Tshombe was, to the Eisenhower administration, not the calamity as perceived by Patrice Lumumba. Although not going as far as officially recognising the state, the State Department (via cutouts) reassured the Katangan authorities that this was not to be taken as a hostile action. In fact, the State Department was secretly hedging its bets; Congo after all exported most of the cobalt, uranium and tantalum used in the American aerospace industry, and most of those metals were mined in Katanga. If Lumumba and his cohorts failed in restoring order in the other portions of the republic, then at least there’d be somewhere semi-desirable in the region that the US could fall back on.

That policy necessitated a watchful eye on the UN force sent to replace the 6,000 Belgian troops in Katanga supporting Tshombe to begin with. This was not a tall order; while Secretary-General Hammarskjöld wasn’t necessarily an outright partisan of US interests, most of his advisors on the Congo were American.[viii] When Lumumba asked Hammarskjöld to use the UN taskforce to end the two secessions by force, the Secretary-General refused, arguing the UN was only there to keep the peace. Lumumba then appealed to Washington, who predictably refused;[ix] then he appealed to the Soviet Union. Khrushchev, who seemingly saw an opportunity to extend Soviet influence into central Africa, promptly dispatched nine Soviet Ilyushin Il-14 twin-engined aircraft and 200 engineers[x] to airlift loyal Congolese troops to suppress the rebels in South Kasai. A bloody campaign ensued, displacing hundreds of thousands of people…’

- Taken from Heart of Darkness: The United States in Southern Africa


‘The Socialist countries are the sincere and true friends of the nations that are fighting for their freedom or that have already succeeded in throwing off the imperialist yoke and oppression. They decisively reject any interference whatsoever in the internal affairs of the young nation-states and deem it their international responsibility to help the nations in their fight to strengthen their national independence. They offer these countries help of all types...’

- ‘The Moscow Declaration,’ made by Communist Party leaders in the USSR, November 1960[xi]


‘EMBASSY AND STATION BELIEVE CONGO EXPERIENCING CLASSIC COMMUNIST EFFORT TO TAKEOVER GOVERNMENT…WHETHER OR NOT LUMUMBA ACTUALLY COMMIE OR JUST PLAYING COMMIE GAME TO ASSIST HIS SOLIDIFYING POWER, ANTI-WEST FORCES RAPIDLY INCREASING POWER CONGO AND THERE MAY BE LITTLE TIME LEFT IN WHICH TO TAKE ACTION TO AVOID ANOTHER CUBA’

- Cable dispatched to CIA Director Allen Dulles by CIA Station Chief in Leopoldville, Lawrence Devlin, August 1960[xii]


‘[Lumumba] is an ignorant pawn, in his utter lack of experience of the big political currents, balances and pressures.’

- Dag Hammarskjöld, circa August 1960[xiii]


‘Apart from the fevered activity of Communist bloc nations here, the pattern of events is becoming apparent to students of Communist policy. Premier Lumumba’s startling changes of position, his open challenge of the United Nations and Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld, his constant agitation of the largely illiterate Congolese can be explained in no other way, veteran observers say.’

- Taken from The Washington Post, 28th August 1960[xiv]


“I think it is best now for Mr Lumumba to be removed from the scene.”

- Alleged comment made by President Eisenhower to the National Security Council in August 1960, according to minute-keeper Robert Johnson[xv]

‘[Slide switches to image of Lumumba being forced to eat one of his own speeches.]

On the 5th September, President Kasa-Vubu dismissed his Prime Minister; arguingthat he had no right to do this,[xvi] Lumumba declared Kasa-Vubu deposed. For a while it looked as if Lumumba might cling onto power by the sheer force of his charisma, but on the 12th September the Army Chief of Staff, Colonel Joseph Mobutu, tiring of the chaos placed the Prime Minister under house arrest. Then, on the 14th, Mobutu seized power in a coup d’état widely believed to have been orchestrated by the CIA, suspending parliament and the constitution. Lumumba’s Vice-Premier, Antoine Gizenga, fled to the east of the country in order to continue the old administration there. Thus, Congo was now divided into four polities, none of them led by Patrice Lumumba. He had become expendable; a potential threat, he was delivered into the arms of his former rival in Elizabethville, Moise Tshombe, and beaten to death by Katangan military personnel…’

- Extract from The Cold War: Rivalries and Aberrations lecture series, by Prof. George Rear, 2012


“HARVEY: I was in and out [short pause] of Leopoldville from ’60 to ’63; it wasn’t my home [Subject stubs out a cigarette onto the table.] I lived in Brazzaville – safe, supplied Brazzaville, over the water – and sent my cables out from there too, partly because my remit was the whole delta. More often than not though the news came from Leopoldville, and that was where I first met Larry.

I was out there for a special reason: Langley[xvii] was expanding, diversifying somewhat into military training. Somewhat. This was the...Nixon Doctrine in action [Subject attempts an impression] “By God Bill,” he says to me…[xviii][I] think…he says “We gotta fix up that goddamn mess in Africa son, and you’re the man to do it. You were good with the Na-[hiccups]-ermans, and you’ll be goddamned excellent with the Congo’s.” I knew some French, but not enough to feel good about myself. But I’d pissed a lot of the top brass over there anyway, and since May of that year I’d been superfluous to…requirements anyway.[xix]

I wanted a little action, adventure, time away from home. Anyway, lots of guys with no officers roaming around the streets with guns was action alright. When I got off the ferry[xx] you could see them, hooting and hollering in their jeeps, or whatever cars they could steal[xxi], firing those guns in the air and calling all the whites ‘flamands.’ That was their derogatory term – ‘Flemings.’ Well, don’t decry them for lack of imagination.

It was down the Avenue des Aviateurs[xxii] that my tactic of trying-to-watch-but-not-making-eye-contact stopped workin’. A burly Congolese snapped at me in Lingala something angry, and since by then all I could say was the odd phrase [in French], I responded with je ne comprends pas and something about not wanting to get hurt. I was. Naturally he thought I was a goddamn Flamand. The soldier bucked my jaw with the butt of his rifle, and I was hauled into the back of a Cadillac they’d stolen earlier that day.

I was only saved by luck and by Larry. He’d spotted me in the back, and what’s more he’d spotted my little tourist camera – one I hadn’t used, by the way – and that it was a goddamn Kodak. Maybe it was that he thought that because it was American, I was, or maybe it was cos I was a White guy in trouble, but he ran up to the back of the car and ordered the soldiers to release me. I, apparently, was a Consul of the United States of America, and was not to be harmed. Well…that did it. Under the Belgians, a Consul had been an important person, and the soldiers didn’t want to be in more shit than they already were for stealing the Cadillac.[xxiii]

[Subject lights another cigarette. He burns the end of his finger with the lighter; following two minutes of recording irrelevant to research material.]

I was taken to the US Embassy, which looked like the architect had tried to design a normal house only to have a spider shit web all over it.[xxiv] “You good?” Larry asks. I probably grunted a reply, because he went on about how the same thing had happened to him a few days before without missing a goddamn beat.[xxv] We became friends after that, because we never got that close together in our work, you see. It was all ‘social’ occasions, and whatnot. Certainly around the time I met him, I think there might have been more important guys he was after…’

- William ‘Bill’ Harvey, CIA Deputy Chief of Station for the Republic of the Congo (Leopoldville) in 1963, transcript of an interview for the 1976 BBC documentary America’s Secret Wars


“The Congolese National Army has decided to neutralise the chief of state until December 31st 1960. This is not a coup d’état, but a peaceful revolution…”

- Colonel Joseph Mobutu, broadcasting on Congolese radio, 14th September 1960[xxvi]

***

‘At 18:09 on the 17th February 1961, the Luanda Municipal Prison was set on fire.[xxvii]

Not all of those who watched the flames lick a sky already ablaze with the light of the setting sun were possessed of a white skin. This was an itinerant mob, of white and mulatto,[xxviii] of the unemployed, the prejudiced, schoolchildren brought along to see, watching impassively as the masonry of the prison slowly crumbled in on itself; they watched as the prisoners first shouted, then screamed for aid given half-heartedly by the authorities; they watched as they died; they watched as remaining wood hissed and the smoke billowed up and up into a starry night. And then they went home.

War had come to Angola. The previous weeks had seen the União dos Povos do Norte de Angola march south from hideouts in the Congolese hills, down into the northern provinces of the colony to raise hell. Thousands, Portuguese and Bakongo, had been displaced; hundreds had been killed in the opening days; the Army had been rushed in to restore order in small numbers, and then in divisions once it became clear this was no ordinary operation.

The Army did put down the UPA rebellion in the north; nationalist activity ceased one year to the day after the prison was burnt down. But neither action solved the problem. On the 20th February 1961, several Bakongo families gathered their possessions and savings and moved to the countryside…’

- Taken from Colonialism in Angola[xxix]


MASSACRE IN ANGOLA – REBELS KILL HUNDREDS

- Taken from The Manchester Guardian, 8th March 1961[xxx]


“My journey began in the Congo. It is true that, in some part, I grew up there. But it was not my home. I was proud that I did not speak Lingala; I spoke Kikongo. I was a Catholic, not a Baptist.[xxxi] I was Bakongo, not Congolese.

We were trained in the north though.[xxxii] By who, I am not sure I am allowed to say now. Sometimes we didn’t even know who really trained us. We had our own officers by 1960 yes, but the col…white men who came and aided us were not always of the same country. Some we thought were Belgian, others French, maybe even American. And we had many visitors, let me say that. Not all of them looked European.[xxxiii]

We followed Comrade Roberto, his law. Kongo would be free. The Chiefs would be restored. The Portuguese would be eradicated. We almost succeeded in all those objectives in the first year.[xxxiv] We descended on [the Portuguese] like avenging angels, tearing them up from the earth and scattering them asunder. We wiped them out. But then the Portuguese sent all their army to bear, with their helicopters and tanks, and we had to hide beyond the villages and roads, in amidst the trees and the animal trails.”

- Pedro Augusto, UPA guerrilla from 1960, interviewed for Stagnant Depths: The Portuguese Colonial Wars


‘Angola was a paradox in irresistible motion, a modern, diversified economy ruthlessly exploited by an ancient colonial power. Iron Ore was mined for the first time at Cassinga in 1956; manganese, mica and copper started to be prospected. 1955 saw oil struck, with refineries built in Luanda to accommodate demand. An increase in international trade flowing through the capital attracted a migrant population from the countryside: between 1940 and 1960, the population of the capital Luanda alone had grown by 293%, facilitating the rise of a newly assertive urban proletariat.

Yet, despite these industrial and demographic advances, no comparative leap in working or living conditions occurred until circumstance forced Lisbon to change Angola’s cruel forced labour laws. Angola was not an educated country; by the end of the 1950s, of those of primary school age, only 8% attended, and by 1957, there were only 23,600 indigenous secondary school pupils in the whole of Portuguese Africa.[xxxv] Portugal’s intentions for her colony were indicated by her first major development plan, initiated in 1956: nearly three quarters of the funds earmarked for Angola went into building basic infrastructure, dams and irrigation. Social services received 6%, education none.

‘Angola,’ Agostinho Neto would later say, in reference to Portuguese exploitation ‘a husk.’ Whatever it was, the Portuguese had shown time and again through their actions on the world stage[xxxvi] that this was not a territory that they altogether wished to lose. Thus, when the Belgian Congo received its independence in 1960, Lisbon looked on the new nation with alarm. Blacks there expected an instantaneous improvement in all aspects of their lives with the Whites removed from power, and the disorder that engendered when that expectation was not fulfilled fuelled disturbing rumours into Angola. White nuns were apparently being raped and murdered by their former Congolese charges; former colonial officials were being hung from lampposts.[xxxvii] The northern Portuguese coffee planters grew nervous; were they next? When a small crowd of Black coffee pickers marched up to one plantation house in the beginning of 1961, the planter there thought that he certainly was; the demonstration was fired upon, and soon the pickers were repaying in kind…’

- Taken from Angola: 1882-1961[xxxviii]


PORTUGUESE ABOLISH FORCED LABOUR STOP RACIAL DISTINCTIONS SCRAPPED STOP LISBON RUSHING IN TROOPS STOP

- AP Wire, 1st September 1961


‘Antonio Oliveira Salazar was, by all definitions of the word, a survivor.

Born in 1889 to a family of modest origins, he had come of age in a period of turmoil in Portuguese history. His was an age of coups d’état, of strikes, riots, plotting and mutiny. The First Portuguese Republic had convinced Salazar of the benefits of strict law and order, over the (perceived) chaos that democratic institutions fostered. Schooled in a seminary in the foothills of central Portugal, the young Antonio was a gifted, yet austere pupil, his personality a complex blend of the religious and the rational, the ascetic nationalist who knew his country’s limitations as well as his own. When he was appointed Finance Minister in 1928 by the military government, and in 1932 Prime Minister, Salazar seized the chance to imprint those values on Portugal as a whole.

The New State (Estado Novo) was in reality an oligarchy of landowners, generals and industrialists, led by Salazar, who ruled by decree. Officially there were elections every four years; the only one that really mattered was the fight in 1958 for the office of President, which nevertheless ended with the sidelining of the opposition candidate and confirmation of the ruling order.[xxxix] More subversive opponents of the regime- mainly Monarchists and Communists- were harassed constantly by the security police, the ‘International Police for State Defence’ (PIDE.) The secret police operated a national and empire-wide network of agents[xl] to maintain its rigid hold over the Portuguese people. National youth and union organisations catered to the need of the regime to placate and organise working opinion. Information too was strictly controlled; not for nothing did the Portuguese Empire come to be known as the ‘Kingdom of Silence.’

Under this dictatorial regime, Portugal’s economy remained largely backward, dominated by a ruling oligarchy that looked largely to Portugal’s own territory to fuel economic growth. For nigh on a century, Portugal had ruthlessly exploited her own colonies to do exactly that, buying up colonial raw materials and then selling them onto the world market for a lucrative profit. Salazar, recognising this fact, sought to reawaken national pride by portraying the empire not as a constellation of colonies, but as a natural extension of Portugal.[xli] Buttressed by Gilberto Freyre’s myth that the Portuguese were the “pioneers of modern tropical civilisations” by not imposing racial distinctions on its subject populations,[xlii] the New State saw its empire in Africa as integral to the Portuguese future. Certainly, no outside force was going to deprive Portugal of that. Therefore, by the UPA Rebellion of 1961, Portugal stood out as the most intransigent of the colonial powers in Africa; not only had she not made any move toward independence for her African colonies, but she had hardly liberalised her colonial institutions to even paint a veneer of legitimacy over her holdings.

Perhaps needless to say, foreign opinion was not favourable to Portugal; however foreign action, or rather inaction, was. In 1949, because of the value of the Azores as a refuelling point for military aircraft on their way to destinations in Europe or Africa, Portugal was asked to join NATO as a founder member. In 1951 Portugal and the United States signed a defence agreement that allowed the latter base rights on the Azores; a secret agreement between the two stipulated that the US would look the other way if, at any time, the Portuguese decided to use NATO equipment within her own colonies. Clearly, the implication was that if the US openly challenged Portugal over her actions within her colonies, the base rights would be withdrawn and NATO’s defence against the predations of the Warsaw Pact undermined forthwith.

Despite this, Salazar himself retained a deep antipathy to the United State; to him, American society had its “values wrong,” and its people “barbaric…illuminated not by God but by electric light.”[xliii] The US, to the Portuguese dictator, was simply biding its time in order to undermine the Portuguese Empire behind the scenes and then exploit Africa economically, as had done so in Europe. He was further alarmed by the pronouncements of those within the US legislative branch who insisted Portugal’s time in Africa was now rightfully at an end; future presidential candidate Sen. John F. Kennedy routinely attacked US policy with regards to colonial powers and met with nationalists like Kenyan labour leader Tom Mboya, Algerian nationalist A.K Chanderli and, most alarmingly, Angolan separatist Holden Roberto. In the election of 1960, Kennedy had met with Guinean President Sékou Touré in St. Petersburg, Florida[xliv] and requested former Soviet ambassador Averill Harriman to undertake a fact-finding tour of Africa; during the campaign, he mentioned Africa in various speeches no less than 504 times.[xlv] It was no coincidence that, when Kennedy lost the election for the Presidency, ‘there was a collective release of breath felt across Portugal.’[xlvi]

The ascent of Richard Nixon to the Presidency raised expectations in Lisbon, soon to be tested by Portuguese dissident Henrique Galvão’s hijacking of the liner Santa Maria off Venezuela just after Nixon’s inauguration. It had been timed not only to raise the issue of Portuguese decolonisation in the United States, but, more importantly, the accession of Jânio da Silva Quadros as President of Brazil.[xlvii] Nixon rose to the challenge; without hesitating, he ordered the US Navy to board the vessel and release the American hostages present. The seizure was bloodless. Galvão was arrested and brought to trial in the United States,[xlviii] the story barely making the Monday news. The reaction in Lisbon however was that of cautious jubilation; finally, the American people had elected someone with sense to the White House…’

- Taken from Heart of Darkness: The United States in Southern Africa

***

‘AMBASSADORIAL APPOINTMENTS:

[…]

Ambassador to the Republic of the Congo [Leopoldville] - Mr Henry Luce[xlix]

[…]

Ambassador to the Republic of Portugal – Mr Charles B. Elbrick is retained as Ambassador’

Taken from The Washington Post, 23rd January 1961


“The President would like it known that he considers the Congo region, in every sense of the word, a distraction…”

- Henry Kissinger to Secretary of State Bohlen, 3rd February 1961


‘With Lumumba dead and the arrival of the Nixon Administration in January 1961, the US conflict of interest between its support of Katanga and the Mobutu regime could have ended; instead, the State Department wilfully carried on with both strategies. Nevertheless, a unity of purpose existed between the pro-Mobutu CIA and the pro-Katanga State Department, which essentially boiled down to leaving the two Congolese factions to fight a war of words.[l]

This reluctance for the US to involve itself in a conflict of their own construction could not however remain a permanent state of affairs, despite the wildest dreams of the Africa Bureau. With the US embroiled in the Portuguese efforts to suppress a major nationalist uprising in the north of Angola, a unified approach was desired by President Nixon, one that could be adhered to so that he and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger may concentrate their attentions on the comparatively (to US interests) more important Caribbean.[li]

The approach was a qualified endorsement of a federal, rather than unitary, solution to the Congo Crisis. Katanga would be an autonomous state within a larger federal constitutional framework; Tshombe’s authority would be largely preserved, and a national unity government would be formed to include representatives from Tshombe’s Katanga, Gizenga’s eastern provinces and Mobutu’s Leopoldville government.[lii] This was qualified even further when reports filtered to the CIA that Gizenga was receiving his own supply of weapons via Sudan, from the Eastern Bloc. Nevertheless, confidence remained high at the State Department, high enough for Secretary Bohlen to pressure Hammarskjöld to slowly scale down the UN mission in Congo, and to delegate even greater authority to the diplomatic corps and the CIA…’

- Taken from Heart of Darkness: The United States in Southern Africa


“I can’t fiddle sir, but I can make a great state from a little city.”

- Edward G. Lansdale to Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, in 1962


“HARVEY: Larry’s job wasn’t to manipulate the government – no matter what people think, the Agency could rarely achieve such a thing – but to gather information, and nudge here, there and everywhere if he so could.

[Clattering of pans in the background] Not everything was run by Mobutu. When you take over a government like he did, you can’t run everything yourself; you’d get nothing done, so you rely on loyal subordinates who accumulate enough power to be considered something like equal partners in the whole goddamn scheme. So we didn’t just have the Mobutu regime; we had the ebullient, the charming Justin Bomboko in Foreign Affairs making sure the Americans kept up their good work; we had bunion-beset Senator Cyrille Adoula, heavy with the unions; Albert Ndele, head of the Central Bank; and the rambunctious Victor Nendaka, head of the Sûreté ,[liii] who only got the job by exercising his own initiative in amidst the chaos during Mobutu’s little move on the government. All of these men I know were close to Larry Devlin, but their actions didn’t give the impression that they were just his pawns. They’d all hated Lumumba, and now they hated Gizenga, and they were, in their own heads, patriots…

My job was to oversee the military mission. At first, that was just it; I was Allen Dulles’ man in Brazzaville, and all that meant was ‘make sure the MPs don’t teach ‘em to torture their own people. [Subject stubs out cigarette, and picks up a whisky tumbler on a side table.] Just Commies.’ It was easy enough; they sent over fifty guys, all fair-weather employees of the United States Army, to train the Brazzaville boys to be some kind of Plan B if things went to shit over the river, and they taught them how to shoot. Only, Dulles being Dulles…[Subject puts down his drink. He leans forward.]

The Chief was a sucker for skulduggery, and so was [Richard] Bissell. Bissell had been the one who sent over can’t-say-who with poison toothpaste to top Lumumba. The Chief knew we couldn’t get at Gizenga – we didn’t recognise his government, but the Reds did, and that afforded him just enough protection to have every Agency hand in sight put a hundred miles in the wrong direction – but we could train the locals to get close enough themselves. So, Bissell says, “Why don’t we send over Lansdale?”

Edward G. Lansdale, God of Indochina. The Quiet American;[liv] Agency hero alright. Lansdale was installed as some goddamn generalissimo for the Congo Basin, really just demoting Larry, who’d been working damned hard to stop the Binza Group from fighting each other. We thought we were lucky at first; Lansdale let Larry be. But he started sticking his nose into my work, and into the operations of the Leopoldville Army too.

[Subject leans back; he stubs out another cigarette.] You wanna know where all this psy-war crap came from? Guess…”

- William ‘Bill’ Harvey, CIA Deputy Chief of Station for the Republic of the Congo (Leopoldville) in 1963, interviewed for the 1976 BBC documentary America’s Secret Wars


“I’m not going to tell the UN to march into east Congo, no. That’s not what the UN is for. And where does it end? They arrest this Red Gizenga, then what? What are they gonna say about Tshombe and his dago guns? We get Mo-bu-tu, and a country that can’t hold itself together because it’s too damned large and speaks too many fucking languages. No. You tell Hammarskjöld we’ll cut his balls off in Congress if he starts shouting about armed incursions. What in the hell would the Russians use that city on the river for anyway…”

- President Nixon to Henry Kissinger, on future US policy with regards to the Congo, March 3rd 1962[lv]


PEACE DEAL IN LEOPOLDVILLE STOP MOBUTU TSHOMBE AGREE ON COMPROMISE CANDIDATE STOP FEDERAL SOLUTION TO CRISIS STOP NATIONAL ELECTIONS WHEN GIZENGA REMOVED FROM SCENE STOP

- AP Wire, 7th March 1962


‘[…] A. The powers listed below will be reserved exclusively to the Central Government:

Foreign Affairs
National defence, excluding local police functions
Customs
The production and maintenance of a central currency, exchange control, fiscal policy
Taxing powers sufficient for the needs of the Central Government

B. The State governments will, of course, have control over their own administration and will be given all powers not expressly reserved to the Central Government…’

- Extract from the ‘Accord of National Reconciliation,’ reached between the Leopoldville government and Katanga province on the 7th March 1962[lvi]


‘1. Total reduction of unemployment and work for all.
2. Multiplication of schools especially in rural milieux. Free primary and secondary education.
3. Raise in salaries for all.
4. Improvement of housing in rural milieux.
5. Free medical care for all non-salaried people.’

- Promises extant in the Parti Solidaire Africain electoral manifesto for 1960, led by Antoine Gizenga, enshrined in the ‘Constitution of the Republic of Congo’[lvii] proclaimed by the Stanleyville Govt. in March 1962[lviii]


‘Although I don't feel that it's all necessary to tell you how I feel about the principle of individuality, I know that I'm going to have to spend the rest of my life expressing it one way or another, and I think that I'll accomplish more by expressing it on the keys than by letting it express itself in sudden outbursts of frustrated violence…’

- Hunter S. Thompson in a letter to his friend Joe Bell, 1957[lix]


“NARRATOR: […]retirement from the Agency in 1963, Harvey embarked on a life of leisure…

[Cut to a visual of a household kitchen. Ladles hang from the roof; pots and pans, some dirty, have been left all over the surfaces. Cut to Bill Harvey; he is attempting to cook some sausages in a frying pan.]

HARVEY: Goddamn, for..[The pan spits at Harvey’s hand. Various juices begin to ooze from the sausages.] We didn’t have this in the service…[The pan spits out again; Harvey flinches, and clatters the spatula into the pan in shock and frustration.] Goddamn!

THOMPSON: What the hell are you doin’. [HST takes off his sunglasses, glances at the pan and moves to intervene.] You [Audio removed] fool, that’s not how you...[HST wrestles the spatula from Harvey]

NARRATOR: When we approached him for an interview, [HST and Harvey visibly argue in the background] Harvey was living with his friend from the Congo, journalist Hunter S. Thompson…

THOMPSON: [Cut to footage of HST, sitting in a chair. He is wearing his sunglasses again; his eye appears to be bruised.] Met in ’62. Middle of 1962.[lx]

NARRATOR: Under what circumstances?

THOMPSON: They dumped me there. [Subject lights a cigarette] The paper, the…Newsweek, thing. Got in a…tight spot with one of the girls from the typing pool, and the editor wasn’t too pleased about it. Man didn’t want his office used that way. [He] must have hated me; could have fired me right [Subject slaps his hand down onto the arm of his chair.] there, then. Turn up at the airport, go into the nearest bar. [I] think hell, damn…expense account. That’s how I met Bill. The American James Bond,[lxi] using his god-given skills to see if this broad would go and…

NARRATOR: [To the audience] Thompson used his time to file a number of commentaries on a notorious spate of murders in the southern section of Brazzaville, and the American role in Africa.

THOMPSON: Ah please, it wasn’t just Bill who knew the Russians were in Orientale.[lxii] It was just what they were really doing that was the mystery. In ’60 they’d flown Lumumba’s men into…[Subject waves his right hand above his head, as if to grab his thoughts from the air] Kasai, sure, and they’d left all their grubby manifestos at Ndili [Airport] behind, the ones that Mobutu paraded before all the reporters when he seized power.[lxiii]

After that though, after Mr Mobutu kicked the Soviets and Chinese out of the capital, they just went to Stanleyville and put all their chips on Gizenga. When the Binza Group monopolised all power in Leopoldville, really the only way the Russians were going to get back in their old embassy was if they rode there with Gizenga and 10,000 of his men…”

- Hunter S. Thompson, Newsweek correspondent for the Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville) in 1962, interviewed for the 1976 BBC documentary America’s Secret Wars


“They must think that we care. We can afford to wait to see whether we actually do or not.”

- Alexandr Shelepin to Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, 9th March 1962


‘[…]while the Soviet Union interfered in Congolese internal affairs since independence, there was no coherent objective behind its scheming. Soviet aims under Khrushchev remained shrouded in mystery;[lxiv] analysts at the time pointed to a desire to detach the Democratic Republic from the orbit of the West, but this must be taken in its context and the Soviet ability to actually achieve such a feat. In 1960, the USSR had neither the personnel, nor the will, nor the funds earmarked to destabilise the Congo basin; their most assertive action at the time, that of airlifting Premier Lumumba’s troops to South Kasai, was also the most they could achieve.

After the overthrow of Khrushchev in 1961, Soviet policy in the Congo can best be understood in light of the subsequent factional plotting occurring in Moscow. Alexandr Shelepin, leader of the Stalinist faction and head of the KGB, sought to augment his foreign policy credentials by funding leftist revolutionary groups across the planet in their struggle to overthrow either colonial or rightist third world governments. This would both force the West to commit valuable men and resources to halt Communist progress, thus weakening those nations internally, but also hand Moscow several new allies in the process. Perhaps also, the acquisition of such allies would, in time, outflank NATO installations toward the north, but this was not an overriding objective.[lxv] In the grand scheme of things however, Africa was not high on the list of priorities; Southeast Asia, South America and, after 1962, the Middle East, all afforded more lucrative opportunities for Shelepin to exploit.

Nevertheless, the new KGB policy accorded its African stations more resources to dispense than ever before. The Congo held potential in the sense that the Americans thought it valuable to the Soviets, when in reality Moscow could hardly care less to whose values Stanleyville openly swore loyalty to. What was important though was the ruse, and this was confirmed in US reaction to several KGB forgeries planted in disparate locations around the world that analysed American dependency on Congolese cobalt,[lxvi] or what a coup it would actually be to prize the infant republic from the grip of the West. The policy was also backed up in more material ways. Starting in 1961, close to $500,000 was sent to Stanleyville in several instalments, via Khartoum;[lxvii] the arms arrived, in quite small quantities according to the shipping manifests of the Tanganyikan vessels used transport them,[lxviii] in the January of 1962.[lxix] Machinery was also delivered in a less circumspect manner through Czechoslovakian sources, an easier undertaking given Prague’s comparatively smoother relations with Khartoum.[lxx]

The formation of ALOC, the healing of the Sino-Soviet ‘split’ and the concomitant arrival of SEATO troops in Indochina were Shelepin’s first victories; progress in turning the Mineworkers Union in the C.A.F seemed to be affording another. The progress in the latter sphere briefly switched Shelepin’s attentions to Gizenga’s government. By the end of 1962, the ‘Congo Crisis’ had degenerated into a sporadic, inconclusive civil war; Shelepin’s machinations in supplying the Stanleyville government, and giving him the confidence to resist peace overtures from Leopoldville and the UN, convinced the General-Secretary that he had brought half of the Congo over into the Soviet sphere…’

- Taken from The Soviet Union and Africa


GIZENGISTS USING CZECH TRUCKS STOP RECOMMEND CLOSER SURVEILLANCE OF THEIR ACTIVITIES OUT OF KHARTOUM STOP

- Lawrence Devlin, CIA Station Chief in Leopoldville in a communiqué to Langley, VA

***

‘How was Angola benefited under Portuguese rule? The darkest slavery, scorn and most complete ignorance! And even the Government have done their utmost to the extent of humiliating and vilifying the sons of this land who do possess the necessary qualifications for advancement…What a civilizer, and how Portuguese!’

- Jose de Fontes Pereira, an assimilado lawyer from Luanda, writing in O Futuro d’Angola, 1882[lxxi]


‘The Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique [are] very badly governed and administered. The Portuguese authorities exploit the resources of these areas mercilessly, and put very little back for future development. They believe that the best way to manage the natives is to avoid educating them. Forced labour was very common…’

- Clarence B. Randall to President Eisenhower at an NSC meeting in 1958, after returning from a fact-finding mission to sub-Saharan Africa


‘Before going to lunch with [President Tomas] at Ajuda Palace, Mr Eisenhower greeted the embassy staff and representatives of the military aid assistance group assigned to Portugal. He had special praise for Portugal as a “tremendous friend and ally.” He said that when situations such as that currently posed by Russia arose to confront other nations, “we have to work even stronger to strengthen our own camp and to bring it even closer together.”’

- Taken from The Milwaukee Sentinel, 20th May 1960[lxxii]


SNIE 81-62 Washington, 9th December 1962[lxxiii]

SHORT-RANGE OUTLOOK IN ANGOLA

The Problem

To assess the likelihood of a pro-Communist insurgency in the Portuguese territory of Angola, and the implications such a possibility is likely to incur on Portuguese-American relations.

Background

With the end of Portuguese rule in Diu and Damao,[lxxiv] the annexation of Fort Ajuda in August by Dahomey,[lxxv] and the continuing debate over the legitimacy of its position in Goa, the image of Portugal in Africa has been severely damaged. Although until recently regarded by her African subjects as a hard and invincible overlord, Portugal is now regarded as vulnerable, as a nation in rapid decline. The activities of the insurgents almost certainly will be stepped up, although there is no reason to believe their activities will be more successful this year than the previous two. In the interest of maintaining friendly relations with newly-independent African nations, it has hitherto been the policy of the United States to gently pressure Portugal to liberalise her institutions, while undertaking the covert funding of liberation groups within her (colonial) borders.[lxxvi]

Likelihood of Communist subversion

Already nationalist resistance elements have been united in the north of the country by the militant União dos Povos do Norte de Angola (UPA), led by Holden Roberto, and in the south by the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA,) led by Agostinho Neto. Training of UPA and MPLA fighters has taken place in most prevalently in neighbouring Congo, with other cases reported in Tunisia and Guinea. Roberto himself indicates to various members of the Press, both in the United States and in Guinea, that guerrilla operations will resume in the north once again when the rainy season resumes. Roberto has also indicated that the UPA is likely to accept ‘humanitarian support’ from any nation, but will only accept direct military aid from African countries.

Given the escalation of Soviet aid to leftist movements across Africa, it is a reasonable assumption to make that the KGB or the GRU will attempt to supplant our position as the primary supplier of funds to the UPA. Already, the failure of round table negotiations between the warring factions in Congo has been attributed to the confidence Moscow places in Antoine Gizenga. Soviet intelligence is also known to have made significant approaches to President Nyerere of Tanganyika and leftist movements operating in the C.A.F.

However, broad support of African nationalist movements by the Soviet Union does not necessarily preclude unwavering support for the UPA. Roberto’s ideology, a fusion of Christian Democracy, mysticism, tribalism[lxxvii] and outright anti-intellectualism, does not fit easily with the motives of the Soviet Union, id est the establishment of friendly governments on the African continent. Ideologically, its intentions would be far better suited to supplying the MPLA, an organisation known to espouse Marxist beliefs[lxxviii] and a member of the wider anti-colonialist, pro-Moscow Conferência das Organizações Nacionalistas das Colónias Portuguesas (CONCP,) an umbrella organisation of similarly motivated parties located in different portions of the Portuguese empire. However, while efficiently organised, the MPLA has yet made little headway in its real base of operations, southern Angola.

Recommendations

[…]

- State Department Intelligence Estimate on Angola, supplied to President Nixon on the 9th of December, 1962


“They are worried about the Communists.”

“They mean our Communists, do they not?”

- Conversation overheard between Foreign Minister Adriano Moreira and Prime Minister Antonio Salazar, on the American position on Angola, 11th December 1962


‘Sustained attacks by both the UPA and MPLA movements have become a pressing issue to all contacts within the government. The question of our willingness to aid Lisbon in stamping this activity out, indeed our very hand in it, is a constant concern…’

- Ambassador Elbrick in a communiqué to Secretary Bohlen, 10th December 1962


‘By suffering the rebellion of 1961, Angola had joined distinguished continental company. Far to the north, the French Army were already vigorously hunting down FLN fighters across the wastes of Algeria. Closer to home, the Republic of Congo, although by no means a European colony any longer, found itself torn apart by internecine conflict often aided and abetted by European interests. In 1962, Northern Rhodesia joined the pack, as Black nationalists violently agitated for quick independence from the Central African Federation, and by that extent, London.

1961 proved far from a perfect storm for the UPA’s political ascendancy. Unlike in other European colonies, the social conditions that had engendered calls for autonomy only materialised in Angola by the late 1950s; moreover, while the independence of those very colonies created a safe haven for those native radicals to plot a course toward their own liberation, that independence proved to be sketchy at best. The latter factor proved hugely important for a society used to rooting out and crushing dissent. Starting in 1957, nationalist societies were infiltrated and then decimated by the secret police- PIDE- forcing ideologues like Holden Roberto and Agostinho Neto to flee north, to Leopoldville.[lxxix] The resulting independence movements were formulated, organised and harassed for the most part abroad. For this, the Portuguese government entirely discredited them. To the propaganda machine of the New State, the UPA, and later the MPLA, were simply ‘tribalists…Stalinists, pawns of Moscow and the powers that be that seek to usurp Portugal in Africa for their own ends.’[lxxx]

The Portuguese were half right: the nationalist groups purporting to be the rightful government of Angola were not really fighting for it, but rather, a people within it. The UPA were essentially a Kongolese movement, and derived the majority of their support from the BaKongo in the north of Angola and those exiled in the Congo. The MPLA meanwhile, although they made the claim of being above tribal politics, were in fact a party representing the Mbundu ethnic group…’

- Taken from Stagnant Depths: The Portuguese Colonial Wars


‘Ideologically, siding with Roberto’s UPA would be a pragmatic decision: its interest lie in ordaining a BaKongo state at the expense of other tribal interests, while acting for the kulaks of the coffee regions and businessmen normally used to working more in Leopoldville than Luanda. The MPLA meanwhile, while small in number since being driven from the capital two years prior,[lxxxi] are faithful adherents to the socialist ideal…’

- KGB Briefing document for Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, January 1963


‘The neutralisation of Henrique Galvão and his comrades-in-arms by the US Navy raised eyebrows in certain State Department quarters; nevertheless, it set the tone by which President Nixon wished to deal with the New State. The only part of Africa to command any significant interest in the White House was the Congo;[lxxxii] conversely, the status of the Azores was of critical importance to Pentagon strategy-makers, and, to that extent, President Nixon personally in his separate dealings with the Soviet Union. It is possible that Nixon had already anticipated a tussle over Berlin as a consequence of the firm stand he would be making during forthcoming negotiations with the Soviets at Vienna;[lxxxiii] retaining an unmolested US presence on the Azores would provide security for that stand.[lxxxiv] In any case, with Soviet-American nuclear tensions as high as they were, such security made sense on its own.

The negative consequences possible through a continuing rapport between Washington and Lisbon- mainly the alienation of African opinion- mattered less and less to the former as their material commitment to the Congo diminished. Even there, Portuguese and American objectives began to dovetail…’

- Taken from Heart of Darkness: The United States in Southern Africa


AGOSTINHO NETO HAILS SLAYING OF PORTUGUESE TROOPS IN CABINDA STREETS STOP LISBON CENSORS LEOPOLDVILLE FOR HARBOURING COMMUNIST INSURGENTS IN RESPONSE STOP

- AP wire, January 8th 1963[lxxxv]

***

“HARVEY: All Ol’Henry [Luce] was to Nixon was a man to be rewarded; editor of Life, sided with the President during the campaign. Maybe made a donation or three. So…hic… Nixon calls him up in his New York office, and thanks him with an Ambassadorship. Henry was thrilled, he says “Where, pray tell, will you send me to further the interests of these United States?” Somewhere…somewhere ‘integral,’ Nixon replies. Henry’s jumping with joy. “Where oh where?” he cries down the receiver. “I’m sending you to the most important area in the world for America right now: I’m sending you to the Congo.” No goddamn wonder he thought he’d done something wrong.

Nobody really thought it was a reward either; there was always the question of the wife. Clare Boothe Luce had been named Ambassador to Rome by Ike, and then to Yugoslavia before she had to resign over some misunderstanding. [Stubs out his cigarette] She was also one of Goldwater’s gals. Pal back at NBC who’d worked in Washington had told me that it was Nixon’s dream to win a second term, and he sure as hell wanted a coronation at the convention in ’64. He wanted Clare as far away as possible when that happened for obvious reasons, and what better place than the Congo? One, he wasn’t really interested in it, two, he was sending over an armchair America-First fanatic to represent him, three he’d thrown in a woman who’d actually proved herself as a competent Ambassador and D, it was far away. And hot. And far away…

Meanwhile, Lansdale was doing everything in his goddamn capacity not to help. His idea of the American role in the Congo was to just provoke the Gizengists with incidents and try to turn into double agents any damned prisoner from the east he could get his hands on. At first, this’d work – maybe he’d rough ‘em up,[lxxxvi] or go all sweet and hand over a few dollars and say ‘tell us what your Red master is up to’ – but always they’d disappear off our radar. The ones who sent back any intelligence for any period of time were always radioing in items that were either out of date, common knowledge, or wrong. For all we knew, the KGB could have gotten their hands on them, but theirs wasn’t really the same game they were playing back in Berlin. They were [lights another cigarette] into the training business, like Lansdale and I. Occasionally, we’d see Ivan’s efforts in the provincial cities; a bomb here, some voodoo shit at some marketplace there to scare the Congolese witless.[lxxxvii]

INTERVIEWER: Did you know General Lansdale well?

HARVEY: Through work. Not socially. Goddamn effete, Ivy-League, son of a[lxxxviii]…hic…we met socially only once. I got in our apartment in Brazzaville about this at the New Years Party thrown by the Embassy, over in Leopoldville, and since our mission wasn’t very large, it made sense to Mr Clare Luce to invite us all over, and what with her wife’s fortune the booze never stopped flowing. Rumour had it that the party was only being thrown because Ol’Henry wanted to celebrate another year being employed, aside from having engineered the whole agreement between Mobutu and Tshombe. Everyone was there of course. All the cultivated Congolese: Mobutu, Nendaka, Bomboko, Adoula. Larry skulked in the corners, doing the rounds. Turned out Luce actually liked his job. All the Katangan intrigue, the idea that because he was the highest ranking American in the Congo, he was the man ordained by Washington to fight hell for leather against the Reds in Orientale. Well, along with Lansdale, who was remained at the Ambassador’s side throughout, regaling the secretaries with stories of how he and he alone had saved the Vietnamese from the Commies.

The party got better when Bomboko decided to move on with his little entourage to this house down in the south of the city. Larry was going too; I thought it a good idea to follow. Might not have been. We got to the place, which turned out to be more of a hall than a house, and quick as a goddamned flash all of Bomboko’s kinsmen had shown and now, now it was a big thing. Memory’s sketchy after that, but I don’t think I gave the right impression. Larry got made the honorary Mongo…’

- William ‘Bill’ Harvey, CIA Deputy Chief of Station for the Republic of the Congo (Leopoldville) in 1963, interviewed for the 1976 BBC documentary America’s Secret Wars


‘With the signing of the Mobutu-Tshombe Accord in January 1963, the (forced) resignation of President Kasa-Vubu, the elevation of the non-entity Jean Bolikango[lxxxix] to the presidency and Joseph Ileo to the Premiership,[xc] the two authorities friendly to the United States were no longer at one anothers’ throats. The compromise had also disproportionately weakened the power of the central government, while, for the moment, augmenting both Mobutu and Tshombe’s hold over their own fiefdoms. Tshombe calculated that the war between the Leopoldville and Stanleyville governments would bleed both sides white and guarantee Katangan independence; Mobutu in turn gambled that he’d be able to crush Gizenga in the east and then, the UN having withdrawn after the signing of the Accord and his relations with the CIA more than healthy, turn on Katanga while whispering to the Americans that their interests were not under threat if he, rather that Tshombe, were to rule there.

Meanwhile, the cautious Gizenga bided his time. In order to understand the events of 1963, one must appreciate that the Stanleyville government was not only aided by the Soviet Union; as the successor to Patrice Lumumba’s administration, it was recognised by thirty-two other nations, a fair few of those directly bordering the Republic of Congo. Moreover, those nations did not care to give discreetly. Ghana dispatched a volunteer regiment of infantry; Guinea sent technicians; Tanganyika, after independence in the December of 1961, sent plentiful funds.[xci] Egypt offered to act as a go-between between Stanleyville and Eastern European governments eager to prevent its fall.[xcii] This all rendered Soviet support rather miniscule in comparison.

Nevertheless, it was clumsily disguised Soviet support and training that allowed the Stanleyville military to survive the occasional raids of Mobutu’s army, and allowed it gain enough confidence to resist constant UN peace overtures. By late 1962, with the war proving nigh on inconclusive, the Congo had become a new centrepoint for leftist ideals in opposition to ‘neo-colonialism.’ Antoine Gizenga, although by Soviet assessment a mere figurehead, had become many things to many people: ardent Communist stooge to Washington; potential ally and useful tool to Moscow; heroic nationalist to the pan-African movement…’

- Taken from The Soviet Union and Africa


POLICE STRIKE STOP TEST OF RESOLVE FOR CENTRAL GOVERNMENT STOP LOOTING IN NORTH OF LEOPOLDVILLE STOP

- AP wire, January 2nd 1963


“HARVEY: Lansdale had used his MPs to drill into Mobutu’s men that they were the defenders of the Constitution, and the defenders of the people. That was about it. He taught them to shoot, but only at paper targets on a range and not with anything moving;[xciii] the Mission had the money for that, but then that was spent on the agents Lansdale was throwing toward Stanleyville and making sure certain units around the capital didn’t mutiny every Tuesday. Those cargo ships sailing in every morning? Full of Lucky Strikes, Rye and Steaks.[xciv] Larry was beside himself. I think he saw it coming.

The deal between Mobutu and Tshombe kept Mobutu in charge in Leopoldville, but not in title. His responsibilities passed to a man called Joseph Ileo- which I suppose Luce thought would attract all Lumumba’s disciples back from Stanleyville[xcv]- and the Presidency was shorn off Mr Kasavubu’s shoulders and onto…oh, I, uh, I forget now. What was it, uh…no, it doesn’t matter. Anyway, both were idiots; Ileo had experience but no sense of action, and it was the reverse for…Bolikango! Yeah. People didn’t know that though. Nobody in the capital realised that Mobutu was still the de-facto leader there; they thought the compromise had weakened the government just enough so that, when they forced their own ideas onto the people, they’d get concessions. Strikes, etcetera. First, the taxi drivers and porters for better fares, but that made little impact. But then the civil service, dockers. And the police.

I knew from Larry that Mobutu was a brave man. Stupid, I dunno. The strike had been going on for something like a week before I heard the government was gonna do something about it. I think Larry must have been trying to convince Mobutu to send in the Army. Obvious drawback to that in what’s supposed to be a civilian democracy, and Lansdale’s men weren’t thought to be the most reliable. I was at some bar at portside in Brazzaville when I heard; Lansdale was calling all his men in, and that meant me crossing the river. When I got over there, everything stank of panic. Nobody was sitting on their asses; even the girls in the typing pool were flying around with hard looks waving bits of paper webbed with sentences in French, English and Flemish.

One of the MPs marches up to me while I’m staring at this goddamn hurricane. He’s out of breath - “Thank God you’re here, the General wants to see you in his office right away.” I’m frogmarched over. Lansdale’s pacing. “Mobutu’s dead.”

I’m goddamned aghast. I asked if Larry knew.

“Larry was there. He’s not dead, he’s with Nendaka. He couldn’t persuade the Colonel to use my boys.” He always called them his boys. Arrogant [REDACTED.] “Mobutu went over to confront the police, face to face, apart from Larry and Nendaka, alone. He thought talking to them would solve it.” I remember he tried to light one of his cigars, maybe to calm himself down, but he was all fingers and idiot. “Walked up to them, unarmed. Brave man. Brave man.”[xcvi]

Larry and Nendaka, it turned out, had to really run after that after that little [REDACTED] up. That was it though. It made sense to deal with Nendaka now, as the next most powerful man in the Binza Group, but that was it. It did not take long for Ivan to find out.”

- William ‘Bill’ Harvey, CIA Deputy Chief of Station for the Republic of the Congo (Leopoldville) in 1963, interviewed for the 1976 BBC documentary America’s Secret Wars


RIOTING IN LEOPOLDVILLE STOP MOBUTU ASSASSINATED STOP UN TROOPS GUARDING FOREIGN EMBASSIES STOP

- AP Wire, January 6th 1963


“Signal the men.”

- Antoine Gizenga to Colonel Laurent Désiré Kabila, January 7th 1963

***

[Open with a scene of domestic bliss; a housewife is making her husband coffee. She hands it to him, smiling.]

WIFE:

Henry, want anything special for your birthday?

HENRY:

Just a decent cup of coffee.

WIFE:

You’re kidding!

HENRY:

Honey, I’m serious! Your coffee’s…undrinkable!

WIFE:

That’s pretty harsh!

HENRY:

Well, so’s your coffee. You know, the girls down the office make better coffee on their hotplates! Well…see you later.

[Henry storms out of the kitchen. Cut to his wife and her friend talking in the kitchen later on.]

WIFE:

…and he didn’t even kiss me goodbye…you know, if I could just make a decent cup of coffee, I could relax.

FRIEND:

So, relax! Why don’t you try instant Folgers. [Friend holds up a container of the coffee in a close-up.] Tastes good as fresh perked.

WIFE:

Good as fresh perked?!

FRIEND:

Yeah. [She hands the container over.]

WIFE:

I’ll surprise Henry for his birthday tonight…

[Cut to Henry and his Wife sitting at a candlelit table, with a birthday cake and a jug of coffee in front of them. The occasion is formal; Henry’s wife has clearly gone to great effort in her preparation. Henry sips a cup of coffee.]

HENRY:

Hey, great coffee.

WIFE:

It’s instant Folgers; doesn’t it taste as good as fresh perked?

HENRY:

[Clearly pleased] Better.

WIFE:

Better than those girls make at the office?

HENRY:

[Blows out the candle.] Honey, theirs can’t hold a candle to yours. [He leans over to kiss his wife on the cheek.]

[Cut to a close-up of a Folger’s Coffee jar, next to a steaming cup of coffee.]

NARRATOR:

Instant Folgers tastes as good as Fresh Perked. Try it!

- Folgers Coffee Ad, broadcast on various television networks 1960-1964[xcvii]


‘[…]the United States purchasing the majority of coffee produced in Angola, 52.5% of the total produced in 1958. The United States in turn is the preeminent foreign exporter to the colony, accounting for 11.6% of imports to the colony…’

- Extract from a State Department paper on Angola, supplied to Henry Kissinger, 8th October 1961[xcviii]


“We know [the MPLA] are near Leopoldville. We know it. My government has seen this all before and we will not see it again. If Leopoldville is overrun, Katanga has no future. And if Katanga is overrun, what’s to stop the Communists from doing the same to the plantations in Angola?”

“With respect Your Excellency, the United States is not concerned with a lack of granules to wake herself up with each and every morning, but a lack of metals and minerals to make the missiles that guarantee a morning to wake up to…”

- Portuguese Foreign Minister Adriano Moreira in a private conversation with Ambassador to Congo-Leopoldville Henry Luce, December 8th 1962


‘By 1963, the State of Katanga possessed powerful friends.

Over the Atlantic, the United States perceived Katanga as a valuable bulwark against the Soviet-influenced aspirations of the Stanleyville government. To the south-west, the Portuguese held an obvious interest in denying the rebel UPA and MPLA movements cross-border sanctuaries.[xcix] In the south-east, the Central African Federation saw value in Katanga as a buffer-state against possible African pressure against her minority rule, a concern that was inherited by the British government in their efforts to police North Rhodesia in her violent transition to majority rule and independence.[c] Lastly, the Belgians possessed an interest in maintaining Katangan autonomy through their parallel interest in preserving the integrity of the largest Katangan employer – Union Minière du Haut-Katanga.[ci] A small contingent of Belgian paratroopers was also resident in the country, just north of Elizabethville, as a more visible form of security.[cii]

Of all these powers, Portugal provided the most material support for Moise Tshombe’s regime,[ciii] selling on American-made weaponry originally intended for mainland Portuguese units. It is not clear whether the US government deliberately turned a blind eye to this practice, although given their knowledge of Portuguese atrocities in Angola committed with similar weapons, it would not be the greatest leap of the imagination to think so…’

- Taken from Heart of Darkness: The United States in Southern Africa


“By 1963, they were all exiles from their own homelands, or what they thought should be their homelands.

They had come mostly from the towns and the cities. They were not the…the uh, establishment so to speak of the natives, but certainly educated. In an economy that they thought did not value them, and in a political climate that they knew would be hostile toward their ideals, these radicals travelled, or were driven out by the secret police, to the United States, to the Soviet Union, to Europe. They kept to themselves, all knew each other, and we knew them. We certainly knew about Holden Roberto and his UPA, from his contacts with Senator Kennedy.

But you must understand that they were not representative of all of Angola, or Mozambique, or Guiné. The UPA acted for the Bakongo, the MPLA for the Mbundu people.[civ] P.A.I.G.C were for the Cape Verdean islanders, even though they fought predominantly in Guiné.[cv] And they were all late in the game, too, and saw what was going on in Kenya, in Tanganyika and didn’t like it.[cvi] They were not only prepared to fight the Portuguese for their visions, but any other group that got in their way.

Lisbon at first did not know how to deal with them. They’d prepared a little when the Congo was granted independence in 1960- putting more secret police and army personnel on the border- but nothing concrete. So when the UPA flooded in the following year, they lashed out without thinking, mobilising everything and smashing the UPA back with airstrikes and heavy armour. Naturally, they fled back into the jungle, kept away from the roads, while the Portuguese moved the villagers into little fortified towns.[cvii] They kept them down. But the...MPLA attacked in Cabinda and a little in the south, and Lisbon began to get a little more worried. These terrorists could be stopped in Angola it seemed, but their secret police could only do so much outside of it. They relied on foreign cooperation, and they were receiving almost nothing.

Our dilemma was of course who to support. Our security was at risk if we openly sided with the rebels, so of course we weren’t about to do that. Open support of Lisbon though would set back our relations with the newly independent states in Africa. So, we kept a balance; what we’d do was pressuring them behind the scenes to accede to the inevitable. We put forward plans- Portugal could turn into a Commonwealth on the British model,[cviii] with NATO bankrolling the whole thing- but that was at odds with their thinking that the colonies were inseparable from Portugal. I remember one of their officials at a conference saying to me, “Henry, it would be like dividing California in two because of all the Mexicans. And you would not cut off your right arm, would you?”[cix]

So we didn’t. At State, Secretary Bohlen kept the whole issue on the backburner. We kept contact with Holden Roberto, but nothing more. You remember the Administration had a lot more important policy initiatives occurring in Southeast Asia and in Berlin those first two years. We let the British handle the C.A.F on their own, and kept an eye on the Portuguese in Angola. Soon though, we had to come to terms with the fact that our Africa policy, especially in the Congo, was more dependent on the goodwill of the Portuguese than we thought possible…”

- Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor in 1963


“Some days we were hunted. The Portuguese would rest in the forest by day, point a rifle in the back of one of their prisoners, one of us, and force him to reveal our camp location. You knew when they’d try to lie because you’d find the body the next day. Occasionally though, they’d leap on our camp. If they discovered one of the new villages, we’d stay and fight while the women and children escaped, but if they found just a refuge for the men, we’d flee into the brush.

The only difference I can tell you for the beginning of that year was that they did not use the jets.”

- Pedro Augusto, UPA guerrilla in 1963, interviewed for Stagnant Depths: The Portuguese Colonial Wars


‘[…] and it is the view of the Republic of Portugal that the Republic of Congo has facilitated the emergence of the aforesaid terrorist movements operating in Portuguese sovereign territory through their shelter on Congolese soil. Therefore, the Republic of Portugal feels it its obligation to act in defending the integrity of her territory in Africa, vis-a-vis the constituent territory of Angola, and informs the Congolese Government that, henceforth, the Republic of Portugal will, given the continued shelter of such terrorist movements on Congolese soil, undertake measures to police the border zones of both territories herself…’

- Diplomatic note dispatched by Portugal to Congo-Leopoldville, January 8th 1963

***

“So now we have Nendaka and Gizenga…”

“Scylla and Charybdis…”

- Lawrence Devlin to Ambassador Luce, January 7th 1963


“THOMPSON: Gizenga started moving his men [on the] 7th. Over the river, I didn’t hear about it until the 9th, when we started hearing all these rumours of…fighting between Lansdale’s boys[cx] and Gizenga’s men. I couldn’t do anything though; the ferry to Leopoldville had had its service reduced since the strike to once a day, then once every three days, and then whenever the ships captain decided it was safe, which it never seemed to be. Anything printable had dried up in Brazzaville since New Years, so I wasn’t doin’ anything but talking in the hotel about how we should go out and report something in the name of our hallowed profession while simultaneously arguing to myself that I couldn’t write just any old shit. Then, in came the news, from a telegram delivered by one of the bellboys: the Gizengists were on the move, and that refugees were now flooding into Coquilhatville.[cxi] Ok, I said: that’s where to go.”

- Hunter S. Thompson, Newsweek correspondent for the Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville) in 1962, interviewed for the 1976 BBC documentary America’s Secret Wars


‘[…]led by Kabila, the ‘Gizengists’ advanced from Stanleyville in the direction of Coquilhatville, in force. The Leopoldville Government forces, not a well-disciplined army to begin with, fell back toward the provincial capital, the officers among them spreading stories of the Gizengists cruelties in the hope that their enemies advance would be delayed for lack of cooperation among the rural population. As a result, while token units of the Leopoldville Army defected to Laurent Kabila and another smaller force under Pierre Mulele, masses of refugees began to follow the general retreat into Coquilhatville.

The news that most of the civilian population had been following the progress of the government army into Coquilhatville prompted the government units, who probably considered the imminent arrival of thousands of people to be less than conducive toward a defence of the city, to flee even further south, upon which discipline among such units broke down irrevocably. The soldiers of the republic originally sent north and east to put down a treasonous rebellion were now simply men with guns, and a few days, hungry men with guns. The government forces looted and raped south with unprecedented rapacity; Coquilhatville was taken by Kabila on the 11th January, empty and, thanks to the refugees clogging up the roads and one enterprising inhabitant having looted what he could of the ground-to-air radio system, virtually inaccessible by land and air…’

- Taken from Heart of Darkness: The United States in Southern Africa


“THOMPSON: Well, no surprise we couldn’t get there, but I managed to bribe a pilot with enough Luckies to get as far as Lukolela on the Congo River, which lucky for us had built an airstrip to supply Mobutu’s men in the north. Much good it was now. Really, it looked like someone had taken a giant scoop kids use at the beach and used it to scour a mile out of the forest. Dirt track, all of it.

As we circled overhead, you saw the refugees; those lucky enough to steal a boat began wading ashore, and those who didn’t trudging up the shoreline with all their belongings. There wasn’t a direct route from Coquilhatville to Lukolela, just the river. Some o’ them were running; most were moving very slow, while others remained motionless in the water. By then though, I was concentrating more on that dirt track moving fast right into our line of sight. The plane was shaking badly, and the wind was up; I was alright, but I’m pretty sure the pilot near-pissed himself.

Lukolela wasn’t a big place - we knew there wasn’t exactly a Hilton nearby among these colonial huts, and we’d promised the pilot back at the airstrip we’d only be an hour or two – so we moved straight to the shoreline. The refugees were dropping like stones on the streets, and further back, their legs were often getting stuck in the dark sludge of the river. I ran, half on impulse, over to one guy who didn’t look as exhausted as the rest of his compatriots.

They were near, he said. “Who are they?” The soldiers, Gizenga’s men. “And others.” I kept asking him, “Who, who?” He shouted, spittle an everythin’, back in my face: all of them, anyone with a gun! He looked behind him…at two women and a child…his family, I guess, and back toward me. He asked us if he knew where there was shelter, for an hour or more.

All along the river, up to a bend a mile away, villagers were hauling themselves along the shore or near to it, sometimes up to their waists in water and always carrying their lives on their backs. [I] heard a crackle of gunfire in the distance; the villagers remained impassive. Then I heard what I thought was the roll of thunder. Then it started to rain, but I hadn’t seen any flashes on the water or around me and I was damned if that thunder was stopping. And the roar became deafening, artificial.

Four jets flew low overhead, ducking and…weaving like Swallows over the forest, over on the opposite bank of the river before rising up and up [subject demonstrates] into the midday sun. The roaring…diminished a little as their altitude increased, but then rose to a whole new intensity as they dived down, into the distance. Then they danced back up into the grey and black cover of the clouds, but, left seemingly motionless above the forest, they’d dropped something. [Subject stares into the middle distance for a moment, then resumes] The villagers…began to run and scream and wrench their legs out of the mud toward anything that resembled dry land and out…out in the bend in the river, over a…mile away I think, I saw…men stretch like bubblegum, behind brilliant shades of red. I ran…”

- Hunter S. Thompson, Newsweek correspondent for the Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville) in 1962, interviewed for the 1976 BBC documentary America’s Secret Wars


“Alvo neutralizado. Repita, alvo neutralizado.”

- Radio transmission picked up by Air Traffic Control in Maya-Maya Airport, Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), 11th January 1963


“If our allies are unable to prevent uncontrollable chaos in Congo, we should certainly try. Try we will, and tried we have.”

- Prime Minister Antonio Salazar to Ambassador Elbrick, 11th January 1963


‘The American policy in the Congo Basin had unquestionably failed: nothing short of military intervention by the United States Army could avert, in the eyes of the State Department, the catastrophe of a secure Gizenga-led government ensconced in Leopoldville. “Observing the sullen faces of many in the Africa Bureau,” Clare Timberlake would later remark, “you would have been forgiven for thinking we’d lost Africa to the Communists there and then.”

In desperation (and certainly overreaching his authority), Ambassador Luce cabled the State Department recommending that overwhelming force should be applied to smash the Stanleyville Army while it was vulnerable, picking through the refugees they had unwittingly put in their own way. This would buy enough time to halt the infighting within the Leopoldville government, while Victor Nendaka struggled to rein in the multiple factions now sprouting forth in the absence of Mobutu. “I am a policeman, not a damned bureaucrat!” Nendaka is said to have shouted at Luce, as panic began to grip the capital. “And I just print magazines, but a higher power has decreed that I should be more than the sum of my parts…”

When the news of the collapse of Leopoldville’s forces filtered to the White House, Henry Kissinger turned apoplectic with rage, quickly finding time to blame the Secretaries of State, Defence and (more inexplicably) Transport for wasting his time with “a great deal of [REDACTED] conjecture and not enough action,” before going cap in hand to the Portuguese to act. It was a classic example of the Nixon Administration’s capacity to overreact; Congo seems to have been the first time however where the White House was prepared to inflict serious damage on its own diplomatic reputation in exchange for an ill-thought out, ill-planned objective that few in Washington understood, let alone thought right.

The Portuguese already had a stake in the future of the Congo; facing serious insurgencies in the far reaches of Angola and, since the beginning of the year, in Cabinda, they had invested much support in autonomous Katanga. The age-old fear of foreign division of their colonial empire, combined with Antonio Oliveira Salazar’s well-known antipathy to all things ‘Red’ prompted Kissinger to gamble on Portuguese military intervention against Gizenga. Kissinger was correct in his assumption that Salazar was entirely willing to act: “Now we’ll be indispensible enough to make them keep their noses out of our own ‘backyards.’” The Portuguese Air Force, it was relayed to Ambassador Elbrick the next day, would carpet-bomb the Gizengists at three points along their advance, and issue a statement the next day asserting that they had taken unilateral action in securing their own borders. Kissinger is known to have forwarded the plan to President Nixon, although so late as to make the standing-down of Portuguese personnel nigh-on unavoidable. Nixon’s outburst to his Chief of Staff Robert Finch that his National Security Advisor had “handed [him] another goddamn Cuba” may be apocryphal.

The intervention, when it occurred, wreaked monstrous destruction not only on the advance-guard of Kabila and Mulele’s armies, but also on the line of refugees waxing along the Congo River. Although US involvement was at first not suspected, the outcry within the week was enormous. A UN Security Council resolution condemning the Portuguese action was co-sponsored by Congo-Brazzaville and Czechoslovakia and would have passed with eight votes had France not used her veto for the first time.[cxii] Soon however, that consternation was to be overtaken by the news of Leopoldville’s fall. For, the airstrikes had only slowed the inevitable…’

Taken from Heart of Darkness: The United States in Southern Africa


“It is the right of every power to guard themselves from attack. The New State did exactly that: they were already facing attacks from the UPA from the border with Congo-Leopoldville, and they thought that the advance of the comparatively well-organised and motivated Gizengists from Stanleyville to topple the central government would make things immeasurably worse. So Salazar ordered his air force to bomb Gizenga. Short of a ground invasion, this would slow, and perhaps stop the advance, and certainly weaken them.

INTERVIEWER: Was this action condoned by President Nixon and yourself?

KISSINGER: Yes. You know what happened…”

Henry Kissinger, US National Security Advisor in 1963, interviewed for Heart of Darkness: The United States in Southern Africa

***

Universal – International News

CONGO CAPITAL FALLS TO RED REBELS

Voice: Ed Herlihy

[Open: Footage of Congolese looting shops and smashing cars on the streets of Leopoldville. Cut to a white family running from a burning building.]

The city of Leopoldville in chaos, as the government flees, and looting replaces law and order.

[Cut to a wide shot of a crowd beating a man with rushes.]

Strongman Victor Nendaka is caught trying to escape. The crowd deliver their own brand of summary justice.

[Cut to footage of seemingly disciplined soldiers jumping out of the backs of jeeps outside a large gated compound. They proceed to form an honour guard. Cut to a short Congolese man; his face is visibly scarred. He salutes the soldiers; they salute back.]

Antoine Gizenga, leader of the invading army, arrives to seize the reins of power…

“THOMPSON: [I] argued with the pilot to leave the strip as soon as possible, because if we didn’t there’d be every chance in the world that the next target those jets’d hit would be us, just waitin’ on the dirt. I think I hit him twice before he went ‘D’accord’ and sent us up.

They didn’t notice us, we got out fine. I made a point of not looking back, but you could see in the pale reflection of one of the mirrors all the fire and death we’d left behind. Over the next hour, the vision melted away, and we were back gliding over comforting greens and blues.

“We have a leak.”

That threw me. We were four miles out of Maya-Maya. Couldn’t we fly even [toward] that?

“To much traffic, the radio’s gone crazy,” he says, “and the wind’s against us.” I had not picked for my charge Amelia Earhart, and I sure as hell couldn’t fly.[cxiii] It was Ndili, or trees, and two hours later it looked like a mixture of the two. By then, it was too late to worry about goddamn traffic.

“You have any family, Monsieur Thomas?”

Well I [REDACTED] grimaced, and wrapped my fingers around the latch on the door.[cxiv] The whole plane shook as we dived. I saw…[REDACTED] two, three military transport planes swoop over ahead of us, one helicopter and millions of tiny people surging out of the terminal. I don’t remember how we landed, but according to Patrice[cxv] I was hollering outta that window all the way down. I remember climbing out and ducking again as a goddamn C-133 spluttered a yard above my hair.

Out toward the terminal, I faced a sea of white faces, jumping and running and beating each other up with suitcases and rage. [Takes a drag of his cigarette] I didn’t think Lukolela was close, but Kabila had gotten there: I didn’t know it, but he was already in the city, doing just what in the hell African armies do when they’ve won, and all the Whites wanted out.[cxvi] We were…surrounded on all sides. Out in the crowd, a short, stubby man of fifty points at our plane and begins shouting. Loads of others gave him this sort of…confused look, as if to say, maybe you need a pilot for that. Patrice sure as hell wasn’t there; I’d climbed out of the plane to leave him swearing at whatever he’d done to whatever it’d done to the goddamn engine, which was smoking, but I glanced back then and he’d goddamn disappeared.

There sure as hell wasn’t any way out of the city from here, so I got out [of the airport.] Had to [takes a drag on his cigarette]…brutalise a few old men to get to the road and the abandoned Cadillac’s and jeeps.[cxvii] From there I knew I had to find Bill. Agency Bill; if he was still alive, still in the city and still sober, he was going to be in the Embassy. So I slammed on the gas…but don’t tell him that, yeah?”

- Hunter S. Thompson, Newsweek correspondent for the Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville) in 1962, interviewed for the 1976 BBC documentary America’s Secret Wars


“Gizenga Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa za Banga! Ha! Est-il assez courageux pour assister à son propre triomphe?”

- Laurent Kabila to Pierre Mulele, on the outskirts of Leopoldville, January 1963


“HARVEY: Lansdale kept me in Leopoldville throughout. I protested, but the MPs kept me back. That was a goddamn sign. I tried to keep in radio contact with my station in Brazzaville, what with the ferry out of play, but by the time Gizenga’s cronies had reached the outskirts of where I was, I stopped trying. I was dockside, thinking “Gee, I wonder where this or that hunk o’junk would take me,” when I heard a voice I recognised. Suddenly, everyone around me had shut up; the sound of the surf and seagulls, that stayed, but now the only human voice was coming from the radio, then two, three, eight more, echoing all along the quay. “Lay down your arms…” Gizenga. The son of a bitch was here.

My first thought was “Jesus, Larry.” He’d be with Nendaka, and Nendaka would in all likelihood flee. And I didn’t think he’d give a damn about Larry then. Fleeting visions of Mussolini and…Clara Petacci… I realised, hell, I didn’t know where Nendaka or Devlin’d be; in fact, the only hope to get anyone out of here would be to board a ship, fly a plane, wait for rescue or call for help from upriver. I ran to the Embassy, which…I’m not a spritely fellow…past all the other Congolese, no longer hypnotised by their radios. Started looting. End of the world, right? Not if I had anything to do it; I thought [subject leans forward] maybe I could call Brazzaville; they’d send a detachment, fight their way into the city, liberate the Embassy staff and maybe, just maybe, frighten Gizenga off. The last bit was wishful thinking, but I still think most of that plan was sound thinking for a man who’d ran eight blocks past screaming looters and dodged any goddamn White guy with a car and a will to live.

I thought, Luce would have ordered an evacuation. Normally, there’s a plan for that…hic…something like, burn all you can, assemble out in the courtyard and wait for rescue, probably from the nearest Embassy, but it could be some helicopter or buses by the government. They had none of those, and sure as hell wasn’t a Navy battlegroup floating about nearby.

I arrived at about four. Passports were strewn all over the floor, typewriters smashed, all the windows open. Everybody was too scared to go outside – people were looting dockside – so before I showed up, everyone was stuffin’ every bit o’ paper into burn barrels, so at the drop of a hat…course, they saw me, and thought things might not turn out so bad if they cut and run, either back to their homes or to the ships. Ten minutes, it was just me, Lansdale, Larry and a few MPs in the whole complex.

Lansdale was in the Ambassadors office, pacing again and screaming to on high about how some folks in Washington had screwed him over, right over. Then he stops, puts his hand to his holster, and grabs his Smith and Wesson: “The time is now, men! The time is…” He was going to go out himself and shoot Gizenga. I sent him flying over his desk, and grabbed the gun.

[I] got through [to Brazzaville], not on the radio, but one of the phones in the typing pool. Idiots hadn’t worked out to cut the lines yet. The Embassy operator said she’d get the military liaison; would I hold? Christ, I said, there isn’t the…and she did. I picked up another phone – they were strewn all about the place – and dialled up Hunter’s hotel. I was gonna inform him of a very lucrative scoop, and it was just happening if he just popped over on a boat…

INTERVIEWER: But he wasn’t there?

HARVEY: Hell no. So, I left. [Lights a cigarette, then proceeds to pour himself another drink]…mustn’t dwell.

INTERVIEWER: Can you tell us about the Embassy?

HARVEY: I ran out to look for Hunter at about…half four. Whole city screaming, smoke on the horizon, alarms wailing. Then, finally, as I ran out the complex, past the deserted sentry posts, I see Larry, shirt torn, gun in his hand.[cxviii]

“They got him,” he says. I felt bad about the Petacci thing. He waved his free hand toward the Embassy. “Anyone left?” I said Lansdale for certain; maybe a few MPs, shoving things into the barrels.

“BURN barrels? Ah Jesus, Bill…” and he runs straight into the building.

I was about a hundred yards away when I heard this tremendous roar. I didn’t know what in the hell he was on about, but the…barrels they were using, the ‘burn barrels.’ Lined with magnesium. Poor bastard…’[cxix]

- William ‘Bill’ Harvey, CIA Deputy Chief of Station for the Republic of the Congo (Leopoldville) in 1963, interviewed for the 1976 BBC documentary America’s Secret Wars


“En survolant la ville maintenant. [sound of explosion in the background; screaming; scattered gunfire]…Fils de pute…”

- Recorded conversation, overheard by Gizengist forces, held between Belgian pilots flying over Leopoldville, 14th January 1963


“So I have an Embassy in the middle of Africa that I have to evacuate, with no Navy unit in the vicinity, with the nearest country refusing to let our MPs in to save the day, and a bunch of Fascists the only ones who can do the job? Jesus Henry, I’ll have your ass for this…”

“Sir, there are the Belgians…”

- Alleged conversation between President Nixon and Henry Kissinger in the Pentagon, 14th January 1963[cxx]


LEOPOLDVILLE FALLS TO GIZENGA; TSHOMBE VOWS TO RESIST

- Taken from The Washington Post, 15th January 1963

***

“My fellow Senators, we not only saw this war coming: we facilitated it. A war that has killed and maimed thousands, a war that has elicited the unwanted rapacity of a vicious colonial power, an unnecessary war, inflamed by this chambers reluctance to furnish the United Nations with the money and men it needed to keep the peace. When those fighter jets of the Portuguese Air Force soared over the skies of the Congolese Republic they not only rained death upon the thousands more, more than those already dead and those already wounded, but dropped a symbol. Etched into those bombs were three words: Made in America. Gentlemen, we carry the mark of Cain…”

- Sen. J William Fulbright (D-AR) addressing the United States Senate, March 6th 1963[cxxi]


“Someone should tell that arrogant shitass if he wants to be President, he’ll have to give speeches people give a damn about.”

- Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson (D-TX), to Bobby Baker after observing Sen. Fulbright’s speech on the Congolese Civil War


SOVIET UNION RECOGNISES GIZENGA; WASHINGTON REMAINS WARY

- Taken from The Times, 22nd January 1963[cxxii]


‘SEN. HENRY M. JACKSON: Sir, I am saying that the Soviet Union has…

SEN. GOLDWATER: […]suggesting that we are placed in danger by…

[Both talk over one another]

SEN. DODD:…gained a new outlet for which to outflank us in Europe…

SEN. GOLDWATER:…what is little more than a, a petty conflict in the dark heart of Africa…

NARRATOR: The fall of Leopoldville to the armies of Antoine Gizenga would constitute a major embarrassment for the Nixon Administration…for a few days.

[Cut from the debate to silent footage of press conferences; Secretary Bohlen, Kissinger and several military figures all make appearances.]

President Nixon’s recognition of the last anti-Communist political unit in the country – Katanga – as a sovereign state offset much of criticism aimed at the Administration for endangering crucial components for American missiles.

[Cut back to footage of Thompson and Harvey. They are sat on a sofa together in the formers living room, drinking whisky and seemingly debating something with great violence.]

Although the media storm had been quelled, heads would still roll in Washington. Kissinger, having remained at the side of the President for most of the debacle, sidestepped most of the blame. Charles Bohlen would remain as Secretary of State, but many considered his term in office to be limited to the expiration of Nixon’s current term in office; Bill Harvey, as the most senior accountable Agency operative to escape alive from Leopoldville, was fired.

HARVEY: [To HST] Goddamn lucky to see you there…

THOMPSON: Gonna get…

HARVEY: Gonna get the boats anyway yeah…but we were picked up by that Belgian chopper…

THOMPSON: Haulin’ everyone out…

HARVEY: And dumped on Brazzaville beach. But I was…[turns briefly back to HST, then back to camera] recalled. Hell, they thought I blew up the goddamn Embassy, and they wanted someone to fire for all the attention that’d got the State Department on the Congo. The papers all thought we were like Lansdale, wanted to make a last stand. Bull. [Turns to HST] In and out, ever since…[Smiles weakly]

NARRATOR: Thompson would go on to recreate his experiences in his second novel, How I learned to stop Worrying and Love the CIA…

THOMPSON: [His eyes widen; he looks briefly into the camera, and whistles. He downs his Whisky, and exhales, as if exhausted.]…’

- America’s Secret Wars, BBC documentary broadcast throughout November, 1976


“[…] remain wary of foreign plots in the rebellious south, but not deny our national aspirations to the temptation of taking sides. This new, Democratic Republic of the Congo, will remain Non-Aligned in name and action! [Cheering in the hall]’

- Premier Gizenga’s inaugural speech to the Congolese Parliament, 1st February 1963


‘[…] that Mr Mulele has been most receptive to our offers…’

- Communiqué dispatched from the Soviet Embassy in Brazzaville to Moscow[cxxiii]

___

[i] OTL; the title is ‘In Portuguese West Africa: Angola and the Isles of the Guinea Gulf,’ which gives the impression I’m talking about Angola still; if you read the article however, its more of a travelogue of his time moving from the Belgian Congo to Angola, rather than a geographical exposition of the Portuguese colony.

[ii] Comment made by Michael G. Schatzberg in ‘Mobutu of Chaos? The United States and Zaire, 1960-1990.’

[iii] Article 73 of the UN Charter advocates self-determination for peoples across the globe, which naturally clashes with everything colonialist. The Portuguese were kept out of the UN for this reason until 1955, when they argued that their colonies were in actual fact constituent parts of the Metropole.

[iv] OTL. Leopold II is obviously (still, too) unpopular in the Congo for the human rights abuses that occurred under his rule in pursuit of the acquisition of rubber in the colony, in the 19th Century. Read Joseph Conrad’s work ‘Heart of Darkness’ for a general introduction to that vile period.

[v] ‘Eisenhower, Nkrumah and the Congo Crisis’ by Ebere Nwaubani: the Force Publique at independence contained ‘some 24,000 soldiers and non-commissioned officers, all of them Congolese, and about 1,000 officers, all of them Belgian.’

[vi] OTL: they also decided to arm the Katangan rebels, with both small arms and warplanes, the latter used later to strafe UN columns. Contrast the Belgian attitude with this statement, made by the Minister of the Congo in 1959 and sourced from ‘Katanga Secession,’ by Jules Gérard-Libois: ‘It is therefore vain to cast doubt on the unity of the Congo and to place before public opinion programs which consecrate its division; the balkanisation of the Congo would deprive it forever of the possibility of occupying a preponderant place in Central Africa.

[vii] This was a fallback plan for the State Department: if Lumumba turned out to be a Communist/idiot, stable and corporative Katanga would be the last bastion of anti-Communism in the Congo. You’ve got to remember that Eisenhower and, to some degree, Kennedy, had watched Communism creep across the world since 1945 and had more or less internalised the struggle against it. Congo was a good a place as any to be a battlefield against Moscow.

[viii] Another fact supplied by ‘Mobutu or Chaos.’

[ix] If the UN use their troops to suppress the rebellion in South Kasai, that obviously doesn’t augur well for Katanga.

[x] Facts supplied from this useful page.

[xi] OTL.

[xii] OTL.

[xiii] OTL, quoted from ‘Eisenhower, Nkrumah and the Congo Crisis.’

[xiv] OTL, quoted by ‘Killing Hope: US Military and CIA interventions since World War II’ by William Blum.

[xv] Robert Johnson stated as much to the Church Committee in 1975, although he couldn’t remember his exact words.

[xvi] Because Lumumba still commanded the confidence of the Congolese parliament.

[xvii] Harvey is referring to the CIA.

[xviii] President Nixon.

[xix] See Chapter II. Berlin has become less of a battleground since the Soviets decided to fiddle with the border in the background, rather than build a wall.

[xx] Brazzaville and Leopoldville are essentially opposite each other on the Congo River. To get from one to the other, all you have to do is simply hop on a ferry, which is what many whites in both Congo’s did; Leopoldville was dangerous and at certain points didn’t stock much food at its markets, and Brazzaville was the complete opposite.

[xxi] Which even non-mutinous Congolese soldiers, according to Larry Devlin in his memoirs, weren’t averse to…

[xxii] Not far from the port, according to this 1954 map.

[xxiii] Devlin used this trick a few times to get himself and others out of trouble. He even saved IIRC the actual Ambassador, Clare Timberlake, by implying he outranked him by being a ‘Consul.’

[xxiv] Embassy here. Devlin describes the embassy compound in his memoirs in a more orthodox day, stating that the latticed brickwork might have aided attackers if a mob decided to ransack the embassy.

[xxv] In his prologue, Devlin describes a frightening encounter with mutinous troops, where he was forced to play ‘Congolese Roulette’; basically, it’s like the Russian version, only the bullets are removed from the gun and you don’t know it. And there’s only one player.

[xxvi] OTL.

[xxvii] OTL, a white mob, aided by the police, scourged the suburbs and slums of Luanda in search of nationalists and their fellow-travellers on the 4th February 1961. This had followed on from an attack by the MPLA on the prison, aiming to liberate their fellow comrades-in-arms. ITTL, tensions come to a head on the 17th, and the white mob decide to simply set the prison on fire on their own accord, thanks to butterflies. Thoroughly nasty butterflies.

[xxviii] One of the interesting things about the Portuguese in Africa was their (really, relative) reluctance to raise racial barriers, in both law and society generally. It was completely normal for Portuguese settlers to marry Bakongo/Mbundu/Ovimbundu wives and have recognised mixed-race children; with regards to Cape Verde, much of the population would be seen as ‘Black.’ Passion however does not necessarily equate equality. While adherents of Lusotropicalism point out again and again in the sources, as do a few northern European academics from the era (c.1961-1974) point out, this wasn’t a pluralistic society in the best sense of the word. Attitudes to indigenous employment were only changed in light of the 1961 rebellion, and the statistics (illustrated later) heavily imply a colour bar when it comes to it after, albeit in light of a lack of investment in education and infrastructure rather than outright segregation.

[xxix] This opening is based on that by David Birmingham in his (transcribed) lecture ‘Youth and War in Angola.’ I think it’s him; the book I’m reading for this, ‘Portugal and Africa,’ is a collection of essays, and he doesn’t seem to attribute other authors very much.

[xxx] In reality, the death toll stretched to around 1,000. Source: “The Portuguese Army in Angola,” DL Wheeler, 1969.

[xxxi] That might be an oxymoron, but by 1961 100,000 refugees had amassed in the former Congo Free State, out of a migrant population – who sought to escape Portuguese forced labour requirements- of 500,000. Integration, and the questions it raises as to someone’s identity, naturally became a major issue among the exiles.

[xxxii] I.e., the north of the modern day Republic of Congo.

[xxxiii] One of the main characteristics of the nationalist movements fighting the Portuguese from the Sixties onwards was their foreign nature; forced abroad by the secret police (PIDE,) to survive they had to become expert diplomats, begging assistance and shelter from anyone they could. That included the newly independent African nations like Ghana and Guinea, and of course the superpowers. We must remember of course, with regards to the former, these were the years of pan-Africanism.

[xxxiv] In 1961, a major rebellion in the north of Angola, led by the UPA, would signal the beginning of the oft-forgotten Portuguese Colonial War. That said, there is some question as to whether the UPA actually instigated the rebellion and led it later, or plotted it; the conclusions of David Birmingham in his essay on Angolan race relations imply that this might all have started as a peasant jacquerie, rather than a purely nationalist uprising.

[xxxv] Compare that to the white population of Angola in 1960, which was 172,259.

[xxxvi] See below.

[xxxvii] Like David Birmingham, the author from whom I get these particular facts – from his essay ‘Race and Class in a Fascist Colony’ – there’s a degree of sensationalism.

[xxxviii] Again, this is mostly OTL. All of the figures provided certainly are.

[xxxix] There’s actually a bit of debate as to whether Humberto Delgado, the opposition candidate, actually lost the 1958 Presidential election. On the one hand, it does look suspicious when a dictatorial regime wins yet another important election, but on the other it seems that many Portuguese, out of fear, actually did vote for Americo Tomas for President.

[xl] Although PIDE didn’t actually move into the colonies until the 50s. The author is including informers as well as intelligence officers in his definition.

[xli] Portugal is not a small country!

[xlii] See ‘Lusotropicalism.’

[xliii] OTL quote.

[xliv] OTL, it was Disneyland.

[xlv] OTL, it was 479, but given he loses ITTL, it’s pretty reasonable to suspect he’d attack Nixon more on the African aspect of his foreign policy credentials.

[xlvi] ATL; the author is quoting an ATL State Department paper, supplied to Nixon.

[xlvii] Then conspirators believe Quadros is more sympathetic to the overthrow of the New State more than Nixon.

[xlviii] This is a very ATL event; OTL, Kennedy vacillated, and then negotiated the release of the hostages while providing Galvão sanctuary in Brazil.

[xlix] Not until Mobutu’s ‘Zaire’ was there thought up an adequate differentiation between the Republic of Congo in Brazzaville and that resident in Leopoldville; the press and foreign diplomats had to make do with ‘Congo-Leopoldville’ etc.

[l] OTL, at around the time Kennedy had just ascended to the Presidency, that conflict of interest was more violent; while the State Department was the one who supported Mobutu, the CIA delivered arms to Tshombe in order to defend his country’s independence, weapons later used against UN troops.

[li] See earlier references to Operation Zapata.

[lii] OTL, this was broadly what was proposed by Tshombe, as early as September 1960 in an unpublished declaration, and what occurred, apart from the emphasis on federalism; the US saw that, in the Congo from 1961-1990, a strong central government was what it took to prevent chaos, rather than a federal solution.

[liii] Day to day Security Services.

[liv] It’s a myth that Lansdale was the basis for the antagonist of ‘The Quiet American,’ Pyle. The book was written before Lansdale was even in the country. What is more likely is him being the hidden figure behind the ‘Ugly American,’ a political novel on the influence of Americans in a fictional South East Asian country (commonly thought to be either Thailand or Vietnam.)

[lv] In 1962, Congress voted to grant the UN a sizeable subsidy in order to perpetuate the Congo mission. ITTL, Nixon is considering pressuring GOP Congressmen to vote against it.

[lvi] This closely follows the OTL proposal by UN Secretary-General U Thant, sourced from ‘Katanga Secession.’

[lvii] Something he didn’t do in OTL, but he does ITTL; it makes a lot of sense, considering he’s purporting to represent the legitimate government of the Congo.

[lviii] Damn Reds.

[lix] So obviously OTL.

[lx] My excuse for the style of HST in this is that, by 1976, his timeline has been so altered that he is, in effect, a different man. That and in a lot of interviews on Youtube, he just mumbles. Contrast that with an eloquent performance for the Paris Review, and I got royally confused.

[lxi] Bill Harvey’s (very) tongue-in-cheek nickname.

[lxii] The eastern chunk of the Congo. Not Congo-Brazzaville.

[lxiii] An event recounted in Devlin’s memoirs. Mobutu announced his seizure of power after the tiff erupted between President Kasavubu and Premier Lumumba and justified it by waving about all the party literature being handed out by the Russians in Leopoldville. Neither party were very subtle.

[lxiv] Still is, really.

[lxv] Larry Devlin speculates again and again that this was the case, in his memoirs.

[lxvi] Far from unusual for the KGB.

[lxvii] This is recorded in Lawrence Devlin’s memoirs, ‘Chief of station, Congo: a memoir of 1960-67.’ OTL, Devlin stumbled across Soviet plans to fund Gizenga via suitcases of cash left at a Sudanese airport; ITTL, that doesn’t happen, although the KGB in Africa wise up to the fact that that probably isn’t the best way of passing on money to your ally.

[lxviii] This paper shows that Gizenga’s main problem lay not necessarily in arms, but in the amount of money he had to pay his men.

[lxix] The previous list in the timeline being rather hopeful…

[lxx] By 1963, Czechoslovakia had adopted the rather unorthodox role of Communism’s leading vanguard in Africa, supplying a lot of machinery and technical assistance to Egypt, Guinea, Ghana and Sudan. Sudan wasn’t very pally with Moscow around this time, pretty much denying in OTL any avenue for Soviet material support for Gizenga. In our timeline also, Moscow – thinking Congo largely unimportant in the grand scheme of things and a potential flashpoint in the Cold War if things got ugly there – didn’t take advantage of their relationship with the Czechs to circumvent this little problem. They’re also very friendly with Ethiopia – Haile Selassie visited Prague in 1959 – and arms could conceivably flow in through unsecured borders via covert flights from there. ITTL, Shelepin pays the right amount of attention, and takes advantage of Prague’s ‘goodwill.’ If anyone’s interested, this rather shadowy part of Warsaw Pact/Africa relations can be explored in ‘Czechoslovakia’s Penetration of Africa, 1955-1962’ by Curt F. Beck, published in ’63.

[lxxi] An assimilado is more or less an indigenous person in the Portuguese colony who has been assimilated into the Portuguese framework of rule. This was not altogether uncommon, given the greater degree of racial integration (partly down to a higher rate of miscegenation) than in the British or French empires. This is an OTL quote, derived from the brilliant article by Douglas L. Wheeler, ‘Angola is Whose House?’ Pereira could make such a comment because censorship in Angola was so lax; that was more or less ‘fixed’ by the New State later on. It’s also only – unwittingly – really representative of later attitudes among assimilados, considering that many at the turn of the 19th Century actively identified themselves as Portuguese; Pereira himself was, in contrast, quite the demagogue, and even advocated at the end of his journalistic career that Angolans would be better off under British rule.

[lxxii] OTL, found here.

[lxxiii] Based on this State Department archive document.

[lxxiv] Another Portuguese holding in India, near Gujarat.

[lxxv] Now the Republic of Benin. The Fort itself is one of the most ridiculous colonial territories I’ve come across. Basically a throwback to the slaving era, at the time of its annexation by Dahomey, there were only two Portuguese nationals in the place, who furthermore tried to burn it when they saw the Army arrive to take it.

[lxxvi] Emphasis on covert; the US were shit-scared that if Lisbon found out, Salazar would just go on and kick the US out of the Azores, compromising the entire NATO defence in Western Europe against the Warsaw Pact. In 1964 in OTL, the Portuguese indicated they would do this after they found out about CIA supply of the UPA, and the Americans did in fact back down.

[lxxvii] Roberto didn’t really want the UPA rebellion spreading from the historical Kingdom of Kongo area in northern Angola, which would kind of defeat any Soviet purpose in funding it.

[lxxviii] There were very real fears among State officials that the MPLA was in danger of supplanting the UPA as leaders of the revolutionary movement. Relevant document here.

[lxxix] You’d know it better as Kinshasa.

[lxxx] The idea, per se, of an empire as opposed to a metropole, like in the case of Great Britain, was not the Portuguese case. Thanks to a re-jigging of attitudes in the 1930s by Salazar and his colleagues (and the die-hard attitudes remaining from 19th Century, post-Pink Map imperialism), the empire was not simply an appendage of Portugal; it was Portugal. Anyone who interferes with a colony interferes not with Angola or Guine, but ALL of Portuguese society and honour.

[lxxxi] ‘Its initial organisation in Angola was largely destroyed by Portuguese reprisals after an unsuccessful attack on the Luanda central prison in February 1961’ – in the article ‘The Soviet Union and Angola,’ dated 1975 by Christopher Stevens.

[lxxxii] This should be telling, given the other parts of the continent currently on fire…

[lxxxiii] See Chapter II.

[lxxxiv] The author is following an ATL argument for Nixon as the Bismarck of his era.

[lxxxv] OTL, the MPLA was operating out of Brazzaville IIRC. ITTL, the perpetuated chaos of the Congo Crisis force Brazzaville to keep an eye on who is coming into their country, and who is likely to cause the most headaches.

[lxxxvi] Lansdale is rumoured to have been involved in the torture of a high-profile Japanese prisoner in the Philippines, at the end of the Second World War.

[lxxxvii] One shouldn’t underestimate the effect such witchcraft had, on what was still a very superstitious population. Devlin mentions its use time and time again, and even uses it against the Soviets in Leopoldville at one point. Isolated cases still crop up today.

[lxxxviii] Always a major point of contention for Harvey. Like Nixon, in a way…

[lxxxix] Leader of the ‘PUNA’ party, that catered to the narrow interests of the Bangala in the Equateur province, while all the while saying that it spoke for all Congolese.

[xc] OTL, this is what happened (ish) when Mobutu supplanted Lumumba, with Mobutu acting as the power behind the throne while Ileo exercised the office of Prime Minister. ATL, Mobutu holds onto actual power given US worries about the strength of Gizenga and a counterpoint to Tshombe’s ambitions for Katanga. Now, to really balance Katanga and Congo-Leopoldville out and preserve the federalist compromise, both the office of President and Prime Minister are handed to non-entities.

[xci] OTL, all these nations supported Gizenga, but I’ve altered their contributions.

[xcii] Largely a hollow gesture, given Soviet-Egyptian relations in 1961-62.

[xciii] Accuracy with a firearm is greatly reduced when a target is moving and you’re trying to actually kill said target. The reason why Stormtroopers and Hollywood Nazis can’t shoot anything isn’t just because of their helmets and the heroes capacity for good…

[xciv] According to Devlin, cigarettes were the primary currency in which to bribe a Congolese rifleman.

[xcv] Ileo came from a rival faction of the MNC, which was part of his overall appeal in his OTL appointment. He was also – at least according to Devlin – an utter incompetent.

[xcvi] This happened in OTL, albeit at a different time and with a different outcome. Mobutu did solve the strike himself, and did approach a crowd of unruly, armed policemen, and cowed them with his bravery. ATL, the policemen know better.

[xcvii] Largely OTL, although I can’t pinpoint the exact date of broadcast with any accuracy. The original name of the husband is ‘Harvey,’ but I’ve changed it to Henry to avoid confusion with Bill.

[xcviii] These statistics are derived from Irene van Dongen’s 1961 paper on the subject, ‘Coffee Trade, Coffee Regions and Coffee Ports in Angola.’

[xcix] Although Katanga housing MPLA fighters is less of a problem.

[c] This forgets the large commercial interest the Rhodesians held in Katanga, through ‘Tanganyika Concessions,’ headquartered in Salisbury and capitalised at £9.5 million, or £138m in today money.

[ci] The influence of UMHK was immense; it held an interest in 17 Congolese companies, in addition to 10 holdings in Belgium and 5 other foreign companies. UMHK was capitalised (in 1966) at 8 billion francs. In addition to this company, Société Générale de Belgique was estimated to exert control over 70% of the Congolese economy. All of these statistics are derived from ‘Katanga Secession’ published in 1966 and written by Jules Gérard-Libois.

[cii] The capital.

[ciii] OTL, this was somewhat the case, as outlined in the excellent ‘Engaging Africa: Washington and the Fall of Portugal’s Colonial Empire’ by Witney W. Schneidman, although the scale of support was by no means as large.

[civ] That also meant Luanda; the capital was predominantly an Mbundu city.

[cv] That’s an inaccuracy by Kissinger, although their leadership was comprised of assimilados of often Cape Verdean origin.

[cvi] In the sense that these nations don’t exactly conform to their own, either tribal or Communist, sensibilities.

[cvii] More accurate would be fortified villages. The Portuguese called them ‘aldeamentos.’ Kissinger’s chronology is a little out here too.

[cviii] An OTL plan, put forward by Paul Sakwa in the State Department.

[cix] Portugal conducted, like the Katangans, a PR campaign aimed at the Congress and influential businessmen in the United States.

[cx] The Leopoldville Army.

[cxi] Modern day Mbandaka.

[cxii] It’s hard not to imagine an authoritarian militarist regime not agreeing with another like-minded dictatorship over similar African policies now, is it.

[cxiii] Not to say that Hunter hadn’t tried; he’d applied to become an aviator during his military service in the US Air Force, but had been rejected.

[cxiv] Should be visible.

[cxv] Could be his real name, or Hunter might be repaying a favour.

[cxvi] Similar mass terror gripped the white community in the Congo during the 1960 crisis and in 1964.

[cxvii] According to The Rum Diary, Hunter wasn’t averse to the brutalising bit.

[cxviii] If you’ve read his memoir of the era, you’ll note that Larry didn’t usually go out armed into Leopoldville; if he was caught by happy-go-lucky soldiers, his getting caught with a weapon would mean a death sentence. So you can see how serious the situation has gotten.

[cxix] OTL. Larry Devlin notes that the Embassy staff were preparing to evacuate during the ’60 crisis, leaving all the important documents in burn barrels so as to be destroyed immediately if the Embassy was stormed. He also notes that if those barrels were lit, the whole building would have likely exploded from the amount of magnesium lining said barrels. I know, I’m asking the same question. ATL, Devlin knows about this, but has been spending too much time making sure Nendaka doesn’t get lynched to tell everyone else.

[cxx] There is no White House Situation Room ITTL.

[cxxi] I was originally going to have Sen. Fulbright as a character, but without the necessary biographical material, I thought better of it.

[cxxii] Of course, little more than a formality for Moscow, since they never stopped recognising Gizenga as the legitimate heir to Lumumba, albeit ensconced in Stanleyville and not Leopoldville.

[cxxiii] Remember, since Mobutu kicked them out, there isn’t a Soviet presence in Leopoldville. Only in Stanleyville.

[Basileus Giorgios]

Excellent as ever- no real comments besides I'd like to see more about the Portuguese in Africa, which seems a very interesting situation.

I think I asked you this when at the pub the other week, but I forget, so forgive me. What's actually going on with the Central African Federation? You mention it a couple of times in this update, which has jogged my memory. For someone whose knowledge on Cold War geopolitics is very limited, I'm afraid I have to be spoonfed this sort of thing...

[037771]

Originally Posted by Basileus Giorgios

Excellent as ever- no real comments besides I'd like to see more about the Portuguese in Africa, which seems a very interesting situation.

There will me more, I promise; I agree, it is a fascinating subject. That was partly why I put in so much exposition on the internal state of Angola.

Originally Posted by Basileus Giorgios

I think I asked you this when at the pub the other week, but I forget, so forgive me. What's actually going on with the Central African Federation? You mention it a couple of times in this update, which has jogged my memory. For someone whose knowledge on Cold War geopolitics is very limited, I'm afraid I have to be spoonfed this sort of thing...

I left it in IX with it slowly being dismantled - Nyasaland has been broken off - but the remaining unrest in Northern Rhodesia (modern-day Zambia) necessitates a longer handover, before it can also be let go. The Soviet Union sees much potential for mischief there, attempting to subvert the powerful Mineworkers union (copper being the country's most important export), but may find more allies in the Southern Rhodesian nationalist movement.

Macmillan is contemplating sending over a few regiments to aid the Rhodesians in subduing some of the more questionable (to Salisbury and London) nationalist protests, which would also double up as insurance as to when Southern Rhodesia is pressured into dismantling white minority rule.

[Archibald]

I've started reading this timeline - so far I'm deep into the June 61 events in France.
Just a word: frightenening. I couldn't helped thinking about another dylan song, used for a certain ATL movie
- the time they are changing and Watchmen.

Keep on the good work.

[Dunois]

Excellent update 037771, it seems that Austral Africa is in for interesting times during the next few years. Katanga can easily become an "African dragon" with its ressources and the right economic policies, though the hill to clim will be very very steep. Portugal's position in Angola is now even better, the Benguela railway looks like it will be up and running for a long time, providing further economic benefits to the province.

If the war overseas is somewhat less taxing for Portugal, the regime might just be able to butterfly away the Carnation Revolution or maybe to delay it a few extra years. Enough time to make the Portuguese position in Angola truly impregnable?