Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror by Mahmood Mamdani Page A

movements that were opposed to MPLA: the Front for National Liberation of Angola (FNLA), which operated more or less as a surrogate of Congo’s General Mobutu, and the Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita), which had few external contacts apart from fledgling ones with apartheid South Africa. But more funds had to be approved by Congress since the assistance soon used up the CIA Contingency Reserve Fund for 1975. When Ford asked for $28 million for covert support of FNLA and Unita, Congress flatly declined, the Senate by a vote of 54-22,and the House by 323-99. By that time, MPLA was already receiving military aid, matériel, training, and advisers from Cuba, though there was as yet no large-scale entry of Cuban troops. Kissinger devised a second option in this rapidly changing situation: “in response to the arrival of the Cubans, the administration tried to raise a mercenary army, just as Johnson had done in Zaire [Congo] in 1964.” But the mercenaries were few, less than 250, mainly English, and many rapidly graying veterans of a decade earlier. The result was a debacle. They were inferior, some “literally lured from London pubs with the offer of easy money and high living,” and they were unable to stop the Cubans. Mutual recriminations followed “the execution of 14 of the mercenaries,” while forty-five “limped home [to London] on crutches and wheelchairs.” Seeing the writing on the wall, Mobutu deported twenty-two who just had arrived from London. Meanwhile, instead of fighting MPLA, FNLA and Unita took to fighting each other. Faced with an ignominious end, Kissinger opted to back a proxy invasion by regular South African forces. Gleijeses has summarized the internal debates between hawks and doves in both Pretoria and Washington and the contacts between the two capitals. In Pretoria, the debate pitted the Foreign Office against hawks in the defense establishment. In Washington, it pitted CIA director William Colby against Kissinger.
    One of the sharpest disagreements was recorded in the minutes of the National Security Council meeting of April 9, 1975. Three weeks before the fall of Saigon, Colby warned of the dangers of overreaction:
Mr. President, there is the question of how these recent events [in Vietnam] may affect the attitudes of other nations towards us. In general, the current debacle is seen not as a turning point, but as the final step on a particular path that most governments had long seen coming…. Adjustments were already being made…. Soviet, Chinese and other Communist leaders, for their part, will not automatically conclude that other U.S. commitments are placed in question, unless U.S. public reaction points to a repudiation of other foreign involvement, or internal U.S. recriminations are so divisive as to raise doubts of the U.S. ability to develop any consensus on foreign policy in the near future.
    Kissinger disagreed, sharply and immediately:
I want to take issue with the estimate of the Director of Central Intelligence regarding the impact on our worldwide position of a collapse in Vietnam. It was his judgment that the world reaction would be negligible, based on the fact that everybody would be anticipating what would happen. Let me say that … no country expected so rapid a collapse…. Especially in Asia, this rapid collapse and our impotent reaction will not go unnoticed. I believe that we will see the consequences although they may not come quickly or in any predictable manner…. I believe that even in Western Europe, this will have a fallout.
    Having failed to defend the line in Vietnam, Kissinger was now determined to draw the line in Angola. South African troops entered Angola in mid-October 1975, and Cuban troops followed in early November.
    The irony is that as soon as the South African invasion became public knowledge, it turned into a massive liability for itsU.S. sponsors. Most observers believe that a quid pro quo—a withdrawal of South African