Laughter in the Shadows (30 page)

—T. E. LAWRENCE, Seven
Pillars of Wisdom

President Bongo was angry. Recent reverses in Angafula had not set well with the president, and he sent for me. When I arrived, he was talking to his chief of staff, General Bumba. A young artillery captain stood next to him. The president turned and wagged his finger at me and said, “Mr. St. Martin, why are you standing by while the Russians supply the PMFA with Orgues de Stalin? Why do you allow them to outgun our FLA friends? Why can’t you supply Rebello with big guns like 155s so he can fight back?”

The president didn’t wait for me to answer, which was fortunate, because I didn’t have a good answer.

“Since you won’t do anything to stop the Cubans and their Stalin’s Organs, I will!” he continued. “Two years ago the North Koreans gave us two long-range 140-mm cannons. When I expelled the North Koreans later, I didn’t give them back their cannons. Those cannons have a range of thirty-five kilometers, which is more than enough to reach Lunda from Ambrizio!”

He waited for this revelation to sink in, and then he went on. “Tomorrow I am sending my artillery officer, Captain Ilongo, to Ambrizio with the two North Korean cannons. When he gets them set up and begins shelling Lunda with these 140-mm cannons, the Cubans will run all the way back to Havana! I want you to go with Captain Ilongo to Ambrizio so you can see for yourself my big guns in action. Then
you
can report to Washington what we do to help our friends when they’re in trouble!”

The president was pleased with himself. He squared his leopard-skin toque and left with General Bumba. Captain Ilongo, who had been smiling and nodding while Bongo was speaking, remained behind.

After Bongo left, I saw that the young artillery captain was no longer smiling. He confided to me that he was worried. He hadn’t wanted to say anything, but he didn’t dare tell the president about the guns. He said that when the North Koreans left, they took all the firing tables for the 140-mm cannons with them. The distressed captain said it hadn’t mattered until now. They rolled the cannons out only once a year, towing them down Boulevard Bongo for the Independence Day parade. The two guns had never even been fired.

I understood why Ilongo was nervous. Without firing tables, there was no way of knowing the amount of powder and propellant to pack into the breech for the “maximum charge” required for the shells to hit Lunda. It was like trying to bake a cake without a recipe.

Ilongo asked if there was any way I could get him a 140-mm firing table, maybe from my military friends. I told Ilongo I would try, and I did. Unfortunately, by the time a firing table was found, Ilongo and I were on our way to Ambrizio.

The two big cannons rolled down the ramp from the rear of a Buwana air force C-130. Trucks were standing by on the tarmac to tow them to the front, where the cannons were unhooked and wheeled into place behind newly prepared revetments. Ilongo’s crews climbed onto the big guns and swiveled the long barrels around until they pointed toward Lunda. The two ironclad behemoths, poking their long snouts over the elephant grass, looked like mammoth Jurassic Park anteaters.

Captain Ilongo paced back and forth, glancing over to see if by some miracle I had come up with a firing table. When he decided he couldn’t wait any longer, he ordered “maximum charge” to the crew of the first cannon. When the charge had been packed into the breech, he gave the order to fire. The crew chief pulled the lanyard, and the big gun roared, bucked into the air, and exploded. Reverberations from the blast threw everyone to the ground. No one moved as the debris rained down over the area.

When the cloud of yellow smoke finally lifted, the carnage around what was left of the big cannon became visible. It was a gruesome sight. The remains of the crew and the gun sergeant, the lanyard still clutched in his hand, were splattered around the revetment. Captain Ilongo, his head partially severed from his body, was barely recognizable. A long gash ran down along the barrel of the cannon, which lay on its side, with one wheel still spinning in the air. Molten fragments, some still glowing, were scattered over the area.

We went out to cover the remains of Ilongo and his crew. The carcass of the cannon, wisps of smoke still curling from its serrated barrel, was dragged down to the beach.

Wally, a psychological warfare officer stationed in Ambrizio, arrived a short time later carrying a bottle of Four Roses. He proposed a toast “To Captain Ilongo and his crew, may their names be forever inscribed on that Uhuru headstone in the sky!” Local legend has it that the “long round” kept orbiting over Lunda until the Cubans left Angafula. It then dove into the ocean, resurfaced with newly sprouted fins, and guided the convoy back to Havana.

The entry of the Cubans added a new dimension to the covert war. The FLA and UTIA irregulars were no match for the battalions of Fidel’s finest. Their hit-and-run sabotage operations and commando raids against the PMFA and their Cuban allies were pinpricks against a formidable foe.

Some psychological warfare operations were more successful.

Wally

Like the catastrophe of the old comedy.

My cue is villainous melancholy,

with a sigh like Tom o’Bedlam.

—W. SHAKESPEARE,
King Lear

Wally had spent fifteen years grinding out propaganda for a number of Agency programs. He had tried without success for an overseas assignment and had never been able to break away from Headquarters. When Wally heard about Operation Uhuru, he immediately volunteered. His request was again turned down because he was “badly needed at Headquarters.” But this time the angry and frustrated Wally threatened to resign and take his talents to Proctor and Gamble, where they would be more appreciated. Headquarters relented, and Wally was sent out to run Uhuru’s agitprop program.

Wally set up shop in Ambrizio, and several weeks after his arrival Radio Free Angafula (RFA) came on the air broadcasting in three tribal dialects. The radio offered PMFA soldiers amnesty if they gave themselves up and joined UTIA or the FLA.

He also set up a parallel “black” radio supposedly broadcasting from Havana. Radio Havana warned Cuban soldiers to beware of the PMFA’s pleasure women camp infected with the incurable Sappho venereal disease. Radio Havana also urged Cuban volunteers to desert and smuggle themselves back to Havana to protect their wives from KGB predators.

One evening when Wally was out walking, a rocket slammed into his radio shack. Unperturbed, the next day Wally flew to Bintang and spent several days scrounging Le Cite’s black markets until he found a secondhand transmitter. Within a week Radio Angafula was back on the air.

During lulls Wally took long walks along the beach collecting oval-shaped sandstones. Working at night by Coleman lantern, Wally painted filigree designs on the stones he had collected along the beach. He gave me one of his hand-painted stones with the word MERDE (French slang for “shit”) filigreed on one side, a souvenir of “the world’s greatest goatfuck.”

One Step Forward

MiGs, Cubans, and Stalin’s Organs, backhanded Soviet responses to Uhuru, an operation beginning to stick in their craw. Even with FLA reverses at Ambrizio, the project was making progress. The
Christina
, fitted out with a Gatling gun and maritime mortar, was preparing for a hit-and-run operation against a Russian supply ship. Castillo and Bentavo, now attached to Uhuru, had recruited and trained two hundred commandos, who would soon be sent in against PMFA and Cuban targets behind the lines.

Sanchez had set up a provisional government, consolidated UTIA’s control over the Benguela Railroad, coffee and rubber plantations, and the gold and diamond mines. A third of the country was in the hands of the UTIA.

And Radio Free Angafula was readying the population for the creation of a united front against the communists.

Two Steps Backward

They were now only bizarre playing-pieces in an interminable game, of which he ended up forgetting the rules, who his opponent was, and what the stake was.

—GEORGES PEREC,
Life: A User’s Manual

Although the U.S. “imperialists” had been pilloried in the press for their support of mercenaries and anticommunist independence groups in Angafula, most of the adverse publicity had subsided. Then two Bongo misadventures, not of
Uhuru’s making, backfired and ignited another flurry of bad press about our activities in Angafula.

The first misadventure was Bongo’s attempt to capture the oil rich enclave, Cabrola.

Cabrola

Cabrola is a part of Angafula that juts into the territory of its covetous neighbor, Buwana. The size of the enclave belies its importance, its rich offshore oil deposits providing the primary source of Angafula’s revenue. An American company had offshore drilling rights in Cabrola, its wells pumping out 150,000 barrels per day, providing the government in Lunda $500 million a year in revenues, a large portion of which went to support the Soviet-backed PMFA.

It was a strange twist for an American oil company to be the primary provider for a Soviet-backed organization dedicated to bringing down two anticommunist groups backed by the United States.

The irony wasn’t lost on the national security adviser, who tried persuading the chairman of the American oil company to suspend royalties to the government in Lunda. The chairman refused, citing U.S. President Calvin Coolidge’s maxim, “The business of America is business.”

Cabrola had always been a thorn in the side of President Bongo, and its lucrative offshore oil revenues offered a tempting prize. The current unrest and civil war in Angafula led Bongo to believe the time was ripe to make a grab for the enclave. He secretly hired a hundred foreign mercenaries, many of them ex-members of Major Mike’s mercenary battalion, to capture Cabrola. If the raid succeeded as planned, Bongo would step in and claim the enclave for Buwana.

It all went badly awry, and the raid was a fiasco. The operation to capture Cabrola leaked, and Cuban reinforcements were rushed in to shore up the enclave. When the mercenaries attacked, the Cubans were ready. They routed the surprised mercenaries before they had even penetrated the outer perimeter and took a number of prisoners.

The “imperialist lackeys” were put on display at a press conference in Cabrola’s capital. Pointing to the prisoners, the governor called the attack “another example of interference in Angafula by the Bongo-American clique.” To emphasize his point, he held up a fistful of U.S. dollars seized from the mercenaries.

The second step backward came three months later when President Bongo, still smarting from the Cabrola misadventure, decided to send his two “elite” parachute battalions into southern Angafula to relieve Rebello’s forces besieged in Ambrizio. The “invasion” was short-lived and another disaster. The two battalions
penetrated less than fifteen miles into Anaconda when they came under a barrage from the Stalin’s Organs. Bongo’s “elite” battalions immediately turned tail and beat a retreat back to Buwana, slowing only long enough to plunder and pillage Angafulan villages along the way.

The international press once again vilified Bongo, the “CIA puppet,” for his unprovoked invasion of a friendly African neighbor.

Although Uhuru played no part in Bongo’s disastrous forays into Angafula, the unfavorable publicity tarred Uhuru by association and began the unraveling of the project. An American senator did the rest.

The Bells Toll

A perfect tragedy is the noblest production of human nature.

—JOSEPH ADDISON,
The Spectator

He was a senior U.S. senator from the Midwest and cochairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Senator Smothers had become disturbed and unhappy about the “secret war” in Angafula. Although he had been briefed on Project Uhuru, the senator believed his committee was being kept in the dark about the true extent of U.S. involvement in Angafula.

Senator Richards, chairman of a subcommittee on Africa, shared Smother’s misgivings and went on a fact-finding mission to Angafula and Buwana. The senator was accompanied by his aide, a UCLA graduate who had majored in African poetry and was ardent admirer of poet laureate and PMFA president, Augustus Sappho.

The senator and his aide were warmly received in Angafula by Sappho, who arranged for their accommodations. He spoke to them at length about his movement and his aspiration for independence. The gracious host also arranged for them to travel around Angafula, at least in the areas controlled by his PMFA.