-Caveat Lector-
March 31, 2002
History rewritten, experts charge
By The New York Times
Recommend this story to others.
In the summer of 1975, with the Cold War raging and the memory of Saigon's
fall terribly fresh, the United States sponsored a covert operation to
prevent another communist takeover, this time across the world in Angola.
The effort failed to keep a Marxist government from taking power but ushered
in a long and chaotic civil war, involving U.S., Chinese and Russian
interests, and Cuban and South African soldiers.
Now, coinciding with the death in February of Washington's longtime rebel
ally in Angola, Jonas Savimbi, a trove of recently declassified U.S.
documents seems to overturn conventional explanations of the war's origins.
Historians and former diplomats who have studied the documents say they show
conclusively that the United States intervened in Angola weeks before the
arrival of any Cubans, not afterward, as Washington claimed.
Moreover, though a connection between Washington and South Africa, which was
then ruled by a white government under the apartheid policy, was strongly
denied at the time, the documents appear to demonstrate their broad
collaboration.
``When the United States decided to launch the covert intervention, in June
and July, not only were there no Cubans in Angola, but the U.S. government
and the CIA were not even thinking about any Cuban presence in Angola,'' said
Dr. Piero Gleijeses, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University, who
used the Freedom of Information Act to uncover the documents.
Similarly, cables of the time have now been published by the National
Security Archive, a private research group.
``If you look at the CIA reports which were done at the time, the Cubans were
totally out of the picture,'' Gleijeses said. But in reports presented to the
Senate in December 1975, ``what you find is really nothing less than the
rewriting of history.''
Cuba eventually poured 50,000 troops into Angola in support of a Marxist
independence group, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola.
The group held the capital in the months just before independence from
Portugal, declared in August 1975.
But Gleijeses' research shows that the Cuban intervention came in response to
a CIA-financed covert invasion via neighboring Zaire, now known as Congo, and
South Africa's simultaneous drive on the capital, using troops who posed as
Western mercenaries.
The Marxist party quickly defeated the United States' first ally in the war,
the National Front for the Liberation of Angola, based in Zaire.
Then, in a decisive but little known battle at the village of Ebo in November
1975, 1,300 Cuban soldiers fought a much larger South African column, halting
its advance.
The United States gradually switched its support to Savimbi's movement,
Unita, and continued to support it intermittently during nearly two decades
of devastating warfare.
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Copyright © 2002 The Register-Guard
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