When War Is Not Meant to Be Won

Reflections on a proxy war and cannon fodder

“We had set ourselves well above and beyond the law, beyond the Congress, beyond the Constitution. We were lying to the President, lying to the Secretary of State, lying to the Congress about what we were doing.”
—John Stockwell

No Win

“Disgrace is too mild a word,” John Stockwell explained to the CIA Deputy Chief of Africa when asked about his experience in Vietnam. It was 1975 and Stockwell had just been named as Chief of the Angolan Task Force, the CIA’s secret effort in the only active war of the United States at the time, only months after the end of the Vietnam War. “How do you think I feel?” the Deputy Chief said in response to Stockwell’s accounts of failure. “Eighteen years of my life invested in losing wars in Southeast Asia.” Stockwell could not help but point out the irony of what they were embarking upon. “So now we’re going to start up in Africa?” he remarked. The Deputy Chief predicted more trouble for the Agency on the horizon with this new endeavor, including televised Senate hearings once the Angolan operation would be exposed: “We may very well preside over the death of the CIA,” lamented the Deputy Chief, who had tried to retire from the Agency but his request was denied. Stockwell wondered what the CIA was expected to achieve with the $14 million (worth $77 million today) initially allocated to the project. “The best we can,” replied the Deputy Chief, explaining that the White House’s direction through its sub-delegated committee was “to prevent an easy victory by Soviet-backed forces in Angola.”

“No win?” Stockwell slowly uttered, suddenly realizing the implications of the assignment. He was speechless. Another no-win policy, he thought to himself, harassing the Soviets as they make a major move on the world chessboard, trampling a few thousand Africans in the process.

Although born in Texas, Stockwell had spent years of his youth growing up in the Belgian Congo when his father was posted overseas. He also worked for six years in Africa with the CIA, becoming Chief of Station in Bujumbura, Burundi in 1970 before being transferred to Vietnam. However, he lacked deep knowledge on the current situation in Angola. He knew the broad strokes: Portugal had announced it was withdrawing from its colony and a civil war had broken out between three nationalist groups. The Soviets were backing the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the CIA were prepared to back the two other oppositional groups: the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA).

Stockwell went in search of information at CIA headquarters, walking up to the desk officer responsible for Angola and she impressed him with detailed answers to all of his questions. When he repeated Henry Kissinger’s line that the Soviets had to be countered anywhere in the world they tried to exert influence, including the Third World, she corrected Stockwell: “You are suffering from a bad case of ‘party line,’” she explained. “The Soviets did not make the first move in Angola. Other people did: the Chinese and the United States. The Soviets have been a half-step behind, countering our moves. And don’t put all the blame on Kissinger, the CIA led the United States into the Angolan mess.” In July 1974, the CIA had secretly begun funding Holden Roberto of the FNLA, without the knowledge of Kissinger’s committee overseeing CIA operations. The desk officer also believed the Angolan effort would only serve to discredit the United States; the Soviets and Chinese had already made public announcements of their support for their preferred factions, the CIA was operating in secret, and Angola itself was of little strategic importance to either the U.S. or the Soviet Union. The CIA’s proposed operation was too small to secure victory, but also too large to be kept quiet, she estimated. Stockwell was overwhelmed: “Okay, okay!” he said. “But what then do we do in Angola? What is our best line?” Noninvolvement, she proposed. Condemn any intervention from outside the country and work with the three main parties, as well as the Soviets and Chinese, to develop a peaceful solution. Stockwell took this idea to the Deputy Chief of Africa, who informed him sternly that it was not the CIA’s role to analyze policy, only to implement it. The funding of Roberto without the knowledge of the White House evidently not considered as policy-making in his eyes, that was the extent of any broader reflection on the nature of the conflict and the Angolan operation went into full swing.

The Grunt

Stockwell had already seen enough in Vietnam to form a negative view of the CIA. Perhaps he was missing something, he thought; Angola presented an opportunity to learn how decisions were made at high levels in the government. He would see the process from start to finish. Maybe his career would make sense. His new position as the Chief of the Angolan Task Force meant a seat at the table of power: a subcommittee of the National Security Council, the center of U.S. foreign policy oversight.

The process, as he was to quickly learn, did not instill confidence as to the decision makers’ intellect. He recalled the first briefings rolling out as follows: “Gentlemen, this is a map of Africa. Here is Angola.” The next chart explained the three rival factions in Angola. “One of them is headed by Holden Roberto, he’s the good guy. We’ve worked with him for years.” The reductive approach at conveying information surprised Stockwell; the presentation continued: “The MPLA is headed by this drunken psychotic Marxist poet, Agostinho Neto; he’s the bad guy.” By using these simplistic terms, the CIA “made sure the people understood,” Stockwell elucidated.

Proposals were surfaced indicating that American observers were needed on the ground in Angola, prompting one of Stockwell’s CIA superiors to surmise that a common playbook was being employed: “Here we go! It’s Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia all over again! Fifty Americans now, five hundred next month. Fifty thousand next year!” In order to make this a reality, Stockwell’s superiors approached Kissinger, with inconclusive results. At the subsidiary of the National Security Council tasked with overseeing the Angolan operation, the meeting participants were filled in on just how vague the direction was that they had to work with:

“What did Kissinger say?”

“He didn’t exactly say anything.”

“Did he read the paper?”

“Oh, yes. I took it to him myself just a few minutes before he left for Peking. I insisted he read it.”

“You mean he didn’t make any comment? He just read it and took off?”

“He read it. Then he grunted and walked out of his office.”

“Grunted?”

“Yeah, like, unnph!”

“He’s going to be gone ten days! What are we supposed to do in Angola in the meantime? We have to make some decisions today!”

“Well, was it a positive grunt or a negative grunt?”

“It was just a grunt. Like unnph. I mean, it didn’t go up or down.”

They tried sounding out different kinds of positive and negative grunts, as if reading a comedy script, but as Stockwell pointed out, “no one was smiling.” He sat taking notes as their voices rose and fell in their attempt to divine what the grunt could have meant. They decided against sending advisors, believing that inaction would be the safest course of action given Kissinger’s lack of clarity. Stockwell could not help but be unimpressed with reaching the highest echelons of U.S. foreign policy decision making, lamenting “the superficiality of what I saw. I saw fat old men dosing off in subcommittee meetings of the National Security Council in which we were making decisions that were getting people killed.” He likened their conduct to a student attending a 9:00 a.m. class, balancing their glasses on their nose to hide the fact that they were sleeping: “Their head’s nodding off and then you’d have to wake them up, sort of, to get their concurrence on something, explain something to them again.”

The Propagandists

LUSAKA, Zambia, March 11 (UPI)—An all‐woman guerrilla firing squad has executed 17 Cuban soldiers with their own guns for “rape and murder” while fighting to install a communist‐backed regime in Angola, a pro‐Western faction has reported.
—The New York Times, March 12, 1976

The Cubans announced their intentions to intervene in Angola, spurred on by ideological agreement with the cause of the MPLA. “We, on the other hand,” noted Stockwell, “were fettered by our secrecy and by the fact that our program would be judged wrong by the American people if they learned of it.” To change the public’s perspective on the conflict and to make the war be viewed as the result of Russian and Cuban aggression, one-third of Stockwell’s staff on the task force were “propagandists, whose professional career job was making up stories and finding ways to get them into the press.”

The propagandists got to work in four cities far outside of Angola, wining and dining Western journalists to influence the news’ narrative. The propagandist located in Zambia fabricated a story that was reported by Reuters and run in the New York Times on November 22, 1975: “LUSAKA, Zambia, Nov. 21 (Reuters) —An Angolan nationalist movement today reported the capture of 20 Soviet soldiers in the battle for the key Angolan’ town of Malange earlier this week.” Stockwell described the rationale behind the false story: “They thought this would show that Russians were running the thing in Angola. There weren’t Russian advisors; it wasn’t a factor and we knew that.”

The Zambian-situated propagandist was not done and his next major story had legs, lasting for weeks. “It was a good story in terms of the CIA’s propaganda interests,” Stockwell admitted. “He had some Cuban soldiers raping some young Angolan girls. Then there was a battle and he had that Cuban unit cut off and captured. And then he had the Cuban women, the victims, identifying their rapists. And then there was a trial and they were convicted. And then he had them executed by a firing squad of the women who supposedly had been violated, with photographs of young African women with weapons shooting down these Cubans. There had never been a rape. There had never been the military action. The Cubans had never been captured. It was all fiction.” Stockwell was aware that newspaper editors were not going to worry about running such stories, no matter how farfetched: “most Western newspapers are not going to be too skeptical of a Cuban rapist story. It sort of fits the general Western line.”

Fred Bridgland worked as a Reuters correspondent for Angola at the time and published some of the CIA-generated content, which spread into the local newspapers across the world that used Reuters as their main source for international news. Bridgland was not terribly bothered by the deception, believing it to be part of the trade: “Basically and to put it very crudely, you can publish any old crap you like and it will get newspaper room...I would say people are very silly if they believe everything that newspapers tell them and I think probably anybody who buys a newspaper needs a course on how to read newspapers.”

The Mercenary

Gary Acker learned about the Angolan Civil War in his local newspaper, the Sacramento Bee. After graduating from high school in 1972, he had joined the U.S. Marine Corps, hoping to fight in the Vietnam War, but the ground war was nearing its end. He had told his sister Cathy since he was 10 that he expected to die by the time he reached 21 years of age. When asked about the appeal of war to her brother, she replied: “I think it’s a lot of what you’d see on television as the American dream. I saw a lot of war movies and, really, it sounds glamorous to kids, and they make all these war toys and stuff. Plus, he thought he was helping his country.” Acker was discharged from the military for psychological reasons three years later after becoming corporal. He was the picture of instability, having difficulty controlling those in his command. He had even more problems with being supervised, with Acker saying he was setting aside a bullet just for his lieutenant.

Acker had no future prospects; he was described by everyone that knew him as a loner. On November 24, 1975 he read a newspaper article that offered the possibility of realizing his dreams. There was a shadowy recruiter named David Bufkin, with ties to the CIA, offering cash for mercenaries to join the Angolan Civil War. Little did Acker know that the CIA itself was in the midst of abandoning the cause, surrendering to an almost certain victory by the MPLA. By the time of his arrival in Angola in February 1976, CIA staffers had been pulled out of the country the month before, the Agency believing the situation to be too dangerous. “It was a suicidal situation,” Stockwell conceded. “We sent Gary Acker in a month after we pulled out our own people. The Cuban and Angolan force was marching forward with tanks and jets and a modern military machine, and it was being opposed by a...disorganized, untrained force of about a hundred mercenaries.”

The FNLA’s cause had been given a significant boost with $5.5 million (about $30 million today) delivered in cash by the CIA to Holden Roberto. Acker’s role as mercenary was funded through this CIA money with the prospective mercenaries being promised $500 (worth $2,600 today) a week to fight in Angola. The intermediaries employed allowed the Agency to deny any involvement. George H.W. Bush, then CIA Director, wrote a letter to the Chairman of the House Special Subcommittee on Investigations, stating that following a review of Agency files, there was no record that Acker had any connection with the CIA. The Agency later further refined their answer, telling the press in an official statement it “neither paid nor authorized funds to Mr. Acker or to other Americans engaged in armed combat in Angola. Neither Mr. Acker nor other Americans engaged in armed combat in Angola were flown there by or for the CIA.”

Stockwell explained how these denials were deliberate manipulations of the truth: “He went in on a truck, a CIA truck. We sent a shipload of equipment over there, most of it trucks and vehicles. He went in by truck. He was not signed on a contract by the CIA that, you know, with CIA letterhead. He was hired by Bufkin, who was hired by Roberto with our money and under our supervision. He was armed inside the country with CIA weapons.” Sending these mercenaries to Angola was the last gasp of a failing operation, and a pathetic one at that, according to Stockwell: “If you had set out to discredit the United States totally, that was the best thing you could possibly do. You’re dealing with the dregs of the earth, in terms of humanity and morality.”

Four days after entering the country, Acker’s truck was shot up by a Cuban armored car: “The first bullet went right through the windshield,” he remembered. “The show was over. Silence followed the first shot for the space of three beats of my racing heart and then the Rover started coming apart like a beer can blasted by birdshot.” Acker was captured before he had fired a single bullet. The government in Angola’s capital city of Luanda held a trial of 13 foreign mercenaries, mandating that the maximum penalty for their crimes would be death by firing squad. The prosecutor referred to one of the captured mercenaries as a baby, referring to Acker’s young age. This undoubtedly helped Acker to escape the death penalty and he was sentenced instead to 16 years in prison.

Stockwell had mixed emotions on Acker’s fate: “On the one hand…he did go to Africa to kill people, for fame and fortune, for adventure and money. The other side of that is that the CIA had a massive propaganda action going presenting substantially false information about what was happening in Angola, with the objective of creating sympathy and support and getting mercenaries and people to go and fight on our side. And Gary Acker was one young man who got caught in this march off to fight Communism.”

In 1977, rebel forces in a coup attempt invaded the prison where Acker was held and lined nine of the prisoners up against a wall, with guns pointed in their direction. “They were there to kill us,” he recalled. As Acker stood waiting to be executed and others cried in agony, he thought not of his personal safety but instead admired the automatic weaponry: “I noticed an MP43/44 German assault rifle from WWII and pointed it out to the others.” He failed to interest anyone else in this trivia and one of his fellow prisoners “just looked at me funny.” The soldiers ultimately decided against shooting the prisoners and after the coup attempt failed, the prison overflowed for months with coup participants, who Acker could hear being tortured throughout the night.

Most of the time, however, there was little to do and Acker would spend his days reflecting, locked in small cells as he served his prison sentence. He found it difficult to think of the future and could only aspire to living day by day. Acker wrote to his parents:

There is only the feeling of total solitude and emptiness, the continued striving and struggling to reach the lights within, the ultimate realization of being lost. Where is there understanding and meaning? Where is there truth and knowledge? Where is there reality and life?

The Outcome

As predicted, the CIA’s secret campaign in Angola was eventually exposed, with Seymour Hersh writing a piece in the New York Times on the operation. The Clark Amendment was signed into law in February 1976, barring any U.S. military or paramilitary operations in Angola. “We escalated the fighting and we lost, ultimately,” Stockwell concluded. “We discredited the United States, ultimately. We spent $31 million, altogether, in the program.”

Ideology mattered little as far U.S. and multinational business interests were concerned. Even though the United States’ official enemy, Agostinho Neto of the MPLA, was now the first President of Angola, what followed next reinforced the futility of Stockwell’s CIA task force work, as he explained the irony:

When we went in, Gulf Oil was pumping the Angolan oil. We forced Gulf to stop. The way we did this was by Henry Kissinger placing some phone calls and saying that he would open an investigation of international bribery by Gulf Oil Company…The fighting was effectively over in about February of '76. The Congress stopped us and forced us to withdraw. By early March, within about three weeks, Gulf Oil was back with U.S. technicians in Cabinda to pumping the Angola oil with Cuban soldiers protecting them from CIA mercenaries who were still mucking around in northern Angola. Now, years later, Western corporations are doing business great with Angola. David Rockefeller, Gulf, Boeing, Texaco has built a new refinery there, De Beers, you know, working with the diamonds. They all lobby in Washington, saying they have no problem doing business with the government of Angola.

Even with the Congressional ban in place, the CIA delivered an additional 145,490 pounds of weapons through 22 flights past the February 1976 deadline. In addition, the Agency offered payouts to those who had been loyal to the cause, including President Mobutu of Zaire, who rather than disburse the funds to rebel leaders, pocketed $2 million for himself. As a final indignity, CIA Director Bush asked Stockwell to prepare award recommendations for the more than 100 Agency employees who had worked on the Angolan operation. “Writing these commendations was the ultimate challenge of my ‘professionalism,’” he said with dismay.

Adding to his consternation, Stockwell learned about other secret CIA operations through the U.S. Senate Church Committee in 1975. Among the revelations were plots to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the plot that assassinated General Schneider in Chile, the continued storage of poisons against the wishes of President Nixon who had ordered them destroyed, and an electric pistol that fired poison pellets purported to dissolve and kill a person without a trace. He was particularly bothered by the admission that the CIA, as he wrote, “had conducted drug experiments on hundreds of unwitting American citizens by hiring prostitutes to lure them into apartments, feed them drugs and seduce them, so their activities could be filmed secretly for later viewing by pseudoscientists of the CIA’s Office of Technical Services.” Stockwell was among those in the CIA who felt betrayed by these facts, that he had been lied to from the beginning of his career in the CIA, when recruiters had denied that such activities ever took place in the Agency. “If we were still the good guys, the elite of the American foreign service, we ourselves seemed to be the only ones who appreciated the fact.” The deception extended into his own involvement with Angola: The CIA had reassured the Senate that arms were not being shipped by the United States into Angola. “We lied patently to the Senate about that,” Stockwell said. The Agency’s deception knew no bounds. The CIA, in Stockwell’s view, “does not hesitate to give the President its view of the world by lying.”

Stockwell finally resigned from the Agency in 1977. Asked why he had not done so earlier when he knew what was to follow in the Angolan operation, Stockwell rationalized that the temptation got the better of him:

“At the outset, when they offered me this job, then I had a choice of...what do I do, do I participate? Or do I resign? Or do I quietly lobby for some other job and let someone else run the Angola program? And my decision was that I was going to stay with the program because it was too interesting to see how does the United States get dragged into these things and how does the CIA conduct them once it’s in them. I don’t think anybody could turn down that kind of an opportunity. Just to know that it’s not what some newspaperman is telling you what happens when he doesn’t really know himself. It’s what's really happening, you were there, running it. So I decided to participate and in order to make sure that I remained on the inside, I remained a good soldier throughout the whole thing. I did not balk or fight it, until we got into phases that I thought were just beyond the pale, such as alliances with the South Africans and mercenaries, for example.”

He wrote a book about his experiences, entitled In Search of Enemies, published in 1978. The U.S. government took him to court and confiscated the book’s profits, as Stockwell had not submitted the manuscript to the CIA for review in advance of publication. Stockwell’s motivation had not been money, however. In two years, the book had earned him $20,000 (about $90,000 today); had he continued working for the CIA in those two years he would have earned over four times that amount in salary. Stockwell continued to speak out against the CIA in public for years, testifying before Congress on both Angola and proposed legislation affecting freedom of speech and the CIA. One U.S. Senator expressed disgust at Stockwell’s book and activities, calling him disloyal. Stockwell responded to him in person: “I cannot let anyone challenge my loyalty to this country. I have been awarded medals. I have served in three wars for this country. I was 19 years in the Marine Corps Reserve…The CIA is not the United States of America.”

For seven years, Gary Acker remained in an Angolan prison. The State Department initially refused to act on Acker’s behalf as the U.S. did not have diplomatic relations with Angola at the time. Eventually in 1982, he was freed in a prisoner exchange with two other soldiers for three Soviet soldiers captured by South Africa. After returning to Sacramento, he started a family and died in 2001 shortly after his 47th birthday.

Once while travelling on a fact-finding mission in Angola back in 1975, Stockwell had experienced a moment of clarity, standing on a hill after witnessing the near worship of Jonas Savimbi by his UNITA followers. They believed in the cause and cared for the future of their country, in contrast to the U.S. and the Soviet Union, for whom this conflict was unimportant. These thoughts caused him to reflect on his career: “I felt an almost mystical objectivity about the CIA and the things I had done, the pointlessness of my operations in Lubumbashi, the brutality and betrayals of Vietnam, the empty cynicism of the case officer’s role.” He could not think of a single operation he had been involved in that had helped to protect the United States’ national security. Later asked what he would do with the CIA if given the chance, Stockwell replied, “I’d close it down.”