La Nacion Cubana
31 de octubre

"Conflicting Missions"

Cuban Documents Reveal Truth of USA's Proxy War in Angola

The National Security Archive posted a selection of secret Cuban
government documents detailing Cuba's policy and involvement in Africa
in the 1960s and 1970s. The records are a sample of dozens of internal
reports, memorandum and communications obtained by Piero Gleijeses, a
historian at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International
Studies, for his new book, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington,
and Africa, 1959-1976 (The University of North Carolina Press).

Peter Kornbluh, director of the Archive's Cuba Documentation Project,
called the publication of the documents 'a significant step toward a
fuller understanding Cuba's place in the history of Africa and the Cold
War,' and commended the Castro government's decision to makes its long-
secret archives accessible to scholars like Professor Gleijeses. 'Cuba
has been an important actor on the stage of foreign affairs,' he said.
'Cuban documents are a missing link in fostering an understanding of
numerous international episodes of the past.'

Conflicting Missions provides the first comprehensive history of the
Cuba's role in Africa and settles a longstanding controversy over why
and when Fidel Castro decided to intervene in Angola in 1975. The book
definitively resolves two central questions regarding Cuba's policy
motivations and its relationship to the Soviet Union when Castro
astounded and outraged Washington by sending thousands of soldiers into
the Angolan civil conflict.


Based on Cuban, U.S. and South African documents and interviews, the
book concludes that:
- Castro decided to send troops to Angola on November 4, 1975, in
response to the South African invasion of that country, rather than
vice versa as the Ford administration persistently claimed;
- The United States knew about South Africa's covert invasion plans,
and collaborated militarily with its troops, contrary to what Secretary
of State Henry Kissinger testified before Congress and wrote in his
memoirs.
- Cuba made the decision to send troops without informing the Soviet
Union and deployed them, contrary to what has been widely alleged,
without any Soviet assistance for the first two months.

Professor Gleijeses is the first scholar to gain access to closed Cuban
archives-a process that took more than six years of research trips to
Cuba-including those of the Communist Party Central Committee, the
armed forces and the foreign ministry. Classified Cuban documents used
in the book include: minutes of meetings with Fidel Castro, Che
Guevara's handwritten correspondence from Zaire, military directives
from Raul Castro, briefing papers from intelligence chieftain, Manuel
Piniero, field commander reports, internal Cuban government memoranda,
and Cuban-Soviet communications and military accords.

In addition to research in Cuba, the author also worked extensively in
the archives of the United States, Belgium, Great Britain, and West and
East Germany, teaching himself to read Portuguese and Afrikaans so that
he could evaluate primary documents written in those languages.

Gleijeses also interviewed over one hundred fifty protagonists, among
them the former CIA station chief in Luanda, Robert Hultslander who
spoke on the record for the first time for this book. "History has
shown," Hultslander noted, "that Kissinger's policy on Africa itself
was shortsighted and flawed." He also commented on the forces of Jonas
Savimbi, the rebel chief recently killed in Angola: "I was deeply
concerned ... about UNITA's purported ties with South Africa, and the
resulting political liability such carried. I was unaware at the time,
of course, that the U.S. would eventually beg South Africa to directly
intervene to pull its chestnuts out of the fire."


In this first account of Cuba's policy in Africa based on documentary
evidence, Gleijeses describes and analyzes Castro's dramatic dispatch
of 30,000 Cubans to Angola in 1975-76, and he traces the roots of this
policy-from Havana's assistance to the Algerian rebels fighting France
in 1961 to the secret war between Havana and Washington in Zaire in
1964-65 and Cuba's decisive contribution to Guinea-Bissau's war of
independence from 1966-1974.

"Conflicting Missions is above all the story of a contest, staged in
Africa, between Cuba and the United States," according to its author,
which started in Zaire in 1964-65 and culminated in a major Cold War
confrontation in Angola in 1975-76. Using Cuban and US documents, as
well as the semi-official history of South Africa's 1975 covert
operation in Angola (available only in Afrikaans), this book is the
first to present the internationalized Angolan conflict from three
sides-Cuba and the MPLA, the United States and the covert CIA operation
code named IAFEATURE and South Africa, whose secret incursion prompted
Castro's decision to commit Cuban troops.

Conflicting Missions also argues that Secretary Kissinger's account of
the US role in Angola, most recently repeated in the third volume of
his memoirs, is misleading. Testifying before Congress in 1976,
Kissinger stated "We had no foreknowledge of South Africa's intentions,
and in no way cooperated militarily." In Years of Renewal Dr. Kissinger
also denied that the United States and South Africa had collaborated in
the Angolan conflict; Gleijeses' research strongly suggests that they
did.


The book quotes Kissinger aide Joseph Sisco conceding that the Ford
administration "certainly did not discourage" South Africa's
intervention, and presents evidence that the CIA helped the South
Africans ferry arms to key battlefronts. The book also reproduces
portions of a declassified memorandum of conversation between Kissinger
and Chinese leader Teng Hsiao-p'ing which shows that Chinese officials
raised concerns about South Africa's involvement in Angola in response
to Ford and Kissinger's entreaties for Beijing's continuing support.

The memo quotes President Ford as telling the Chinese "we had nothing
to do with the South African involvement." Drawing on the Cuban
documents, the book challenges Kissinger's account in his memoirs about
the arrival of Cubans in Angola. The first Cuban military advisers did
not arrive in Angola until late August 1975, and the Cubans did not
participate in the fighting until late October, after South Africa had
invaded.

In assessing the motivations of Cuba's foreign policy, Cuba's relations
with the Soviet Union, and the nature of the Communist threat in
Africa, Gleijeses shows that CIA and INR intelligence reports were
often sophisticated and insightful, unlike the decisions of the
policymakers in Washington. .

By Especial Services of TCN