Some Familiar Echoes in Financing of Angola Rebels

WASHINGTON —  One of the most mysterious details about Lt. Col. Oliver L. North is that our newest hero boasted he had fought in two of our nation’s wars: Vietnam and Angola.

That’s right. Angola.

Angola was one of those wars Congress never declared. Most Americans probably don’t know the location of the West African nation, the size of New York, California and Texas combined. But various evidence suggests that the Reagan Administration pursued the same strategy to help Angolan anti-government rebels as it did to help the Nicaraguan contras.

By failing to question witnesses about Angola, the congressional committee investigating the Iran- contra affair enabled North to turn the hearings into a test of the virtues of aiding the contras.

The question remains whether there was a pattern of behavior by the Reagan Administration designed to circumvent the will of Congress and the reluctance of the American people to enter into another remote jungle quagmire. Details emerging about Angola suggest that sneaking aid to the contras wasn’t an aberration or a lapse in judgment; it was part of a plan to use the Administration’s influence to sustain anti-communist guerrillas when Congress tried to prohibit official government aid.

The background in Angola is similar to Nicaragua. For nearly a decade, aid to Angolan rebels was prohibited by a congressional measure called the Clark amendment, similar to the Boland amendment that blocked aid to the contras . Despite White House lobbying, Congress balked at repealing the Clark amendment, passed in 1976 to put an early end to an extensive Central Intelligence Agency program helping two of the three warring factions in Angola. The Cuban and Soviet-backed faction prevailed and is the official government today. When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, CIA operatives were eager for another chance. “The CIA felt burned by Congress in 1976,” said a State Department source, and it was eager to try again.

The strategy works like this: Confidant that its lobbying would eventually bring repeal of the Clark amendment, the Administration appears to have used a three-pronged approach to continue helping the rebels. One, tap a network of wealthy individual Americans for contributions. Two, urge backing for the rebels from friendly foreign governments eager to curry favor and obtain U.S. arms. Three, set up or employ a self-financing service company that would generate funds for the rebels.

Part of this strategy may have been perfectly legal, such as soliciting private money from individual Americans. But its aim was the opposite of the aim of Congress.

Act I of the strategy--patronage by rich Americans--began in December, 1981, with the arrival of Jonas Savimbi, head of a rebel group called the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). The Administration’s first attempt at repealing the Clark amendment had failed, so after lobbying congressmen and newspapers, Savimbi visited California to rub elbows at a country club with the Eagles, a group of Republicans who have donated $10,000 or more to the party.

Angolan rebels made another pitch for private contributions at the World Anti-Communist League meeting in Dallas in 1984, together with the contras. One Angolan rebel fund-raiser said he met with North several times in 1984, and was encouraged to pursue private money.

Act II of the strategy--help from friendly governments--also started in 1981. Savimbi told me during his December, 1981, visit that his biggest aid donors were Morocco and Saudi Arabia. Savimbi cited Morocco as a key training base.

Morocco at that time was receiving between $50 million and $100 million in U.S. military aid, one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid in Africa. With its own war simmering in the western Sahara, it is difficult to see why economically ailing Morocco would independently give aid to Angolan rebels.

Saudi Arabia’s interest in Angolan rebels also was more than philanthropic. On July 1, an Arab-American businessman, Sam Bamieh, testified at the House subcommittee on African affairs that in the course of his business dealings with the Saudi government, King Fahd told him that Saudi aid to anti-communist movements was “part of an understanding” with the United States in return for greater Saudi operational control over AWACS, early warning planes supplied by the United States. (The U.S. end of the AWACS deal was negotiated by Gen. Richard V. Secord, then deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Near East and South Asia and later the man who worked with North to transfer profits from the Iran arms sales to the contras. )

In his testimony, Bamieh also asserted that in October, 1983, Ali Ben Mussallam, a former Saudi intelligence officer then serving as King Fahd’s emissary in North Africa, said that the Saudis gave Morocco $50 million to help train UNITA troops.

Act III--setting up private corporate channels--came later. Bamieh said that in February, 1984, he met in Cannes, France, with Prince Bandar bin Sultan (now Saudi ambassador to the United States). Bamieh says Bandar proposed that Bamieh establish a company that would sell oil to South Africa and ship arms and military support items elsewhere. Bamieh balked at the arms part, but says Bandar urged him to obtain expertise by working with Secord and Robert Lilac, a former Defense Department and National Security Council official. When Bamieh expressed concern about the legality of the arms deals, Bandar told him that CIA Director William J. Casey was aware of the plan. (Bandar says that Bamieh is making his story up because of a business dispute with the Saudi royal family.)

As it turned out, Casey may have developed a better arrangement than a company involving Bamieh. Southern Air Transport, an air cargo company that had done some work for the CIA in the early 1970s but had later fallen on hard times, obtained a lucrative contract to shuttle equipment to Angola’s diamond mines and carry diamonds out. The mines, producing valuable gem-quality diamonds, had been cut off because of unsafe road conditions caused by fighting in northeastern Angola. Apparently unaware of the company’s history, the Soviet- and Cuban-backed Angolan government in 1984 paid Southern Air Transport to run a busy airlift that kept two Lockheed L-100 cargo planes flying nearly around the clock, according to diamond industry sources. The Angola contract accounted for about 65% of Southern Air Transport’s income.

Flying over Angola is a particularly sensitive business. When I visited Angola in August, 1985, the air force chief said that Savimbi’s rebels have been helped by mysterious air drops of several tons each of weapons and ammunition. He said the Angolan government had captured one 10-ton drop that they believed to be from the South African air force.

As a result, alarm bells rang in Luanda last October, when it was discovered that the contra re-supply plane carrying Eugene Hasenfus, which crashed in Nicaragua, was operated by Southern Air Transport.

The Angolan government’s suspicions grew when it noticed that Southern Air Transport serviced its planes in South Africa, an odd choice because South African defense forces back UNITA in its war against the Angolan government.

Southern Air Transport said it was the only place in Africa to service the planes, which are leased from a South African company. Southern Air Transport also listed a number of flight destinations--in papers filed with the U.S. Federal Aviation Authority--located in a particularly intense war zone in Angola, far from the diamond-producing area.

Finally, FAA records show that the lease agreements for the L-100 cargo planes used in Angola specify that in case of a default on lease payments by Southern Air Transport, the South African company that owns the planes should notify the contracting officer at headquarters of the Military Aircraft Command, Contract Airlift Division at Scott Air Force Base, Ill.

Since the Hasenfus incident, the Angolan government has begun relying on other airlines to fulfill Southern Air Transport’s contract

The Clark amendment was eventually repealed in August, 1985, and U.S. aid to Savimbi and his Angolan rebels has become public. But it seems Administration help to the Angolan rebels started long before Congress changed its mind.

When North was in Angola remains unclear. But the fact that he calls it an American “war” underlies his misunderstanding of the fundamental issue involved in this month’s televised hearings: Congress declares war, not the CIA and not the National Security Council.