Langley coordinated war strategy with BOSS, permitted high-level talks with BOSS officials in Washington, and sent UNITA some arms through South Africa. The CIA paid for gasoline to move SADF armored cars to help Savimbi. Plans were in process to procure a C-130 transport and some helicopters to be given to SADF for its UNITA supply flights. In October the South Africans asked for help acquiring 155-millimeter artillery shells they claimed were needed in Angola.

  Stockwell’s account maintains that Africa Division chief Potts entertained even wider cooperation with the South Africans. These were stifled by staunch State Department opposition. The diplomats upheld the Kennedy administration’s arms embargo on South Africa and quashed suggestions for major collaboration. State proved right in the fall, when journalists confirmed the presence of South African troops with UNITA. Instant black African revulsion toward the Western-supported factions followed. This dealt Project Feature’s political action component an irreparable blow.

  Ironically, one of the diplomats who closely questioned CIA plans for Angola was Frank Wisner, Jr., son of the legendary secret warrior. Another cautious diplomat was Edward Mulcahy, State’s representative on the Colby working group, who quietly threatened to resign if Potts went ahead with the South Africans.

  South Africa escalated its involvement in the fall of 1975, sending a force that included armored cars plus associated logistics. Task Force Zulu, its commander code-named Rommel (an Afrikaner, Col. Koos van Heerden), was more powerful than Savimbi’s entire army at the time. Zulu became Savimbi’s spearhead. Typically the South African Operation Savannah was passed off as a UNITA offensive and the SDAF troops, if anyone asked, as mercenaries. Savannah became the most successful military action mounted against the MPLA. Rommel advanced rapidly while another SDAF task force joined Savimbi at his headquarters. Within two weeks Zulu captured the major port in southern Angola and threatened the port at Lobito and the Benguela railroad, one of Angola’s few major transport systems.

  The South Africans were good fighters. With them UNITA gained much of Benguela province. Neto turned to his Soviet allies. Moscow increased its shipments, allowing MPLA troops to introduce potent artillery rockets during the summer and 76-millimeter guns about this time. The Cuban military mission became active in late August, planning to operate four training detachments, and Cuban advisers of one of these first participated in combat toward the end of October—a few dozen men compared to the Zulu force of well over a thousand. Lobito fell on November 7, four days before independence. Kinshasa newspapers praised the fighting abilities of FNLA and UNITA.

  The Zulu force represented one prong of a pincer attack toward Luanda. Roberto’s FNLA was the other. Stiffened by more than a hundred Portuguese mercenaries—their recruitment financed by the CIA—the FNLA advanced on Luanda from the north. Finally inside Angola, Roberto got a bit of South African help too: advisers and some guns in early November. South African sources report a small CIA contingent with Roberto as well. The American consul and all remaining U.S. diplomats left the capital at this time.

  Through exhaustive research Piero Gleijeses established that Fidel Castro decided to commit combat troops to Angola on November 4, the same day Havana sent a hundred heavy weapons experts that the Angolans had wanted for months. (Kissinger both greatly exaggerates the pace and timing of the Cuban commitment and wildly underreports the South African involvement.) The first men of an elite battalion left for Luanda several days later aboard two aircraft. Gleijeses believes Castro moved when he appreciated that South Africa had really intervened. The Cuban unit went into the lines defending Luanda from the FNLA. The MPLA and the Cubans blunted Roberto’s attack. The South African advance also stalled with ambushes set by the few Cubans facing them, who destroyed bridges and then defended the only other paved road to Luanda.

  Henry Kissinger cites a CIA report to the 40 Committee on November 5 as showing that the FNLA and UNITA were on the cusp of victory. But what he quotes shows a static picture: a list of a list of ports and provincial capitals controlled. The report itself notes the factor already beginning to swing the pendulum: the “heavy” commitment of Soviet equipment, armor, and trainers, plus Cuban combat troops. Secretary Kissinger adverts that “we” interpreted Moscow’s moves as harassment, not policy, and “therefore judged that Moscow would recoil once the United States asserted an important national interest.” Kissinger miscalculated, not the CIA.

  On independence day, November 11, there were about seven hundred Cubans in Angola. In an emergency airlift and sealift called Operation Carlotta, Cuban volunteers came in large numbers: the remainder of the elite battalion almost immediately (this unit halted SADF’s Zulu force), a thousand artillerymen in early December, several thousand more by the new year, up to fifteen thousand in all by the spring of 1976.

  Between the end of October and November 18, according to the CIA, more than twenty Russian aircraft delivered arms to the MPLA. After Ford and Kissinger appealed to Moscow, the Soviet airlift halted on December 10, not to be resumed for weeks, without affecting the military balance. There could be no plainer demonstration of rebel weakness.

  Estimated Soviet aid stood at $100 million in December 1975, and four times that amount by March. Weapons delivered included fifty T-54 tanks, 122-millimeter artillery, and MIG jet fighters. Moscow had always had this capacity but no reason to engage so deeply until its client seemed menaced. The Soviet-bloc response anticipated in Washington’s original deliberations had come to pass.

  In northern Angola the FNLA failed to capture the isolated enclave of Cabinda, seat of Angolan oil production. Cubans and MPLA forces began to push back the FNLA. Holden Roberto tried to raise more mercenaries to stiffen his army. Roberto offered a million dollars for a “parachute regiment.” Soldier of fortune John Banks received advances to recruit in England. In the United States the recruiter was David Floyd Bufkin, a former pilot and California crop duster, variously reported to have received cash from either Roberto or the CIA. Mercenary recruiting used the grapevine plus ads in newspapers. Bufkin also appeared on television and advertised in the action magazine Soldier of Fortune. Roberto’s “parachute regiment” ultimately received 140 British and seven American recruits, some with no military experience at all. Twenty-three arrived too late and were sent home. Another group was rejected as unsuitable.

  The Central Intelligence Agency engaged in a parallel effort to recruit in Portugal, yielding several hundred men for FNLA. Through French intelligence, which also contributed ammunition, four helicopters, and its own agents, the CIA contacted longtime soldier of fortune Robert Denard, who recruited twenty mercenaries for UNITA. Another forty went to UNITA from BOSS. Instructions prohibiting Americans from working inside Angola were spurned by a fresh army mobile training team at FNLA headquarters.

  Washington viewed the worsening situation with alarm. On November 27 President Ford authorized another $7 million for Project Feature. That exhausted the CIA director’s contingency fund. Any more had to come from Congress. Langley prepared options for the 40 Committee alternatively priced at $28 million, $60 million, or $100 million. Director Colby, now a lame duck awaiting replacement, recommended the first program. Ed Mulcahy of State personally carried the options paper to Kissinger before the latter departed on a ten-day trip to China with Ford.

  Later Mulcahy, unable to tell the working group just what Kissinger had decided, said, “He read it. Then he grunted and walked out of his office.”

  “Grunted?” asked Potts incredulously.

  “Yeah, like, unnph!”

  They were reduced to trying to figure out what an affirmative “unnph” might sound like.

  Kissinger is silent about this exchange. He writes that he backed the $60 million option. Ford approved the CIA’s recommendation. This revolved around “reprogramming”—taking money from one government account and moving it to another—which applied to amounts of less than $50 million and could be done with the approval of appropriations committee chairmen alone. But the $28 million gambit was blocked.

  In the Year of Intelligence, Congress had ceased to be a rubber stamp. It also knew a lot more about Project Feature than earlier secret wars—a result of the Hughes-Ryan reporting requirements. The CIA first informed both House and Senate members and staffs beginning a week after Ford’s presidential finding, though not the full eight committees required. In particular, on August 4 Director Colby briefed Democratic Senator Dick Clark of Iowa shortly before Clark left on a fact-finding mission to Africa. The senator, chairman of the African Affairs subcommittee of the Foreign Relations panel, feared the intentions behind the project. What Clark saw led him to suspect U.S. collusion with South Africa. He returned determined to do something. South African intervention and the collapse of the rebel offensives only sharpened Clark’s resolve. At just this time the executive came to Congress for the Angola money.

  Meanwhile public exposure, delayed by the secrecy of Colby’s CIA briefings, inevitably occurred. Congressmen had sworn silence on what they learned in thirty-five briefings from the DCI in 1975–1976. The first leaks appeared in the Washington Post and the New York Times in late September to no apparent effect. They were muted by the continuing CIA-manufactured propaganda, a case of blowback in which agency foreign activities affected American politics. Even afterward, in his congressional appearances, Colby continued claiming that no CIA weapons were going directly to the guerrillas and that no Americans were involved inside Angola. The operative words were “directly” and “inside.” Henry Kissinger lent his own hand, testifying to the Church Committee on November 21 that CIA involvement in Angola was purely to bring about negotiations.

  The subterfuge finally collapsed. On December 5 Ed Mulcahy came late to a hearing at Senator Clark’s subcommittee. The CIA witness, William E. Nelson, went first. Nelson, a Colby protégé, probably feared his own days numbered, as Ford had suddenly fired Colby a month earlier. Having spent most of his career in the Far East Division, including a long tour on Taiwan at the nadir of China operations, Nelson knew the downside of covert action. By December an insider could certainly view Angola as trending in that direction. For whatever reason, Bill Nelson suddenly admitted the truth about Project Feature.

  Then Mulcahy arrived and laid out the agreed version that minimized U.S. actions. Senator Clark confronted Mulcahy with Nelson’s testimony, revealing the lie. Capitol Hill buzzed. Legislation to terminate the project was the result.

  In 1994, in a debate waged on the letters page of the Washington Post, former CIA baron James Potts attributed the legislation to a complete outsider, the academic Gerald J. Bender. The true story revolves around California Democrat Alan Cranston, the Senate majority whip at the time. Cranston wrote an amendment in conjunction with his aide, William E. Jackson, Jr. They relied on Bender for expertise on Angolan history and politics, but he had no other role. Meanwhile Democrat John Tunney, junior senator from California, faced tough competition for reelection in 1976, beginning with the nomination. Cranston permitted Tunney to present the provision in his own name, and they attached it to the Pentagon appropriations bill.

  President Ford lobbied hard to defeat the Tunney Amendment. He made telephone calls, had newly promoted national security adviser Brent Scowcroft assemble a chronology designed to show how little had been done, and threw his congressional liaison staff into the fray. Ford directed Kissinger to postpone a trip to Moscow in part to oppose the legislation, which prohibited expenditure of any money for Angola not specifically appropriated, thus ruling out the reprogramming ploy that Ford counted on. After debate in the Senate, Tunney’s amendment passed by a considerable margin (54 to 22). In a statement Ford complained of the grave consequences of abandoning responsibility.

  Ford’s statement laid groundwork for a counterattack when the bill came before the House. But on December 21 a provocative article appeared on the front page of the New York Times. This time Seymour Hersh had details of Feature plus the story of Ambassador Davis’s resignation. Driven by more leaks, discussion of Angola mushroomed. Ford simultaneously engaged in a very public fight with the committees investigating intelligence over whether their reports and findings could go to the public, including a specific study of Angola from the Pike Committee. The Church Committee had recently released its report on CIA assassination plots, opening many eyes and increasing Ford’s political difficulties on Angola.

  As the House bill moved forward, the president pulled out all the stops. Press secretary Ron Nessen’s notes of January 1976 briefings indicate careful parsing of Angola questions, and marching orders to reiterate Ford’s position. On various occasions Nessen’s instructions were to claim that Washington knew nothing of South African troops, that there had been no U.S. recruiting of mercenaries (tightened to become a denial of recruiting Americans), that Congress had been fully informed on all covert matters, that he had nothing to say, or that he had nothing to say beyond Ford’s and Kissinger’s comments. When White House counts indicated probable defeat, the president himself phoned House leaders to delay the vote. Talking points prepared by Scowcroft’s staff show the Kissinger visit to Moscow now served to excuse postponement, and that a delay of even a few days was considered helpful for the CIA to move arms and for the United States to explore alternate sources. Ford got his delay but the Tunney Amendment passed the House. President Ford reluctantly signed it into law on February 9, 1976. So intent is Kissinger on shifting blame that he argues “with victory for the Cuban and Soviet forces in Angola, the geopolitical context for SALT [nuclear arms control] was gone.”*

  Calamity befell the FNLA mercenaries. Generally an undisciplined lot, they arrived to a dilapidated bus, ratty clothes, and tatty weapons, as Dave Tomkins recalls. There were no maps. The mercenaries were led by a self-styled “colonel,” an enlisted veteran of the British Parachute Regiment, who called himself Costas Gheorghiu. Unbalanced in the opinion of some, a good trooper according to others, he had only fifty or sixty men. Tomkins understood that they, plus some black troops with them, were the entire FNLA army in northern Angola. They never had a battle. He never saw a Cuban. Gheorghiu cut a swath of murder and rampage across Zaire and Angola, culminating in the execution for alleged desertion and misconduct of more than a dozen men by their own comrades.

  Others died as well. Among them was a real paramilitary expert, well regarded at Langley—George Bacon III, a Green Beret who had served in Vietnam in 1968–1969 and done a tour for CIA with the Hmong, using the agency cryptonym Kayak, in 1972–1973. Bacon received an intelligence medal for Laos but quit in disgust at what he perceived to be American betrayal of South Vietnam. He was a “cowboy” in the CIA tradition and enthusiastic about Angola.

  The mercenaries’ demise came when the MPLA decided to advance and Gheorghiu tried to ambush them. Many were captured including Gheorghiu, wounded, and three Americans. In Luanda the Angolan government put them on trial. The self-styled colonel, American Daniel Gearhart, and two others were condemned to death. Nine men received long prison sentences, with sixteen-year terms for Americans Gustavo Grillo, a Marine Corps veteran of the Battle of Hue; and Gary Acker, also a Vietnam veteran. The State Department barely acknowledged these men and made few efforts to secure their release. Grillo and Acker were finally freed in an Angola–South African prisoner exchange in 1982. Surviving mercenaries complained about CIA severance pay. Mobutu simply pocketed final payments given him for Roberto and Savimbi.

  The South Africans continued destabilizing Angola. Thoroughly disillusioned, CIA officer John Stockwell resigned and went public. With this fiasco so recently revealed, it is not so surprising that Senator Church made strong charges on covert action in his committee’s final report. Church also called Henry Kissinger a “compulsive interventionist.”

  The Tunney Amendment, attached to a specific budget bill, would soon expire. Senator Dick Clark took a hand and proposed permanent legislation. It would be reported out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee unanimously—highly unusual—and passed by large majorities in both houses of Congress in mid-1976. The Clark Amendment made the restriction an enduring one. In April 1977, after the changeover to the administration of President Jimmy Carter, another White House meeting centered on what to do about Angola. Afterward the CIA director went to Senator Clark with a proposal to funnel the rebels weapons through France. Clark would have none of it, and the episode embarrassed President Carter, who publicly claimed he had only learned of this covert action scheme from the newspapers. That proved the end of Angola operations for an entire presidency.

  The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence went on to do a yearlong investigation of Project Feature. In the spring of 1978 it concluded that the Ford administration had misled Congress on the scope of the operation, not revealing some activities and mischaracterizing others. Documented with cable traffic and official papers, the study confirmed that the CIA had indeed spent more than a million dollars to recruit mercenaries, that despite standing orders U.S. personnel had served inside Angola, and that the CIA had been much closer to the South Africans than admitted. The committee also singled out Henry Kissinger’s November 21, 1975, testimony to the Church Committee as especially misleading. The Central Intelligence Agency denied the charges and tried to show congressional overseers where it had briefed various matters. Colby maintained that the CIA had not conducted Angola the way it had Laos. Kissinger dismissed the inquiry as a smear job.