Blowback - S6 Episode 1 - "The Dead Myth"

Episode Date: September 22, 2025

An introduction to and overview of our sixth season: the story of Angola, Cuba, and apartheid South Africa's Cold War showdown.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Tonight, the issues and the controversy, a thousand people have gathered at the City College of New York for a town meeting with Nelson Mandela. Nelson Mandela. In June of 1990, Nelson Mandela visited the United States. He had only recently been released from prison, where he'd spent the better part of 30 years for resistance to the government of apartheid South Africa, a government and a system which had not yet fallen at the time of this visit. During his tour of the United States, Mandela sat down with ABC News for a town hall discussion at the Harlem campus of the City College of New York, with Spike Lee, Harry Belafonte, and Stevie Van Zantt, looking on from. the crowd. In our time, Mandela is known and remembered as a celebrated, almost a political figure,

somebody on the right side of history. But his appearance at City College, again, before apartheid had yet fallen, it quickly turned combative, sometimes downright hostile. Some people questioned him warily over whether he aimed to turn South Africa into a socialist state, Some condemned his demand to sanction the South African government as dogmatic and hard-lined. ABC even teleconed in an angry Afrikaner who warned Mandela against nationalizing white people's assets and implementing communistic policies. One question came from Ken Adelman, a former U.S. ambassador and high-level advisor during the Reagan administration,

and a future member of the project for the New American Century, an advocate for the Iraq war. Mr. Edelman did not approve of some of Mandela's friends in the anti-apartheid struggle. Those of us who share your struggle for human rights and against apartheid

have been somewhat disappointed by the models of human rights that you have held up since being released in jail. You've met over the last six months three times with yes or Arafat, You have praised, you have told Gaddafi that you share the view and applaud him on his record of human rights and his drive for freedom and peace around the world. And you have praised Fidel Castro as a leader of human rights and said that Cuba was one of the countries that's head and shoulders above all other countries and human rights, despite the fact that documents of the United Nations and elsewhere show that Cuba is one of the worst. I was just wondering, are these your models of leaders of human rights?

And if so, would you want a Qaddafi or an Arafad or a Castro to be a future president of South Africa? Mandela's response was prompt and straightforward. One of the mistakes which some political analysts make is to think that their enemies should be our enemies. Our attitude towards any country is determined by the attitude of that country to our struggle. Mandela's response only invited

more hostility from questioners, not to mention repeated prodding from the host Ted Koppel. If I might just intervene with one point, I don't want to leave the impression that this is only going to be a Jewish blank issue. There are great many Cuban Americans in this country who will be just as offended by some of the comments

you've made about Fidel Castro and Cuba. No, Mr. Coppell, I don't agree with you. In the case of Fidel Castro in particular, Mandela indeed embraced the Cuban leader as a close friend for the rest of his life. After the fall of apartheid and the election of Mandela himself as the first president of a free South Africa,

Mandela appeared in Havana, demanding that his friend Fidel Castro visit his country. Before we say anything, you must tell me when you are coming to South Africa. When are you coming? When are you coming? I haven't visited my country to South Africa. I haven't visited my South African homeland. I want to be a country.

I love it as a whole land. What did Cuba, a tiny island nation in the Caribbean, have to do with the struggle in South Africa? Was it merely diplomatic support? Military aid? Sanctions against Pretoria? Mandela would go on to specify that it was not only diplomatic support

and military training that linked Cuba to his country. Much of the training it had turned out took place in the South West African nation of Angola, a nation that fought apartheid South Africa and its allies for the better part of 30 years. And it was Cuba, led by Fidel Castro, that sent tens of thousands of troops to defeat the South Africans and their allies again and again. The defeat of the racist armies in Angola, according to Mandela, quote, destroyed the myth. of the invincibility of the white oppressor

and inspired the fighting masses of South Africa. It was, he said, the turning point for the liberation of our continent and of my people from the scourge of apartheid. Why are you so keen that I should involve myself in the internal affairs of Cuba and Libya? No.

I expect you to be consistent. I don't know if I have paralyzed you. No, no, no, no. Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colwyn. And this is Season 6, Episode 1, The Dead Myth. Hello again to all of our listeners, new and old, and thank you for joining us for a new season, our sixth season of Blowback.

As usual, the first episode of this season, the one you, you're listening to right now, we'll be free for everybody. And we hope you join us on the other side at blowback. Dot Show, where paid subscribers can sign up right now and get not only the rest of this season, but 10 more bonus episodes and an ad-free back catalog of all our previous seasons and more. So go to blowback. Show and hit the big button that says subscribe.

And now, on to the show. How much do you know about Angola, the guy that you would be playing there? I don't know anything about Angola, but Angola's in trouble. This season, we are covering the vast and multifaceted Cold War showdown in Africa. A series of wars, a colonial and international, and a civil war in Angola. It began as a revolution against Europe's most backward empire, Portugal, ruled by the well-dressed, economist-turned dictator, Antonio Salazar. But in the scramble for power that followed the collapse of the Portuguese empire in the mid-1970s, the best-positioned faction in Angola was a socialist party, the MPLA. This was not welcome news, not only for its rivals, but also the C.O.A.

the CIA and South Africa, which wanted to spread its apartheid imperium across southern Africa itself. In 1975, the combined might of the MPLA's rival nationalists, foreign mercenaries, and South Africa invaded the newly independent nation. Angola, to paraphrase Charles Barkley, was in trouble. And it was friends thousands of miles away who answered the call. answered the call. This season contains many firsts. It's the show's first visit to the African continent. It's the first serious stretch of time spent with an old-fashioned European empire in the 20th century. And it's the first return of protagonists from an earlier season.

A three-way collaboration between the Angolan nationalists, Revolutionary Cuba, and the Soviet Union, against the CIA, foreign mercenaries, apartheid South Africa, and a certain ex-Maoist turned anti-communist warlord. Much as our season covering Cambodia, which was in fact a larger story about Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and to a degree, Thailand, This season is a constellation of conflicts. Angola's fate was deeply intertwined with its neighbors and fellow travelers in the wave of liberation movements across Africa and the interconnected web of allegiances and vendettas in the region. One key player in the neighborhood besides Angola and South Africa, and in fact the country that had South Africa so interested in Angola, was Namibia.

Wedged between Angola and South Africa, Namibia was once a German colony, which South Africa conquered and therefore retained beyond the aforementioned wave of independence on the continent. Namibia therefore bore more than a few similarities to the white minority rule in South Africa and Rhodesia. And so, of course, there rose up a resistance movement to fight this white occupier, the Southwest Africa People's Organization. known as Swapo. A lot, and we mean a lot, of the action in this season,

will be driven by the status of Namibia. Angola's progressive government, it turns out, would be sympathetic to Swapo and would offer it aid and territory. And that's before the Cubans even got involved defending Angola's southern border. Then you have Zaire, today called the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Zaire was one. ruled by one of the 20th century's most notorious dictators, Mobutu Seseko. Mobutu was a close ally of the United States in Africa. He was responsible for deposing and disposing of the deeply admired and popular Congolese leader, Patrice Lumumba. We'll see how, along the Angola Zaire border, an anti-Mabutu separatist group from Zaire, was also keen to make use of Angola's support and its territory to strike at Mr. Mobutu. Complicating things further, Angola's Cuban protectors had a real problem with it. The story of Angola is remarkable for the way it grew and

grew in a corner of the world, largely ignored by the American Cold Warriors, until it was one of the hottest spots of the standoff between East and West. We'll see how a small, vulnerable Caribbean nation out of both passion and pragmatism poked the American giant to its north, not in the so-called backyard of Latin America, but halfway across the world. But it is also a terrible story without a true happy ending. Just when you think you're hearing the end, the war revs up again. Hundreds of thousands of people perished in Angola. Those who did not die had their limbs blown off, suffering famine and dislocation. Angola today, like most countries, has many serious problems.

And despite the celebrated legacy of its war for independence and its subsequent war against invaders, its government has been of a very different flavor than that of the one in the late 20th century. It's not even in the same place with its old ally, Cuba. But to understand even a bit of Angola and why, for many, almost anything has seemed worth the price of peace, this story cannot be ignored.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, speak to you later. Okay, Bobby, go back to 945, 46, the sound bite in the alley, it starts, so why were you in Angola? Come! So, why were you in Angola? Money. Well, that's where the job's at, you know, that's what I get paid to do. It's hard to say what the one thing is that Americans might know about Angola. For earlier generations, it was probably coffee.

Later, it might have been the oil. Today, likely tourism. But by the 1980s and 90s, the widespread use of mercenaries there had certainly seeped into public consciousness. First, the enemies of the MPLA consistently maintained that the Cubans were themselves the mercenaries, selling their swords in the name of international communism. Now, this wasn't true. Cuba was not making money on its Angolan mission. In fact, as we'll discuss this season, the opposite was true. The cost was high for Cuba.

To the contrary, it was American and European mercenaries and glory seekers who traveled to Angola in the mid-1970s, looking to turn a buck fighting communists. For six years, Gary Acker was held in a prison in Angola. He was convicted along with other mercenaries at a trial in 1976. One of Acker's fellow mercenaries was executed. Gary Acker was sentenced to 16 years. How did a young American from a nice home in California end up a mercenary? These 1970s American Mercks were not especially well prepared,

mostly castoffs from a deindustrializing society. According to a Christian Science Monitor reporter who visited, them. They were, quote, unemployed bricklayers, assembly line workers or repairmen. A few were petty crime offenders, some were school dropouts, and most were marital misfits. Few had any army training. Okay, plan B, look, we go outside my network, Craigslist, Soldier of Fortune. Let's say we get lucky. I mean incredibly lucky and find a guy who's not an undercover cop or some kind of survivalist nut job want to be. You got to ask yourself, how good is good enough? But there were some more serious mercenaries in this conflict, too. Europeans, alumni of British,

French, South African, and other armed forces, and African professional soldiers as well, who graduated from other conflicts in neighboring countries. These were men who often fought on both sides of the war, particularly in the 80s and 90s, fighting one day on the side of the Angolan government and on the next, when fortunes changed, on the side of the rebels. South Africa was previously suspected of developing nuclear weapons. It already had a conspicuous presence of the UN because of apartheid and its armed expansionism. But when neighboring Angola and Mozambique became socialist countries in 74, South Africa felt, pounded into a corner, so it accelerated its nuclear program to protect itself.

There was another distinguishing factor of the Angolan conflict, the nuclear dimension. South Africa's nuclear program got going in the late 1970s and became part of how it projected threat in the 1980s. When the walls began closing in on apartheid South Africa near the end of the 1980s, what exactly Praetoria would do with its nukes was a live question. As Cuban troops advanced through southern Angola, Fido Castro gave clear instructions for the soldiers to travel at night, with anti-aircraft weapons, and to split up in groups. He wanted them, as he put it, quote, always keeping in mind the possibility that the enemy might use nuclear weapons, end quote.

It would turn out that Fidel had good reason to be, at least, worried. Although South Africa ultimately declined to use nukes, the country had at least six atomic bombs available and was working hard on the technology to make more of them and to make them even deadlier. And the leadership in Pretoria clung tightly to the ally that had helped the apartheid state become an atomic power in the first place. Israel.

South Africa's largest trading partner, a buyer and seller of weapons, and a state similarly premised on ethnic hierarchy, Israel was South Africa's not-so-secret partner in crime for the 70s and 80s. And near the very end for apartheid, when the entire world, including the U.S., had turned against it, South Africa still found a friend in Israel. In the words of a former Israeli ambassador to South Africa, quote, Link was very intimate. Three years later, the Soviets discovered a test facility. And two years after that, an American satellite observed a flash in the southern Indian Ocean.

It said this was South Africa conducting a nuclear test with the help of a certain ally. In Rock E4, he fought for his country. What the hell is this? Now, Dolf Lundgren is taking off his... gloves, and taking on an entire army, one man at a time, red scorpion. A couple seasons ago, we unfortunately had to break it to listeners, that the infamous line, this film is dedicated to the brave Mujahideen, never actually appeared in the Sylvester Stallone, Afghanistan, shoot him up, Rambo 3.

In general, Hollywood was just ripping from the headlines, and riding on a natural anti-Soviet sentiment built up through decades of Cold War cinema, rather than making a direct contribution to Operation Cyclone. But as it happens, the very same year that Rambo 3 came out in 1988, there was a greased up action film explicitly meant to build up the image of the U.S. ally in Angola, Jonas Savimbi, and serve as a thinly veiled piece on the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, and it was financed and supported by apartheid South Africa. Red Scorpion, starring the Swedish Schwarzenegger Dolf Lundgren, tells the story of an elite Soviet Spetsnaz soldier assigned to assassinate a rebel leader in an unspecified African nation

where Soviets and their allies have invaded. But when Lundgren finally meets the brilliant and tenacious leader, Lundgren abandons the evil communist empire to fight alongside the plucky rebels, and to drive the Soviets out of, insert African country's name here. The film was shot in Namibia, then controlled by apartheid South Africa, with tanks, trucks, troops, and mortars supplied by the South African defense forces, or SADF. The impetus behind the rebellion is this man. He is your targeted objective. The film's production company reported the New York Times, quote, advertised in Namibian newspapers last fall

for light-skinned Namibians to work as extras portraying Cuban soldiers, end quote. A Namibian paper reported that South African troops also had the privilege of playing extras in the movie. And the main producer of the film? Jack Abramoff, a Republican lobbyist who had made Savimbi

one of his main clients in the PR blitz for the Reagan administration's global anti-communist. crusade. Asked if the South African government had invested in the film, reported the Times. Mr. Abramoff replied that the money had come from, quote, normal film investors, end quote. The Times added that Mr. Abramoff is the executive chairman of the International Freedom Foundation, a conservative organization based in Washington, the group reportedly has branches in Israel and South Africa, end quote. Red Scorpion was more than just a box office dud.

The film became something like a lightning rod for anti-apartheid activism in the West, especially in Lundgren's home country of Sweden. The protests were part of the reason that much of the film had to be shot in South Africa's backyard. Warner Brothers, which was originally set to distribute the movie in the U.S., was unhappy to find itself in the middle of a sordid political drama and pulled out altogether. reported the Times, quote, A Warner Brothers spokesman in Los Angeles said Tuesday that the studio had ended its agreement to distribute the film

because of the production's South African involvement. Even Abramoff himself, as conservative Republican as they come, was reportedly disgusted by the Hollywood levels of violence and profanity in the movie. And it was probably the biggest bump in the road for his career until he was convicted of conspiracy fraud and tax evasion years later, when he and several Bush administration figures were caught swindling Native Americans for millions of dollars.

But if you can get over the foul language and the violence and end up with an open Friday night, Red Scorpion is one of the more fascinating historical documents of the Cold War Culture War in Angola. brutal, repressive and opportunistic. That's the way guerrilla leader Jonas Zavimbi is described, but he has the support of the president. In the pantheon of American allies and friends in the Cold War,

Jonas Savimbi cuts a distinct figure. As we've already heard, he was cool enough to get a Dolph Lundgren movie made about him. Educated by Baptists and raised in Central Angola, people around Savimbi noticed his singular. ambition from a young age, from the time that he was a student abroad in Portugal and Switzerland. Part of the revolutionary anti-Portuguese nationalist milieu that cropped up in the early 60s, Savimbi zigged and zagged politically for many years. First identifying with Maoism in the mid-60s, Savimbi's politics were then considered moderate by Western governments in the mid-70s. His faction,

Unita, or the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, drew its base from the southern and central countryside. But Savimbi's sponsors were not local. Though he was very much his own man, and Unita grew more and more to resemble a cult of personality around him, Savimbi had foreign benefactors. The most important of these was South Africa. But in the Ronald Reagan White House, Savimbi became almost an icon of anti-communist resistance. I hope that the American public, the Congress and the administration, they will understand that we will go on fighting because there is a resolve from our people to fight. Where do you get your aid now?

I think the people they are driving at South Africa. I think when you are fighting a war, you have to get support from wherever you can get it. All those who fought the war, they know that. Indeed through the 1980s, Savimbi graduated from fringe anti-commi hero to a mascot for the Reagan Doctrine, as well as a welcome guest at the White House. Magazines from Newsweek to the New Republic covered Savimbi's struggle and openly stumped for Unita, successfully lobbying for the group to get Stinger missiles and communications equipment and everything in between. But in the twilight of the Cold War, reports of Savimbi's personal brutality, and the practices of Unita, began to break through in the Western press. The hero became a pariah, and his more unsavory aspects, training and deploying child soldiers,

burning people as witches, reports of extreme sexual abuse, trafficking ivory and diamonds, and blowing up peace talks whenever he didn't get his way, all of this came to the fore. Yet after his death in 2002, Jonas Savimbi was still revered in far-right circles, and, like his supporter, Colonel Oliver North, featured positively in the Call of Duty video game franchise. Even now, all these years later, American diplomats who worked with Savimbi speaking glowing terms of his personal brilliance, Chaz Freeman, a former State Department official in African affairs, is one of those people. and he spoke with us for this season. So Vimbi was a polyglot.

He was swooned in German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Kio Vimbundu, Kimbundu, and Lengala, and eventually Afrikaans. He hated the Afrikaners, but he had to be supported by them. He spoke excellent Chinese. So this was somebody who, read four hours a day, regardless of whatever else he was doing. He had cerebral malaria,

which made him murderous. And so he did murder a fair number of people. Freeman added casually that he always made sure to bring Civimbi the books that he had asked for, lest he end up strangled to death. So when I went to see him, I would take a tin trunk full of books from Kramer books in Washington, D.C., and I paid for them to, I paid for them myself. It was a sort of an insurance policy against being strangled or whatever. Returning to the show in this season is the nation of Cuba. Back in our second season, the bulk of our coverage about Cuba focused on the early 1960s, where the island nation, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, narrowly avoided catastrophe in the nuclear-tipped showdown known as the missile crisis.

And as the Cold War drew on, Cuba remained a permanent adversary of the United States, despite some moments of promise for normalized relations. But the American government's obsession with Havana did not stop at the borders of the island. Cuba, itself a poor country, sent doctors to other poor countries not only in Latin America, but all over the world. And owing to what Castro described as a shared fate under imperialism, Havana consistently provided training and material to anti-colonial movements across Africa, from Che Guevara's famous and doomed mission to the Belgian Congo,

to Cuban support for Algeria, and another Portuguese colony, Guinea-Bissau. But also, by the time of our story, Cuba felt much freer to support revolutionaries outside, of Latin America, where the Americans were keeping a watchful eye and where many of Cuba's militant plans had fizzled out. Still, in the autumn of 1975, Cuba was faced with a critical decision. It was clear that without any help, the most progressive Angolan party, the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola, the MPLA, would lose control of Luanda, the capital, and the forces backed by apartheid would take over.

Cubans knew that their most important ally and trading partner, the Soviet Union, would likely oppose a direct intervention to help out. And Havana, which was currently in dialogue with the Americans to weaken U.S. trade restrictions, also knew that Washington would not look kindly on any Cuban troops in Southern Africa. Historian Piero Glehesus, author of the book Visions of Freedom, is the foremost diplomatic historian of this moment. And in an interview with us, he argues that what transpires was something like the pinnacle of Cuban idealism. And so this is really a critical moment for Cuba. And this is a moment, in my view, of the great Cuban idealism.

In terms of real polity, it was not in the interest of Cuba to send troops. In terms of real politics, it was in the interest of Cuba. Cuba, not to do anything, but Fidel decides to send the truth. And eventually, I read the minutes of a conversation of Fidel with the first group of special forces, elite troops sent to Angola. We're talking about 90 people. And Fidel spoke to them, and he told them, look, and paraphrasing, is very tough for me. to send you because I'm not coming with you. One single Angola, you have to fight.

If the MPLA loses Luanda, because the South Africans are invading, but start guerrilla war, if the MPLA stops fighting, and collapses, then you have to withdraw. And one of the officers who was there, who eventually became a friend of mine, Said this, I wonder, where are we going to, how are we going to do to withdraw? All the borders are enemies of the NPR, Zambia, Zaire, but they went. And they stopped the advance of the South Africans. In time, however, Cuba's leaders came to feel that if they won in Angola,

this would also help Cuba protect itself at home. Glehesus' book, drawn directly from American, South African, and Cuban archives, shows just how closely Cuban leaders were involved in Angola, from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, right down to Fidel Castro himself, calling in battlefield deployment orders. Fidel and his brother Raoul saw this fight not just as something for the MPLA in Angola, but also against South Africa. They saw, years before others, that the forces of apartheid were weaker and less clever

than they appeared. As one of South Africa's most famous soldiers later put it, quote, bloody Fidel Castro outwitted South Africa's generals, end quote. In the waning days of the conflict, Fidel memorably exclaimed that a South African diplomatic offer was, quote, a proposal written by idiots. They are not intelligent. while Raul used a memorable Spanish idiom to describe their enemy's position. We've flipped the tortilla, and things are getting rough for them.

I'm telling the truth, Doc, you've got to believe me. Then tell me, future boy, who's president of the United States in 1985? Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan? The actor? We've come across Ronald Wilson Reagan on this program before. In this season, we'll see his rise, first in the unsuccessful challenge to Gerald Ford in 1976,

and then in his triumph against Jimmy Carter in 1980. Reagan, now remembered by many across the political spectrum as a popular, unifying figure with his twinkly-eyed folksiness, even if you disagreed with him, was known in his time by both admirers and enemies as a right-wing extremist with a deep loathing of society's parasites and the grand

communist conspiracy that he believed had infected the homeland. And when it comes to his foreign policy, we'll see that in many ways this season is a sister season to our coverage of Afghanistan, where the Reagan administration took the bones of policy

from Democrat Jimmy Carter and assembled a much larger and more powerful Frankenstein that would grow and make mutate as the 1980s went on. Most people are familiar in one way or another with the term contras, either from awareness of the Reagan-backed death squads in Nicaragua, or the second half of the term Iran-Contra, a scandal that we'll touch on in this season.

But in general, one way to think of Reagan and his administration, not to mention the throughline of this program, is a repeating scheme of hiring, training, and deploying contras. not just in Nicaragua, where the term originated, but all over the world. Nicaraguan contras are just one of several anti-Soviet rebel forces receiving real or tacit support from the White House these days. In southern Angola this week, four of these rebel movements from three continents formed an alliance at a unique summit arranged by a lobbying group for President Reagan. Alan Pizzi was there.

The ammunition is live, the training is. in deadly earnest. These guerrillas call themselves Unita. Their enemy is the Cuban-backed government of Angola, which they see as a tool of Soviet expansionism. These American conservatives are trying to make Unita an American tool of sorts by joining its firepower with other anti-Soviet guerrilla groups. We've covered Cuban contras, the CIA connected terrorists who killed school teachers and hijacked planes. We've covered Afghan contras, the Mujahideen commanders, who collected concubines and ran heroin. We've even found worthy Cambodian contras

in the one-time enemy, the Khmer Rouge, who ended up working with America's allies to terrorize, torture, and murder anyone sympathetic to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. This season serves as another chapter in that series. In fact, one of our guests, author William Minter, titled his book about the US South African policy in Southern Africa,

apartheid's Contras. The Reagan administration, again picking up from the Carter years, would play coy about its tilt to apartheid South Africa, while building up Jonas Savimbi as Angola's chief freedom fighter, another member of the Justice League alongside the Contras operating in Cuba, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Cambodia. Quote, I will celebrate the man who rode a Trinity of Arkansas. awesome fates to the cause of our trampled race, thou healer, soldier, and poet. Chinua Achebe, in his poem dedicated to Angolan leader, Augustinion Netto. There is no contest as to which leader holds preeminence in the history of modern Angola.

Augustinio Netto was one of the original leaders of the resistance to the Portuguese. He had studied abroad in Portugal itself, mixing with fellow exiles, radicals, and revolutionaries, in between earning a degree in medicine. He was also a known and celebrated poet. Twice in the 1950s, Neto was arrested and imprisoned for his activities against the Portuguese empire, earning him a credibility that would soon catapult him to the top circle of leaders in the movement to free Angola from Portugal. As Chinoa Achebe put it, healer, soldier, and poet. We'll meet not only Neto, but his rival revolutionaries,

Angolan nationalists who, while sincere in their fight against the Portuguese, were wary and eventually downright hostile to any kind of communist influence or participation in the liberation struggle. One of these rivals was the master operator Jonas Savimbi. Another was the stylish firebrand Holden Roberto, whose organization the FNLA was a major rival to Netto's MPLA. The conflict between these competing revolutionary movements, not to mention the messy internal politics of the MPLA itself,

meant that Netto had a rough time at the top. Then came the war in 1975, and then came the coup attempts. Netto, possibly against his natural instinct, as a man of literature and healing, ruled his party with a ruthless logic that at times produced brutal repression of dissent. But for Fidel Castro and the Cubans working with Netto, Angola's leader was, without a doubt, the man to back in a contest between a big-tent progressive party, the MPLA, and the forces of the corrupt Holden Roberto, backed by the CIA and Mobutu,

and the insatiable Jonas Savimbi, backed by South Africa. As a Chebe's poem tells Neto, quote, Your feet learned their fierce balance in violent slopes. The early side of this season will acquaint us with the ways and methods of the Portuguese Empire, a latecomer to the European trend of imperial conquest, but an enthusiastic one, all the same. And at the top of that empire, ruling as dictator for over 40 years, was the austere, well-groomed, Dr. Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.

Salazar was born from the peasantry, but through a mixture of personal ability, cunning, and a lack of impressive competitors for the throne, rose through the ranks of the stagnant Portuguese state in the early 20th century. By the 1930s, after gaining credit for getting the dysfunctional government's finances in order, Salazar rode his sterling reputation into a coalition that earned him the top spot in what he would christen the Estado Novo, or New State.

Salazar was a reactionary nationalist, yet he kept himself and his country at arm's length from the currents of fascism and Nazism, sitting out on the Axis Powers during World War too, and even keeping his distance from perhaps his most similar contemporary, Spain's general Francisco Franco. Salazar was an odd duck as far as right-wing despots go. He made no attempt, like the fascists, to develop a mass politics or some modern ideological indoctrination. He despised democracy in favor of monarchy, yet he avoided any restoration of the old royal dynasty. He instead saw himself as the father of his people, protecting them from the rest of the world and from

themselves, all with the aid of a reactionary morality and a robust secret police. Salazar wanted a strong, solvent Portuguese economy. He wanted a conservative religious moral code to combat the epidemic of liberalism and socialism, and of course, he demanded retaining Portugal's grip on its overseas empire. The colonies in Goa, in Guinea-Bissau, in Mozambique, and in Angola. Ever the political plate spinner, Salazar balanced these old-school colonial ambitions with an alliance, the Americans. He once told his doctor, quote,

The Americans in politics are childlike. Their anti-colonial complex harms them. They don't have any real. idea of what is happening in the world, end quote. Yet, he was slick enough to get Portugal into NATO, a club in which Franco was not welcome, all due to Portugal's control of a key set of islands that would house a NATO airbase. As we'll see, Salazar, viewed by Washington as a brutal, backward crank, nevertheless used this kind of bargaining chip to tell the Americans where to kill.

Get off when it came to Portugal's harrowing colonial war in Angola. This season, we'll start our story in colonial times, as the rickety Portuguese Empire turns its southern African holdings into slave lands, coffee plantations, and other hallmarks of colonial rule. We'll see how, in the mid-20th century, this system begins to break down, and how Angolan nationalism bursts forth in the 19th. as liberation movements across Africa come alive. The battle for independence from Portugal crescendos in the early 1970s,

as the factions, the MPLA, FNLA, and UNITA, duke it out for control of a post-colonial Angola. After the Carnation Revolution ends the Portuguese Empire, the left-wing MPLA seems poised to run the government in the capital, Luanda. Apartheid South Africa, alarmed by this development, amasses an army to invade Angola. The CIA begins work on a secret program to arm the anti-communist movements, but due to a daring military commitment of Cuban troops by Havana, which arrives at the 11th hour, the South Africans are denied their easy victory.

The midpoint of our season is the start of a civil war, which persists for more than two decades. There's an insurgency from the south of the country, led by Jonas Savimbi, and supported by South Africa, the United States, and their friends in the infamous Safari Club. The Reaganers see a spike in support for Savimbi. Angola becomes another battlefield in the fight against Soviet communism, as Unita's leader becomes a fixture on the D.C. Republican cocktail circuit. But the party doesn't last. The Cubans and Angolans make their big stand in the late 80s at the legendary battle of Cuidoquanival, where they beat back a South African Unita joint offensive. But even into the 1990s, Jonas Savimbi refuses to stand down. It is only with Savimbi's death in the early 2000s that Angola, at long last, settles into some kind of peace. As always, this season you'll hear from a wonderful array of guests,

often people whose work provided the backbone for the show. We speak with Angolan scholar Antonio Tamas, historian Piero Glegesis, filmmaker Nagash Abduraman, historian Marissa Mormon, author William Minter, U.S. diplomat Chaz Freeman, and historian Justin Pierce. So if you want to join us, head over to blowback.com, hit the big button that says subscribe. You'll also get 10 bonus episodes, consisting of full interviews with our guests, and a longer narrative bonus episode about Israel's special

relationship with apartheid South Africa. And as a subscriber, you'll get discount codes for t-shirts, hats, and posters, and keep an eye out for this season's soundtrack coming later this fall. And maybe even another big announcement concerning the not too distant future. So, get to it, folks. Head to blowback. Show and hit the big button that says subscribe. And we'll see you on the other side. You know,

Ah!