Blowback - S6 Episode 6 - "Total Onslaught"

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

Carter goes Cold Warrior. Savimbi visits Washington. Angola loses a founding father. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to blowback. I'm Brendan James. And I'm Noah Colwyn. And this is Season 6, Episode 6, Total Onslaught. Last time, we covered what came after Angolan independence, how, in the first couple of years after November 1975, Augustin Yonetto and the MPLA consolidated control over Angola, ruling from the capital of Luanda. We saw the retreat of the invading South Africans, the effective destruction of Holden Roberto's FNLA, and the near destruction of Jonas Savimbi's Unita. We also saw, in the United States, the end of the Watergate and Vietnam era, how, as part of closing the book on those troubled times, Congress and Gerald Ford's White House shut down the various investigations into what made those times so difficult. troubled in the first place. CIA organized coups, assassination programs, blackmail, domestic espionage, and so on. We then saw the rise of Jimmy Carter, who was elected president with a notion of playing peacemaker in southern Africa. But events would unfold differently. The invasion by Katangi's separatists from Angola into neighboring Zaire, called Shaba One, tested Jimmy Carter's medal.

But Cuban and Soviet support for the new Marxist government in Ethiopia, combined with yet another Katangis invasion, Shabatu, these events brought out the Cold Warrior in Carter. All the while, America's actual friends in Africa, the white-ruled settler states of Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa, resisted Carter's and the UN's pressure for peace. In Namibia, South Africa maintained a military occupier, and a so-called Bush War, marked by spectacular acts of violence, like the May 78 massacre

at the Kasinga refugee camp in southern Angola. This episode will see how the Carter administration finally resolved in a showdown between the bleaters and the dealers with the seeming ascendance of National Security Advisor Zbiknev Brzeinski and the sideline of Cyrus Vance and Andrew Young in the State Department. We'll look in on the nascent revolutionary state of Angola, which is about to experience the loss of a founding father, as it continues to press for peace with the West and resist insurgency with Cuban help. And we'll also look at how white South Africa, despite setbacks in Angola, recommits itself to war across the region, to preserve apartheid's preeminent political power in Southern Africa. And finally, we'll see the re-emergence of two other familiar figures. In America, Ronald Reagan will challenge the status quo of Kissinger's Cold War de Tant,

and in Angola, Jonas Savimbi, emboldened by South Africa and other foreign aid, will reinvigorate the fight against Luanda. Two years ago, a violent black student uprising began in the South African township of Soweto and quickly spread throughout much of the white-ruled country. It was finally put down by the South African government, but not before many of the blacks involved decided that the only way to achieve majority rule was through violence. So they sought sanctuary and friendly neighboring black-ruled countries,

such as Angola, and began their guerrilla war. Bill Moyers recently went to southern Africa to report on the black-white confrontation. In the middle of 1978, Jimmy Carter's Africa policy, which had started out with such high hopes, was falling to pieces. At its first National Security Council meeting on Africa, writes Nancy Mitchell,

the administration had decided to avoid the moral ambiguity of the Ford administration and pursue peace in Rhodesia, the independence of Namibia, and the end of apartheid simultaneously. But by the middle of 1978, she continues, that pristine policy had been battered by reality. In June, at the request of the Angolans, Carter sent a delegation led by Andrew Young's deputy to Luanda to explore what was possible in the aftermath of the disruptions of the Shaba 2 campaign and the Kasinga massacre. Specifically, as a White House note put it, we will seek their cooperation in reaching a Namibia settlement. Progress toward internal reconciliation with Savimbi,

willingness to improve relations with Zaire and a withdrawal of Cuban combat troops, end quote. The cross purposes were evident from the start. The Angolan's, according to Pierre O'Glahesus, quote, wanted to establish diplomatic relations with the United States, and they worried about South African aggression. The Americans wanted the Cuban troops to withdraw, but offered no substitute to shield Angola from the South Africans, end quote. With the exception of the Namibia issue, which we'll come back to in a moment, no breakthrough was sought or achieved, in the words of a State Department memo. Carter's national security advisor, Zbignev Brzynski, had been patient.

A so-called bleeder who wanted to expand the Cold War in Africa by backing white governments and their allies. Brzezinski had been in the comparative backseat until now, with the so-called dealers, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and UN Ambassador Andrew Young, carrying out Carter's policy. The strain of holding these two divergent groups together was too much for the Carter White House. Hawks in the Washington Press Corps, like columnists Bob Novak and Roland Evans, complained that Brzynski had been, quote, ripped on Africa policy.

When the National Security Advisor returned from a treacher, to China at the end of May, where normalization of relations was preceding a pace, Brzezinski appeared on NBC's Meet the Press. During the show, whose contents were front-page news on the Washington Post the following day, Brzeinsky was asked not about China, but about Carter's Africa policy. In a notable departure from the diplomacy that Vance and Young had been pushing, Brzezinski suggested that the Soviets and Cubans should, should not be allowed to operate in Africa, quote, cost-free, end quote.

In his memoirs, Prisinski says that he should have declined the media request, which is curious, because as he notes, he ultimately won the PR and policy battle that it produced, with the editorial board of the Washington Post, quote, endorsing the position I had taken and praising the administration for developing a more coherent, and firmer posture. And policy drifted further and further Brzynski's way for months. In October of 78,

the National Security Council held its first meeting on Southern Africa and over a year and a half. A month earlier, left-wing militants used a surface-to-air missile to bring down Aero-Dia Flight 825, and the region again looked like it might go up in flames. With Carter, Vance, and Young, present

at the meeting, Brzynski pounced. The president's prestige is involved, Brzynski said. I do not believe we will be successful because the Soviets and Cubans offer radical military solutions. We are not able to succeed unless we face up

to the Soviet and Cuban problem, end quote. Seeing this conflict as a global one, Brzinski was at this time arguing for a policy of linkage, that if the communist world wanted diplomatic gain, on things like arms reduction or NATO bases in Europe,

it would have to make linked concessions in Southern Africa and elsewhere. President Carter gradually came to appreciate Brzezinski's position. The Soviets and Cubans could not be allowed to run roughshod over Africa by helping black liberation groups fight Rhodesians and white South Africans. Already, as we mentioned last time, Brzezinski had been working to steer aid, largely through U.S. allies to Jonas Savimbi and Unita, not unlike what he did for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.

Already, there were press reports out in the open that the U.S. was pushing to aid Savimbi. At the time of Brzynski's trip to China in May, the Washington Post reported that an obsessed Brzynski was pushing for a plan, quote, to permit the United States to funnel sophisticated arms and funds clandestinely to African guerrilla forces fighting Soviet-backed Cuban troops in Angola and Ethiopia. According to sources in Washington, Brzezinski wants the United States to shake free from the Vietnam War-inspired curbs on presidential power, enough to permit U.S. aid for clandestine operations in Africa to pin down the Cubans and limit their ability

to stretch into other adventures, notably in Rhodesia. End quote. There was some political backlash to this turn toward bleeding over dealing. Iowa Senator Dick Clark, whose name was on the amendment officially prohibiting U.S. re-engagement in Angola, sounded the alarm, telling reporters, quote, It is increasingly clear that President Carter has made the decision to re-involve the United States in the Angolan Civil War. But the results of the 78 midterms suggested the domestic apatom. for peace was waning. Doves like Clark lost their seats,

on top of new polling that showed rising hawkish sentiment among the American people. Although Senator George McGovern visited Luanda that December, the first visit by a member of Congress in over two years, his recommendation that the U.S. recognized the Angolan government no longer carried much water. By early 1979, writes Mitchell, quote, Jimmy Carter, who had been narrowly elected by a fragile and unlikely coalition, had no cheering

section. He had no political base. He and his team had to construct a new coalition to support every issue. And, in the distance, they stared at the next election. Rhodesia's new biracial government has been unable to end the long war with black nationalist guerrillas. In an apparent effort to show why the government today has. held an unusual news conference. It presented a captured 22-year-old who was said to be a foreign-trained gorilla. By late 1978, in Rhodesia, the white-ruled government appeared on the

verge of collapse, with left-wing militants supported by the Soviet Union, poised to take control. In Rhodesia, white South Africa could only do so much, as the Rhodesians were clearly on their way out. But in Namibia, the nation separating South Africa and Angola, the apartheid state still had the final word. Though the international community was hoping that it could be made to end its occupation of Namibia peacefully. Much of the pressure that the Americans were placing on Augustino Netto, the Angolan president, when they met with him in the summer of 78, was indirect pressure on Swapo. the Namibian resistance group fighting an insurgency against the white

South Africans. Netto, writes Glahesas, wanted to reduce the danger to Angola from the U.S. and South Africa by supporting a negotiated settlement in Namibia, and he was pressuring Swapo to make concessions. Neto faced a delicate balancing act. He supported Swapo in their war

against the South Africans, but, under pressure from the U.S. and South Africans, Africa, he also pressured Swapo to make concessions at the negotiating table. In July, Swapo agreed to accept Western plans for Namibian independence without changes, writes Clehess, a decision in which Angola had played a key role in pressuring Swapo to agree to settlement, according to a State Department official. But America's ally, South Africa, did not play ball. In September, notes Glehess, South Africa had flatly rejected UN Security Council Resolution 435,

which spelled out the provisions for Namibia's independence. Angola's foreign minister, Paulo Georges, remarked, dryly, that his government, quote, doubts that the U.S. and Europe will exert sufficient pressure on the South African government to bring about cooperation with UN resolutions on Namibia. The government in Pretoria simply rejected everyone's compromise of UN Security Council Resolution 435, which all other parties had hoped would finally settle the Namibia issue. Unilaterally, South Africa instead chose to hold elections for a rump government in Namibia in December, where Swapo, previously recognized by the UN as the sole representative of the Namibian people,

boycotted the election. And Netto, despite his earlier efforts to bring everyone together, would continue to support Swapo's war against South Africa. He was not optimistic, notes Glehassas, that negotiations would ever succeed. That winter, when Neto met directly with Fidel Castro in Havana, he told the Cuban leader that the South Africans, quote, are not willing to leave Namibia.

They want to stay there. And when Castro asked, what do you think Swapo should do? Netto replied, fight. I see no alternative to war. Netto was convinced that South Africa viewed Namibia not only as an end in and of itself, but also as a pathway to dominate Angola. And as Glehassas letter found in the South African archives,

Netto was right. In late 78, a new South African prime minister came to power. P. W. Bota, a heartliner close to the military establishment, Bota's ascendance was a sign that Praetoria would not relent. A state security council memo from March of 79 described the new prime minister's intentions well. Quote, the aim of the strategy of the South African government is to further the establishment of a well-disposed, or at least neutral government, in Angola, and to perpetuate its existence after it has come to power. Angola must eventually form part of a community of states in Southern Africa, end quote. This was total onslaught and total strategy, as phrased by the historian

Jamie Miller. It was an extremist Usher Them path that South Africa had set itself on, which, quote, became entrenched at the heart of the apartheid regime's understanding of its place in the world, its sense of self and its existential predicament in the region, where they would remain right up until the end of the Cold War." Until then, if you were a neighbor of South Africa's, it was apartheid's way or the highway. And although devastation like Kasinga suggested to Netto and Castro that more war was likely around the corner, circumstances were forcing them to draw down Cuban support at this time. And although Netto and Castro both anticipated more bloodshed, the two allies were, at that moment,

caught in their own debate over Cuban personnel inside Angola. The civil war that had followed Angola's independence smothered any chance of a flourishing economy, let alone political or social stability. The task of building a new country, based on the stated goals of the MPLA, among others, racial and social equality, would have been difficult in peacetime. In wartime, the task was all but doomed.

Quote, once the MPLA had secured its hold on the country, writes a story in David Birmingham. Disputes within the ruling circle over the nature of the new nation were many. Was Angola to be a radical country? with an ideology of egalitarianism, which broke with the traditions of class, race, and privilege that had been so prominent

in the colonial period. Or, have the struggle for survival been so disruptive to the elite's way of life that continuity needed to be tightly clasped and old institutions tenaciously maintained? The complete evaporation of the colonial-run sections of the economy at the time of independence had led to a vacuum.

Quote, Most colonial heirs, particularly in Francophone Africa, but to a lesser extent also in Anglophone Africa, inherited an entrenched legal framework, a functioning civil service, an internationally recognized currency, and an integrated army. In Angola, the abrupt departure of most of Portugal's soldiers, bankers, administrators, and lawyers left few functioning institutions which could be adapted to the new political circumstance." End quote.

One major symptom, or, according to some, one major cause of ongoing instability was Angola's liquid gold. Oil was both an essential resource to fund one's side of the war and a prize for those who won the day. Quote, it can be argued that it was oil which kept the several Angolan wars running for 27 years, writes Birmingham. oil revenue was the only source of wealth, adds Martin Meredith. Oil enabled the government to prosecute the war against Unita,

to pay for food imports for the urban population, and to provide the nomenclatura with extravagant lifestyles. End quote. It was also a contaminant. Western firms, both American and European, greased Angolan leaders with the potential riches on offer in the oil trade. quote, without any national auditing of oil revenue, adds Birmingham. The anger felt in the deprived provinces was all too understandable.

Ironically, it was foreign parties, some of whom were corrupting city politicians who were also arming the rebellious provinces and stoking a war of destabilization, end quote. As a result, the MPLA fell into the all too common trope of a ruling party, that offered its own members privileged access to the luxury goods and even common goods that the majority of the country would never see. Scotch whiskey, Belgian chocolate, and the rations of meat and poultry were available to the loyalists, both for consumption and for guaranteed profits from resale on the black market to the rest of society. In many parts of the country, official money took a backseat to the barter currency of eggs

and 24 packs of lager beer. Meanwhile, the fighting itself continued to disfigure independent Angola. Quote, young men were constantly liable to be conscripted or kidnapped to serve in Angola's rival armies. And it was therefore women, children, and old men who were left to fend for themselves, inventing ever more imaginative economic strategies based on small-scale farming and petty barter, end quote.

the masses were not only subject to starvation as a tool of war, but a familiar weapon from our last season in Indochina. Landmines, the proliferation of which Birmingham compares to Cambodia's killing fields. One cruel way of manipulating civilian populations was by laying minefields around farmland and water sources. Women going out to their field or children going down to the stream were liable to have their legs blown off. The strategy maimed rather than killed many victims, leaving the opposing side in the war with the cost of feeding and caring for its crippled citizens." As there was a rising conflict in southern Angola along the Namibian border,

something different was unfolding elsewhere in the country, to the north, as a result of the peace with Mobutu and Zaire after the events of Shabatou in 1978. Long-exiled Angolan's living in Zaire had returned to their ancestral towns and villages. These returnees, who would be labeled pejoratively as Zairotas, performed the rather thankless role of supplementing the shaky state-run economy with the churn of private markets. The returnees from Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire, writes Birmingham, quote, identified opportunities which made them economically indispensable, though not popular, when they became Luanda's new trading community.

The drive commonly possessed by migrants with no access to landed property or salary jobs made entry into the risk-taking crafts and trades the only option. Officially, the MPLA looked askance at the rapid rise of the private enterprises which these Northerners established. In practice, however, welcoming the scarce skills in business offered by returnees was an important survival strategy for urban. dwellers, whose needs could not be satisfied by the poorly supplied and inadequately staffed official agencies.

End quote. None of this made for a sustainable situation, and for as long as it rained in the coming decade, it would slowly eat away at the credibility of the once inspiring ethos of the MPLA. Our segment three tonight takes us inside Angola. an African country which is enjoying some support from Cuban soldiers and is fighting a civil war with a large, well-equipped opposition force. The story requires the knowledge of some names.

The leftist government of President Augustino-NATO used to be called the MPLA and is still called the MPLA by its enemies. Its enemies are called Unita and are active in the southern part of the country. Their leader is Jonas Savimbi. He is not an easy man to find, but Mike Nicholson of Britain's independent television news walked 1,500 miles to get the following story. After his late 1976 op-ed in the New York Times, Jonas Savimbi and Unita didn't get much play in the United States. But when they did get attention, it mainly reflected just how little American journalists knew about Africa.

A series by the aforementioned columnists Novak and Evans are case in point. In two of their articles, notes political scientist Elaine Windrich. Savimbi was called Lucas instead of Jonas, and in the first, his Yanita forces were credited with having quadrupled their numbers and killed some 3,000 Cubans since their overwhelming military defeat only the year before. And quote. And despite the lack of oxygen in the press, Yenita was getting help from its friends in Pretoria.

By September 1978, writes journalist Fred Bridgeland, who was very close to the Unita leadership, quote, South Africa was moving brand new Mercedes trucks, diesel fuel, ammunition, and tinned and dried food across the border to the guerrillas, who had set up a new central base in southeast Angola in a vast wilderness area, teeming with wildlife, and laced with pristine rivers and swamps, end quote. By March 1979, writes ex-Guardian editor, Victoria Britain, quote, The South Africans were ready to create Jamba, the Potemkin village in the southeast corner of Angola, which was to be Savimbi's headquarters for 13 years. It was a desolate place, with no agricultural base and no convenient water supply,

chosen entirely for its geographical location. as far from Luanda as possible and within easy reach of the South African bases in occupied Namibia. Professor Antonio Thomas told us more about South Africa's strategy here, with Savimbi's Unita as their ace in the whole. South Africa just, you know, start to support Unita, because then Unita was actually occupying, you know, the South-eastern part of Angola, in a place called Jamba

because they had created their bases there, right? The Tunica called Terrash Leveres in Angola, free lands of Angola, right? And the idea was to create like a sort of alternative capital.

In South Africa, they had like, you know, a whole way to fight, you know, because the idea was to destroy the cells of insurgencies and so on, you know, through killings,

you know, through cross-border operations, bombs, assassination, and so on. It was a whole operation, you know, in order to disrupt either, you know, either the nationalism, the emergence of nationalism in Namibia or even to disrupt, you know, the fight against apartheid and for democratization of South Africa.

Savimbi boasts 12,000 men under arms, and he says he has enough ammunition in caches inside the country to last him at least another three years. Many of Unita officers have been trained in Morocco, especially in the use of the French-designed anti-tank gun, which Unita say they've successfully used against Cuban tanks. Unita's biggest problem outside of Angola is the United States, who Sabimbi accuses of putting pressure on his allies to drop their support. of him. If the Americans will decide, we'll embark upon a policy of putting pressure on our allies so that they cannot give us support, I think it's wrong. It's wrong because the Americans, they are not on control of the situation in Angola yet. Later that year, writes Windritch, Savimbi went on a publicity tour, organized by his American supporters, in an effort to rectify media neglect, end quote. Though the Carter administration was direct,

a acting aid to Savimbi in private, they declined to meet with him on his publicity tour, which may have invited uncomfortable questions regarding any further support for him post-Clark amendment. Instead, the Angolan insurgency leader met with other D.C. heavyweights. In meetings scheduled by the group's Freedom House and Social Democrats USA, Savimbi met Democratic and Republican congressmen, like Scoop Jackson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, as well as Henry Kissinger, ex-defense secretary James Schlesinger, and the infamous hawk, Alexander Hague. Noting the uniformly hawkish profile of the people Savimbi met with,

the mainstream media was cool on his DC trip, also sensing the controversy of hyping up any war leader backed by apartheid South Africa. But Windritch notes that, quote, the reports on Savimbi's visit in the right-wing media were a different matter altogether, combining adulation with credulity. Commentary, the National Catholic Register, the American Spectator, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, all sang his praises.

Quote, despite the snub from the Carter administration and the indifference of most of the mainstream media to Savimbi's appeal for understanding, the 1979 visit did result in the establishment of ties with the right-wing lobby groups and their media that were to play a key role in the 1980s, end quote. Meeting with him soon after his U.S. visit, Fred Bridgland depicts a Savimbi already quite effective at playing the Cold War hits. Quote, Savimbi hoped his message had been reinforced in American eyes by the major event of that December, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Savimbi argued that the weakness of the U.S. response in Angola in 1975 to the Cuban-S.-Soviet takeover

had encouraged subsequent Cuban-Soviet boldness in Ethiopia, Vietnamese confidence in invading Cambodia, and now Soviet's certainty that its move into Afghanistan would not be opposed. I don't believe Russia will give up Afghanistan, Savimbi said directly. the West will have to combat this kind of Russian strategic advance by unconventional means, and we are one of the peoples who can do it, end quote. But this was not all that Unita could do. Already at this early stage, writes Victoria Britain, there were reports of wanton destruction by Unita forces,

in addition to the mass theft of children. Quote, tens of thousands of youths were systematic, kidnapped from towns and villages to form the new Yenita army in the empty lands of the South, and thousands of young girls taken with them were to form the basis of sexual and family life in an almost unpopulated place. This vast movement of population was a phenomenon unseen and unheard of by outsiders. And even in Angola itself, the weak new state did not know much of what happened in remote areas. The serious weakness of the MPLA in communicating with the rest of the world began to emerge as a key factor in the distortion of Angola's realities, and one which

would dog the regime for 20 years and hand the propaganda specialists of the CIA and Pretoria a blank sheet on which to write their version of Angola's story. Savimbi's story of a typical day in 1979 expressed to Bridgeland was much more sanitized than the chaos and kidnapping described above. Savimbi rose early and after a 5.30 a.m. cabinet meeting and subsequent inspection of patrols, he would deal with his correspondence, thanking China or one of the, quote, several Arab and black states that back us, end quote. He would work ceaselessly through the day, say,

saying, quote, I stop at one or two in the morning, and when I go to bed, I am so tired, I don't need a pillow to sleep. After some weeks, I'm exhausted. Then I like to go hunting for two days. If I kill an elephant, outside of one of those conservation zones, we have meat for 500 for a week. We dry it in the sun or by fires. The hunts are my only relaxation, the only time I can read my books. I've just finished Field Marshal Montgomery's autobiography. He said leadership is about having the capacity and the will to rally men for a common cause. I like that very much, end quote. Savimbi's personal demeanor was highly impressive to Western audiences. We spoke with Chas Freeman, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia,

who met with Savimbi multiple times in the 1980s while working as a diplomat on Africa matters. And he gave us an interesting description of the man with his own unverified theory of Savimbi's apparent pensioned for violence. He had cerebral malaria, which made him murderous. And so he did murder a fair number of people. So when I went to see him, I would take a tin trunk full of books from Kramer books in Washington, D.C., and give them to, I pay for them myself.

It was a sort of an insurance policy against being strangled or whatever, and he was always very grateful. In early 1979, Augustine Yonetto visited Havana for a multi-day meeting with Fidel Castro. By now, the Cuban and Angolan governments had achieved a distinct stability in their relationship. Quote, the Cubans bent over backwards to treat Neto with respect and deference, writes Glehesas. Even when provoked, they did not threaten to withdraw their support on which Netto depended. This is rare in international relations, end quote. In Havana, the depth of this relationship was tested. Both leaders agreed that a drawdown, not a total withdrawal, of Cuban personnel, was necessary.

There remained the risk that Angolan natives could grow to resent the Cuban presence and influence over their nascent country and society. But more significant was the American pressure. Carter had made it clear that as long as Cubans stuck around, the MPLA would be frozen out diplomatically. In the next few months after this Havana tete-a-tete, writes Glahesas, quote, the two governments agreed to reduce the number of Cuban aid workers, which decreased from almost 7,000 in early 1979 to less than 4,000 by late 1980. In their stead came Western experts, particularly Portuguese. After three years in Angola, Cuba trimmed its sails, end quote.

Starting in January, Cuban troops ceased participating in counter-insurgency operations against Unita. The civilian mission disappeared, to use Glehessus' word, and the actual Angolan military took on more responsibility. The sequence of events led to something of a siege mentality, as Netto and his comrades still felt a threat from hostile South Africa and didn't quite trust the truce with Zaire. But by the autumn of 1979, Augustino Netto was in no shape to lead Angola any longer. He was in poor health, a fact that he confessed to the Cubans and the Soviets at his home in August.

I have to receive you here, and not in my office, because my doctors have recommended that I stay in bed as much as possible. He had cancer. The conversation with his Cuban and Soviet partners was brief. He was, as he had been for months, cagey about the drawdown of Cuban troops, and he was adamant that peace could only be achieved when South Africa was finally out of Namibia, and therefore that Angola and its friends must keep supporting Swapo there. He died just over a week later. The Marxist government of Angola was left without its strong man president today, and already harassed by an active guerrilla movement, its future is considered uncertain.

President Agostino Netto, one of the Soviet Union's best friends in Africa, died in Moscow after undergoing surgery for cancer of the pancreas. The 56-year-old poet and physician became president in 1975 after gaining independence from Portugal and then winning a three-way civil war. Quote, the person most apt to succeed him, writes Glehesus, the best prepared intellectually, and a man of extreme probity, was Lucio Lara. Lara, however, was a light-skinned mulatto, and most Angolan's distrusted and resented the mulattoes. Lara withdrew from consideration.

Instead, the MPLA leaders chose 37-year-old Jose Eduardo de Santos, who was a close aid of Netto and black. He was a compromise candidate, the lowest common denominator on whom all could agree, end quote. Netto would be remembered as a hero of independence. In the years that followed, writes journalist Jeremy Harding, wherever you went in Luanda, Netto's name was held in respect. He was a mythical figure like Kwame and Krumah, Amilcar Cabral, Patrice Lumumba, or Nelson Mandela. If he was mentioned at the end of a long evening,

inveterate drunks would straighten their backs and blink with an air of offended surprise at the glass they'd. had just rained. Even before Netto's death, the MPLA had fallen far from the kind of movement it had been years earlier, according to Piero Glehesas. But the historian told us,

there was one essential principle of Nettos that the MPLA did continue. After 76, the MPLA deteriorated as a movement became corrupt, repressive, etc., etc. But one thing

they remain loyal to this idea of NATO. Once the MPLA is won the civil war, NATO offered its country to the liberation movements of South Africa.

Swap of Namibia, Sapu of Rhodesia, the NSEC of South Africa. They were welcome to train in Angola to use Angos as their base and you have essentially a tripartite unspoken agreement.

Angola offers the land. The Cubans offer the military instructors and the Soviet offer the weapons. We're going to replay a program that we first taped in 1979 during the Carter regime. It concerns the discovery of Russian troops in Cuba. The administration of Jimmy Carter, the one-time sunshine spreader, had come to be endlessly foiled by Fidel Castro's Cuba. Quote, for the American public, writes Pierre O'Glajasasas, and even for many U.S. officials, Carter's foreign policy successes, pailed before the administration's reverses. The fiasco in the Horn of Africa, the fall of the Shah of Iran, the leftists take over in Granada, the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua, and the continuing Cuban presence in Africa.

In all but one of these crises, the Iranian Revolution, Americans detected the hand of Castro, end quote. National Security advisor Zubignu Brzynski leaned on the CIA to provide new intelligence and analysis on Cuban and Soviet activities across the world. The same month that Netto died, the agency produced a bombshell, so to speak. A blast from the past, a sequel, or perhaps a remake of an old classic.

The CIA had discovered a Soviet combat brigade of troops, tanks, and artillery on the island of Cuba. President Carter may decide to counter the Soviet combat presence in Cuba by stepping up an American military presence, both in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the world, unless, of course, the Soviets take steps on their own to change the status quo as the president has demanded. In 1979, these weren't the typical military advisors the U.S. had grown used to since the missile crisis 17 years earlier in 1962. This brigade, according to the bleeders, appeared to be a new threat. Somebody leaked the report on this ominous new Soviet brigade in Cuba. There may not have been a nuclear threat this time, but the political fallout was dramatic. This is John Scally. Top administration officials have now started to consider a wide range of military and economic pressures against the Soviets.

Among the most sensitive is the possibility of helping arm China with modern weapons, a step that would be sure to alarm the Kremlin. It was as if the clock had rewound to the height of the missile crisis. Brzynski rode the wave and called for, as ever, a harder line against the Russians. America, he told the president, craves both a more. assertive tone and a more assertive substance to our foreign policy. Even Frank Church, the senator from Idaho, who had become the face of opposition to CIA malfeasance, directed his ire at the USSR and Cuba. The New York Times reported, quote, Senator Church stunned Secretary Vance and other administration officials by coupling the disclosure of the Soviet

brigade, with the demand that the Soviet Union remove the brigade, a public ultimatum with which the administration and the Soviet Union are still wrestling, end quote. Berzinski counseled the president to be wary of his arch nemesis in the administration, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who, as it happened, had written in his diary that this new, scary Soviet brigade was probably not new, not so scary, and left over from the time of of the missile crisis over a decade and a half earlier. Vance was correct. Conversations with the Soviets

and closer scrutiny of the intelligence revealed that the Soviet brigade was, indeed, an old and minimal security measure the Cubans had asked for in the aftermath of the missile crisis. In fact, the Ford administration had known about the troops and the gear. Somehow, the records of this information

had been lost. in the day to day of Cold War America. All of this could have been just another bad week for the White House, but the stakes were quite high. At that very moment, the U.S. and Soviet Union were locked in high-level negotiations over arms control, known as the Salt II Treaty. Desperate to avoid yet another foreign policy flop, Carter appealed to Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev,

to do the Americans a favor. Yes, we know this was an intelligence heir, but if you would, please dismantle this brigade so the American people could, presumably, feel as though their president had spotted a threat and acted decisively. This was the scenario Brzezinski had painted to his boss to give him a shot in the arm ahead of primary season.

Brezhnev refused to play along. He called the whole issue, quote, artificially created. After so much bluster, writes Glahesas, it would have been embarrassing to tell the American people that the Carter administration had blundered, that this Soviet brigade had been in Cuba since 1962, and previous administrations had known it, that therefore there had been no Soviet breach of detente, and that there was no reason for concern, end quote. And so, the president went on TV and promised he would crack it.

down on Cuba and therefore the Soviets, more surveillance of the island, and more support for the government's regional enemies. A phantom threat had been quelled, but the very real arms-controlled treaty, Salt 2, was now in jeopardy. The artificial crisis over a Soviet brigade in Cuba cast serious doubt over ratification of the treaty by the Senate. Only a few months later, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan would seal the fate of the treaty, detente, and the Carter era itself. There was one more political embarrassment for Jimmy Carter at play. In September 1979, a nuclear explosion was detected in the southern Indian Ocean, about halfway between South Africa and Antarctica.

Not the kind of thing that could be concealed. The so-called Vela incident was a political embarrassment to Carter, who had, quote, wrapped himself in the flag of nuclear non-proliferation, in the words of journalist Seymour Hirsch. There were a few officials, he writes, who immediately concluded that Israel and South Africa had finally conducted a nuclear test, a test they had tried and failed to accomplish two years earlier. Those officials were right, end quote. According to journalist Sasha Polakov Sarnski, quote, By the time the Vela event occurred in 1979, South Africa had learned from Israel that it could make the world take them seriously. Soviet support for the communist government of Afghanistan

served as an American pretext for abandoning detente at the end of 1979. but it was perhaps the Marial boat lift from Cuba in April 1980 that was the final nail in the coffin. The State Department is not happy at all with the sea lift of political refugees from Cuba to Florida, concerned that the refugees are not being properly processed. The department threatened to prosecute boat owners bringing them in illegally. But the waters between Ivana and Key West are becoming crowded. Ed Rable reports from Marialbe, Cuba. Even after the mini-brigade scandal, the Cubans and the Americans had continued meeting with each other,

with a final two-man Yankee delegation sent to Havana in early 1980. But only two weeks after their departure, notes Clehesis. A U.S.S.R. 71 Blackbird spy plane flew over Cuba, the first in several months. Quote, the overflight, a Cuban official told an American diplomat, had been carried out In a particularly blatant offensive manner, it had broken windows all over Cuba. With satellites, peripheral photography, and electronic methods now available, Cuban leadership could not believe the overflights were necessary, or were undertaken for any purpose other than to humiliate and intimidate Cuba.

The intimidation was meant for more than just Cuba. Another SR-71 blew through the sky on the first state visit of Angolan President Eduardo Dost Santos in Havana. These were not the only omens. Alongside the highest-level Cuban-American diplomacy of the early Carter years, there were meaningful changes happening on the ground, not all of them positive. In 1979, the Cuban government agreed to let Cuban Americans back into the island for the first time in over 15 years, with more than 100,000 visiting, just as the Cuban economy was slumping hard. The American diplomat, Wayne Smith, described the moment in his memoir.

At a time when most Cubans were asked to tighten their belts, relatives from Miami and New Jersey were flooding back into the country with tales of the good life in the U.S. To hear them tell it, everyone had a mansion, three cars, an unlimited number of. of TV sets and more food than anyone could eat, end quote. This produced an uptick in hijackings of boats by Cubans who were trying to get to Miami, and many others who staged high-profile occupations of foreign embassies in the hope of securing visas out of the country. In Miami, notes Glehessas, the hijackers who forced crews to Florida at gunpoint were greeted as heroes and never indicted.

Between the spy planes, the faltering economy, and now these new problems of immigration, by the spring of 1980, Fidel Castro decided on his move. On April 21st, he announced that the port of Mariel would be open to American boats, and that any Cuban who wished to leave could do so. Within six months, over 125,000 Cubans left for the U.S., including a sizable contingent, of people with violent criminal records. It was, for both sides, a bruising public relations moment. On the U.S. political scene, writes Glehessus,

quote, the Mariel crisis had several consequences. The Cuban government had humiliated the Carter administration. Trapped by its own propaganda, every Cuban who left the island was a political refugee deserving asylum, and fearful of losing the Cuban-American vote in the forthcoming presidential elections, the administration was unwilling to prevent the so-called freedom flotilla from entering the United States, but the result was a wave of unwanted immigrants. It seemed that Jimmy Carter could not even control

America's border. End quote. The Cuban government is expecting a constant flow of votes from Florida, now that Castro has given the green light. Castro says Cubans from the United States are welcome to evacuate not just the refugees from the Peruvian embassy, but relatives living here as well. When Nettos' successor, the Angolan president Jose Eduardo Dos Santos visited Havana on the eve of the Mariel crisis in the spring of 1980, he was there to discuss a drawdown of Cuban troops from Angola. Or rather, according to one Cuban official's description of the meeting, Dos Santos spoke with Fidel and told him, quote, Please don't even think of withdrawing troops in the coming years. This was probably not particularly

welcome news to Fidel. But Angola, as it happens, was feeling its own pressure, the increased heat from the new South African Prime Minister's strategy of total onslaught. The fall of 1979 had seen South African plains attacking towns north of the Namibian border, over 150 miles into Angolan territory, as well as the deployment of South African Special Forces in helicopters. Unita, too, was claiming credit for attacks on bridges, roads, and railways. It was a trend that continued into the next year.

In the fall of 1980, Gerald Bender, historian at the University of Southern California, testified before Congress about this upswell in South African aggression. In Lubongo, we saw a large furniture factory which South African bombs had destroyed. In Mungo, my wife discovered a leaflet dropped by planes advising the Angolan people that they had nothing to fear from the South Africans who were in the country to kill members of Swapo. Yet we saw that South African planes had bombed every single building in Mungo, from the hospital which suffered the worst attack to two schools and even a church. Further south, we experienced the fear which grips every Angolan in the area. the fear of being hit by a bomb from one of the South African plains which fly over southern Angola almost every day and night.

Criticizing America's do-nothing policy on Angola, Bender argued that it reinforced, quote, the image abroad that the United States is involved in a plot with South Africa to overthrow the Angolan government, end quote. And he noted how, in just a few months, that image abroad might just become reality. In fact, Bender said, if Ronald Reagan wins in November,

these hearings may be the last time either House of Congress will meet on Angola before we could be at war in that country again. Different follow-up question. You've had suggested that there would be no Iranian crisis had you been president because we would have given firm a support to the Shah. But Iran is a country of 37 million people who are resisting a government they regarded as dictatorial.

My question is not whether the Shah's regime was preferable to the Ayatollahs, but whether the United States has the power or the right to try to determine what form of government any country will have, and do we back unpopular regimes whose major merit is that they are friendly to the United States. The degree of unpopularity of a regime, when the choice is total authoritarianism, totalitarianism, I should say, in the alternative government makes one wonder whether you are being helpful to the people. And we've been guilty of that because someone didn't meet exactly our standards of human rights, even though they were an ally of ours. Instead of trying patiently to persuade them to change their ways, we have, in a number of instances, aided a revolutionary

overthrow which results in complete totalitarianism instead for those people. And I think that this is a kind of a hypocritical policy, when at the same time we're maintaining a detente with the one nation in the world where there are no human rights at all, the Soviet Union. A few years earlier, Ronald Reagan might have seemed like just another Barry Goldwater, a hardline conservative, too radical for the tastes of the American public. But by the late 1970s, almost anybody looked like a better deal than Jimmy Carter. In 1979, inflation, particularly in energy, caused by a spike in the price of oil after the Iranian revolution, it was wreaking havoc on Jimmy Carter's approval rating. By the middle of 79, more than half of the country told pollsters that they disapproved of the job Carter was doing. In July, Carter delivered what is probably his most famous speech, an attempt to diagnose American malaise, or a crisis. of confidence. The speech was memorable to be sure, but it did not move the needle. That would come

with the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, and the Iranian hostage crisis, which began in the fall of 1979, which allowed Carter to temporarily strike a confrontational pose against the spooky Ayatollahs in Iran. But as time ground on, the hostage crisis did not resolve so neatly for Carter. In April of 1980, Carter approved a hostage rescue mission, led by the elite Delta Force, Operation Eagle Claw. It was a disaster. Let me just tell you quickly that this is the hour when Good Morning America would normally begin. However, as those who have been watching so far this morning already know, there has been the startling new development in the Iran hostage crisis. That U.S. attempt to launch a military rescue of the American hostages in Tehran has been, as you have now heard several times, aborted.

Eight U.S. servicemen killed in the process. For Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Eagle Claw was the last straw. For well over a year now, he had been on the losing side of an argument in the Carter administration. He was a dealer, and he had been opposed to the Iranian hostage military operation from the start. And now, he made himself gone. Days after the helicopter crashes in the desert, Vance's resignation was made public. It was the second high-profile exit of a dealer from the administration. Less than a year earlier, U.N. ambassador, an advocate for diplomacy in Southern Africa,

Andrew Young, had been forced out. writes Nancy Mitchell, quote, despite his impeccable record of support for Israel while a member of Congress and his affiliation with Jewish leaders while working with Martin Luther King, Young had encountered swift and fierce opposition from American Jews. Young was never the most popular official, perceived as too dovish, out of touch with a cold war starting to heat up again. But Young's final offense was an unsanctioned meeting with the people.

Palestine Liberation Organization's permanent observer at the UN. Good evening. An apologetic State Department did a quick about face today. It said that UN Ambassador Andrew Young did hold an unauthorized meeting with a top representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Zaid-E-Turzee, and that they did discuss matters of substance. The meeting last month was dismissed just yesterday as a chance encounter, but today Israel lodged to protest that the meeting violated U.S. commitments. The state's Department looked into it and then came the reversal at today's news briefing. Bernard Calb reports. Unbeknownst to Young, writes Mitchell, Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad, routinely

tailed this PLO official, and it was reported had bugged his apartment. The Israelis quickly went public, lodging a formal protest against Young for his meeting with a PLO official. It was a Wall-to-wall Washington scandal, leading all-news media coverage. Vance, who viewed Young as internal competition, lobbied hard for Carter to cut him loose. But Carter didn't need his Secretary of State to point out the obvious. Quote, the political costs of not firing Young would have been enormous, as Mitchell puts it.

So, Young had to go. Though at a final State Department press conference, he told reporters, I really don't feel a bit sorry for a thing I have done. With Young and Vance, now both gone by the middle of 1980, Carter's dealer era was done for good. Most notably, in Afghanistan and Angola. Ronald Reagan is about to make his acceptance speech, presumably. He is at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles.

Here is Ronald Reagan coming out at the Century Plaza. He was congratulated by President Carter about 10 minutes to 7. California time back now to NBC News. Ronald Reagan won about 50% of the vote in the election of 1980. As historian Rick Pearlstein points out, only 52% of eligible voters came out, the fewest since 1948.

According to one poll, 60% said they weren't excited by any of the candidates, he notes. 43% of Reagan voters said they were just voting against Carter. 34% of Carter voters said they were just voting against Reagan. But Reagan did win. For the new Reaganites, a mix of flag-waving conservatives, religious fundamentalists, neo-conservatives, and the John Birch Society set,

everything that had made him sound like an unhinged, ignorant extremist in the 1976 primary, had now tickled their hearts. Yes, America had surrendered. render to the Cold War. Yes, the Democrats were a fifth column indulging loopy college students and welfare queens. And yes, what was needed was a hard right swing at home and a militant comeback abroad. We'll restore hope and we'll welcome them into a great national crusade to make America great again. Reagan's White House would reshape America, just as the man had promised. and the other side in the Cold War seemed to know it.

The Soviets were genuinely terrified the new White House was capable of a nuclear first strike on Moscow. The Cubans, however unimpressed by the Carter regime, hunkered down for a new U.S. crackdown in Latin America. But some were looking forward to the new administration, the Contra Death Squads in Nicaragua, for one. the Islamist drug king pins in Afghanistan, and Angola's own battle-tested, unkillable anti-communist commander. Dr. Jonas Savimbi.