Laughter in the Shadows (27 page)

Bongo would obviously not be happy with the change, and we recommended offering him fifty M-16s for his presidential honor guard in Ladolite, the location of his summer palace, and a “slush fund” for the quartermaster and his crew.

Headquarters must have done some arm-twisting, because within twenty-four hours, “sterilization” had been excised from the Uhuru lexicon. Bongo protested the change as predicted but came around with the sweetener of the M-16s for his honor guard.

“Sterilization” and “plausible denial” had taken a hit, but Uhuru was back on track.

Stark

Stark’s qualification for coordinating the task force was that he had spent part of his childhood in Africa as the son of missionary parents and had a smattering of Swahili, a language spoken in a remote corner of Angafula.

When Stark arrived in my office, he was wearing a black safari suit and black boots. A silver Maltese cross dangled from his neck, glinting as he introduced himself and asked for immediate transportation to “the front.” I arranged for a chartered Air Buwana Fokker to take him to Rebello’s headquarters in Ambrizio and later on to Sanchez’s base in the interior. I told Stark the plane would pick him up when he was ready to return to Bintang.

Two weeks after he left, Stark was back in my office. His safari suit was still unrumpled and spotless. He handed me the report he had prepared for the task force and an envelope containing Polaroid snapshots of his trip. I looked at the snapshots: Stark and Rebello standing next to a bullet-riddled sign pointing toward Lunda; Stark standing with Sanchez on top of a burned-out half-track, the red PMFA star still visible; Stark looking at PMFA prisoners; and Stark talking to UTIA guerrillas.

Stark said he had been impressed by both Rebello and Sanchez. He was convinced that with additional training and weapons, their combined forces would soon control most of Angafula. He said it was all in his report, and he would appreciate being able to add my comments.

I hastily read the report and then handed it back to Stark. I said I wouldn’t add any comments because the report was Stark’s personal assessment and should stand on its own. I did say that I found his report somewhat optimistic, probably because it hadn’t taken into account the African Equation. Stark looked puzzled, and I explained.

As Stark was aware, Africa was unfathomable and unpredictable. Elephant droppings and tribal drumbeats were as reliable in predicting the future as intelligence estimates and projections. Angafula was a witches’ brew that was currently being stirred by tribal shamans, village chiefs, guerrillas, and foreign interlopers. The brew was simmering but one day it would boil over.

For the first time Stark stopped fingering his Maltese cross. He was probably wondering whether I was pulling his leg with African mumbo jumbo.

He reached over and took back his report, and the following day he left for Washington.

In fairness to Stark, he didn’t know the cauldron was about to boil over, and when it did, ten thousand Cuban volunteers spilled out—and rendered his report worthless.

The Flying Circus

Je vous querir un grand peut-etre,

irez le rideau, la farce est jouee.

-FRANÇOIS RABELAIS

Supplying Uhuru forces inside Angafula was dangerous and difficult. It was pointless to ferry supplies across the river because there were no roads on the other side to truck them into the interior. Portaging the heavy crates for long treks through the jungle was impractical, slow, and dangerous. As a result, crates of supplies from the
American Chariot
were stacked in Bintang warehouses. Supplies flown in by C-141 and C-130 cargo planes had to be off-loaded in Bintang because American aircraft were forbidden to fly into Angafulan air space.

Uhuru desperately needed an air bridge into Angafula. We had tried chartering Air Buwana planes, but the airline was unreliable, with crews showing up late or not at all, and the planes frequently down for repairs, hors de service, for weeks at a time. The supply pipeline had slowed to a trickle, and the project was grinding to a halt.

Then fortune smiled on Uhuru.

With Angafula drifting into civil war, Portuguese expatriates began leaving the country. When a leftist government came to power in Lisbon and announced its support for Sappho’s PMFA, more Portuguese joined the exodus out of Angafula. Some Portuguese, however remained in Angafula, and from among these emerged Uhuru’s first foreign “volunteers.”

Obie, the Uhuru air operations officer, woke me at midnight. An Air Angafula plane with a Portuguese crew had landed at Bintang’s international airport. Obie said the pilot was waiting outside. I told Obie to bring the pilot in and offered him a cold beer before asking him to sit down and tell us his story.

Carlos said he was a Fokker pilot for Air Angafula, the Portuguese charter airline serving the colony. Carlos had filed a flight plan in Lunda for Carmona, a regular destination. The tower cleared his flight, and Carlos took off, but about fifty kilometers north of Lunda, he altered course for Buwana. Approaching Bintang, Carlos radioed the tower, requesting permission to land. The flight was unscheduled, but the tower operator authorized the plane to land, ordering Carlos to taxi to an unmarked hangar at the far end of the runway.

When the plane taxied up to the hangar, one of the guards immediately called Obie, who instructed the guard to open the hangar and have the pilot park the plane inside. Obie had immediately gone out to the airport and talked to Captain Carlos. The two men had then come directly to my house.

Carlos’s story was that he had heard on the Portuguese grapevine that the Americans were supporting Angafula anticommunist movements. Carlos and his
crew were fed up with the leftist colonial government in Lunda and had decided to come to Bintang to offer their services.

Leaving Carlos to nurse his beer, Obie and I went into my study, where we discussed the various options open to us regarding the Air Angafula plane and its crew and finally narrowed them down to three: The first option was to turn the crew and plane over to the Buwanans. This wouldn’t endear us to the Buwanan Security Service, which would not want to get its president involved in a diplomatic row with a foreign government. The second option was to notify the Portuguese embassy. The Portuguese ambassador would immediately inform his government and demand that the Buwanan authorities impound the plane and send the crew to Lunda to face charges. This was another course of action that would not sit well with President Bongo, who had little use for the Portuguese and would have to resist any attempts at extradition, but would not like getting involved. The third option, and the one we settled on, was to hide the plane, stash the crew, and then decide on a plan of action. Obie said he already had a plan. All he needed to implement it was a special hangar, plenty of paint, a few technicians, and approval to put Captain Carlos and his crew on the Uhuru payroll.

When Obie advised Carlos, the pilot thanked him on behalf of all the crew. He said more “volunteers” would come soon, which was borne out when a second Air Angafula plane arrived the following week. The third plane landed three days later, the last “defector” plane before the Portuguese authorities grounded the rest of the Air Angafula fleet.

Air piracy protests, lodged by the Portuguese ambassador with the Foreign Ministry, were “duly noted” and filed away. Obie drew up an official-looking document incorporating Peter Pan Airlines, signed at the bottom by James Barrie, president.

The first freshly painted “Peter Pan” Fokker with a new tail number and redocumented crew emerged from Obie’s hangar in less than a month. Along with the two other planes, which joined the fleet soon afterward, the charter airline began flying supplies into Angafula, and before long the warehouse had almost been emptied of the backlog of supplies.

Uhuru finally had its air bridge.

Mister Brown

The Portuguese ambassador was not the only one upset about the pirated Fokkers. Ralph Brown, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) adviser at Njili Airport, had become increasingly curious about the activity at the “special hangar.” He decided to go see for himself what Obie was up to.

Brown had met Obie, but the two men had never gotten along, Brown resenting the rapport the Apaloosa horse breeder from New Mexico had with Buwanan airport officials. Obie, for his part, had little use for the FAA technocrat.

One day Brown walked down to the special hangar and saw Buwanans stenciling a new number on the tail of a freshly painted Fokker. He stomped into Obie’s office in the back of the hangar: “Obie, you must be crazy! You can’t change tail numbers on a plane like license plates on a car! Those tail numbers are internationally registered. Altering them is a violation of international law! I’m going to report you to the FAA!”

Obie looked up at the fuming Brown, surprised to see the normally taciturn FAA adviser so excited. He got up out of his chair and walked around his desk, putting his hand on Brown’s shoulder. “It’s OK, Ralph, don’t sweat it! National security operation; know what I mean?”

Brown shook off Obie’s hand, turned, and stormed out of the office repeating his threat to report Obie to the proper authorities.

Brown was eventually called back to Washington for “medical consultations,” which Obie attributed to “hallucinations of tail numbers dancing in his head.”

The MiGs

Yet much is oft in the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.

—J. R. R. TOLKIEN,
Lord of the Rings

Obie’s airlift was going full steam. Repainted planes took off before their new colors had time to dry. If there were a place for air operations in the
Guinness Book of World Records
, Obie’s would have been right behind the Berlin airlift.

For one urgent flight to Sanchez’s base in the interior, however, he had to charter an Air Buwana Fokker with an American crew. The plane was to make a stop for a load of rations in a neighboring country to avoid paying the exorbitant surcharges levied by Bongo’s Bintang vendors and to pick up a French TV cameraman contracted by Sanchez to film a documentary about UTIA.

Sanchez was waiting at the airstrip when the plane landed and invited the crew and cameraman to join him at his command post next to the airstrip while the rations were being unloaded. Two planes suddenly appeared overhead. Sanchez’s troops unloading the rations stopped to wave at the planes, assuming they were friendly Cessnas that occasionally flew reconnaissance missions for UTIA. This time, however, the planes were not friendly Cessnas. They dove down toward
the airstrip, rockets spewing from their wings. The American pilot recognized the silhouette of the planes and yelled out, “Take cover! They’re MiGs!”

Sanchez also began shouting, “MiGs!
Ce sont les MiGs! Planquez-vous!
Get down, they’re MiGs!”

The two MiGs roared down over the airstrip, their rockets kicking up clouds of dust as they screeched along the airstrip toward the Fokker. One of the rockets skewed off the runway, but the second one hit the Fokker behind the cockpit. By this time the TV cameraman was on his feet filming the attack and shouting epithets at the Russian “swine” when the MiG’s streaked past. The MiGs then circled back to make another pass. On the second sortie, a rocket scored a direct hit on the Fokker’s fuel tank, setting the plane on fire. The MiGs pulled up and circled over the airstrip, wagging their wings as they made a final pass en route back to Lunda.

The covert war had burst from its cocoon

After the MiG attack, Sanchez decided to move his base farther into the interior. He sent a squad of his soldiers to escort the Fokker crew and the cameraman through the jungle to Bintang. They arrived two weeks later, with the TV film still intact.

The TV film was made into a documentary in Europe, and a copy was sent to Headquarters. The film of the MiG attack was evidence of Soviet intervention in Angafula, and I was certain it could be used to counter critics of American involvement. The decision was made, however, that the film raised too many questions. Who had provided the plane to bring in rations to Sanchez, the Air Buwana logo still visible on the tail of the charred wreckage? Who had provided the foreign rations still scattered around the airstrip?

Even though the planes were MiGs, the Russians would deny any involvement, claiming the MiGs were part of the Angafulan air force and the pilots were Cuban volunteers.