Another ex-spook tattles on the CIA
Among CIA staffers it was known as IA-FEATURE; the letters IA being the agency's designation for the target country, Angola, and FEATURE the code word for a special covert operation. When the IAFEATURE task force was assembled in late summer 1975, on the eve of Angola's independence from Portugal, it was handed a mission nearly impossible: to help two Angolan leaders who would presumably remain friendly to the West when the big, troubled former colony went off on its own. The IAFEATURE directors, who worked out of a "vaulted" (super-secure) office at the CIA'S headquarters in Langley, Va., were given an initial $14 million to achieve this assignment.
So begins an "inside" tale of how a CIA operation grew—and failed—from one who was intimately involved with it: John Stockwell, 40, an ex-Marine lieutenant who, before he quit the intelligence agency, not only was a CIA agent for twelve years but served as the "case officer" in charge of the Angolan venture. Stockwell's book, In Search of Enemies, is a narrative of IAFEATURE'S short, six-month history. Like Decent Interval, the highly critical account of CIA operations in Viet Nam by ex-Analyst Frank Snepp—who happens to be a friend of Stockwell's—In Search was published without CIA permission. It thus becomes the latest entry in what may become a full-blown literary genre: spy-and-tell books by disaffected former intelligence operatives who profess to be turning to their typewriters much more for principle than for profit.
As Stockwell tells it, the CIA's aim in Angola was modest at first: merely to slow the progress of Agostinho Neto's pro-Moscow Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), which in mid-1975 already controlled twelve of the country's 15 provinces, and see that it had some competition in the pre-independence elections. The CIA decided to shore up two other guerrilla groups, the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) under Holden Roberto and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) led by Jonas Savimbi. But before long, says Stockwell, the looking-glass warriors at Langley began to view Angola as "our war," and the goal became victory for the pro-Western groups. To that end, Stockwell says, the agency not only got directly involved in the spreading fighting, which soon swept the elections away, but also lied about its activities to Congress and to the so-called 40 Committee, the White House-Pentagon-State Department group charged with overseeing U.S. intelligence operations.
As the ambitions for IAFEATURE grew, so did its cost—to a total of $31.7 million. The money was used mostly for military supplies for UNITA and FNLA, which were channeled through Zaire. Stockwell had a staff of about 26, plus an additional 83 operatives "in the field." The CIA also recruited a number of mercenaries, called "foreign military advisers" in deference to African sensitivities, to fight with UNITA and FNLA units. But instead of stopping the MPLA, Stockwell maintains, these efforts only spurred the Soviet and Cuban assistance that enabled Neto to win the war.