White Malice (6) Nelson Mandela

These days Nelson Mandela is a hero in the United States, but at the time the CIA worked to undermine his activities and support the Apartheid regime in South Africa. Susan Williams records that the CIA helped with his arrest.

The life of Nelson Mandela was influenced by the CIA. Mandela was a target of the agency’s surveillance and covert operations directly to his arrest in 1962, after CIA agent Donald Rickard gave the apartheid government information about Mandela’s whereabouts and his disguise (White Malice p.474).

Susan Williams’s book is worth reading. I had already read about CIA nefarious activities in Central and South America, but I had not realised the extent of the harm it did in Africa.

White Malice (5) Dag Hammarskjold

I was in my last years at primary school when Dag Hammarskjold the Secretary-General of the United Nations died in 1961. The news was shocking because he was a good man, committed to doing the right thing, even if it upset people with economic and imperial power. At a time when they were gaining independence from the old colonial powers, many African saw him as a defender of their rights.

The official verdict was that he died accidentally in a plane crash. Susan Williams does not discuss this much in this book (because she has a separate book that led to the cause of his death being reinvestigated) but she explains that the CIA was involved in the organization of his death.

CIA director Allen Dulles had promised full cooperation with ‘Operation Celeste’, a plot to kill Hammarskjold.

Hammarskjold’s DC-6 crashed while preparing to land at Ndola. This is significant due to the absence of any serious hills nearby (White Malice p.415).

Local witnesses who had seen a second plane above the DC-6 and shooting at it. I think one of the mercenary aircraft, operating around Ndola on that night fired a tracer bullet into the fuel tanks of the plane, causing the left wing to catch on fire. The plots had no choice but to put die plane on the ground (White Malice p.418).

In 2013, a Hammarskjöld Commission made up of four distinguished international judges conducted a rigorous examination of the available evidence and interviews in Ndola with witnesses who were still alive. They concluded,

There is persuasive evidence that the aircraft was subjected to some form of attack or threat as it circled to land at Ndola … (and) was in fact forced into its descent by some form of hostile action.

This was another ugly incident by people who wanted to retain economic and political power.

White Malice (4) Congo

The Belgium Congo had one of the worst colonial experiences in Africa. The cruelty of the Belgium rulers has been well documented. Although the Congo was rich in minerals, all mining was controlled by US and Belgium companies.

The Shinkolobwe mine in Katanga the southern province of the Congo produced uranium that was far richer than any other uranium in the world: it assayed as high as 75 per cent uranium oxide, with an average of 65 percent. South African goldmines had a uranium oxide content on the order of 0.03 per cent. (Uranium from the Shinkolobwe mine was essential for the Manhattan Project).

Shinkolobwe uranium underpinned the value of the Congo to the US through the 1950s. The American government financed two major capital investment programmes at Shinkolobwe in the 1950s, in order to expand the mine and develop the plant (White Malice p.30).

Patrice Lumumba was one of the key leaders of the Congolese people prior to independence. He had a vision of the liberation and unity of the African continent. He praised the practice of Gandhi, who had led the campaign of peaceful civil disobedience in India. He had a strong focus on non-violent struggle. His party won the first election in Congo.

Patrice Lumumba threatened to end the contracts of Union Miniere, the Belgium mining company when independence was achieved. This was perfectly reasonable given that the new government representing the Congolese people was not a party to their signing.

America wished to maintain absolute control over the uniquely rich uranium at the Shinkolobwe mine in the Congo, so the CIA planned to have him poisoned. The plan was approved by President Eisenhower but the CIA failed to get it implemented. Lumumba was eventually shot by Congolese rebels. A CIA operative said,

Lumumba was killed, not by our poisons, but beaten to death, apparently by men who were loyal to men who had received—agency salaries (White Malice p.383).

In White Malice, Susan Williams explains that this was a huge loss for the new nation.

Congo’s tragedy illustrates Africa's problem with the Western world, whereby the Congo “is still not stable and able to relieve the poverty of its people. Lumumba, writes Duodu sadly “lost power; lost his country, in the end, his very life”. The ‘amazing thing, he adds, ‘is that he had done absolutely nothing against the combination of forces that wanted him dead! They just saw him as a threat to their interests, interests narrowly defined to mean, “His country has got resources. we want them. He might not give them to us. So let us get him”. All this was done”, Duodu observes, “to achieve the selfish end of continuing to control the Congo’s rich mineral resources” (White Malice p.517).

The destruction of the Congo’s hard-won democracy was pitiless, despite powerful popular resistance. The expulsion of Lumumbists from government, despite their electoral victory, led to the ‘second independence movement—a major event in the struggle for democracy in the Congo. The uprisings were met with brutal repression, fuelled American interference. It has been estimated that the conflict in the Congo between 1961 and 1965 led to the deaths of one million people.

In November 1965, Joseph-Desire Mobutu overthrew civilian rule in a coup backed by the CIA. For the next thirty-one years, the Congo was ruled with an iron fist by Mobutu-a dictator chosen by the US government and installed by the CIA. (White Malice p.518).

White Malice (3) Angola

Another ugly story told by Susan Williams is about CIA involvement in the civil war in Angola. Two separate independence groups began a struggle against their Portuguese colonists.

The MPLA, which described itself as anti-imperialist, received funding from the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc; consequently, it was perceived as an enemy to America. The MPLA actively favoured a union with other Angolan freedom lighters, a stance that the US firmly resisted ((White Malice p.455).

The US opposed the MPLA and supported an alternative group called the the UPA. In February and March 1961, the UPA led a violent revolt in Luanda, the capital of Angola, and also in the northern region of the Portuguese colony. Attacks were made on farms, government outposts and trading centres, leading to the deaths of an estimated two hundred white people. The Portuguese responded with a veritable blood bath, Fleeing villages were strafed and napalmed. Between twenty thousand and thirty thousand people were killed. Hundreds of thousands of refugees fled Angola, walking long distances to reach the Congo.

A range of new strategies was developed by the Portuguese in order to suppress the Angolan freedom struggle. One was an industrialisation policy for the colony, which included plans to greatly increase and support white immigration. Another was to send a massive number of troops to Angola.

Angola was of central significance to the US by reason of its geographical position, its mineral resources and the discovery of oil there in the mid-1950s. Was on the route by which Uranium was exported from Congo to the United States (White Malice p.456).

As often happened in these independent struggles the US chose the wrong side to protect its economic interests.

The MPLA continued to petition for a union of all Angolan liberation movements, a position that was firmly opposed by the UPA (which was funded by the CIA). The UPA, which became the FNLA in 1961, was unable to appeal as widely to Angolans as the MPLA. The CIA decided to sideline the UPA; instead, it backed Jonas Savimbi, who had left the FNLA in to form the pro-Western Unita movement. In November 1975, the Portuguese finally withdrew, the MPLA was recognized as the legitimate government of Angola.

The CIA had singled out the MPLA as an enemy even though the MPLA wanted relations with the US and had not committed a single act of aggression against the country. (White Malice p.460).

The division stirred up by the CIA resulted in an ugly civil war.

A bitter civil war between the MPLA and Savimbi’s Unita ensued, lasting twenty-seven years and killing more than five hundred thousand people. South Africa and Mobutu’s Congo intervened on the side of Unita, backed by the US. Cuba sent fifteen thousand combat troops to support the MPLA, which finally prevailed (White Malice p.460).

In Stockwell’s analysis, the US led the way at every step of the escalation of the fighting: We said it was the Soviets and the Cubans that were doing it. It was the U.S. that was escalating the fighting. There would have been no war if we hadn’t gone in first. We put arms in, they put arms in.

We put advisors in, they answered with advisors. We put in Zairian para-commando battalions, they put in Cuban troops. We brought in the South African army, they brought in the Cuban army. And they pushed us away.

They blew us away because we were lying, we were covering ourselves with lies, and they were telling the truth. And it was not a war that we could fight. We didn’t have interests there that should have been defended that way (White Malice p.461).

This war was a terrible waste of lives harmed the economy, but the US failed to achieve its goals.

White Malice (2) Kwame Nkrumah

Ghana was one of the first colonies in Africa to gain independence. Kwame Nkrumah was the first Prime Minister of the newly independent nation, but he became of target for the CIA. Susan Williams explains what happened in White Malice.

In October 1965, Nkrumah Published Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of imperialism. The book launched a powerful attack on the workings of American capitalism in Africa, supported by a mass of factual detail. “Africa’s possession of industrial raw materials”, argued Nkrumah “could if used for her own development, place her among the most modernised continents of the world without recourse to outside sources”. Instead, this was prevented by the greed and dishonesty of US capitalism. American interest in the Congo, he insisted, was motivated by very substantia! investments, which were frequently hidden by “engaging leading personalities in United States political affairs”.

Nkrumah was correct claim was correct about US hypocrisy. For example,

Adlai Stevenson “representing his government at the UN” Nkrumah wrote, “presided over the firm of Tempelsman & Son, specialists in exploiting Congo diamonds”.

The US government was incensed by the book. A stiff note was sent by the State Department to Nkrumah, and American aid to Ghana was instantly cancelled (White Malice p.493).

In the early morning of Thursday 24 February 1966, Nkrumah was overthrown in a military coup dubbed ‘Operation Cold Chop’ by its instigators. While the Ghanaian president was in Beijing, on his way to Hanoi with proposals for ending the war in Vietnam, the military and the police toppled Ghana’s civilian government. Major General Charles V Barwah who was in command of Ghana’s army, was woken frorn his sleep by the arrival at his house. He was asked to join the coup, and when he refused he was shot dead in front of his wife and children (White Malice p.494).

State corporations were privatised, and many state-run projects were abandoned. Foreign multinationals, which had been held firmly at arms length by Nkrumah, swiftly took control of much of the production sector (White Malice p.496).

John Stockwell put the CIA firmly at the centre of Nkrumah’s ouster in an extensive footnote in his memoir. The Accra station, he noted, was given a generous budget, and maintained intimate contact with the plotters as a coup was hatched (White Malice p.497).

The CIA got rid of one of the best leaders that emerged in Africa, because he would not go along with US control of African economies.