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4

A new strategy

On a security-strategic level, South Africa was in an unwinnable situation by the 1970s. Both within South West Africa and internationally, it was regarded as an illegal colonial occupier. Officially, South Africa administrated SWA “in the spirit” of the old League of Nations mandate of 1919 (revoked by the International Court of Justice in 1971), but in practice the territory was run as a fifth province of the Republic. Initially, Pretoria was intent on applying the policy of grand apartheid in SWA, with self-governing and eventually independent homelands for the different black ethnic groups. Petty apartheid – segregation at a grassroots level – was applied assiduously by an army of officials and policemen. This, as we have seen, provided the main cause of dissent and gave rise to SWAPO’s insurgency.

Pretoria responded to the challenge with a pragmatism that, in hindsight, was quite surprising. Instead of the usual semi-theological arguments that apartheid was a naturally ordained way to order human relations and a blanket refusal to give up the territory, the government reacted with some flexibility. In 1973, Prime Minister John Vorster declared that the SWA population would have to decide its own future, thereby tacitly accepting that the territory could become independent. He also undertook to abandon the grand apartheid scheme of territorial separation for whites and blacks.[1]

Vorster also received the UN special envoy, Alfred Escher, implicitly acknowledging that the UN had a say in the territory’s future. Four years later, a conference between SWA political parties was convened in the Windhoek Turnhalle building, where South West Africans were allowed to decide on the political structures that would govern them. SWAPO viewed the process as a sham, though, and boycotted it. But the apartheid laws were progressively repealed: job reservation was abolished in 1975, along with the hated pass laws and laws forbidding mixed marriages and sex across the colour line, and the principle of equal pay for equal work was accepted in 1978. All of this was a rather adventurous process, seeing that it was still unthinkable in the Republic to contemplate more than just cosmetic changes to apartheid.[2]

In a top-secret assessment, signed by Dr Niel Barnard, director-general of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), it was concluded that white South West Africans had to be convinced “that they cannot demand the same as the whites in the RSA” (with regards to apartheid) and that they had to make “compromises”. The “big chasm between white and black aspirations” had to be taken into account in the formation of a united front, wrote Barnard.[3] Looking back on the 1980s, Barnard later told writer Padraig O’Malley, “[t]here is no military solution to any conflict in the world; there are only political solutions”.[4]

In the military, the changes were reflected in an ever-increasing number of blacks and coloureds fighting for the South African administration. In 1975, the South African Cape Corps (SACC) was for the first time designated a combat unit, and, later that year, sent a contingent of 190 men to the South West African operational area to take part in counterinsurgency operations. The navy followed suit, while the army established various ethnic-based infantry battalions.[5] The first unit to allow blacks to join the hitherto lily-white SADF was 32 Battalion (consisting of ex-FNLA Angolan fighters). This was followed by 31 Battalion (Bushmen), 101 Battalion (Ovambos), 201 Battalion (East Caprivians), 202 Battalion (Okavango), 203 Battalion (West Caprivians), and 911 Battalion (ethnically mixed). Both 32 Battalion and 101 Battalion were much more than ordinary infantry formations, and effectively grew into motorised infantry brigades. Many blacks also joined the police counterinsurgency unit, Koevoet.

With the exception of 32 Battalion (SADF) and Koevoet (SAP), these units became part of the fast-growing South West Africa Territorial Force (SWATF), an indigenous South West African force under South African command that was founded in August 1980. Whereas SWATF members comprised about 20% of the total South African military presence in 1980, this grew to 51% by 1985. During the 1980s, the force supplied about 70% of the military manpower in the territory – about 30 000 men. More than 90% of these were not white.[6]

The communist threat

The government’s more flexible approach in SWA did not mean that the South African government was willing to hand the territory over to SWAPO. During the 1970s and 1980s, the National Party government viewed the USSR as a major threat and Cuba as its surrogate. As Prime Minister PW Botha explained to Parliament in 1980: “The main object . . . under the guidance of the planners in the Kremlin is to overthrow this State and to create chaos in its stead, so that the Kremlin can establish its hegemony here.”[7] Botha’s Minister of Defence, Magnus Malan, often used a quotation ascribed to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in 1977: “Our goal is to get control over the two great treasuries on which the West depend – the energy treasury of the Persian Gulf and the mineral treasury of Central and Southern Africa.”[8]

As far as the USSR’s strategy towards South Africa was concerned, a 1981 analysis by Military Intelligence referred to “recent, very credible information” that Moscow expected SWAPO to “tie down” South Africa “through a protracted military struggle in SWA, while the so-called ‘united front’, of which the ANC onslaught against the RSA forms the other facet, is being developed”. Soviet activities in other southern African states, such as Zambia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, confirmed the time scale for the subjugation of southern Africa, which the Soviet Union had shortened “from ten to five years”.[9]

These kinds of analyses were, with certain reservations, shared by the Reagan administration. In a 1984 document, the CIA determined the USSR’s objectives in southern Africa as a programme “to supplant Western and Chinese influence”. Moscow “also seeks to consolidate the emerging leftist, pro-Soviet regimes in Angola and Mozambique, to bring the South-West African People’s Organization (SWAPO) to power in Namibia, and ultimately, to undermine the white minority regime in South Africa”. Angola, the analysis stated, “is central to these objectives, because it positions the USSR to support and influence Namibian and South African insurgents . . .”.

According to the CIA, the Soviets viewed their support for the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and SWA “as a central element in their approach to Sub-Saharan Africa over the next decade”.[10] “Soviet long-term objectives may also include denial or obstruction of Western access to the region’s strategic mineral resources.”[11] The document stated that the Soviets sought access to ports for their air and naval forces. In an earlier assessment, the CIA also included the geostrategic securing of “Soviet sea lines of communication between the European USSR and the Soviet Far East” as a USSR military objective in the region.[12] However, the CIA acknowledged that southern Africa was “largely peripheral to core Soviet security interests and of lower priority than, for example, South Asia and the Middle East”.[13]

The main issue here is not whether these analyses were accurate or not. The point is that the NP government believed that South Africa was engaged in an “oorlewingstryd” (struggle for survival), as PW Botha put it.[14] Whoever wants to understand the South African security strategy during the 1970s and 1980s must take the National Party government’s fear of the Soviet Union seriously. Rightly or wrongly, this was their point of departure. Their security strategy was therefore in principle defensive.[15]

Probably without realising it, Russian academic Vladimir Shubin has since confirmed the South African and American fears about Soviet intentions at the time. In a 2008 book, he rejects the allegation that the Cold War influenced Moscow’s strategy towards South Africa, but he apparently understands the term differently from the way it was viewed in the West. He emphasises that Soviet support for African liberation movements was “regarded as part of the world ‘anti-imperialist struggle’, which was waged by the ‘socialist community’, ‘the national liberation movements’ and the ‘working class of the capitalist countries’ . . . For us the global struggle was not a battle between the two ‘superpowers’ assisted by their ‘satellites’ and ‘proxies’, but a united fight of the world’s progressive forces against imperialism.” Shubin also notes that the Supreme Council of the MPLA decided in 1982 that South Africa was its “main enemy”.[16]

The government’s initial security strategy, after PW Botha took over from John Vorster in September 1978, was to try to establish an anti-communist bloc in southern Africa as a counterweight to the Marxist alliance, consisting at the time of Angola and Mozambique, and aided by the USSR and Cuba.[17]

The government’s stance on SWA and Angola flowed from this strategy. In fact, South Africa accepted fairly early on that independence for South West Africa was unavoidable. Halfway through 1977, Minister of Foreign Affairs Pik Botha told Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith so during a visit to Salisbury. South African hopes, he said, were pinned “upon the formation of an interim government established to draw up the constitution for an independent Namibia”.[18]

But this still did not open a door for SWAPO. Pik Botha wrote to his US counterpart, Secretary of State Alexander Haig, that South Africa strove for an internationally recognised independence for SWA “under a government which does not subscribe to Marxist-Leninist doctrines”.[19] During a visit by Haig’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence, Dick Clarke, to South Africa in 1981, Botha explained that his government was not against independence for SWA as such. However, he insisted:

SWAPO must not be allowed to win an election in South West Africa. We were not prepared to exchange a war on the Kunene for a war on the Orange . . . If South West Africa would be governed by SWAPO, then a serious risk would rise that the Russians could threaten South Africa from the Territory. South Africa would then have to decide to invade the Territory in order to protect its interests. Such a situation would probably be less acceptable to the USA than the status quo. If SWAPO would govern South West Africa, Botswana would directly feel threatened, Dr Savimbi would be eliminated and South Africa would be totally encircled with Russian-inspired powers. If the entire Southern Africa then came under Russian tyranny, the strategic sea route around the Cape and its critical minerals would be lost to the West.[20]

In other words, yes to independence, but a definite no to a communist SWAPO government.[21] “There should be no doubt that South Africa did not want to have the red flag flying in Windhoek,” Pik Botha told US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Dr Chester Crocker.[22] A top-secret report by the Directorate of Military Intelligence bluntly stated: “The RSA is planning to let the constitutional set-up in SWA develop in such a manner that a pro-SA government comes to power there.”[23]

And so, on a security-strategic level, the war became an attempt to win enough time to create the conditions in which SWAPO would lose an election.[24]

At times, the South Africans did try half-heartedly to engage with SWAPO. General Georg Meiring – who was GOC South West Africa at the time – related to Hilton Hamann how he, Dr Willie van Niekerk (South African Administrator General in SWA), and Foreign Affairs consultant Sean Cleary flew to the Cape Verde Islands in 1985 to try to get SWAPO to participate in a transitional government of national unity. According to Meiring, the guerrilla movement’s reaction to this basically boiled down to: “Bugger you!”[25]

To Jannie Geldenhuys, who became one of the SADF’s most influential strategic thinkers, the time factor was important. In itself, he reasoned, time was neutral – it was on the side of those who utilised it best. Therefore, the important thing was perseverance: “Soviet Russia,” he wrote in his memoirs, “would in the long run not be able to keep up its attempt in Angola and with SWAPO. And if they withdrew, the scale would swing radically in our favour.”[26] Geldenhuys and the other leading officers in the SADF knew they couldn’t win the war against SWAPO (or, for that matter, the ANC) militarily. The most they could do was to stem the tide for a while in order to gain time. It was up to the politicians to utilise that time wisely in order to reach a tolerable political solution, as Constand Viljoen warned the government in the early 1980s.[27]

All of this meant that apartheid, race discrimination and colonial domination diminished, though not vanished, as casus belli. What remained was SWAPO’s avowed aspiration to convert SWA into a Marxist one-party state (see Chapter 10), thereby enabling Pretoria, ironically enough, to present the conflict in the rather more respectable cloak of communist dictatorship versus liberal multiparty democracy. And that, we may surmise, weakened SWAPO and strengthened Pretoria to some extent.

The importance placed upon the military in South Africa’s purported struggle for survival may also be seen in the increase in defence spending. From a very low R36 million in 1958/59, it increased to exactly double that in 1961/1962 (R72 million), but concomitant with the first security-strategic analysis conducted in 1961, it suddenly jumped to R129 million in the next financial year. The steady increases then resumed until the Savannah debacle, when the R692 million budgeted for 1974/1975 shot up sharply to R1 043 million for 1975/1976. By 1982/1983, the budget stood at R2 668 million. Put differently, whereas 0,9% of South Africa’s Gross National Product (GNP) was allocated to defence in 1969/1970, by 1979/1980 this had risen to 5%.[28]

A strategy for Angola

Major General Jannie Geldenhuys took command in SWA in September 1977. To him and his staff at their headquarters in Windhoek, debating the question of how to turn a losing war into a winning one, things must have looked rather bleak. His orders, as relayed by the Chief of the SADF, General Magnus Malan, were “to keep the level of the insurgency at least at the level necessary to ensure that the constitutional development could take place in an atmosphere of stability and peace.”[29] But SWAPO insurgents were infiltrating across the border in sufficient numbers to cause severe headaches to the South Africans, and the army’s ham-fisted counterinsurgency operations had practically no success.

The key word was initiative. SWAPO had it; the SADF did not. This had to be changed around. But how?

There was a way, and Colonel Jan Breytenbach was the pioneer. Breytenbach took the FNLA troops he had commanded during Operation Savannah to South West Africa, and transformed them into a highly efficient and feared secret unit: 32 Battalion. With these fighters, who spoke Portuguese and the indigenous Angolan languages, he began clandestine cross-border operations against SWAPO soon after the SADF pulled out of Angola in the wake of Operation Savannah. Under his inspired but unorthodox leadership, 32 Battalion struck repeatedly inside Angola and harassed SWAPO in places where it deemed itself safe.

It was his intention, Breytenbach wrote, “to turn the southern Angolan bush into a menacing, hostile environment for SWAPO”. In short, he wanted to “out-guerrilla the guerrillas”. The purpose was “to get them off balance and keep them on the wrong foot until they began to collapse psychologically and subsequently also militarily”.[30] (This approach was behind all SADF cross-border operations in the late 1970s and early 1980s.) The army allowed him to undertake clandestine operations – as the command directive put it, “to deny SWAPO an area of 50 kilometres north of the South West African border”.[31] Nevertheless, by the end of 1977 it was clear to the SADF that even 32 Battalion’s operations across the border were not enough.[32]

According to James Roherty, Geldenhuys noted, after taking over command in Windhoek,

[t]hat while South Africa was in a strategic defensive posture this must be understood in operational terms as requiring aggressive, offensive operations. It would be folly, he informed his superiors in Pretoria, to rely on defensive operations (or a defensive mind-set) in what would certainly be a protracted conflict. It reduces very simply, Geldenhuys argued, to a matter of casualties. The SADF cannot and must not sustain the casualties that would be an inevitable concomitant of manpower-intensive, counterinsurgency and conventional warfare. By carrying the war to the enemy – by inflicting disproportionally heavy casualties – the task becomes manageable. SADF units will have again to be trained in “the way of their forebears”.[33]

Geldenhuys’s approach, which was built on Breytenbach’s example, was adopted by the SADF high command. In a document entitled “The SADF basic doctrine for counter insurgency (rural)”, dated November 1977 and generated by the office of the Chief of Staff Operations, it was stated that hitherto the Defence Force’s strategic doctrine “was based on defensive reaction”. This meant that the insurgents, with their bases outside South Africa’s borders, retained the initiative. Because of political considerations, the SADF could not go after them. “Freedom of action was thus largely the prerogative of the enemy and the SADF had perforce to dance to their tune.”[34]

This had to change, the document stated. If the SADF remained on the defensive, offensive tactics notwithstanding, “it will not win the war against terrorism”. Consequently, the SADF “must now go over to the strategic offensive if it hopes for any success against the communist insurgent strategy being employed against it”. The object of such operations should be “destroying the terrorists, their organisation and infrastructure”. The basic theme in counterinsurgency strategic doctrine, the document declared, “is to wrest the initiative from the terrorists by offensive action”.[35] Here, in a nutshell, is the rationale for the series of cross-border offensives the SADF conducted into Angola in the decade between 1978 and 1988.

This type of posture was in line with South Africa’s history. Successive governments had always seen the country’s first defence line, not on its northern borders, but far northwards in Africa. This was, for instance, one of the rationales of Prime Minister Jan Smuts in taking South Africa to war against Italy and Germany in 1939.[36] This point of view was, of course, articulated with a view to the threat posed by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, but the idea took root that South Africa’s true defence line should be as far to the north as possible. And this influenced thinking during the 1970s and 1980s as well.

How did all of this influence South Africa’s view of Angola and the war between the MPLA and UNITA? In March 1978, Magnus Malan, then still Chief of the SADF, visited Salisbury and told the Rhodesians that South Africa’s course was changing. He said that the military would in future dominate Pretoria’s security policy, that a realpolitik approach would be followed, and that the interests of his country would be followed above all else. He said there would be no further compromise regarding South West Africa, and that the idea was to keep southern Angola destabilised, to assist UNITA and to attack SWAPO whenever the opportunity arose.[37]

A year later, Malan’s thoughts crystallised in two documents for the State Security Council (SSC), in which a strategy regarding Angola was proposed. The second document made provision for the following: “The political situation in Angola must be kept as unstable and fluid as possible . . .” This aggressive thought was, however, motivated by a defensive purpose: “[T]o ensure the national security of SWA against the Marxist onslaught from without Angola.” Therefore, the Angolan government had to be forced to “prevent SWAPO from deploying in South Angola”.

The document refers to a future state “when the political situation, especially in South Angola, has improved to the extent that a stable anti-communist government can be brought to power to the advantage of Southern Africa”. It further states that the Angolan rebel movements – UNITA, FNLA and FLEC – “should operate under the leadership of UNITA as a united front with the end objective to create an anti-Marxist government in Angola”. South Africa also had to support UNITA, according to Malan.[38]

Not everyone agreed with Malan’s aggressive stance. The reaction of the Department of Foreign Affairs was distinctly unenthusiastic: whatever their ideological preferences, the Angolan and Mozambican governments were both internationally recognised, and South Africa had to act circumspectly. “Our freedom of movement to bring about changes to the governments of these two countries is limited . . . We have to apply more orthodox diplomatic methods, of which the economic weapon constitutes an important part,” the diplomats said.[39]

At about the same time, an agreement was reached between Jonas Savimbi, leader of UNITA, and senior officers of the SADF, according to which UNITA would clear the southeastern part of Angola and restore the lines of communication with South West Africa, while the SADF would take responsibility for the southwestern part.[40] This went hand in hand with a massive SADF aid programme to UNITA. According to a top-secret Military Intelligence report of 1979, South Africa had transferred about 1 400 tonnes of equipment to UNITA in the two previous years. In fact, “UNITA can thank the RSA for about 90% of its present force,” the report stated. In addition “[i]f the RSA did not aid UNITA, UNITA would have vanished from the vicinity”.[41]

South Africa’s limited economic power over Angola may have been another factor that contributed to its more aggressive posture. In the mid-1970s, South Africa had accepted FRELIMO rule in Mozambique and refused to aid attempts by white Portuguese colonialists to prevent the liberation movement from coming to power. In this case, Pretoria had a powerful weapon – Mozambique’s integration into the South African-dominated regional economy. Maputo’s role as a port city was largely dependent on South African expertise and its position as the nearest import point to the Witwatersrand, South Africa’s economic heart. A sizeable portion of the Mozambican working population were migrant labourers in the Republic. After the end of white rule in Rhodesia, South Africa supported the Mozambican rebel movement RENAMO, but this was in part a response to ANC terrorist attacks emanating from Mozambican soil. Its economic leverage enabled South Africa to intimidate Mozambique into signing a non-aggression pact early in 1984, restricting the ANC’s ability to operate from that country.

In the case of Angola, South Africa possessed no comparable economic card. The country had its own railways, there were very few Angolan migrant labourers in South Africa, and its oil industry made Angola relatively independent.[42] This meant that not much else but military measures remained for Pretoria to exert pressure on Angola to stop its support for SWAPO. All these considerations meant that the SADF’s approach, on the levels of military strategy, operations and tactics, was often aggressive and offensive. Nevertheless, the government remained on the defensive in terms of its security strategy.

The new South African strategy was part of a comprehensive reappraisal of South Africa’s geostrategic position, of which the navy became an unfortunate but understandable victim. Traditionally, the navy was, like the rest of the Defence Force, almost a clone of the British mother service. Whereas the army and air force were fast changing their cultures, the navy could still not really be distinguished from the Royal Navy. This did not exactly endear the navy to the army and the air force.

In fact, the navy’s posture and force structure were not even driven by South Africa’s own needs. In terms of the Simon’s Town Agreement of 1955, it was the British who decided what kind of navy South Africa would have, and it had to fit in with their global Cold War strategy. According to the agreement, Britain turned the Simon’s Town naval base over to South Africa, in return for the country’s playing a role in safeguarding the strategic Cape sea route. The agreement also allowed the navy to purchase anti-submarine frigates and minesweepers from Britain.[43] This was the main reason why many in the SADF regarded the navy “as a bit of an ‘oddball’ ” and others even “as a complete anachronism” in the words of Vice Admiral Glen Syndercombe, Chief of the Navy in the 1980s.[44]

But four factors changed all of that. The first was the cancellation of the Simon’s Town Agreement by the British Labour government in 1975. The second was the loss of Angola as a buffer territory, which focused strategic thinking very much on the country’s continental war needs. Thirdly, there was the retirement, in late 1976, of the Chief of the SADF, Admiral Hugo Biermann, under whose long leadership the navy had fared rather well. He was succeeded by General Magnus Malan who – as did other army generals – viewed the navy and its expensive ships as something of an unaffordable luxury. The fourth factor was the imposition of a UN arms embargo against South Africa. This meant that France cancelled a contract for two corvettes and two submarines, and refused to sell further aircraft as well. Most of the available resources were thereafter used for the development of army and air force weapons systems.

Against this background, the SADF, with input from navy officers, produced two documents, the so-called Mandy and Hogg reports. These questioned the navy’s role as custodian of the Cape sea route and, in effect, recommended that the force be transformed to concentrate on coastal defence. At about the same time, Minister of Defence PW Botha announced that South Africa would no longer defend the Cape sea route on behalf of the West.[45] This meant that the navy’s frigates would be phased out, and it would concentrate on its new Israeli fast missile strike craft and submarines.[46] As Admiral Syndercombe wrote,

the frigates, fine ships though they were, were not what we required in our existing operational scenario. We needed small, fast ships with massive surface to surface firepower to present an effective counter to the missile-armed fast attack craft being supplied to the Angolan Navy by the Soviet Union. Their small size also meant that they were difficult to detect, either visually or by radar, while their shallow draft, speed and manoeuvrability gave them the ability to penetrate into restricted waters where other vessels dared not go.[47]

The strike craft and submarines would play a substantial but unsung role in inserting and extracting special force operators behind enemy lines.

Angola: the political objectives

The fact that the proposals in General Malan’s strategic reviews of 1979 about an offensive posture towards Angola were formally accepted by the State Security Council elevated them to the level of official, albeit clandestine, policy. That, at least, was the case in 1979. In some SADF documents, there are casual comments that show that the military saw a regime change in Luanda as their eventual goal.[48] But none of these documents presented any operational plan to achieve it. Did it ever go beyond mere proposals? Several considerations suggest it did not.

Firstly, one should remember that the South African state was not a single, monolithic entity. From the outside, US Secretary of George Shultz remarked to President Ronald Reagan that “[t]he South African leadership is of several minds and the military, in particular, is disinclined to take chances or to favour negotiated solutions”.[49] Malan’s aggressiveness, for instance, was not greeted with whoops of joy by Foreign Affairs officials.

Secondly, the SADF’s military strategy shows that all operations up to 1985 were not primarily aimed at FAPLA, the Angolan army, but at SWAPO. In at least one instance, the South African government warned its Angolan counterpart in diplomatic language of an impending SADF cross-border operation, and assured Luanda of South Africa’s “consistent policy” that these actions were aimed “solely against SWAPO terrorists and any contact with forces of the People’s Republic of Angola is avoided”.[50] (Of course, UNITA’s guerrilla operations against the MPLA necessitated the deployment of about 50% of SWAPO’s forces to help the MPLA, which meant that far fewer SWAPO fighters were available to infiltrate SWA.)[51] The first SADF operations specifically aimed at FAPLA took place only in 1985 and 1986, and then they were on a small, clandestine scale. As we shall see later, the 1987 operation started the same way, suggesting that a forcible regime change in Luanda was not on the immediate military agenda.

Documents in the archive of the Department of Foreign Affairs tend to support this conclusion. In 1984, Pik Botha told Chester Crocker that peace in southern Africa would be impossible if the Soviets took over Angola, as this would help them to take over the entire region. Therefore, it was necessary to achieve “reconciliation” between the MPLA and UNITA; the two had to be forced to talk to each other.[52] On the face of it, it seemed as if South Africa was still committed to the Alvor Agreement of January 1975, according to which the MPLA, the FNLA and UNITA had to form an interim government of national unity to prepare for free elections. But things were not quite that simple.

Although it never happened, President PW Botha and Pik Botha at times actively considered the unilateral recognition of UNITA as the sovereign government of Angola.[53] As Pik Botha explained to a sympathetic Namibian interim government in 1985:

You can only get Cuban withdrawal if there is reconciliation in Angola. If you get reconciliation in Angola, [President José Eduardo] Dos Santos is finished. The moment they start talking to [UNITA leader Jonas] Savimbi, and this is Dr Savimbi’s own assessment, we agree, then this present regime in Luanda is finished, and then SWAPO will be finally finished as well.[54]

The South Africans were thus in favour of “reconciliation”, of talks between the MPLA and UNITA in the hope of replacing the Marxist MPLA with the friendly UNITA by peaceful means. Not that the South Africans had very much hope of this happening; they and the Americans agreed that “no Angolan party can achieve an outright military victory”. If the Cubans were withdrawn, they thought that UNITA could control maybe 60 to 70% of Angola, less if the Cubans stayed on.[55] By 1979, the Directorate of Military Intelligence estimated that UNITA had the support of about 45% of the Angolan population, against 25% for the MPLA.[56] Regardless of its accuracy, the point is that the South Africans were expecting that an election would put UNITA into power in Luanda.

The picture emerging from all of this, then, is that the National Party government would very much have preferred a friendly, anti-communist government under UNITA. Malan’s very aggressive stance of 1979, however, was never implemented. It seems as if the South Africans were realistic enough to realise that they did not have the military means to topple the MPLA.

Conversely, South Africa’s aid to UNITA proved to be counterproductive in one important regard. The MPLA feared that South Africa was bent on regime change, and therefore aided all South African enemies – SWAPO, the ANC, Zimbabwe and others – in the hope that the fall of the NP government would ease the pressure on Luanda.[57]

The South African strategy was shared, by and large, by the Reagan administration. In a 1987 review of its policy, the White House decided to continue with its attitude, which was “[t]o achieve an equitable internal settlement of the Angolan conflict that affords UNITA a fair share of power”. Also, “Soviet and Soviet-proxy influence, military presence and opportunities in Angola and southern Africa” had to be reduced or, if possible, eliminated.[58]

The presence of some 30 000 Cuban troops in Angola obviously complicated things. Fidel Castro, we now know, intervened in 1975 on his own initiative and without informing the Soviets, much less asking their permission.[59] Thereafter, Castro’s main reason for staying on was to “protect” the Angolan revolution from the “racist” South Africans, and not so much to help the MPLA win its struggle with UNITA, which he apparently viewed as an internal affair.[60]

Predictably, this is not how the South Africans – or the Americans, for that matter – saw it. In SADF documents, the Cubans are often referred to as “surrogate forces”. And so, in 1981, South Africa and the US concluded an informal pact to demand the departure of the Cubans from Angola as a prerequisite for the SADF’s withdrawal from Angola and the implementation of Namibian independence – the much-maligned concept of “linkage”.[61] In view of the perceived Cuban/Soviet threat, the South Africans definitely saw their military presence in Angola and SWA as defensive in nature.[62] As General Malan – then still Chief of the SADF – explained in 1979 at a meeting of the SSC,

[t]he question was whether we are going to implement a forward defensive strategy or a close strategy. We want to ensure the RSA’s national security outside the RSA . . . If we look at the Rhodesian front, the Mozambican front and the Angolan front, we see that the crisis is coming. The most forward defence line should be outside the Republic. We should be able to choose the time and place.[63]

PW Botha, then still prime minister, agreed. As long as he was prime minister, he assured the meeting, “he was not going to engage South Africa’s battle on its own territory. We now know what the Russian intentions are and that they have the ability to bring troops quickly to Southern Africa”[64] – a reference to the influx of Cuban troops into Angola in 1975.

The Americans did not always agree with the South Africans’ blunt approach, but there certainly was a convergence of interests, as perceived in Washington and Pretoria. In his memoirs, Chester Crocker explained the US thinking:

The Cuban troop withdrawal link would bring pressure on Luanda to reconcile with UNITA. It would prevent a Namibia settlement from occurring at UNITA’s expense. Cuban withdrawal from Southern Africa was inherently attractive in its own right and in terms of US–Soviet relations. Finally, it would give us the leverage we would need to obtain South African cooperation on Namibian independence.[65]

The question of linkage would become the central issue surrounding the international wrangling about South West Africa and Angola. It would also, in the end, provide the excuse for South Africa to leave SWA, and for Cuba to withdraw its troops from Angola. But all of this lay in the future.

One final point to make is that, obviously, the world looked very different when viewed from Luanda. In 1977, UNITA proclaimed a “Black African and Socialist Republic of Angola” in the areas under its control, but, according to an American researcher, this “was not designed as a secessionist move”. Nevertheless, the fear in Luanda was not only that this “UNITA state” would gain international recognition, but that South Africa “was once again attempting to create a ‘Great Ovambo State’ under its own aegis that would unify the Cuanhama [Kwanyama] speaking communities of northern Namibia and southern Angola”. The researcher described “tremendous alarm and paranoia in Luanda”. Late in 1978, the Angolan Minister of Defence, Iko Carreira, even publicly alleged that South Africa was on the verge of invading Angola again in order to capture Lubango, Huambo and Luanda itself.[66]

As we have seen, however, this fear did not rest on facts. The story emerging from secret South African documents is very different. But that did not make the fear less real.