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CIA $$ Bankroll Attempt: Vets Recruited For Angola

By VVAW

In February, Roy Innis, one-time director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was on radio and TV and in newspapers all over the country asking for Black Vietnam veterans to go to Angola to fight. He was not looking for "mercenaries," he said, but for patriotic men to go to fight against the Soviet Union, the Cubans, and their allies in the MPLA. It would be the same as the anti-fascist volunteers who went to Spain to fight against Franco and the other fascists in the 1930s. Here was a chance, he said, "to assist anti-Communist forces as combat medics" and fight on the right side, unlike Vietnam "where the US government was backing a corrupt dictator."

When he began recruiting , the war in Angola was going hot and heavy with new reports each day about mercenary troops and Cuban troops being poured into the battles. Now that the MPLA has taken the country, Innis says that his recruiting efforts won't stop. "The real war will be the guerilla war that is coming," he says. He wants the US government to turn Angola into Russia's Vietnam.

Of course, the "combat medics" are just a convenient way to get around legal difficulties. "There are narrow legalities involved," says Innis. "I am sending medical personnel who happen to be combat veterans of Vietnam and Korea to aid UNITA." Stripped of all the pretense, Innis is recruiting Vietnam vets to do the fighting in Angola.

CORE has never had close ties with any of the forces in Angola's war; no would Innis deny that the money necessary to pay these troops was coming from the CIA. In fact, according to a British newsman, the CIA allocated $49.2 million for arms, supplies, and troops in a desperate attempt by the US government to prevent their arch-rival, the Soviet Union, from gaining a foothold in this part of Africa. And even though the US rulers try to cover over their relations with racist regime in South Africa, they were willing to work openly with the South African government to try to bolster the UNITA forces.

It's true, as Innis says, that the Soviet Union and Cuban Troops have no business whatever in Angola. But it's equally true that Innis, the CIA, and the US government have no business there either. Neither do Black Vietnam vets, whether they're called mercenaries or not.

Innis is also speaking the truth about the way vets--all vets--were used by the government to back a corrupt dictator in Vietnam. The solution to that problem, however, is not to be used once more, this time by the US ruling class in their greedy competition with their counterparts in the Soviet Union. Veterans, Black and white, have been used once by the rich--and once is more than enough.