AFFAIRS OF STATE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00498R000100150135-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 20, 2007
• Sequence Number: 135
• Publication Date: July 24, 1978
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Approved For Release 2007/06/22 : CIA-RDP99-00498R000100150135-9
:ARTICLE APPEARED
ON PAGE 72-76
THg NEW YUKKEK
24 jJuly 1978
AFFAIRS OF STATE
JULZ- 16
L A ST month, when President Car-
ter's assertions about the Cubans'
responsibility for the May inva-
sion of Shaba Province, in Zaire, were
being met with considerable skeptici,+m,
Renew Kissinger came to the Presi-
dent's defense. "All the evidence," he
said, "is on [Carter's] side, yet here
we are engaged in a public argument
questioning the honor of the President
of the United States." And that, he ob-
served, "tells us something about the
level of our public discourse." This was
itself a curious contribution to the pub-
lic discourse. For one thing, nothing
had been said about Carter's integrity;
it was not his rectitude but his informa-
tion that some found questionable. For
another, Kissinger, whose own veracity
has recently been challenged in the
Senate, spent six years in the service of
a President of the United States whose
honor often had to be questioned. And
how could the former Secretary of
State be so confident that "all the evi-
dence"-or even a preponderance of
it---supported Carter's claims? Even
now, we have only the President's
word for it. In a speech last month to
the 'National Military Intelligence As-
sociation, Admiral Daniel Murphy, an
intelligence officer at the Pentagon,
said that the White House lacked
"what the press could term hard,
conclusive ... evidence or proof of Cu-
ban involvement." Some members of
Congress have been summoned to the
President's office and, on leaving it,
have said that they were persuaded of
the validity of the charges, but no one
has explained what persuaded them. So
much uncertainty surrounds recent
events in Zaire and Angola that the
Senate Intelligence Committee, which
has completed a study of what hap-
pened there in 1975 and 1976, has
considered holding another investiga-
tion of the whole murky affair.
What the committee might look into
is not only the way the White House
handled the matter but the kind of in-
formation on which it based its judo
ments. Where did it come from? How
and by whom was it appraised? It is
suspected that some of it dates back
three years or so, when Cubans were
training Zairian exiles-mostly from
Shaba, which was Katanga when Zaire
was the Congo--along with Angolans
fir the conflicts that followed the ~~ith-
those who moved into Zaire two
months ago. But the same Cuban-
trained forces crossed the same border
in 1977, and if there was Cuban par-
ticipation this year there must have
been Cuban participation last year. We
condemned the 1977 invasion but nev-
er once raised the issue of Cuban re-
sponsibility. As for 1978, the only
Americans known to have been near
the scene were the crews that airlifted
Moroccan reinforcements and supplies
for the French and Belgian troops in
the combat zone, and none of those
Americans left the secured areas in
which the planes landed. There must
have been some Central Intelligence
Agency people around-they, like the
Cubans, had given military training to
Angolans-but, - according to John
Stockwell, who was one of their num-
ber until 1976, and whose "In Search
of Enemies" has just been published,
many of them were agents of misinfor-
mation, sometimes of mischief, and the
reports they sent home were often
"patently false." It is unlikely that by
early this year they were being taken
seriously,-even at C.I.A. headquarters.
If any of our reconnaissance satellites
were focussed on the area, they appar-
ently 'got nothing to strengthen the
Administration's case. As a rule, the
justification for withholding intelli-
gence from the public is that revealing
it would jeopardize those who provided
it. But this does not apply to machinery
in space, and in the present case it seems
unlikely'to apply to information gained
in other ways. The likeliest sources
would be the Zairian government in
Kinshasa; our own and other diplo-
mats in that city, some eight hundred
miles from Kolwezi, where most of the
fighting took place; and the European
and Moroccan troops and the prisoners
they interrogated. Exposure could not
harm such sources. At the same time,
few of them could be regarded as
disinterested. Most of them wanted
American involvement in one form or
another, and
the best way to bring that
a out was to pz , _
the conflict (which in some respects
appeared to be a civil war, a war of se-
cession, or a revolution) was at least
in part ideological---a Cold War battle
in which Angolans and Cubans were
being used to further Soviet ambitions.
If it was nothing but an attempt by
some unhappy eaales to seize control of
their homeland, there would be no sup-
port here for intervention in any form.
MAKING such distinctions raises
again some old questions about
American national interest. If it were
established beyond doubt that the
Cubans were involved--heavily in-
volved-in Zaire in May, would this
fact in itself require us to support their
adversaries? When we decided to pur-
sue the war in Southeast Asia no fur-
ther, in effect we put the region be-
yond the sphere of national interest-
beyond what used to be called our "de-
fense perimeter." There were never
any Cuban or Soviet troops in Viet-
nam, or any large outside forces except
our own, but that war was ideological
in character, and the Russians were sup-
plying the North Vietnamese. Are we
now being asked to redefine the na-
tional interest in such a way as to in-
clude Zaire and Angola while still ex-
cluding Southeast Asa? And if a few
battalions of Cuban soldiers showed
up in Vietnam to help in the border
skirmishes with Cambodia, would that
bring the region once more within our
area of vital concern: Would we then
have to consider helping the Cambo-
dians? Do a few clear photographs of
uniformed Cubans on a battlefield give
us a stake in the outcome of any con-
flict? Given the realities of power in
this century, it is plain that our foreign
policy must in large part he determined
by what the Soviets do. But must we
be hostages to Cuban policy? These
are questions that might and probably
should be raised in the Senate, but they
STAT
probably won't be.
It may turn out that the faces do
support Carter and that there was in-
deed a substantial Cuban presence in
Shaba. And it may be that other facts
support Castro's disclaimers. Castro
does not deny the presence of Cuban
troops in Angola, but he has said that
he did not authorize Cuban involve-
ment in Zaire and that, furthermore,
he counselled the Angolans against the
invasion a month before it took place.
If he did oppose it and if Cubans were
drawal i Approved For Release 2007/06/22 : CIA-RDP99-00498R000100150135-9 w?nu~d nnr h.-