…LONDON…
The fax was there when she got back: three stories. Two were short, just a few paragraphs. The third spread over three pages. It was called:
‘And Unquiet Lie the Civil Dead’.
The date was February 1993. The byline was Richard Monk.
She read quickly and she drew a line beside a section:
As for Namibia, the white South African regime regarded it as a fief. Soldiers killed with impunity. It was sport. One regiment was on horseback. They rode down running humans, teenagers many of them, just ill- nourished boys. The soldiers galloped alongside them and they shot them between the shoulderblades with automatic shotguns. And the riders laughed at what they saw. There were no consequences. Later, Mozambique was the same, a place to corral starving two-legged animals: blow them up with grenades, sizzle them with flame- throwers. But this had limited training value; it was too easy.
And then came Angola, sad, ravaged Angola, cursed with oil. At least 300,000 people-many of them civilians-have died in the civil war since Holden Roberto of the FNLA first took the CIA’s coin in 1962. Together, Holden and the agency held a small war and the whole world came: the US, South Africa, China, the Soviet Union, Cuba. South Africa was invited in by the US and it came with alacrity. In August 1981, given the nod by a Reagan Administration foaming at the mouth over the Cuban presence in the country, it invaded southern Angola. The South African force of 11,000 men, supported by tanks and aircraft, laid waste to Cunene province. Some 80,000 Angolans fled their homes. How many died is unknown. The South African army settled down for a long and murderous stay.
From 1981, the US used both military power-South African troops (and their proxies) and Savimbi’s UNITA forces-and economic pressure as it set out to destabilise countries in the region. As a result, some estimates put deaths by starvation at more than 100,000 in 1983 alone. Along the bloody way, there have been many chances to end the Angolan conflict. But, until last month, the US turned its face against any settlement that did not fully replace Soviet with American influence. The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency will miss Angola and the nearby countries. They like the region a lot. It has been good to them, a wonderful place to train staff, hundreds of them (even black officers, although the South Africans didn’t approve). It has also been a chance to provide extravagantly paid work for the agencies’ loyal friends-the little ‘civilian’ airlines and the freelance specialists of all deadly and corrupt kinds.
As for the warm and loving community who live by selling arms, the misery of Angola has been a bonanza. Millions of dollars of US weapons have gone to the South Africans and their ally, Savimbi’s UNITA.
And hasn’t Angola been fun for America’s so-called mercenaries, the live-action fringe of the gun-crazies. Almost every bar they infest has some thickneck who can tell you stories about high old times killing black people in Angola (with the odd rape thrown in). In Tucson recently, a man called Red showed me his photographs. In one, he was squatting, M16 in hand, butt on the ground.
Behind him was an obscene pile of black bodies, one headless.
‘Soldiers?’ I asked.
‘Niggers,’ he said. ‘Commie niggers.’
Some of these men even claim to have fought Cubans, but that is highly unlikely. In Angola, the Cubans fired back.
Sick American porn-killers are bad enough but there is the possibility of much worse.
In early 1988, CIA and DIA propagandists began feeding the media stories about Cuban troops using nerve gas in Angola. (Angola was always ‘Marxist Angola’, the Cubans were always ‘Soviet-sponsored’, and Savimbi was always ‘the US-backed freedom fighter’.) Highly dubious ‘experts’ were always cited. Of course, their South African and other connections were never mentioned.
Fragments of evidence now suggest that this campaign was in response to rumours in South Africa of a village in northern Angola being wiped out.
Wiped out by which side? How? We don’t know. But should the rumours have spread outside South Africa and been investigated and confirmed, the CIA-DIA misinformation artists had done the groundwork for blaming the Cubans.
Richard Monk. Who was Richard Monk?
Caroline found the contents page. The Notes on Contributors said: ‘Richard Monk is a freelance journalist who is no stranger to the world’s trouble spots.’ That wasn’t going to help. She typed richard monk into the search engine.
An hour later she had nothing.
She circled the editor’s name: Robert Blumenthal. Where would he be decades later?
Another search. Hundreds of Robert Blumenthal references came up. She went back and added editor behind enemy lines.
Half a dozen. The first one said:
…veteran radical editor Robert Blumenthal, 69, collapsed and died Saturday while giving the William J. Cummings Memorial Lecture at the University of Montana’s School of Journalism…Behind Enemy Lines…
She went to the source, The Missoulian, daily paper of Missoula, Montana. Robert Blumenthal was long gone. The Saturday he died at the podium was a Saturday in 1996. The story mentioned Behind Enemy Lines among seven or eight publications Blumenthal had edited. They had names like The Social Fabric, To Bear Witness, Records of Capitalism. It said he had lived in Missoula for ten years with his partner of twenty-two years, the photographer Paul Salinas.
Go home, lie in a bath with a big whisky, eat scrambled eggs for supper. Watch television.
Colley. The bastard. He’d treated her with contempt, casually used her. She didn’t know why or how. But he had betrayed Mackie to someone who wanted to kill him, tried to kill him.
Mackie might be dead.
She might have killed him by going to Colley instead of going to Halligan.
Get on with it.
It took another hour to find a phone number for the right Paul Salinas. When she had the number, it rang but no one answered, No machine.
She waited. Tried again. Again. The fifth or sixth time, she was going to go home, it was after 8 p.m., the receiver was picked up.
‘Salinas.’
‘Mr Salinas, my name is Carol Short. I’m ringing from Sydney, Australia. I’m a publisher’s permissions person and I’m hoping you can help me.’
She carried on lying, told him a story about wanting to publish Richard Monk’s piece in an anthology of political writing.
‘Publisher? Sorry, did you say that?’
He was wobbly, she could tell. He might have been asleep, the phone ringing unheard.
‘Yes. It’s called The Conviction Press. It’s new, no money, no track record. We’re not acceptable politically.’
‘Australia?’
‘Yes. Sydney. I don’t suppose you know, but there are radicals in Australia.’
Salinas laughed and she could hear that it took a lot out of him.
‘We were in Australia in ’75, late ’75,’ he said. ‘Met a lot of people. Amazing people. Byron Bay, we went up there. That was really good stuff they were smoking. Big year for you Aussies, wasn’t it, ’75?’
