of Angola (UNITA), MPLA well may have given the coup de grâce to its political and military opposition by killing Savimbi on Feb. 21, six days before dos Santos’ face-to-face meeting in Washington with President George W. Bush — a meeting supposedly intended to encourage reconciliation between the warring factions. Intelligence sources tell Insight that dos Santos personally gave the command to kill Savimbi. Whether that can be corroborated, it is clear that while dos Santos had it almost within his power to kill Savimbi since October 2001, the prospect of the Bush visit encouraged him to give orders for the kill as soon as possible, the sources said.
      Despite oil revenues amounting to some $3.5 billion a year, the Angolan government is chronically broke. The Economist magazine reported in January 2000 that "the bulk of the money bypasses the budget, disappearing straight into the hands of the presidency." Indeed, the magazine said that the oil revenues for the next three years "had already been spent." According to Alexander’s Gas & Oil Connections, an industry data source, in July 1999 the oil companies, including Chevron, paid Angola $900 million in "secretive signature bonuses" for exploration leases. Such up-front payments are not based on production, but are an on-the-books way to get around the antibribery provisions of the Corrupt Practices Act, U.S. officials suggest. As for the need for a signing bonus, an intelligence source tells Insight: "They used the money to buy tanks, armament, MiGs, chemical weapons and foreign advisers to hunt down and kill Savimbi."
      For many years the military arm of the MPLA, the Angolan Armed Forces (FAA), had been frustrated in its attempts to take out UNITA’s leader because Savimbi’s troops had broad support among the local population and had been well-trained in rapid guerrilla movements by the man they called the "Black Cockerel." "The fish swim in the ocean of the people," says the guerrilla maxim. Moreover, the coalition of tribal peoples that formed the basis of his support deeply distrusted the mestiços, the detribalized and assimilated minority that ruled in Luanda.
      "MPLA decided to drain the ocean," a congressional-staff African expert tells Insight. "When they learned that Savimbi was in the northern province of Moxico, they instituted a scorched-earth policy. They used chemical weapons to defoliate the trees and kill the crops. Then they burned the villages. The people had no food and no houses, so they fled. MPLA forces then rounded up columns of as many as 700 refugees when they could and confined them to camps near the provincial capital. The FAA especially targeted groups trying to get across the border into the Congo [Zaire], because they assumed that the women and children included dependents of UNITA soldiers."
      Once the area was depopulated, the FAA could assume 

that any movements picked up by satellite imagery would be those of UNITA forces, the source says. After that, it was just a matter of time.
      Lisbon’s Diario de Noticias gave an account of Savimbi’s death through the eyes of the enemy FAA commander, Brig. Simao Carlitos Waly, according to a Foreign Broadcast Information Service text. The Lisbon report says Savimbi was cornered with the assistance of foreign commandos. Nevertheless, even the brigadier’s account, given in a press conference at Luanda on Feb. 23, could not avoid a kind of professional admiration of the gallantry of his enemy’s last stand. "By traveling to the Luvuei region, Savimbi would have to pass through dense bush," said Waly. "We continued to pursue him. As soon as he reached the Luvuei River he was caught in an ambush set up by our forces. Upon arriving in the area, Savimbi thought he had lost us. He tried to let his troops rest and reorganize. … Through reconnaissance missions we learnt that he passed through the area. We began to fire all our artillery. We used all the information we had at our disposal. During the first phase we shot Savimbi seven times. He [still] tried to pick up a weapon and defend himself when he saw all his guards were dead."
      On the same day that Waly gave his account, Robert Boucher, the U.S. State Department spokesman, released a statement in Washington. "Jonas Savimbi has been killed," Boucher said. "The death of the UNITA leader is yet another casualty in a war that should have ended long ago. We call upon both sides, in conjunction with the peaceful opposition, civil sectors and international community, to fulfill their obligation to bring peace to the Angolan people." At the White House press briefing, a journalist asked Ari Fleischer, the White House press spokesman, what impact the Savimbi killing would have on the talks with dos Santos. "Does the White House think that the dos Santos government set Savimbi up for assassination, in effect, to get him out of the way before dos Santos gets here?" a savvy reporter asked. Fleischer, a master of the nonanswer, was at his smoothest: "Well, the United States is still committed to achieving peace development through equitable solutions in Angola. And the president calls upon all Angolans to fulfill their obligations to peace there."
      The next day, Feb. 27, President Bush met with dos Santos and the presidents of Mozambique and Botswana and issued a brief statement: "Today I met with three presidents who can help bring peace and prosperity to southern Africa. The three presidents also discussed the tragic wars in Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We agreed that peace is within reach of both countries. I urged President dos Santos to move quickly toward achieving a cease-fire in Angola. And we agree that all parties have an obligation to seize this moment to end the war and develop 

Angola’s vast wealth to the benefit of the Angolan people."
      UNITA’s political leaders immediately turned to Savimbi’s second-in-command, Vice President Antonio Dembo, as their man to negotiate reconciliation with the MPLA. Four days after dos Santos met with Bush, FAA forces in Angola encountered Dembo, who had escaped the original massacre, and shot him down like a dog.
      Angola watchers were not surprised at the administration’s mild response to these dramatic events. Last October, former U.S. ambassador Paul Hare, now executive director of the U.S.-Angolan Chamber of Commerce, which represents U.S. corporations operating in Angola, put it bluntly: "It appears the new American administration wants to pursue a policy of active engagement with the Angolan government. The emphasis will be on practical results and not rhetorical statements. The reasons for this approach are severalfold. Angola’s present and potential energy resources are becoming more important every day. The oil is plentiful and accessible, and is also the type of crude which the United States needs."
      Now such matters are in the domain of National Security Adviser Rice, late of the Chevron board. Lewis, of the Center for Public Integrity, says: "These multibillion-dollar oil interests are active all over the world. So how in the world do you recuse yourself from the interests of a company like Chevron? This may be more of an issue about the recusal process and how it works. I don’t see any way at all honestly that she can serve as national-security adviser and fully, 100 percent, take herself out of matters that may pertain to Chevron. I think it would virtually be impossible for her to function, in all honesty."
      Certainly Rice is very gifted. She attended the University of Denver, entering at age 15 and taking Soviet studies with Joseph Korbel, the father of former secretary of state Madeleine Albright. Rice earned a master’s degree at the University of Notre Dame and a doctorate from Denver’s Graduate School of International Studies. She went to Stanford University in 1981 to study arms control and, in 1986, joined the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a Council on Foreign Relations fellow.
      Rice was named to the Chevron board in 1991 after leaving her post on the staff of President George H.W. Bush’s National Security Council, where she served as director of Soviet affairs. Now she eagerly was sought after by the establishmentarian intelligentsia. In addition to her call to serve the board of Chevron, she was chosen to serve on the boards of Charles Schwab Corp., Transamerica Corp., Hewlett Packard, the international advisory council of J.P. Morgan, the Carnegie Corporation, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Rand Corporation. She also was on the board of Notre Dame and provost and vice president of Stanford, as well as on the boards of a number of other educational institutions.

      This résumé was a good fit with the moderate conservatism of George W. Bush, whom she had served as foreign-policy adviser during the presidential campaign. When nominated, she filed papers indicating that she had more than $250,000 in Chevron stock and an income in excess of $550,000 per year. Insight attempted many times to reach Rice’s office to ask for comment on her service with Chevron, but received no reply.
      During the decade that Rice served on the Chevron board, the corporation prospered, according to its annual reports, going from total revenues of $38.9 billion in 1991 to $50.6 billion in 2000, with net income rising from $1.2 billion in 1991 to $5.2 billion in 2000. On Oct. 10, 1991, Chevron acquired Texaco Corp., resulting in combined revenues in excess of $100 billion.
      Chevron’s role in Angola dates back to the days of Portuguese colonial rule, when Gulf Oil Corp. opened fields in the Atlantic Ocean just offshore from the province of Cabinda. (Gulf was acquired by Chevron in 1984.) Cabindans claim that Cabinda never has been part of Angola. Geographically, it is an exclave separated from Angola by a narrow slice of the Congo (Zaire) and the mighty Congo River delta.
      In the late sixties three revolutionary groups contended to control Angola: MPLA in Luanda and the west, UNITA in the east and the south and Holden Roberto’s Front for the National Liberation of Angola (FNLA), a smaller group headquartered in the northern provinces. The MPLA called on Portugal for assistance, then ruled by a friendly Marxist military junta, and brought in some 30,000 Cuban troops and Soviet advisers and arms. The first thing MPLA did was to march into the Cabinda exclave and seize the prize: the offshore oil fields that, according to recent statements by Chevron, constitute 50 percent of the Angolan government’s gross domestic product.
      The people of Cabinda, more closely related to ethnic groups in the Congo than Angola, have received a mere pittance of the oil revenues taken from their territory. They live in great poverty. A fourth, much-splintered, revolutionary group known as the Front for the Liberation of the Cabinda Exclave (FLEC) has sought independence for Cabinda, conducting a low-level insurgency of harassment and sabotage of oil facilities, seizing villages for a brief time as a demonstration and kidnapping oil-company employees.
      Maybe the issue has been those oil royalties; maybe it has been freedom. In 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan, the new administration backed the MPLA’s pro-Western rival, Savimbi. A charismatic leader who spoke nine languages, Savimbi represented the vast majority of Angolans who lived in tribal societies in the countryside. The new U.S. president saw Savimbi as an anticommunist fighting for freedom.
      "Reagan was an admirer of Jonas Savimbi," Jeanne 

Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations at the time, said recently. "Ron Reagan cared a very great deal about freedom. He detested tyranny. He detested imperialism and colonialism, and he detested communism because it stood for these things. And wherever there were people who had been or were about to be sucked into the Soviet empire and conquered by Soviet forces, who were struggling to preserve or to establish their freedom, Reagan said, ‘I want us to stand with those people who are struggling for freedom and independence.’"
      Savimbi was able to support his movement by taking over the diamond mines in the north, exporting the diamonds through friendly Zaire and by getting supplies via Namibia to the south. The first Bush administration, listening carefully to Chevron and the oil industry, did little to disturb the status quo but kept pushing for "free and fair elections" between the communist and anticommunist factions. Savimbi reluctantly agreed, and the elections were held on Sept. 29-30, 1992, in the waning months of the Bush administration. The international diplomatic elite rushed to pronounce the elections a success, among them U.S. Ambassador Herman Cohen, who was then assistant secretary of state for African affairs. "They were free and fair," Cohen tells Insight today.
      But some election observers had a different conclusion. Margaret Hemenway, a longtime Hill staffer who was part of the U.N.-authorized official delegation, tells Insight: "The first one to report fraud was Holden Roberto. We saw polling places in the morning with no voters. We went in and said ‘What’s going on?’ The ballot boxes were already full. We went back to Luanda and UNITA candidates saw their computer vote tallies actually descending as they watched the screen. They couldn’t believe it."
      A report issued in November 1992 by the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, headed by former top Pentagon official Frank Gaffney, gave more details: Registration of voters was closed 40 days before the election; large numbers of polling stations reported identical numerical results; only the MPLA was allowed access to government-controlled television; pre-election bribery of voters by MPLA was rife; in some areas as many as 25 percent of the ballots cast were nullified; and electricity blackouts took place in a number of key provinces as the votes were being tabulated. Finally, according to the report, U.N. special envoy Margaret Anstee stated that she "had never witnessed a more unfair election, even in Latin America."
      Cohen says Savimbi refused to accept the outcome from the start. "He told me he was going back to war because he had to save the Ovambindu people from being ruled by the Marxists," Cohen says today. "He made that decision early 

on. He even told me that he had enough troops around the country that he could easily win the war, and he almost did. He went pretty far."
      But Hemenway says Savimbi told her that, "Even though there was massive fraud and I was cheated, I will accept." In fact, the terms of the election called for a runoff if neither presidential candidate achieved more than 50 percent of the vote. Savimbi sent his vice president, Jeremias Chitunda, a Western-educated diplomat well-known in Washington and other capitals, to go to Luanda to arrange the terms for the runoff election. But on Oct. 31, 1992, the capital descended into chaos.
      Amnesty International’s 1996 report stated: "Intense fighting broke out in Luanda. Government forces attacked UNITA offices and residences. The [Rapid Intervention Police] and ordinary police, assisted by civilians to whom they had distributed arms in the preceding weeks, carried out house-to-house hunts for UNITA supporters. Many hundreds died in the crossfire or were deliberately killed. Hundreds of others were taken into police or military custody. Prisoners were taken in truckloads to the Camama cemetery on the outskirts of the city where they were shot and buried in shallow graves. Another mass grave is reported to be at Morro da Luz, a steep ravine in the Samba area of Luanda where suspected UNITA members were taken to be pushed off."
      The most prominent victim of this ethnic cleansing was Chitunda. His official convoy, traveling with a white flag of peace, was ambushed and forced off the road. The Associated Press reported on Nov. 2, 1992, that Chitunda was pulled from the car and shot in the face. Another member of the party also was shot in the head; a third, although wounded, got away to tell the tale. Both the U.S. State Department and Human Rights Watch have reported that the dos Santos government consistently has refused to return Chitunda’s body to his family for burial. Hemenway says that this betrayal was the root cause of Savimbi’s subsequent distrust in dealing with Luanda.
      Cohen’s version is more benign: "I don’t know whether Chitunda’s death had any impact on Savimbi. I didn’t speak to him after that. From what I heard, they were killed in an automobile accident when their car went off the road. I didn’t hear that they were deliberately murdered, but I don’t have firsthand evidence. But anyway, it didn’t seem to change Savimbi’s point of view — he wanted to go on with the war."
      In 1993, Cohen resigned from the State Department and registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent for the Luanda regime. Although the Angolan contract has expired, his firm most recently registered as an agent for the Robert Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe, which has just 

completed a ruthless election based on the Angolan Leninist model.
In 1993 the Clinton administration proclaimed sanctions against UNITA "to deal with the unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United States by the actions and policies of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA)." The nature of this unusual and extraordinary threat was not specified. Some say that a key player behind the sanctions was the international entrepreneur and investment banker Maurice Templesman, whose diamond interests in Angola had been compromised by Savimbi.
      Templesman was very close to the Kennedy family, and indeed frequently was seen as the companion of Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Onassis and Templesman even entertained Hillary and Bill Clinton aboard Templesman’s 70-foot yacht Relemar. But his closest influence may have been on the late Michael LeMoyne Kennedy, who was operating Citizens Energy Corp. in Massachusetts, a nonprofit set up by Michael’s brother, Joseph Kennedy II, to get cut-rate fuel oil to the needy. And never mind that Citizens Energy had a for-profit affiliate, Citizens Energy International, where the Kennedy brothers were wheeling and dealing in the oil business.
      The Boston Globe reported in 1998 that Michael Kennedy earned more than $622,000 in salary and stock options in two years on the for-profit side. A cornerstone of this for-profit business was an oil concession in the Cabinda field that Templesman persuaded dos Santos to award to 

Kennedy, the Globe says. In turn, Kennedy was the founder of the U.S.-Angolan Chamber of Commerce, that glittering roster of U.S. firms operating in Angola, and the main advocate of stabilizing the dos Santos regime by forcing the surrender of Savimbi.
      Although UNITA (unlike FLEC) never attacked the oil installations and, in fact, had pledged not to do so, the goodwill of the Marxist regime was about to assume greater importance. Until the mid-nineties, Chevron was operating from the continental shelf off Cabinda; but now it was about to move 40 miles offshore to the deep ocean. "Reserves have been in proportions far exceeding anything on shore," commented Alexander’s Gas & Oil Connections. All during this decade of tightening relationships between Chevron and the Angolan regime, Condoleezza Rice sat in the catbird seat as developments were placed before the board. Last September, President Bush renewed the sanctions against UNITA, using language identical to Clinton’s about "the unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United States" posed by Savimbi.
      The renewal of sanctions sent a message to dos Santos that he would not be penalized for eliminating the leadership structure of UNITA. In October 2001, the scorched-earth policy began, dislocating thousands of civilians and destroying their livelihoods. In February the need to accommodate Savimbi was ended with seven bullets. Dos Santos shook hands with the president, had a photo-op and a three-minute speech and went home to enjoy his victory.’’
      —Insight magazine, April 29, 2002

CNN, At It Again

When CNN opened a Havanna office five years ago, bureau chief Lucia Newman said Cuban officials had promised the network ‘total freedom to do what we want to work without any prior censorship.’ Perhaps that’s because they knew CNN would censor itself. According to a new study by the Media Research Center, CNN’s Havana-based journalists have produced 212 prime-time reports on the Cuban government or life on the island. A grand total of seven of them dealt with political dissidents or prisoners, which is fewer than the number of stories CNN ran in the first three 

months of this year about alleged human-rights abuses of Taliban prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay. The bureau also put out a mere four stories on the absence of democracy in Cuba, including one that had Newman remarking that Cuba’s one-candidate ‘elections’ contained none of the ‘dubious campaign spending’ found in the U.S. Overall, Communist spokesmen were given six times more airplay than non-Communist ones. Perhaps this is because the non-Communist ones would fear for their lives if they spoke against the regime—a great story in itself, if only CNN would report it."
      —National Review, June 3, 2002, p. 10

The suffering of the Indochinese people under communism is one of the most tragic sagas of the 20th century. The terror that communists perpetrated in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos after their victory in 1975 defies simple characterization. The leftists among us, meanwhile, continue to spout their lies about Southeast Asia and about the horror that communism brought to that region.
      Just like contemporary neo-nazis who revel in practicing holocaust denial, leftists just simply can’t help themselves from engaging in gulag denial. They love erasing the historical memory of the millions of people who were liquidated on the altar of socialist ideals. And engaging in historical amnesia is precisely where socialists and neo-nazis share one of their most sacred common bonds.
      And now we have H. Bruce Franklin, a professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University, who has stepped forward to tell us that communism only brought peace and fraternity to Indochina.
      In the March-April 2002 edition of the International Socialist Review, which is otherwise known as the Journal of Revolutionary Marxism (and this title is not meant to be a joke), Franklin writes an article glorifying the memory of the anti-war movement in America during the Vietnam War. Titled "Vietnam. The Antiwar Movement We Are Supposed To Forget," the essay is an excerpt from Franklin’s book Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (University of Massachusetts Press, 2000)
      Franklin pleads with his readers not to forget the anti-war movement, which he complains the capitalists in America have forced people to do. He emphasizes that remembering the anti-war movement is crucial, since it triumphed in bringing about an American defeat and a communist victory in Southeast Asia. And he means this in a positive sense.
      Usually I read the International Socialist Review for the same reason I read other Marxist and socialist literature: for a good laugh. It really is very amusing. Sometimes I get the 

giggles for hours on end after reading our contemporary leftwing intellectuals’ ongoing agony about capitalist modes of production, surplus value, expropriation, and the near-approaching Marxist revolution. Reading this stuff is sometimes so hilarious that I succumb to sidesplitting fits of laughter.
      But oftentimes it’s not very funny at all.
      Aside from how pathetically stupid it is, there is little that is funny about Marxism.
      There is little that is funny about a set of ideas that has resulted in the liquidation of a 100 million lives in the 20th century.
      So this time around, I wasn’t very humored when I stumbled onto Franklin’s piece on Vietnam.
      Franklin praises the anti-war movement, which allowed the communist victory and paved the road for the subsequent mass genocide in Indochina. He writes that the anti-war movement should be "one legitimate source of great national pride about American culture and behavior during the war. In most wars, a nation dehumanizes and demonizes the people on the other side. Almost the opposite happened during the Vietnam War. Countless Americans came to see the people of Vietnam fighting against U.S. forces as anything but an enemy to be feared and hated. Tens of millions sympathized with their suffering, many came to identify with their 2,000-year struggle for independence, and some even found them an inspiration for their own lives."
      It is precisely an interpretation like this that reflects one of the most putrid lies of the Left: that "the people" can somehow be associated with the communists who imprison them. In other words, Franklin writes on the assumption that the U.S. was somehow fighting the people of Vietnam, when in fact it was actually fighting the communists who were seeking to imprison them.
      The fact of the matter is that it was North Vietnam and the Vietcong, as well as the anti-war demonstrators in America, who were the enemies of the Vietnamese people -– not the American government, which sacrificed 56,000 of its young men in an effort to save them.
      Franklin gives us a long (and terribly boring) account of all the different groups that played a role in the anti-war 

movement. He is very proud in remembering the "outrage" that he says served as a key emotion behind anti-war demonstrations.
      But I can’t help from wondering, Franklin: just where exactly did all this "outrage" of the anti-war protestors go when the communists did not bring the paradise that the Left predicted they would? When the communists started liquidating people en masse and setting up concentration camps, where was the "outrage" of the Left then?
      Franklin isn’t interested in such questions. Instead, he warns us at the end of his piece that we cannot "understand what America is becoming if we fail to comprehend how the same nation and its culture could have produced an abomination as shameful as the Vietnam War and a campaign as admirable as the 30-year movement that helped defeat it."
      Sorry, Franklin, you got it twisted: it was the American effort to save Indochina from communism that was admirable. And it was the anti-war movement, of which you are so proud, that was the shameful – and shameless – abomination.
      Franklin’s article reveals to us an individual who clearly prides himself in having declared his partisanship with the communist enemy in the Vietnam War. His only regret is obviously what most of the unapologetic former anti-war demonstrators regret: that he failed to personally travel to Hanoi during the war to volunteer his personal assistance in torturing American POWs.
      While Franklin boasts about what he thinks are the anti-war movement’s great accomplishments, history reminds us that this movement helped spawn a bloodbath in Indochina. David Horowitz, who helped to organize the first campus demonstration against the war at the University of California, Berkeley in 1962, has reflected on this tragedy. In his "An Open Letter to the `Anti-War’ Demonstrators: Think Twice Before You Bring The War Home," he recalls how the anti-war movement prolonged the war itself and how, "Every testimony by North Vietnamese generals in the postwar years has affirmed that they knew they could not defeat the United States on the battlefield, and that they counted on the division of our people at home to win the war for them. The Vietcong forces we were fighting in South Vietnam were destroyed in 1968. In other words, most of the war and most

of the casualties in the war occurred because the dictatorship of North Vietnam counted on the fact Americans would give up the battle rather than pay the price necessary to win it. This is what happened. The blood of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, and tens of thousands of Americans, is on the hands of the anti-war activists who prolonged the struggle and gave victory to the Communists."
      Giving victory to the communists spawned a horror for Southeast Asia that made the Vietnam war look like a time of peace.
      After Saigon fell to North Vietnam in 1975, the summary executions of tens of thousands of innocent South Vietnamese began. There were to be two million refugees and more than a million people thrown into the new communist gulags and "re-education camps." Tens of thousands of South Vietnamese boat people perished in the Gulf of Thailand and in the South China Sea in their attempt to escape what the likes of H. Bruce Franklin had helped to create.
      The anti-war movement in America also facilitated the communist takeovers of Laos and Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge victory in Cambodia led to a killing field in which some three million Cambodians were exterminated. Paul Johnson has given a succinct, detailed and gut-wrenching account of this tragedy in his classic work Modern Times.
      The Black Book of Communism, meanwhile, provides a meticulous and comprehensive account.
      In just a few years after the communist takeovers in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, more Indochinese citizens were killed by the communists than had died on both sides in the whole Vietnam war.
      H. Bruce Franklin wants us to remember the anti-war movement in America during the Vietnam War. We do remember it.
      And we remember it for what it was: a shameful and shameless abomination, which saw tens of thousands of spoiled moral degenerates betray the lives and freedoms of the Indochinese people — as they offered themselves for an association with tyranny and a complicity with evil.
      —Frontpage Magazine, May 14, 2002