By the beginning of 1983, although night interdiction operations were being consistently flown, targets had become rare and kills even rarer. SWAPO and FAPLA had by then ceased nighttime travel altogether. In an attempt to diversify, it was decided from January onward that once a formation had reached the limit of its planned patrol, they would deliver their weapons on a selected target before returning to base. Obviously the selection of targets was carefully considered and made after extensive analysis of aerial photographic intelligence. According to Brigadier-General Dick Lord:
Within a few nights of this type of operation we started to reap unexpected benefits. On the first night, as the pinpoint target for the leader’s rockets we had selected a newly built AAA site just outside Mulondo. The target area we chose for the shepherd [second aircraft] was an area of thick bush just west of Quiteve, the type loved by SWAPO.[19]
Regular radio intercepts revealed a certain amount of consternation in the enemy camp, with reports circulating of accurate attacks and victims such as ‘the Russians’. Apart from adding to the general intelligence picture, this sort of feedback was very encouraging. A three-month plan was drawn up with a view to mounting one or two sorties a night with varying times and targets selected from known intelligence, or any suitable ‘suspect’ area.
The whole concept was extremely successful, so much so that the Angolans began to exert considerable pressure on the United States through the United Nations, which in turn translated into pressure on Pretoria, all of which filtered down to the ops room at Ondangwa.
The operation was ostensibly curtailed but mischief went on nonetheless. It must be remembered that the on-again-off-again negotiated process required that all sides at least appear to be playing the game fairly.
Dick Lord was, however, very impressed upon taking a road trip from Xangongo to Cahama, a 70-kilometre stretch of arterial road, by the sheer weight of destruction that Maanskyn and Donkermaan had wrought in the southern provinces. Every few kilometres or so there lay a cluster of wrecked tanks, military transports and troop carriers, in some cases blocking the road. To this day, a great deal of this detritus of war remains in slow decay along most of the byways of southern Angola, and in many other parts of the country too, lending irony once again to the fact that armed institutions such as the SADF and the SAAF, that failed at no point to achieve every military objective they sought, could still ultimately lose the war.
CHAPTER EIGHT:
ASSISTANCE TO UNITA AND OPERATION ASKARI
1983 opened on a stage of intense international diplomacy over the crisis. The sheer weight of international thought and effort being applied to the matter of ending the war in Angola and introducing some mutually acceptable roadmap toward Namibian independence seemed, at times, to be so much more than the sum total of its parts. Bilateral talks had been underway in Cape Verde since December and seemed, by January, to be yielding the possibility of a ceasefire based on a South African proposal that Cuban and other foreign troops be withdrawn to above the 14th parallel, about 150 kilometres north of the border. This, however, would have left the MPLA more or less unsupported against UNITA in the key southeast of the country. (UNITA was not party to the proposal.) The Angolans countered with the suggestion that a demilitarized zone 50 kilometres deep be created that would, by extension, have had to include UNITA for it to be effective. Rumours continued to circulate, generating some degree of cautious diplomatic optimism, but only some. In reality, the military option remained the most attractive to both sides, with each grappling for some definitive advantage on the battlefield to improve their negotiating position.
Therefore, at times in secret and at times very much under the full glare of international perusal, the war went on. Far beneath the surface, however, as far as Pretoria was concerned at least, was the growing interdependency of South Africa and UNITA. While there may have been considerable official secrecy surrounding this policy, in practical terms it had become more or less common knowledge.
As the year progressed and as international diplomacy limped from one blind alley to another, press speculation began to dwell more frequently on the extent of combined operations underway between the SADF and UNITA. The Angolan news agency Angop claimed on 12 August 1983 that eight SAAF aircraft – four Canberras and four Impala ground-strike fighters – had repeatedly bombed and destroyed the small but strategically important rail and communication centre of Cangamba in the southeast Moxico Province. Although little more than a scattering of thatch and iron-roofed buildings some 500 kilometres north of the South West African border, Cangamba included a functional airstrip that was seen by both UNITA and the MPLA as being of vital strategic importance, and from where the Angolans were tactically able to launch air assaults against Savimbi’s main force concentrations in the southeast. At the time, the MPLA was defending the settlement against a determined and bitter effort by UNITA to gain control of it.
The SADF dismissed the Angolan claim as fanciful but the Angolans persisted, speculating further that SADF troops still garrisoning Xangongo and Ongiva had been massively reinforced, and repeatedly claiming that South African troops were active in Moxico Province in eastern–central Angola in direct support of UNITA. And while all of this had a clear histrionic ring to it, there was no doubt that something was afoot in the region – a region that South Africa obviously had no direct strategic interest in – and no less clear that somehow or other South African was involved.
UNITA certainly had by then grown into a significant force in east and southern–central Angola. This gave it practical control about 25 per cent of the whole country, almost the entire southeast quadrant, with an additional operational presence on a more or less continuous basis in another 50 per cent. This fact, even at the time, was tacitly acknowledged by the central government in Luanda and broadly acknowledged elsewhere. By then, UNITA claimed to have some 35,000 trained and semi-trained fighters in the field. It was well supported by such African states as Zaire and Zambia and, of course, South Africa, with more covert but nonetheless influential support emanating from the United States.
Direct South Africa military support for UNITA – military advisers in the wonderfully opaque political language of the time – offered a clear and tangible strategic benefit for South Africa. In the first instance, UNITA’s military adventures diverted and preoccupied FAPLA and, to an increasing degree, SWAPO too, relieving the SADF of the need to directly defend the Eastern Front, or the long Caprivi–Kavango border region. In certain quarters it was speculated that perhaps South Africa now needed UNITA more than UNITA needed her.
This fact was not, of course, lost on Savimbi, who certainly did capitalize on it frequently by petitioning Pretoria for material and military assistance. Such requests would usually be followed by the SAAF providing VIP air transport for Savimbi to visit either Pretoria or Cape Town, which would then be further followed by a top-secret signal to the SADF detailing the practical assistance that was to be provided.
19
Lord, Brig-Gen Dick.