War of Numbers (6 page)

“The Bafulero, sir,” I said, directly to McCone.

“The who?” McCone replied, looking at me for the first time.

“The Bafulero, sir. They’re a small tribe in Kivu Province just north of Uvira, that town right next to your finger at the head of the lake, and they’re getting their guns from the Burundi secret police. Who the secret police are getting them from, I’m not sure, although it’s probably the communist Chinese. As you know, sir, Burundi’s king, Mwami Mwambutsa IV, is a Tutsi—same tribe as in the movie “King Solomon’s Mines”—and Peking is backing the monarchy against Burundi’s other main tribe, the Hutus, who say they’re republicans. Maybe Mwambutsa’s running guns to the Bafulero in return for Chinese support. Maybe he wants to do it anyway. In any case, the linchpin of the operations, who’s in touch with the Chinese, the rebels, and the secret police, all three, is Doctor Pie Masumbuko, Burundi’s minister of health, and also its only doctor. Right now the DDP’s trying to get a handle on Masumbuko to determine the extent of Chinese involvement. It’s a complex situation.”

“I gather. In other words, our immediate concern here is the Bafulero,” said McCone.

“Yes, sir,” I replied. “As of now, the Bafulero. But the real problem, the potential one, is the Bashi. They’re a much bigger tribe to the Bafulero’s north, and as of now the Bashi are split in two. One group, led by a chief called Kabare, leans toward the Simbas. The other, led by a Queen Mwami Astrida, is holding out for Leopoldville. It’s partly a personal feud between Kabare and Astrida, and Tshombe, who knows
what’s going on, is trying to sweet-talk Kabare into staying on the reservation.”

“I see,” said McCone, who had been listening intently, as was everyone else. Pointing to Stanleyville, McCone asked, “And what about the rebels here?”

I ticked off three or four local tribes, explaining that the rebels were about to announce a so-called People’s Republic of the Congo. The republic’s president would be Christophe Gbenye; the minister of defense, Gaston Soumialot, Gbenye’s chief rival; the foreign minister, Thomas Kanza, now in Nairobi talking to Jomo Kenyatta; the head of the Simba army (such as it was), General Olenga, who commanded it from a white Mercedes. They were a rum lot, I went on, a hodgepodge of tribes, often at each other’s throats, with very few interests in common. Although the communists supported the rebels, the only rebel who remotely approached being one himself was the KGB bagman, Antoine Mandungu. At the moment Mandungu was in Cairo. The questions continued for almost fifteen minutes. At last McCone turned from me to Richard Helms.

“Dick, what was it you said you wanted?” asked the director.

“The B-26s,” said Helms, explaining that the gas tanks on the Cuban T-28s weren’t big enough to get them to Stanleyville. Fortunately, however, the Air Branch of the DDP’s Special Operations Division had just souped up some old World War II B-26 twin-engine bombers, and he thought these would do the trick. There were still some supply problems; these were being looked into. When Helms was done, McCone asked, “How much will it cost?”

Helms named a sum of over a million dollars. McCone turned from Helms to a man across the table, apparently a finance officer.

“Have we got that in the kitty?” McCone asked.

“Yes, sir,” said the man across the table.

“Good,” said McCone, turning back to Helms. “Go ahead on the B-26s.”

At that, the meeting broke up. I left the conference room amid a pack of Ray Cline’s deputies. “First-rate job,” one of them told me. “The
director’s a glutton for detail. He particularly liked your knowing about the tribes, I could tell.”

“Money in the bank,” said another deputy.

As August proceeded, so did plans to quell the revolt. Some half dozen B-26s, bearing the scarcely dry insignias of the Congolese air force, landed in southern Katanga. Belgian sergeants and captains reported for duty with the Congo army. And the first contingent of white mercenaries joined a unit that Michael Hoare called Commando 5. During World War II, Hoare had been a major in the British army.

With the arrival of these reinforcements, Leopoldville launched its first attack on the rebels. Called Operation Watch Chain, its goal was to retake Albertville. A Congo army battalion moved on the city by land and some two dozen mercenaries approached it from Lake Tanganyika by motorboat while a couple of Cuban-piloted B-26s flew cover. Beset by mechanical problems, the white soldiers of fortune spent most of Watch Chain paddling around the lake. The black battalion took the city. The rebels had fled, scared off by the B-26s.

Albertville’s fall brought the first cables describing what life had been like under the Simbas. I read them avidly. They explained that the city folk, hoping for a change for the better, had initially welcomed the rebels, but that disillusion had set in quickly. Most Simbas were teenagers, with neither organization nor discipline. Their sacking of government offices had soon turned into wholesale looting; their execution of government officials into large-scale and random killings. In short order most people had come to think of the pre-Simba era as the good old days. Shortly after its capture, Tshombe toured Albertville in an open jeep. The crowds cheered themselves hoarse.

Despite this first government success, reports were multiplying about potential arms shipments to the rebels. So far, actual deliveries were few—rifles to the Bafulero, but little else. However, I had marked on a map the itinerary of Thomas Kanza, the rebel “foreign minister,” and by correlating his stops with local DDP reports of gun-running plots, compiled an alphabetical list of the countries most likely involved. There was a folder for each, some twenty-six in all, “Albania” to “Zanzibar,”
the thickest being the Soviet Union’s. Clearly the Russians were up to no good.

Although they must have known as much as we did about the impending shipments, the rebels’ nerves in Stanleyville began to fray. Both mercenary and Congo army units were on the move, Tshombe was stumping the backwoods like a Louisiana politician, and witch doctors were spreading the word that the black magic that had once protected the Simbas no longer worked. One morning Stanleyville Radio announced that on the previous day a crowd had broken into the Simbas’s central headquarters and made off with the office furniture. “Whoever stole the furniture must return it at once,” the broadcast decreed. “This is a people’s revolutionary government, and it can’t function without typewriters and chairs.” In early October, an intercepted rebel message referred to the whites in Stanleyville as “hostages.”

“Hostages!” said Dana. “This has gotten serious.”

Others thought so too. For the rest of the month and into November, tense meetings convened, both at the director’s office and at State, to discuss what to do. Despite my low rank, I went to several of these, having acquired the reputation—eagerly spread by the front office—as Washington’s leading authority on the Congolese rebels.

The last meeting I attended took place just outside the director’s inner office. John McCone, Richard Helms, Ray Cline and I hunched in a tight circle in cushioned swivel chairs, listening to Helms describe what the DDP Special Operations Division had in mind to save the five men of the consulate. There were plans for parachute drops, helicopter raids, even something involving speedboats (not as odd as it sounds, because Stanleyville is on the Congo River, which flows past Leopoldville, over a thousand miles downstream, before emptying into the Atlantic.) When Helms had finished his descriptions, McCone asked him what he thought the chances were of success.

“Lousy,” Helms said, “because we really don’t know where those men are.” Several reports put them at the Sabena Airways guesthouse on the edge of the city airport’s main runway, “but the information is
weeks old at best, and I wouldn’t put money on it in the first place. What if we piled into that guesthouse and no one was home. Stand around with egg on our face?”

“What do you advise?” McCone asked.

“Wait,” Helms said. “If we play gangbusters, we might get not only our own people killed, but everyone else in the bargain.” More to the point, Belgium and the Pentagon had worked up a joint plan to save all the hostages at once. It called for dropping a Belgian parachute battalion on the airfield while a Congo army column, led by Hoare’s mercenaries, pushed up from the south.

“Agreed,” said McCone, ending the meeting. I went back down to the sixth floor.

The Congo in-box was even fuller than usual. I read through the paper quickly, taking notes and cross-referencing. Towards the bottom was a message from an A-1 source saying that the KGB bagman, Antoine Mandungu, had just shown up at the Sudanese frontier. I called to Dana, “The Russians are coming!”

The Sudan borders the Congo’s northeast, which the rebels held, and a spate of recent reports claimed that the Russians were about to run guns from that direction. Dana and I debated how seriously to take them. Mandungu was the clincher. I wrote a quick piece saying that Soviet arms were about to arrive via the Sudan.

It was in the nick of time. A day or so later, an urgent cable came in from Egypt reporting that five Russian-made AN-12 transport planes—their Soviet markings painted over with those of Algeria—had just taken off from Cairo for Khartoum, the capital of the Sudan. A second message, sourced to an agent at the Khartoum airport, said that the planes’ wheels bulged out as if they were heavily loaded. A third one, from an intercept station in Ethiopia, placed the AN-12s in Juba, a Sudanese town only a hundred miles from the Congo frontier. A final cable, whose source was a contact in Juba, said the planes had dumped cargo of heavy boxes onto trucks, and that the trucks, covered with tarpaulins, had headed for Aba, a village on the Congo side of the border. I had no
doubt that those boxes contained guns. But if they were meant to save Stanleyville, they were too late.

The Belgian paratroopers jumped into the city at 6:30 in the morning (Stanleyville time) of 24 November. The mercenaries arrived from the south a few hours later.
⁶
I spent the night at the Watch, the seventh-floor office where the cables come in. Speed was essential. The main question was the fate of the hostages.

In fact it wasn’t until well after the Sitrep’s deadline that I found the answer. It seems that in the confusion of the landing the Simbas had herded most hostages into a city street some two miles away. When the paratroopers finally arrived, the rebels opened fire. In the ensuing melee, hostages dropped to the ground, ducked into doorways, and jumped over walls. Eighty were killed or wounded. But over a thousand were unhurt. Among the survivors were the five American staffers, including the four from the DDP.

Shortly I discovered why they made it. It was dumb luck. The Simbas had thrown them in with the other hostages well before the parachute drop. On hearing this news, I asked myself what might have happened if Helms hadn’t quashed the plans to rescue the Americans separately. I could think of only one answer: as bad as it was, the massacre probably would have been far worse except for Helms’s caution and good sense.

The Stanleyville drop marked the high tide of the revolt. Naturally there was a storm of protest, but it lost steam when the first ghastly reports arrived from the interior that the Simbas had killed far more blacks than whites. The black victims ran to the many tens of thousands, mostly killed by torture. Congolese popular opinion began swinging back to the government. Tshombe was cheered wildly wherever he went. By late December, the Simbas’ main asset was the Soviet gun-running operation through the Sudan.

We had those AN-12s pegged. I had cards on each airplane, with separate times of arrival and departure, cargoes, even the names of the Russian pilots. In a way I needn’t have bothered. Most guns captured from the rebels were too rusty to shoot. The Simbas had neglected to oil them.

By March 1965 the rebellion had almost sputtered to a halt, and the Congo Sitrep had changed from a daily to a weekly. With tribal support for the Simbas drying up, the mercenaries captured Aba, forcing the Russians to stop their AN-12s, and the only part of the Congo left in rebel hands—except Kwilu, where government troops skirmished with Pierre Mulele over the remaining chickens—was the so-called Fizi Pocket. Fizi lay in the mountains off Lake Tanganyika, its dominant tribe the Bahembi, reputed to be fierce and loathed by its neighbors. Therefore it seemed to me that the Pocket was just what it said, a pocket, and I began to lobby with Dana to get the Sitrep killed altogether.

But no, the revolt had one last spasm. A group of Cubans, these from Havana, crossed Lake Tanganyika in Russian-made motorboats, landed in the Congo near Fizi, and began handing out rifles. The group’s leader was none other than Che Guevera. Dana and I groaned. Foreign advisors were the one thing the Simbas had so far lacked. We couldn’t discount the possibility that Che and his Havanans might re-kindle the fire of revolution under the Bahembi.

It failed to ignite. Acting with unusual speed, Leopoldville sent the Congo air force to shoot up the new arrivals. Its Miami Cuban pilots were delighted at the chance to avenge the Bay of Pigs, and Che’s advisory effort rapidly became a grudge fight between the two sets of Cubans. The Havanans soon found the B-26’s frequencies, and shouted curses in Spanish at the pilots over their combat radios. Later (it was said), the Miamians got some American-made motorboats, and the angry Latins chased each other at high speeds around Lake Tanganyika.

“Deplorable,” said the Congo desk chief, when asked about this turn of events. “This was once a perfectly respectable Cold War confrontation. Now it’s the goddamn
West Side Story.
” Lost in the commotion were the Bahembi, for whom Che had little but contempt.
^*
In May the
front office decided the crisis was over. It killed the Sitrep. For the first time in almost a year and a half, I had nothing to do.

In fact all southern Africa was relatively quiet. Rebellions against the Portugese were popping along as usual in Angola and Mozambique, apartheid still ruled in South Africa, and the only country that showed any sign of life was Rhodesia. There, the white prime minister, Ian Smith, was wrestling with the problem of what to do about British demands that he give the Africans majority rule. Dana had taken a new analyst to follow Rhodesia, however, and the newcomer—a black who had written a thesis on Ghana at Boston University—seemed to have settled in for the long haul. That’s just what it looked like too: a long haul. The consensus in the branch was that although the white-run regimes in southern Africa were headed for deep trouble, the crunch was several years off.