Speaker 1Welcome back to South African Border Wars with me, your host, Des Latham. This is episode 107. Operation Hooper had ended in failure for the SEDF and back in Pretoria it was time to reassess the political and military situation. What had been achieved after 23 years of war, fighting ostensibly to stop SWAPO from seizing control of Namibia, but really a war to buffer the apartheid state from the sweeping post-colonial independence movements. This was no longer possible in 1988 because the Cold War was rapidly coming to an end. The Soviet Union experiment in communism had failed. Ironically, it was failing at precisely the moment that the whites-only lunacy in South Africa was failing. These two countries, Russia and South Africa, shared a common dawn. It was a moment that was to change both and to alter world history. While Russia and South Africa were indulging in the long-term military dance across Southern Africa, the Americans and the Cubans hadn't been too far away. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that both Havana and Washington had been directly involved in these wars. Both had ideological reasons to send their advisors and their troops, their operators, their specialists, into the region. Three of South Africa's all-important Ulufon tanks were now in the hands of the Angolans. One was virtually undamaged and towed behind two fire brigade lines. The other two were mined and then surrounded by FAPLA troops who dug in. Attempts by the SADF to retrieve all three had failed. 82 Mechanized Brigade, the Omana, had tried their hardest to overcome the positions east of the Kuito River, but really had no hope of ever... ...overcoming these defenses. The top brass were huddled together while commanders in the field were trying to come to terms with the defeat at the third battle of the Tumpo Triangle. All out a map of the area and take a closer look between the Tumpo and the Kuito Rivers. Hundreds of meters of ground there were covered in mines, but more importantly the Russians and the Cuban advisors had set up their guns so that they would overlap. Even if aiming was poor, the pure weight of carpet bombs meant they'd hit something coming towards them. The SADF third assault was on the same axis as previous assaults which had also failed. You have to wonder about these things. It's like analyzing the Allied assaults at the Somme or the German repeated attacks on Verdun in the First World War. Both were examples of a military establishment blinded by its own lack of chess playing nous, lack of innovation, paucity in thought. So many South Africans were not dead because the apartheid policyminders had turned into military dunderheads. Some generals continue to this day to defend themselves flatly rejecting any criticism as being purely in hindsight 2020. But as I've carefully pointed out, that's just silly. The vets who warned before the third battle of Tumpo about this bad plan have been exonerated, but bitterly so. Roland de Vries spoke to me a while back about mobile warfare and he was to say after this war ended "Why, oh why, did we allow ourselves to get bogged down in the enemy's killing ground and minefields east of Quito Canavale in early 1988?" The principles of military strategy are profoundly true in most situations. It's usually a lucky break or miracle when commanders ignore these and are somehow successful. This wasn't one of those times. One of the reasons for the poor planning was political. Pretoria had run out of time. Its obsession with racial segmentation of the South African state had been blown up by internal struggles. The ending of economic support by Western nations. History had moved on and the blokes in their black hats from the Brudderbont were done. The irony here is that up until the battles around the Tumpo Triangle, the SADF was doing quite well. This appears to have lulled the generals in a kind of false sense of security. Propaganda and hoopla. It seems to me that the SADF had replaced proper analysis. On the Cuban and Angolan side, they trumpeted what they called a great victory at Quito Canavale. The only problem was, there was never really a battle of Quito Canavale. It wasn't like Stalingrad, fighting in the streets. But it was like the Battle of Moscow in the Second World War. There, the Germans never reached the city, fighting for months outside the western edges, never defeating the Russians, but still they called it the Battle of Moscow. The battles around Quito Canavale were a bit like this. The battles around Quito Canavale were a bit like this. For some SADF generals now to say that Fidel Castro and the MPLA were wrong to crow about winning this battle because there was never any battle is just plainly wrong. In 1987 and 1988, the South African coverage of these terrible assaults, the bombardments, the fighting, all media in South Africa described it as a fight for Quito Canavale. So denying it has just been cute. What has made this analysis more difficult for me is the fact that, in this period of the border war shuttered to a halt, Havana and Moscow began to crow about defeating the South Africans, and this has stuck in the South African crawl. Fidel Castro boasted about his soldiers defeating 10,000 South Africans, some said 30,000, with hundreds of tanks. It's always better to lie about the size of the army you're defeating. It makes everything sound so much better. As we know, there were fewer than 3,000 troops involved in most battles. But the first thing to suffer in war, after all, is the truth. And both sides had been playing that game, as you know. So as we head towards the end of the series, it's time to talk about the Cubans. Most suggest that Castro was a servant to Khrushchev and Brezhnev and Gorbachev, thoughtlessly sending Cubans to die for the communist system. Not so fast, folks. It's more complex. Castro was motivated by what's known as the "La Escalera" and created a justification in his mind to get directly involved in what he saw as the liberation of Angolans from the yoke of white South Africans. This wasn't just Cuba acting under the order of the Russian government, although much of Castro's funding came from Moscow. The common memory of slavery and colonialism bound Luanda and Havana in a military dance, just like the common thread of fighting against communism bound Pretoria and Washington in their own military dance. It's ironic, was it not, that Africa, and not Latin America, became the most important surrogate for Cuba's perceived liberation struggle. Castro had ordered Operation Carlota in November 1975, responding to South Africa's invasion during Operation Savannah. And here we were, in 1988, with Havana and Pretoria still at each other's throats. It was significant that Castro called his military escapade in Africa Operation Carlota, because Carlota was a female slave who led a rebellion at the Triunvirato sugar mill in western Matanzas province in Cuba in November 1843. That's considered one of the most significant actions in the development of the anti-slavery thinking of his country that would set principles in the independence ideals of Cubans during all the wars for national liberation. By the 1970s, B.J. Foster and then South African President P.W. Bush were utterly convinced that Cuba was just a puppet in the hands of the Russians. And what happened is the South Africans did not fully comprehend the powerful storyline that Castro was using to convince his own people to fight in Angola. It wasn't just communism versus capitalism, it was good versus evil. Castro equated the apartheid government to the Nazis, and then convinced his citizens to take up arms to fight against the modern-day version of slavery. They didn't identify the West as slavers, but as bandits and pirates and criminals. He argued early in the border war that Angola was the primary space for fighting imperialism in Africa. Castro repeatedly argued that Cuba possessed a legitimate reason to interfere in Angola, as many of Cuba's citizens were descended from Africans and from Angola. But there's something else that went missing from South African military intelligence gathering. They just simply didn't think this was important. And when you hear it, not only was the intelligence important, it was strategically fundamental to understanding the enemy, the Cubans. Carlota was a woman, she led the slave revolt, and these women of Cuba in the 1970s and 80s emulated her. Cuban women crewed most of the anti-aircraft batteries in Quito, Guanavale, at least according to the Russians, who described these soldiers as "little mulattos" and "black women who were behind the 23mm cannon and missile systems." Castro had constructed a legend around Carlota because every political movement needs its mythology. When the first Cubans were shipped out to Angola in the mid-1970s, most had no clue who Carlota was. But by 1988, her story had been repeated so often that she was now elevated to a status of communist god. In 1988, Cuban troops had increased to around 55,000, mostly based in southern Angola, and their intervention had averted a military disaster for FAPLA. Castro was over-the-top. obsessed with the South Africans and the war against the SAF, he studied the maps of southern Angola assiduously, immersing himself in the day-to-day events in a similar way that the South African generals were trying to do back in Pretoria. But Buerta harbored his own racial blinkers. He thought that Castro was only doing the bidding of the Russians. The South African state was so blind to an entire political system, they underestimated their enemy, thinking that all Cuban soldiers were being forced to fight at gunpoint, and therefore they were racially inferior to the motivated whites of the SAGF. Perhaps one of the biggest differences, however, was that Castro had a photographic memory when it came to the map of Angola, and unlike Buerta, he had fought directly in a war. Buerta was a politically-minded technocrat. These were not men who had led their troops in battle. Castro had. The Cuban leader could identify Angolan generals as the South African soldiers, but he was not a South African soldier. He was a man of many geographical features and towns, every small dot on the map. He was so absorbed that he knew dozens of these off by heart, and the locations of his troops on this moving map on a daily basis. His absorption in the war was so intense and meticulous that he could quote any statistic relating to Angola as if it were Cuba itself, and spoke of its towns, its customs, its peoples, as if he had lived there all his life. And that was according to García Marquez, the author who met with Castro. At stages of the war, when the situation was urgent, Fidel Castro would spend up to 14 hours at a stretch in the command room of the general staff, at times without eating or sleeping, as if he were on the battlefield himself. He followed the course of the battles with pins on minutely detailed wall-sized maps, keeping in constant touch with the MPLA high command on a battlefield where the time zone was six hours ahead. Perhaps it was this obsession that made Castro the most important man in the world. Perhaps it was this obsession that the South Africans underestimated. He was an implacable enemy to apartheid, and yet Pretoria thought of him as Russia's dog. And then it must be said that Pretoria's weakness was their relationship with their ally, UNITA, which was a guerrilla movement that was now fighting a conventional war. They were not trained to do this, despite years of SADF specialists being sent to assist. It appeared everyone had fought themselves into a position from where some kind of political negotiation would be possible. Now that fighting had subsided at the Tumpo Triangle, both sides had licked their wounds. Behind the scenes, however, diplomacy was the real game. The Soviet Union's Deputy Foreign Minister, Anatoly Ademyshin, had been meeting both Cuban and Angolan leaders and pressurizing them to talk peace. The USSR, you see, was bankrupt and could no longer send men and weapons to their satellite states. The first round of talks between the South Africans, the Russians, the Cubans, and the Angolans, took place around a U-shaped table in London between 3 and 4 May 1988. The South African team was led by Neil van Heerden and included General Yanni Galdnes, Major General Niels van Tonne of the CSI, and Dr. Neil Barnard, head of the much-feared National Intelligence Service. The Cubans and the Angolans attended these talks as a joint team, led by Cuba's Um Kaspas Jorge Resque. Alongside him was Cuban Military Chief of Staff, General Yanni Galdnes, and General Kaspas Jorge Resque. Alongside him was Cuban Military Chief of Staff, General Yanni Galdnes, and General Kaspas Jorge Resque. Alongside him was Cuban Military Chief of Staff, General Yanni Galdnes, and General Kaspas Jorge Resque. Alongside him was Cuban Military Chief of Staff, Ulysses Rosales del Toro. The South Africans called him Ulysses the Bull. The Angolans were represented by Foreign Minister Alfonso Fondunum, who sat alongside Justice Minister Fernandez Fondunum, and FAPLA Chief of Staff, General Antonio dos Santos Franco. Sitting between these groups was Meeting Chair, U.S. Secretary of State for African Affairs, Chester Crocker. He was updating Russia's admission as he went, but both American and European leaders didn't know what was going on in this gloomy, little English room. It's remarkable in these days, as we watch Putin blunder around Europe, that an American high-level leader and a Russian would chat to each other in such a way. The superpowers back in 1988 had both realized this was time for jaw-to-jaw, and both sets of leaders had the intellectual and emotional intelligence to act on the moment. Ulysses Rosales del Toro, who was a high-level member of the U.S. Supreme Court, was one of the top leaders of the U.S. Supreme Court. Ulysses Rosales del Toro, who was a high-level leader, was one of the top leaders of the U.S. Supreme Court. Ulysses Rosales del Toro was one of the top leaders of the U.S. Supreme Court. Ulysses Rosales del Toro, who was one of the top leaders of the U.S. Supreme Court, was one of the top leaders of the U.S. Supreme Court. Ulysses Rosales del Toro, who was one of the top leaders of the U.S. Supreme Court, was one of the top leaders of the U.S. Supreme Court. Ulysses Rosales del Toro, who was one of the top leaders of the U.S. Supreme Court, was one of the top leaders of the U.S. Supreme Court. Ulysses Rosales del Toro, who was one of the top leaders of the U.S. Supreme No social distancing back then. During breaks, everyone stood in their own little groups, drinking tea and coffee and peering suspiciously at each other. However, it takes a soldier to recognize another. General Yanni Geldenhuis, in his blue-gray business suit, wandered over to Cuban General Rosales del Toro with his chest full of medals. Later on, these two would meet for 90 minutes, where Geldenhuis said Pretoria could not agree to the four-year withdrawal period. The Cubans would have to leave Africa quicker than that. And for once, the Cubans stopped arguing. Del Toro had begun to trust the South African word and answered, OK, we are open to offers. The negotiations ended and Crocker summarized everything. These days, he'd probably have shared a PowerPoint, because Neil van Heerden had outlined Pretoria's position in a point-by-point. The Cubans were not happy about some of these. But at least they were talking, with an agreement that the next meeting would take place inside Africa. Everyone went off to indulge in behind-the-scenes diplomacy. Then the problem was deciding where to meet for round two. After various locations were rejected, Crocker lit upon the idea of Cairo. The Angolans regarded Egypt as part of the Middle East, but attached to Africa, whereas the South Africans thought of Egypt as African. The MPLA didn't want to afford the South Africans any propaganda coup, by being allowed to negotiate on "black" African soil. And the South Africans wanted to ensure that this was the case. By choosing Egypt, they kind of split the difference. Then Pretoria and Luanda began to squabble about which luxury hotel they preferred, while Crocker and his Russian counterpart at a mission met privately in Lisbon, agreeing that they had to make sure all sides got together. Kind of like the adults having a chat while the children bickered in the sandpit. U.S. President Ronald Reagan then said, U.S. President Ronald Reagan then said, U.S. President Ronald Reagan then said, U.S. President Ronald Reagan then said, "I'm not going to be a president." "I'm going to be a president." "I'm going to be a president." "I'm going to be a president." "I'm going to be a president." "I'm going to be a president." "I'm going to be a president." "I'm going to be a president." "I'm going to be a president." "I'm going to be a president." "I'm going to be a president." "I'm going to be a president." "I'm going to be a president." 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The mood inside the Cairo conference hall was not a happy one on the first day these enemies sat down for round two of their negotiations. The South African delegation had allowed some of their points to be published in papers, including their demand that the Cubans pull out in seven months. This destroyed the good faith that had built up in that tiny London office just over a month earlier. What happened next is for next episode. Please rate the podcast on iTunes, it helps raise the visibility of the series. If you want to contact me, head off to abwarpodcast.com, there's a contact form on the homepage, or direct message me on Twitter at Deslatan. Until next, fast forward. you
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