Dirty Work 2 The CIA in Africa Hidden Sources of Subversion
by Robert Molteno
The capitalists are getting themselves replaced in the supervision and management of the great industrial and commercial enterprises by intellectuals, who carry them on, and usually are well paid for doing so. These intellectuals of industry and politics, the privileged portion of the wage class, imagine that they are an integral part of the capitalist class, while they are only its servants.
-- Paul Lafargue, Socialism and the Intellectuals (1900)The best service of all which academics could do is to refuse to undertake any more major research about which answers could be gained by asking the poor what they want. -- Frank Field, in New Society, November 15, 1973
This is a study of the attempts which certain political scientists of the United States have launched in recent years to penetrate and, in my personal opinion, also to frustrate the main liberation movements of Southern Africa. Insofar as this study is informed by a theoretical approach, it is that the imperialism of the U.S. capitalist class and its government is a reality, that this class fears any process of liberation that could open the way to a transition to socialism, and that certain American academics engage in research, the aim of which is to foster the interests of this imperialism.Since this paper may be unique in its subject matter and frankness, I must make clear why I have written it:
1. The study of the behavior of academics is at least no less legitimate than the study of behavior of other kinds of human beings.
2. Where academics seek to monitor the struggle of a whole subcontinent for liberation -- a struggle to which their home government is opposed -- then the activities of those academics must be exposed in the interests of liberation.
3. If the argument advanced below is correct, then the escalation of armed struggle in Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa will continue to attract the policy-oriented and counterrevolutionary interest of certain academics. This paper therefore aims to put all of us -- academics and activists -- on our guard against renewed attempts at penetration.
By way of further introduction, let me dispose of two other points. Firstly, I am not anti-American in the sense of being anti-the-American-people, nor am I criticizing American academics in general. On the contrary, I believe the bulk of the American people to be oppressed and exploited and that certain American intellectuals -- notably the Africa Research Group, the late Don Barnett, and so on -- have done tremendous solidarity work in the field of Southern African liberation. This paper is strictly confined to those American academics -- largely white and middle class -- who share the ideology of the American capitalist class to the point of being prepared to act as intellectual auxiliaries to the normal U.S. agencies for espionage and counterrevolutionary subversion.
As for academics of other nationalities, except for Ali Mazrui this paper does not deal with them for the simple reason that none of them, to the author's knowledge, have hitherto sought to enter Zambia for the purpose of penetrating the liberation movements. As for white South African writers, hostile to liberation, they -- at least until now -- have not been allowed to enter Zambia and so have had to rely on South African, Rhodesian, and Portuguese army and police intelligence reports rather than making direct contact with the liberation movements.
Second, the reader may well ask: How reliable are my sources of information? The answer lies for the first part of this paper in sources printed by the academics themselves; and for the second part, it rests on the fact that I worked for the University of Zambia from 1968 until 1976, was consulted by the relevant authorities with each new stage in the attempt to penetrate the liberation movements, and therefore am able to quote from the files of relevant correspondence. It remains the case, however, that the published and unpublished sources available in Zambia are not nearly as adequate as those available in the United States, and this has handicapped this study in certain respects.
Origins: The Gwendolyn Carter Team, 1950s
While I will not deal in too much detail with the roles of U.S. academics researching South Africa in this early period, a historical approach is essential in understanding what has been happening recently. The roots of U.S. academic involvement in Southern Africa go back to the 1940s. On the one hand, African opposition to the South African regime entered a more militant era with the formation of the Youth League inside the African National Congress (ANC) in 1944. For the first time, mass resistance tactics became the basis of ANC strategy. And on the other hand, after World War Two gave way to the Cold War, the United States became increasingly terrified of Third World national liberation movements which had any ties with socialist states or vestiges of a socialist platform.
The reaction to the new militancy of the ANC of South Africa in U.S. circles was speedy. First, there was a rapidly increasing flow of journalists to South Africa, starting with Robert St.John (who wrote Through Malan's Africa in the early 1950s) and including hosts of people since -- for example, John Gunther, Allen Drury, William Frye, J. Hoagland, etc. Second, certain academics in the rapidly developing field of comparative politics turned their attention to South Africa. The leader of what soon became a whole team (she acknowledges seven research assistants in her first book on South Africa) was Professor Gwendolyn Carter, a delightful lady of liberal persuasion who had already made a name in the field of comparative European politics.
As early as 1948, Professor Carter visited South Africa for the first time. She then returned in 1952-53 for more intensive research. What is noteworthy about this visit is that it was financed in part by the Rockefeller Foundation, an organization whose interest in Southern Africa, as we shall see, has thrived ever since. Indeed the Rockefellers have various interests in Southern Africa. These are mainly through the large number of U.S. manufacturing concerns that operate there, and more directly through the Chase Manhattan Bank of New York which now owns 15 percent of the giant Standard Bank of South Africa. Secondly, Professor Carter brought with her -- and this continued to be her custom on her subsequent visits to South Africa -- a veritable team of researchers and assistants. The more prominent of these came to include Professor Thomas Karis -- formerly an employee of the U.S. State Department, stationed in the U.S. Embassy in South Africa in the 1950s, and now with City College of New York; Dr. Newell Stultz; and Dr. Sheridan Johns III, now of Duke University.
What is fascinating are the areas of research which this team embraced in the fifties and sixties. Prof. Carter started off with a study of the Afrikaner power establishment. This was published as The Politics of Inequality: South Africa Since 1948, parts of which were reproduced as early as January 1955, but which appeared in full only in 1958. Dr. Stultz then decided to investigate the origins of Afrikaner nationalism in the period before Carter's work, that is, prior to 1948.
Meanwhile, Professors Karis and Johns turned their attention to the growing threat to Afrikaner control posed by the Congress Alliance, and notably by the ANC. Professor Karis monitored the five-year-long Treason Trial (1956-1961) which proved an almost inexhaustible fund of primary material about the ANC. This he published as The Treason Trial in South Africa: A Guide to the Microfilm Record of the Trial. This book was published by the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace -- a notoriously right-wing and policy-oriented organization which, like the Rockefeller Foundation, has maintained a high degree of interest in Southern Africa as we shall see. It is also important to remember that the whole basis of the South African government case in the Treason Trial was to try to show that the ANC was a puppet of the South African Communist Party (SACP).
It was this issue that the third member of the group, Dr. Sheridan Johns III, turned his attention. He examined the SACP's role, strength, external connections, and internal links with the national liberation movement. This formed the subject of his doctoral thesis. He was generously financed and not only spent a long time in South Africa, but also flew to Moscow and Europe for further research. He has never published his thesis, although in 1973-74 the Institute of Communist Studies at Columbia University (it should more accurately be called the institute of Anti-Communist Studies) financed him to put the thesis in publishable form.
These studies of the ANC and SACP left one major gap: that section of the national liberation movement called Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) which was formed in 1959. This gap was plugged by a new team member, Gail M. Gerhart, who came from Radcliffe (where Professor Carter herself had originally graduated). She started work on the PAC in 1963. Her doctoral dissertation is for Columbia University -- the same institution which financed Dr. Johns' work on the SACP in 1973-74. Gail Gerhart has been supervised informally by another team member, Professor Karis of City College of New York.
But there are far more important facts about Gail Gerhart than these. First, her husband is a fairly senior official of the Ford Foundation -- in 1974 he was head of its regional office in Nairobi, Kenya. Now, not only has the Ford Motor Company large manufacturing investments in South Africa (with an investment in 1973 of between 80 and 100 million dollars and a 15 to 20 percent share of the South African vehicle market), but the Ford Foundation in the 1950s gave major financial assistance to the South African Institute of Race Relations which was, and is, the leading fact-gathering institution in South Africa. What is notable is that the Foundation discontinued its assistance to the Institute, but a few years later used its funds to finance academic penetration of the liberation movements. This presumably, was on the assumption that radical change in South Africa could only come via the liberation movement, which the South Africa Institute of Race Relations had become very poor at reporting on since the movement had been made illegal in 1960.
Returning to Gail Gerhart, the second important fact about her is that she started her study of the PAC in 1963. Since then, she has made numerous trips to South Africa, Tanzania, London, and elsewhere. Where has the money come from? Why twelve years later is she still carrying on the unfinished study? The implication is clear.
The Carter team, while working separately on the white South African power structure and the national-liberation and socialist oppositions to it, also worked together on two other important projects. The earliest was a mammoth collection of primary materials on the South African liberation movement, 1882-1964. Carter, Karis, Johns and Gerhart all worked on this project. It is now being produced in a series of volumes called From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, 1882-1964, published by, once again, the Hoover Institution. This collection of documents is probably rivaled only by that of the South African Special Branch. The second area where they collaborated -- this time Carter, Karis and Stultz -- was in a study of the South African government's proffered alternative to majority rule, that is, the Bantustans.
This team is still preoccupied at the present time with Southern Africa. Karis came as Fulbright Professor to teach at the University of Zambia in 1968-69. Johns taught at the same university in 1968-70 and as a Fulbright Senior Lecturer in 1974. Carter and Karis, barred from entering South Africa, embarked on a research trip around the South African periphery in 1974. Gerhart still visits South Africa. As for Johns, he has expanded his academic attention to the periphery, notably Botswana but with the escalations of the armed struggle since the end of the 1950s has made the logical transition to becoming interested in the liberation movements' guerrilla strategy.
None of the Carter team has been prepared to investigate critically the key support which the United States gives to white supremacy in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and the former Portuguese colonies. None of them has been prepared to support the anti-apartheid movement, beyond the normal liberal criticism of racialism. And while Karis and Carter periodically request the South African government for permission to enter, Stultz has gone so far as to publish in the journal South Africa International, which is the official organ of the huge pro-apartheid propaganda organization, the South African Foundation.
Some Preliminary Conclusions
Wide-ranging Co-ordination: The team of researchers in a period of over 20 years has worked together on South Africa and between them covered an integrated set of key areas -- the South African power structure (minus its external capitalist supports); the opposition to it -- Congress Alliance, Communist, and Africanist; and -- to a much lesser extent -- the transition to guerrilla warfare.
Immense Resources: There has been a host of research assistants over the years (all white American). Professor Carter in the two volumes (The Politics of Inequality and From Protest to Challenge, volume one) mentions fourteen different research assistants, apart from the full members of the team (i.e. Carter, Karis, Stultz, and Johns). Similarly there have been endless research trips -- Professor Carter heading the list with five to South Africa in the 1948-1961 period alone. Then there have been computerization facilities and frequent funds to finance years of full-time write-up work. Above all, there has been the cost of countless taped interviews, and photostated documents which then had to be shipped, catalogued, processed, and stored in the United States. One may reasonably ask how many hundreds of thousands of dollars this research effort has involved down the years. And where did the money come from? What is illuminating (in one sense) is that since Carter's The Politics of Inequality in 1957, she has refused to reveal in the prefaces to her later works where the money has come from.
Think Tanks, Foundations, and the U.S. Government
Let me just summarize these connections. Karis is a former employee of the State Department and has two brothers presently working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Carter, whose brother was in the 1960s a prosperous manufacturer of artificial flowers, served for many years on one of the State Department's advisory committees on Africa. They and their colleagues were financed by a mixture of university money; state funds (Professor Carter, for example, got a grant from the Social Science Research Council, for her early studies); and foundation money. This included the Rockefeller Foundation; and may well have included the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation which finances the U.S.-South Africa Leadership Exchange Program.
Finally, the group of scholars has been closely linked with several notoriously right-wing "think tanks." These include the Institute for Pacific Relations whose International Secretariat gave Professor Carter research funds and the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. The Hoover Institution's Director of the African Program is Dr. Peter Duignan, who published the large-scale apologia for colonialism called Burden of Empire. His co-author, Lewis Gann, is a well known reactionary who in the 1970s was carted around Rhodesia by the Rhodesian military and who then published an extraordinary article in their army journal, Assegai, which tried to show that guerrilla warfare in Zimbabwe could never be successful. (Unfortunately for Gann, he published this just before the successful and sustained offensive put up by ZANU began in late 1972!)
The Hoover Institution not only has an unsavory reputation for getting hold of documents (including OAU confidential papers) that it could not get in any normal way, but has been associated with a series of anti-liberation books, notably those by Edward Feit. So much for the close ties between U.S. policymakers, the Carter group of U.S. academics, and certain foundations and reactionary think tanks.
1970s: Studies on Guerrilla Warfare
Background: In my view -- and more detailed information on the Carter group, especially its finances and its U.S. government contacts may prove me wrong -- this group of academics proved too "soft" for the purposes of the U.S. government as the Southern African liberation wars heated up from the end of the 1960s. The Carter Group were all extremely delightful people and -- again in my view -- sympathetic in general to decolonization and majority rule in Southern Africa, always assuming, of course, the continuance of capitalism. Certainly Carter and Karis were shocked at the brutality of the South African system, depressed at its rigidity, and dismayed at the position of the U.S. government on occasion. They also made friends with many black South Africans. As the wars escalated, they may well have proved reluctant to try to penetrate and frustrate the South African liberation movement. The result was that they seem to have been largely cast aside (Carter was dropped from the U.S. State Department's advisory committee after Nixon's election in 1968) and replaced by a much more hardheaded, "tough cookie" generation of researchers -- to whom we shall shortly turn our attention.
But first it is important to note the following facts as background: The heady days of U.S. Government liberalism toward Africa (how liberal were they?) passed with Kennedy's death in 1963. The Johnson and Nixon eras involved a sharp swing to the right in the United States and abroad. Watergate and Vietnam are well-known. One byproduct of this was a parallel swing to the right in U.S. policy toward Southern Africa. As Robert Smith, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, put it in April 1972:
The Nixon Administration is quietly pursuing a policy of deliberately expanded contacts and communication with the white governments of Southern Africa.... In practical terms the policy has resulted in a number of concrete developments, ranging from major new economic undertakings, such as the recent Azores agreement with Portugal, to the authorization of previously forbidden sales of jet aircraft to Portugal and South Africa.
This new, more right-wing U.S. policy had been set out in Kissinger's secret policy memorandum of 1969. It has now climaxed in the CIA's intervention in Angola in collaboration with the South African armed forces.
The liberation wars in Southern Africa escalated rapidly in the late 1960s. MPLA opened its very successful eastern front in Angola in 1966, the same year as SWAPO reacted to the World Court judgment on Namibia by starting low-key armed struggle in Owambo and the Caprivi strip. The following year, 1967, joint ZAPU-ANC(SA) forces began a series of campaigns (1967-70) which, although defeated, forced South Africa to send in troops to prop up the Smith regime. FRELIMO then opened the second Tete Province Front and in 1972 ZANU started what proved to be a sustained and ever-expanding zone of combat in northeastern and eastern Zimbabwe. These immense successes -- sketched so hastily here, but involving so much sacrifice and courage -- clearly showed the U.S. government that the days of white minority rule were numbered, unless something was done about it.
The United States has had a CIA presence in Zambia for a long time. Let me be brief, but specific. The CIA presence has taken several forms of which the following are known to the author:
1. American academics who come to Zambia and who then (or previously?) join the CIA. The best-documented, but not widely known, case is Dr. Stephen Goodman. He was an economist who taught at the University of Zambia soon after it opened in 1966. He subsequently wrote an article in Africa Report (June 1970) which stated he worked for the CIA as an "economist who specialises in Southern African research." The second case was Dr. John Helgerson, who in 1970 did his doctoral research for Duke University on the Zambian National Assembly and its MPs. He now works in Washington, according to two friends of his, for the CIA.
2. CIA agents stationed in the U.S. Embassy, Lusaka. The stationing of CIA agents within U.S. embassies is common practice. In Lusaka, the U.S. Embassy has always had at least one official, often with the cover post of consular officer, whose job is to penetrate the liberation movements. In 1968, the man was Frank Crump. In 1974 it was Clagett J. Taylor and possibly Mike D. Stempel. [Dirty Work 2 editors' note: Our research indicates it is unlikely that Crump, Taylor, or Stempel were official CIA employees. It is clear from Molteno's description, however, that they worked closely with the agency.] Clagett Taylor has an interesting history. Some years ago, he was a teacher in Rhodesia and came to know several Zimbabwean leaders. He then (so he told me) decided to join the State Department and had to learn Spanish as a second language. Some time afterward, he was posted to the U.S. Embassy, Lusaka, Zambia. There he suffered the unfortunate experience of being exposed.
It happened in this way: For years, it was known that the Mozambican organization COREMO was a puppet body of small size that was being supported by the United States as an alternative to the radical and mass-supported FRELIMO. But only in early 1975, did Paul Gumane, COREMO's head, admit publicly that Mr. Clagett Taylor of the U.S. Embassy in Lusaka had been financing COREMO at least since the April 1974 coup in Portugal. Mr. Gumane stated that Clagett Taylor had instructed COREMO to act against FRELIMO in that crucial period before Portugal recognized FRELIMO as its legitimate successor. The U.S. government hastily redeployed Mr. Taylor to Caracas, Venezuela. This rather reduced the weight of the U.S. Embassy denial that Taylor had been subsidizing COREMO from CIA funds.
The CIA's other activities in Zambia: These include notably the setting up of Nkumbi International College where many young people from the liberation movements went to school under largely American teachers. The Zambian government took over the college after documentation came to light showing the college's links with U.S. government foreign policy. The second case has been a series of CIA attempts to penetrate the Zambian labor movement. These attempts used the African-American Labour Center -- known in radical labor circles to be a CIA front, and an attempt in 1973 by Mr. Mike Stempel of the U.S. Embassy to use a University of Zambia lecturer as an intermediary between CIA agents who flew in from Malawi and the ZCTU.
It is against this background that the attempts by U.S. academics to penetrate the liberation movements must be seen.
Case 1: MIT and Professor William Griffith: So far as I can find out, the first major U.S. academic attempt to use Zambia as a base from which to investigate guerrilla warfare goes back to early 1969. In March of that year, Professor Lincoln Bloomfield, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Center for International Studies' "arms control project," designed and carried out CONEX III. CONEX III was a sophisticated (two-day-long, TV-monitored, and with computer-processed data) simulation of the likely conduct of U.S. and other leaders in a Southern-African conflict situation. This simulation was part of the Center's project to study "the control [sic -- by the US?] of local conflict." Two findings emerged which must have alarmed U.S. policymakers. The first was that, as the Southern African conflict escalated, so socialist (Soviet and Chinese) support for freedom fighters soared, and the U.S.S.R. also lent Zambia SAM-2s for her protection. The second finding was that the United States refused to take any action; in the words of the report of the simulation, "The U.S. would let the regional conflict run its course without substantial assistance or intervention." (Incidentally, it may be of interest to political scientists to see how tragically wrong this latter finding of the "game" has proved to be; see the open CIA money, arms, planes, and mercenaries in Angola at the present time.)
Soon after this simulation, a new event happened which further shook the U.S. government. In 1970 China finally agreed firmly to build the Tan-Zam Railway from Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to Kapiri Mposhi in Zambia over a period of five years. Actual construction started in 1970. It was shortly after this that Professor William E. Griffith of MIT visited Zambia. Griffith, who incidentally is Ford Professor of Political Science, is an old cold-war warrior whose record goes back nearly thirty years. In an amusing interview with the author, Professor Griffith expressed skepticism when told that there were almost no Chinese in Lusaka. His skepticism unfortunately was soon to bear fruit in a new MIT initiative.
Case 2: MIT, Professor Robert I. Rotberg, and the Ford Foundation: On 19 October 1970, Professor Robert I. Rotberg of the Department of Political Science, MIT, wrote to the head of Political Science at the University of Zambia: "I hope that you and other members of your department may want to take part in a study of the politics, psychology and tactics of African liberation movements.... Their internal dynamics are little understood, and their potential as revolutionaries (from a methodological point of view) is little known." The Department of Political Science at the University of Zambia (UNZA), led by its South African members, saw the obvious dangers (to Zambia and the liberation movements) of such a project. There was also the extraordinary lack of information which Rotberg had provided. We began by asking four questions: What is the purpose of the study? Where are its funds coming from? Who will the researchers be? And what is the intended time span? The head of political science communicated these questions to Rotberg, who replied as follows on 30 December 1970 (my comments follow in brackets).
I hope that several of our Ph.D. candidates could gather thesis material in Zambia. [That is, most of the researchers would be Americans.]
The ideal minimum duration of the study is five years. [That is, this was not to be a normal research project of limited duration but an ongoing monitoring of the liberation movements.]
At the moment we have money for about a year from MIT. An application has been made to the Ford Foundation. [Clearly Rotberg, in a hurry, got university financial support immediately and then turned for larger scale funds to a foundation which, as we have seen, had been active in South Africa before.]
Rotberg then made a crucial mistake. When pressed by the UNZA political science staff as to whether he had asked and got the support of anyone in the liberation movements, he replied with only one name -- an African academic associated with one of the movements. I then spoke to this person who denied having consented to collaborate with the project and who expressed his shock at its implications. This the department communicated to Rotberg in due course, presumably much to his embarrassment.
The department also examined Rotberg's research proposal, which he had now sent us. It was clearly hostile to liberation and aiming to do a very thorough job of penetrating the movements. The proposal stated, "Almost every African country is a present or a potential target [sic] of a liberationist movement." ("Liberationist" is a cute new word, presumably to be equated in connotation with communist or extremist.) He also put "liberated" inside quotation marks, thereby further betraying his attitude. But Rotberg was not just hostile; his intentions were manipulative as well and so closely related to U.S. government policy. Thus, reason number 3 for studying the liberation movements was:
To learn about the strategy and tactics of liberation movements is to gain knowledge about small-scale internal and external wars and how such wars may be promoted, contained, or prevented.
As for the scope of the five-year study, it would include:
an analysis of their operational attributes -- their techniques of recruitment, training; mobilization, and tactics, their leadership and internal politics, and their ideology and international relations. In its initial phase the study will concentrate on the more important movements, those directed against [sic] South Africa, South West Africa, Rhodesia, Angola, Mozambique and Malawi.... Data will be collected by structured interview, survey, participant observation [!], and analysis of printed ephemera, the press, and other records.
It is clear, I suggest, that this proposed research was as comprehensive and detailed as anything military intelligence could desire.
UNZA's Department of Political Science were unanimous that the study must be blocked. As one member of the department (not myself) wrote in an internal minute on 22 January 1971, "I am sure I would not be alone in reading possible sinister motives into the proposed project... Our best course of action would be to prevent actively on the grounds that it would compromise the activities of other research students, is unlikely to succeed, and is embarrassing to Government if not to the liberation movements themselves."
When the department turned down Rotberg's proposal on 12 February 1971, he was furious. On 8 April, he replied to the head of the department: "I was a little surprised at your letter of 12 February.... By rejecting cooperation out of hand, you obviously limit the extent to which your Department can influence the shape of the work.... I fully understand the underlying theme of your letter and even what I take to be a possible anti-American tone."
Still Rotberg refused to give the project up and he said he would fly out to Zambia in mid-1971. There now existed a very real danger that Rotberg would use his contacts with very high levels of the Zambian government, misrepresent his project, and get permission to go ahead. So the department did two things: First, it alerted key liberation movements (ANC, FRELIMO, MPLA, and ZANU). They were unanimous that "this research would not be countenanced by the liberation movements; they felt it was ideologically unacceptable, politically inopportune, and practically unfeasible. It was their unanimous opinion, most forcefully expressed, that they would not be prepared to go along with the outlined research proposal."
Second, the department alerted the vice-chancellor and the director of the University's Institute of African Studies (IAS). They agreed in the words of the director, "It is clear that UNZA should on no account be associated in any form with this incredible (indeed, crazy) and, if I may say so, politically suspect project. I would go further and suggest that this man with his dangerous 'research' should be kept out of the country altogether." The vice-chancellor agreed and on 1 June took appropriate action to stop the project. This did not stop Rotberg from flying into Zambia and trying to persuade the Zambian government directly -- apparently without success. It has since been learned that he (like Carter and the others before him) is now engaged in the study of African political activity in the Bantustans, the South African government having let him into South Africa for this purpose.
The department naïvely thought that this had put a permanent end to American attempts to infiltrate liberation movements via placing academics in Zambia. We were wrong. And the reason we were wrong was that we did not foresee the likely U.S. reaction to the huge increase in the liberation wars which FRELIMO and ZANU brought about from 1972 on.
Case 3: Dr. J. Bowyer Bell, Columbia's Institute of War and Peace Studies, and Dr. Sheridan Johns III: In 1973 Sheridan Johns found himself working at the Institute of Communist Studies at Columbia University. His office happened to be near that of Dr. J. Bowyer Bell, who worked at Columbia's Institute of War and Peace Studies. Bowyer Bell is a man of considerable eminence in the hazy field between right-wing academia and U.S. intelligence services. His field of specialty is guerrilla struggles and he has written extensively on the subject. There are other interesting details about Bowyer Bell. He is extremely well off, having a house not only in the United States, but also in the exclusive Rutland Gate area of London. Although he himself says, "I can always be persuaded to write fifty pages for a thousand dollars," he must have a much more lucrative source of income than publication fees. Bowyer Bell works closely with the U.S. government. When he travels around the world's war zones, as he frequently does, he often stays with U.S. Embassy officials and he admits that most of his information of freedom fighters comes from governmental sources. It is not surprising to discover that Bowyer Bell is extremely hostile to liberation movements. Thus on his visit to Rhodesia he was given lots of confidential information by the Rhodesian military. As he admits, "all the relevant departments of the Rhodesian government offered the most detailed and generous cooperation." His article reflected the bias of this cooperation.
As early as 1969-70, Bowyer Bell became interested in the Southern African liberation war situation. He visited Lusaka (skillfully not calling at the University of Zambia), Dar es Salaam, and Addis Ababa, as well as being taken round Rhodesia. It seems that Bowyer Bell was at MIT at this time; he certainly was two years later. If so, his Southern African trip may well have been a precursor of the large-scale Rotberg project which saw the light of day in 1970.
The next time Bowyer Bell became involved in Southern Africa, was in late 1973. By this time he was at the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University where he met Johns. Luckily for Bell, he had also made the acquaintance of a member of staff at the University of Zambia when Bell had been investigating the guerrilla situation in another part of Africa. Avoiding Rotberg's formal approach to the Department of Political Science, Bowyer Bell wrote privately to this acquaintance of his in March 1974, asking him to sound out about the liberation movements about whether they would be prepared to cooperate in being investigated. The letter is an extraordinary one, which was unfortunate for him, since he was incorrect in assuming that his acquaintance would be sympathetic to his purposes. The letter described his research project briefly as "a vast trans-national study out of Columbia" of the nationalist movements "and their ilk." The research was apparently to be done solely by Americans, thereby avoiding the complications which Rotberg had got into in approaching non-American political scientists to cooperate. In other respects, however, the project was clearly the same as Rotberg's 1970-71 proposal -- the same range of countries, the same comprehensive coverage of movements, and the same indefinite duration. Bell then made another mistake -- he stated that Johns was shortly coming to Zambia (as a Fulbright Senior Lecturer from June 1974) and that he would brief Johns fully about the project and Johns could then spearhead its Zambian end.
What happened then is instructive. Details of the intended research and Bowyer Bell's background were given to one of the liberation movements. This movement circulated the information among the others and took it to the newspapers. The net result was that Johns found it virtually impossible to contact Liberation Center and the movements after his arrival. It seems that at least the Zambian end of Bell's project has been successfully scotched. An interesting final detail is that Johns repeatedly denied all knowledge of the project. And since Bowyer Bell had stated in his letter that unfortunately he could not manage Africa "on my terrorism tour this year," we were not able to ask him for more details!
Case 4: Professor Ah Mazrui and the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace: At the very time that Bowyer Bell was setting up his project in early 1974, a similar initiative was being taken by Professor Ah Mazrui and the Hoover Institution, whose busy and reactionary concern with the affairs of Southern Africa has already been analyzed. At first sight, Professor Mazrui's liberation-struggle project is different from its predecessors. After all, he is a citizen of an African state and his approach was through the newly formed African Association of Political Science (AAPS). It is my contention that Mazrui's initiative, although much more skillful than the previous ones, was in fact the same U.S. penetration project, this time with a heavier camouflage.
What in fact happened? On 20 February 1974, he wrote to a member of the Political Science Department at the University of Dar es Salaam. Mazrui requested him to bring before the next executive meeting of the African Association of Political Science an application for recognition. "We are applying to be recognized by the Association as a Research Committee on Armed Forces in African Societies." If one turns to the enclosed memorandum on this Research Committee, one discovers some very interesting things. Firstly, the "we" is never explained. Presuming Professor Mazrui does not use the "royal we" when referring to himself, it is a legitimate inference to suppose he has some American colleagues whose names he prefers not to disclose. Second, the projected committee's concern with liberation movements is buried among seven other topics. Third, the proposal was apparently drafted in such a hurry (is this related to the rapid escalation in the armed freedom struggle in Mozambique and Zimbabwe in early 1974?) that Mazrui had no time to get the consent of the projected other founder members of his committee; nor apparently did Professor Mazrui regard it as proper for the African Association of Political Science's Executive itself to appoint members to its own committee!
There are other points to note about this proposal. Professor Mazrui was an opponent of President Milton Obote, who was a militant foe of apartheid; indeed Mazrui welcomed the coup of General Amin publicly. When he left Africa he accepted a University of Michigan offer (worth some seventy thousand dollars per annum, all told) to join their staff. But it was as Senior Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution that he wrote to the AAPS. Since he does not submit any request for funds to the AAPS, perhaps he was already confident of getting funds from American (including Hoover Institution?) sources. Finally, Mazrui was a close colleague of another academic concerned with monitoring liberation movements -- Robert Rotberg. They had indeed edited a book together.
The skill of Mazrui's attempt was considerable. It used an African citizen as the public initiator of the project and then tried to get the stamp of legitimacy via affiliation to the AAPS. The location of the liberation section of the committee would have been Dar es Salaam -- a sensible choice in view of both the failure to get into Zambia and the importance of Tanzania in relation to FRELIMO, MPLA, ANC(SA), ZANU, and ZAPU. (Remember that this attempt, like Bowyer Bell's, was before the Portuguese coup of April 1974). And being a committee, it would also be an ongoing institution, highly suitable for long term monitoring of the liberation wars. Luckily, the African Association of Political Science saw through the whole ploy and turned it down.
Let us finally turn to the last and most recent case.
Case 5: Dr. Christian P. Potholm, Bowdoin College, and the Rockefeller Foundation: Within a couple of months of the collapse of the Bowyer Bell and Mazrui attempts in 1974, another one was made -- this time by Professor Christian P. Potholm of Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine. Potholm is an ambitious young white American political scientist, very much on the make. A faithful Almond and Powell systems theorist, with a list of publications that take up a couple of pages (and a willingness to write on anything publishable, from the fisheries of the East Coast of the United States to policemen in Africa). He was also extremely skillful. First of all, he bypassed the University of Zambia altogether and somehow made direct contact with the then Minister of Home Affairs, Mr. Lewis Changufu, who was in charge of immigration matters. On 2 November 1973, he got a very favorable reply from Mr. D.R. Chilao, the permanent secretary of Home Affairs. "If all your travel documents are in order, I do not think you need some additional forms to enable you to conduct your interviews in Zambia effectively.... I hope I shall be in a position to give you names of people who may assist you."
Then Potholm made his first mistake. He waited eight months, by which time the Bowyer Bell project had run into snags and Mr. Changufu had lost both his parliamentary seat and his cabinet post in the general elections. Then in July 1974, on the advice of "my good friend, Arthur Lewis" (a black American, senior in United States Information Service in Lusaka), he wrote to the University of Zambia's Institute of African Studies (IAS), thereby apparently avoiding the troublesome Department of Political Science. The letter was a skillful one. It put subtle pressure on the IAS director by enclosing the Chilao letter and using the Hon. Vernon Mwaanga as his reference. Mr. Mwaanga, when Zambian ambassador at the U.N., had contributed a chapter to a book edited by Potholm. The tactic worked. The director replied speedily and cordially on 13 August 1974. Although he asked Potholm for his research proposal (which, as with all these projects, was never produced voluntarily first time round, as is normal research application procedure), but added "I would like you to know that this may be a mere formality in your case, but standing rules stipulate the submission in every case of a research proposal before the application [for Affiliate status at the IAS] can be processed."
What should have been a "mere formality" soon turned into a protracted problem. For Potholm sent not only his research proposal, but also his curriculum vitae and stated his source of funding.
His research proposal was as follows:
This study seeks to focus on the international transfer of aid (to refugees) particularly as it affects Africa and is designed to develop strategies to: (i) increase the generation of aid (ii) ensure that the African nations receive a greater percentage of the total and (iii) co-ordinate and maximize the flow of international refugee relief to Africa.
Since almost the only refugees in Lusaka are from the unliberated territories of Southern Africa and since they are mostly activists in the various liberation movements, Potholm's research on refugees would in effect have given him full access (from January to May 1975) to all the liberation movements. But this research proposal clearly could not reflect Potholm's real purposes. For, as the Department of Political and Administrative Studies (as it was now called) stated when consulted, "He is suggesting that by coming to Zambia to talk to various people about refugee aid he will be in a position to help increase the flow and effectiveness of aid." The subject then rejected the proposal -- "The research proposal of Potholm's does not appear ... to represent serious scholarship." Or, as the director of IAS wrote on 7 October 1974, "it is couched in very attractive terms and one wonders whether this is a smokescreen to blind us to what the man really wants to come and do."
What Potholm wanted to come and do soon became even clearer. His source of funds provided one clue: "I have recently received the good news that the Rockefeller Foundation [that old financier of Gwen Carter's research] will be sponsoring my research project dealing with international aid and refugee resettlement with particular emphasis on Southern Africa." But it was his curriculum vitae that gave the game away. The following facts emerged:
1. Potholm had never been interested in aid or refugees before.
2. Potholm's association with Rockefeller went years back to the period 1958-62, when he held a Rockefeller Scholarship at Bowdoin College.
3. Potholm also had close links with the State Department; in 1971 he was awarded what his curriculum vitae called "Scholar-Diplomat Seminar for African Affairs, U.S. State Department."
4. Under Field of Major Research Interest, he listed four areas of which the first was "International Espionage Sub-cultures"!
5. His interest in spying and his general right-wing sympathy was borne out by some of his publications. These included several on the police and "insurgency techniques" in Africa, as well as a revealing article entitled "Rejuvenation of the ROTC Program."
On 12 November 1974, the IAS wrote to Potholm, "The subject you have chosen is not one which falls within the research priorities of the country at this stage." Potholm never replied.
General Conclusions
As liberation wars rise in intensity and scale, so certain American academics become more persistent in their attempts to penetrate and monitor the liberation movements. When the wars in Zimbabwe and South Africa escalate, we must expect further attempts.
These reactionary U.S. academics refuse to take no for an answer; they merely resort to more subtle subterfuges. These include the withholding of relevant information, misrepresentation of research intentions, use of black intermediaries, bypassing the relevant authorities, etc.
In the period since 1969, one can detect the same old close ties between right-wing U.S. academics, think tanks, foundations, and the U.S. government as existed in the earlier period.
The first duty of the radical intellectual in this situation is vigilance. The second is to inform the liberation movements.
Finally, let me make quite clear why I personally oppose these attempts by U.S. reactionary academics.
1. The liberation movements themselves oppose being studied (except by sympathetic solidarity workers) for obvious reasons. It ought to follow from liberal ideology that if a subject of research refuses to be researched, it is the subject's democratic right to have his wish respected by the researchers.
2. The kinds of studies intended above can endanger not only liberation movements and the populations they are responsible for, but also the governments and populations of front line states.
3. The above research proposals were not studies of the past of a nationalist movement, as is standard historical procedure. Instead they were to be ongoing studies of unfolding present events. Why?
4. Regardless of the motives and intentions of the researchers, the information they would generate could damage the cause of liberation and result in the loss of precious freedom fighters' lives if that information were published or in some other way got into the hands of the former Portuguese and the present South African and Rhodesian governments.
5. The United States was an open ally, via NATO and bilateral agreements, of the former Portuguese government. It is now collaborating militarily with the South African government in Angola. Yet these researchers with one exception were citizens of the United States, and in no way opposed to their government's growing collaboration with racist capitalism's suppression of the liberation movements.
For all these reasons, academics who ally themselves with imperialism in Southern Africa must be held in general condemnation as the enemies of freedom.