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Department of History
King’s College London
London, UK
Saul Dubow
Magdalene College
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, UK
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vii
viii Acknowledgements
ix
x Contents
Conclusion
287
Notes 295
Bibliography 363
Index 385
Abbreviations
AB Afrikaner Broederbond
ACOC ALCORA Coordination Committee
ADR Accredited Diplomatic Representative
ALCORA Codename for cooperation between the military forces of South
Africa, Rhodesia and Portugal 1970–1974
ANC African National Council (Rhodesia)
ARA Acção Revolucionária Armada
ASF ALCORA Strategic Force
ATLC ALCORA Top Level Committee
BOSS Bureau for State Security
BSAP British South African Police
CAF Central African Federation
CAPS Combined ALCORA Permanent Staff
CCSC Command and Control Subcommittee (ALCORA)
CIA Central Intelligence Agency
CIO Central Intelligence Organisation (Rhodesia)
COIN Counter-Insurgency
COPCON Comando Operacional do Continente
COREMO Comité Revolucionário de Moçambique
DCI Director of Central Intelligence
DGS Direcção Geral de Segurança (see PIDE)
DMI Directorate of Military Intelligence
ECM Electronic Countermeasures
EEC European Economic Community
EFTA European Free Trade Association
ELINT Electronic Intelligence
xiii
xiv Abbreviations
xvii
xviii Introduction
military links with the regimes in Salisbury and Pretoria. They believed,
as would become clear at the October meeting, that FRELIMO and the
Angolan nationalist movements suspected the existence of close military
cooperation between Portugal, Rhodesia and South Africa. Lisbon feared
this could threaten peaceful decolonization.5
Explaining Portugal’s new stance did not require, in the end, the
five days scheduled for the meeting. Pinheiro, in the chair, was brutally
unequivocal from the start, stating that ‘the future of ALCORA can-
not remain in its present form’. Cross-border hot pursuit of liberation
movement cadres by Rhodesian security forces was no longer possible.
He also ‘made clear the impossibility for Portugal of allowing any mili-
tary activity within the ALCORA concept’. The meeting continued in a
desultory fashion for a time. The Rhodesians, obsessed with hot-pursuit
rights in Mozambique, were unhappy. The South Africans were more
sanguine. It was agreed to quietly bury ALCORA. While further meet-
ings at ATLC or ‘even higher’ level were seen as desirable, the agreed
final document declared that ‘the code name ALCORA is to be dropped
and future cooperation will continue under a new codename’. As for
PAPO, it would ‘cease to exist from 31 October 1974’. As it turned out,
little liaison continued afterwards as Portuguese power in Africa quickly
evaporated.6 The ‘unholy alliance’‚ as some critics, unaware of its extent,
had termed the white redoubt, was over.7
Was ALCORA a formal defence pact, the military manifestation
of this ‘unholy alliance’? The argument proffered here is that while no
treaty of alliance was signed—though the South Africans were push-
ing for such by late 1973—the nature of ALCORA strongly implied a
commitment to joint defence against major external threats. Its docu-
mentation also suggests that the drive to coordinate operations against
liberation movements in all three countries picked up pace in 1973. This
is clear from recent releases by Portuguese, South African and Rhodesian
archives.8 An analogy can be drawn between ALCORA and other infor-
mal military understandings—most notably the Franco-British staff talks
prior to the First World War, which greatly contributed to Britain’s deci-
sion to enter that conflict.9 The analogy is especially apt given that there
is much dispute as to how much most of the British cabinet knew in
1914 about the moral commitment to the defence of France that Britain
had made through its participation in staff talks.10 No documents exist
or have survived that show that the cabinets of South Africa, Portugal
xx Introduction
Conference in early 1977 did they give way to the total defence strategy
of P.W. Botha.18
It has also been argued elsewhere that Botha’s power base in the
Ministry of Defence ‘created the platform from which he could grasp
the leadership’, and that the institutionalization of a ‘garrison state’, the
virtual displacement of the South African Cabinet by the State Security
Council (SSC) and the increasing dominance of the SADF in policy-
making after 1978 all stemmed from Botha’s rise.19 This project’s ini-
tial research findings tended to support this supposition. However, one
should point to the strong possibility that until April 1974 ALCORA
and the ‘outward policy’ were not incompatible twin-track strategies.
The public South Africa of an apparently ‘Jolly’ John Vorster that sought
peaceful cooperation with South Africa’s black neighbours may well have
coexisted with P.W. Botha’s attempt to strengthen the white redoubt
through Pretoria’s military and financial muscle. So extensive are the
gaps in the documentation, due to deliberate weeding, that a defini-
tive conclusion may never be drawn. Perhaps the existing literature has
focused too much on the internal squabbles between Botha and BOSS.
Indeed, it is argued here that P.W. Botha, as late as 1979, was still blend-
ing a combination of the ‘outward policy’ and ALCORA in his stillborn
idea for a ‘constellation’ of friendly white and black states in southern
Africa linked by anti-communism. It should also be kept in mind that
even in dealings between themselves, the three states at the heart of this
volume remained deeply suspicious of each other’s motives, pursuing,
where possible, their own national interests.
One remarkable aspect of ALCORA was the secrecy which sur-
rounded it. The first indication that ALCORA documents had survived
emerged in Aniceto Afonso and Carlos de Matos Gomes’ unrefer-
enced chronology of Portugal’s colonial wars in 2010.20 The first seri-
ous studies, based on actual Portuguese and South African documents,
only appeared in 2013 in Portuguese and English.21 There were some
oblique references to ALCORA in memoirs but little explanation of
its true nature and extent. Memoirs of some of the protagonists shed
only little light on the subject; others—including Ian Smith’s—none
at all.22 There is silence as well in even the best-informed contempo-
rary accounts.23 The enormously indiscreet Ken Flower, director of the
Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) from 1964 to 1981,
obliquely refers to ‘a common strategy of “Joint Defence of the Zambezi
xxii Introduction
River Line”’, but adds that ‘there seemed little prospect of translating
theory into practice’.24 And General Kaúlza de Arriaga, a Portuguese
military hardliner or ‘ultra’ who served as commander-in-chief in
Mozambique, wrote of an ‘Alcora Alliance’ which never lived up to its
promise.25 Another reference can be found in a semi-official biography of
P.W. Botha, with little made of its importance.26 Hilton Hamann, who
held lengthy interviews with many apartheid-era South African gener-
als, does not mention ALCORA, and describes South African military
support to Portugal as ‘small scale’, with a limited supply of arms and
the occasional ferrying of Portuguese troops on counter-insurgency
(COIN) operations by South African helicopters.27 Extant references to
ALCORA are, for the most part, incomplete or incorrect. The earliest
reference that can be ascertained is by M. Evans, in a 1984 article, which
refers to a South African–Rhodesian–Portuguese ALCORA intelligence
system operating in the years 1964 to 1974.28 Even Kaas Van der Waals,
who was deeply involved as a liaison officer in ALCORA, barely men-
tions it in his account of the Portuguese conflict in Angola.29 Military
cooperation between the white states in the 1960s and 1970s was the
holiest of holies when it came to official secrecy, a secrecy which suited
South African diplomacy and P.W. Botha. After 1974 this secrecy also
suited the emerging democratic regime in Portugal and some of its lead-
ing figures. General Francisco Costa Gomes, president from September
1974 until July 1976, had been involved in ALCORA business before
the revolution, but never mentioned it publicly afterwards.
The origins of the ‘unholy alliance’, which, it must be emphasized,
also included political and economic cooperation long before ALCORA,
lay in events in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. One important cata-
lyst was the shift in thinking about African colonies that took place in
London, Paris and Brussels. Policy was redirected from long-term com-
mitment to empire to rapid disengagement and an acceptance of self-
determination in the face of a rising tide of assertive, sometimes violent,
African nationalism. These shifts, and the sense that African nationalism
was an unstoppable force, produced violent disorder in southern Africa,
where there were large numbers of European settlers of Dutch, British
and Portuguese origin. The state of emergency in Nyasaland in 1959
eventually unravelled the white-dominated Central African Federation
(CAF). South Africa, in 1960, faced an African uprising against apart-
heid’s petty regulations—especially the pass laws, which restricted
Introduction xxiii
ruled over about four times as many people, most of them blacks. South
Africa was a sovereign state where the militantly racist Reformed National
Party (hereinafter NP) government had been implementing, since gain-
ing power in 1948, its doctrine of apartheid. In the Federation, political
power also rested with whites at both the federal and the national lev-
els, as it did in Southern Rhodesia. Only a tiny number of Africans had
the franchise for the Southern Rhodesian parliament, which had enjoyed
considerable autonomy over the country’s domestic affairs since 1923.
Whites exploited this circumstance to impose a notorious land settlement
(the Land Apportionment Act) that allocated half the land to them-
selves. In Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, the British Colonial Office,
through London-appointed governors, retained considerable powers,
particularly over native rights and law and order, which remained out-
side the federal government’s competence. Portuguese governors, usually
military men, ran Mozambique and Angola with only limited input from
the local whites, who could not be allowed to have more of a say in their
affairs than the politically repressed metropolitan population.
When the CAF was established in 1953, the idea that sub-Saharan
Africa would within a decade be predominantly under independent
African authority would have shocked most observers. British, French,
Belgian and Portuguese rule had, in fact, deepened in the years after the
Second World War as colonial powers sought to modernize their respec-
tive possessions. European empires in Africa were barely touched, until
the middle of the 1950s, by the ‘backwash from the demise of colonial-
ism in Asia’.39 In fact, the remoteness of the African nationalist threat in
the decade after 1945 meant that relations between the three major white
powers in southern Africa—the Federation, Portugal and South Africa—
were not always warm. South African apartheid, underpinned by fantasti-
cal pseudo-sociological concepts, was in essence a ruthless programme of
ethnic cleansing, a license to move huge numbers of Africans from urban
areas to economically barren homelands, where they could be denied
citizenship. The NP’s strong nationalism and instinctive anti-Britishness,
derived from memories of Afrikaner suffering during the Anglo-Boer
War (1899–1902), made its supporters suspicious of English speakers
in South Africa and the territories to the north. On the surface at least,
apartheid was qualitatively different from Portugal’s intention to create
multiracial societies in Africa and the Federation’s ‘partnership’ model,
which promised eventual political and economic opportunity for all races,
based on a qualitative franchise. Each country could be dismissive of
6 F.R. de MENESES AND R. McNAMARA
When opportune, those who defended the Federation saw fit to dis-
associate themselves strongly from South African apartheid to curry
favour in Westminster. When this happened, the South African govern-
ment and the Afrikaner press, often little more than a mouthpiece of
the NP, responded in kind. The English-language press in South Africa,
conversely, was usually hostile—sometimes deeply so—to the NP govern-
ment. The most powerful press conglomerate, Argus, which also dom-
inated the Rhodesian press, was more liberal than its readership. Most
English-speaking whites, when it came down to it, opposed apartheid
more because it dispossessed them of power and patronage than out of
concern for Africans. The Afrikaans press did not enjoy large sales and
depended heavily after 1948 on government support through state
advertising and printing contracts. Many of the NP leadership had cut
their teeth as newspaper editors. D.F. Malan was a Die Burger editor
before leading the party to victory in 1948. H.F. Verwoerd, the architect
of ‘Grand Apartheid’ and prime minister from 1958 to 1966, made his
reputation as the founding editor of Die Transvaler. Remarkably, both
he and his successor, B.J. Vorster, chaired the holding company of the
Die Transvaler while being simultaneously head of government.50
Although the Federation barred South Africa’s putative northwards
expansion, South African ministers rarely attacked it in public. They
did so only when Federation politicians used the apartheid system to
make racial partnership sound better than it actually was, or when the
NP wished to emphasize the dangers of the partnership model. In Die
Transvaler of 12 October 1953, the notably maladroit South African
minister of economic affairs, Eric Louw, attacked Sir Godfrey Huggins,
prime minister of the Federation, for criticizing South African racial and
political affairs. Louw warned that such attacks hampered the friendly
relations that should exist between neighbouring states.51 Prime Minister
Malan’s deputy, N.C. Havenga, on the other hand, declared that
‘Rhodesia is a white man’s country and we must co-operate.’ He was,
however, sceptical about partnership, warning that if ‘the non-Europe-
ans were given political rights the time would come when the European
would be in danger’.52
After the 1953 federal election, which Huggins’ United Federal
Party (UFP) won easily, the extreme right-wing Die Volksblad car-
ried, as a headline, ‘UFP Wins Election by Intimidation— Strong
Afrikaner Hatred in Rhodesia—Smuts-Policy’s Big Role’. The English-
language press in South Africa, meanwhile, trumpeted what was seen
1 DEFYING THE WIND OF CHANGE 9
as a good result for UFP and a more liberal approach to race relations.
The Federation’s electorate had ‘emphatically rejected the Confederate
Party alternative of fragmentation through apartheid!’ shouted the Cape
Argus.53 Die Transvaler commented that the South African public would
neither rejoice nor shed tears over the result, although it regretted that
‘the leaders of the Federation do not always maintain the same good
will towards the Union as has been demonstrated by the Union towards
the Federation’.54 This minor press skirmish in some ways illustrates the
problem that the Federation posed for the NP government. Not only did
the Federation prevent South Africa’s territorial expansion, it also pro-
vided ammunition for the opposition United Party (and its press sup-
porters) by providing an apparent alternative to apartheid.55
Portugal was different in the eyes of the South Africans. On the one
hand, unlike the Federation, it was a sovereign power, a North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) member with which formal military links
could be forged. On the other hand, however, there were important cul-
tural tensions due to Portugal’s more relaxed attitude to racial mixing
and the Dutch Reformed Church’s instinctive anti-Catholicism. Indeed,
the US Embassy in South Africa, as late as 1968, opined that security
and political cooperation between the South Africans and Portuguese,
built upon the Afrikaners’ admiration for the ‘extraordinary efforts’ of
Portugal to hang on in southern Africa, was complicated by simultane-
ous contempt for the Portuguese ‘as virtually a mulatto people them-
selves’.56 Still, the South Africans had considerable confidence in the
robustness of Portuguese colonialism. As the Rand Daily Mail noted in
1960, South Africans believed that ‘the Portuguese know how to han-
dle Africans’: they had ‘some almost mystic expertise denied to other
colonial powers’ and often boasted that they ‘were the first to arrive in
Africa and will be the last to leave’.57 The British ambassador to Lisbon,
in 1954, reported on a dinner given by the minister for foreign affairs,
Paulo Cunha, in honour of the South African minister of transport, Paul
Sauer. When Cunha stated that Portugal and the Union might have to
consider stronger ties in the future, Sauer replied that ‘neither Portugal
nor South Africa had any intention of allowing what had happened in
other continents to affect the security or permanence of their hold upon
their African territories’.58
Portugal had carefully rebranded her colonial rule in Africa after
the Second World War in preparation for her admittance to the United
Nations (UN). By turning colonies into ‘overseas provinces’, Salazar
10 F.R. de MENESES AND R. McNAMARA
The Portuguese are most skilful in drafting regulations which will not
offend even the tenderest liberal conscience. Decrees containing the most
autocratic powers read like a United Nations declaration of human rights.
This particular decree, for example, is ostensibly issued for the principal
purpose of protecting the native from possible exploitation by Europeans
and others. In fact it accords to the Administration very considerable pow-
ers of control.61
‘alone, before anyone else, brought to Africa the notion of human rights
and racial equality’, and that Portugal ‘also practiced the principle of
multi-racialism, which all now consider to be the most perfect and daring
expression of human brotherhood and sociological progress’.63
One trait that linked all the three white states was a fanatical anti-
communism. In the Union, the NP had been fusing the threats of com-
munism and African nationalism since the 1930s,64 and increasingly used
fear of both to bind Afrikaners and English speakers.65 As Die Transvaler
explained in 1953, Afrikaners had been at put at ‘the southern point of
Africa by an Omniscient Providence in order to make the light of the
Gospel and civilisation shine here’. This task, or ‘vocation’, was doubly
important since the ‘non-European’ was being courted from various
quarters: ‘From Moscow the attempt is made to make him believe that
his salvation lies in a communist revolution and that he must regard all
Europeans who are living in Africa as his enemies.’66 Anti-communism
also featured strongly in the discourse of Europeans in Rhodesia. After
the UDI in 1965, white Rhodesians lamented the fact that Great
Britain—especially under Harold Wilson—seemed no longer willing to
resist communist encroachment, as they themselves were doing.67 In
Portugal, Salazar made the most of the Cold War by pointing out that
his New State had been warning of the communist menace since well
before the Second World War. Given that the Portuguese Communist
Party (Partido Comunista Português, PCP) was the most important
source of opposition to the regime, this was not necessarily surprising.
Between the beginning of 1959 and the end of 1965, the white-
dominated states of southern Africa witnessed a number of major crises
which appeared to threaten their continued existence, especially when
set against the sudden (and, in the view of the white states, precipitate)
abdication of European power in Africa.68 These crises were the 1959
state of emergency in Nyasaland;69 the outbreak of unrest in South Africa
in early 1960, which briefly shook the NP government;70 the Angolan
rebellion of March 1961;71 the dissolution of the Federation of Rhodesia
and Nyasaland; and the Southern Rhodesian UDI in 1965.72 These
events, while not always explicitly linked (though an increasingly asser-
tive African nationalism and the unwillingness of whites to surrender
their dominance or make significant compromises was at the core of all
of them), were akin to a wave that many observers considered, for a time
at least, unstoppable. By the end of 1965, however, the tide had ebbed.
White rule, had survived, at least in the medium term, in Angola and
12 F.R. de MENESES AND R. McNAMARA
of that country […] but […] the Federation is taking a different road;
apartheid and partnership are irreconcilable’.107 This was not a universal
view among Rhodesian whites: Taswell reported the mayor of Bulawayo
calling South Africa a true friend.108
South Africa’s high commissioner in London noted that the ‘govern-
ment’s charge that there was a widespread massacre plot in Nyasaland
has been received in Britain with a great deal of scepticism and even
incredulity’. He added that there were calls for a commission of inquiry
that would inevitably lead to proposals to placate the Nyasalanders’ opin-
ion and ‘confirm the conviction of the Africans in all dependent territo-
ries that violence does pay’. 109 In conversation with Taswell, the federal
minister of finance, Donald McIntyre, suggested that the Nyasaland and
Barotseland (in Northern Rhodesia) could be handled in much the same
way as the homelands proposed by South Africa: ‘We have a tremen-
dous amount of land here. Much more than you do in the Union and
we can apply separate development more easily.’ Taswell noted that these
remarks bore ‘a striking similarity’ to the plans of the much more right-
wing opposition Dominion Party, which Welensky frequently decried.
McIntyre concluded the interview by saying that ‘all of us whites in
Southern Africa must stand together. We must not be divided by small
matters. If one part falls, we all fall.’ Taswell replied that the Portuguese
had expressed similar sentiments to him.110
The consequences of the Nyasaland emergency continued to develop
over the summer. Macmillan met with Welensky, whom he saw as sincere
and progressive but also as someone who ‘would not shrink from seces-
sion if he thought the Europeans ill-treated from London’.111 Indeed,
military staff in the CAF continued to argue for increased federal con-
trol over Nyasaland.112 But the publication in July 1959 of the damn-
ing report on the Nyasaland disturbances by Lord Devlin reignited the
debate over the Federation’s future. Macmillan, who viewed the report
as ‘dynamite’ that could topple his government, complained privately
that Devlin was an Irish-Fenian, lapsed-Catholic hunchback, embittered
towards the government by his failure to be made lord chief justice.113
According to his diary, Macmillan would have resigned had the Cabinet
not backed his decision to support the Governor of Nyasaland and the
Colonial Secretary. The government easily survived the ensuing debate
by taking a strong line, notably continuing to insist on the veracity of the
murder plot and refusing to release Banda. This misled many European
politicians in the Federation to conclude that the Tories remained
20 F.R. de MENESES AND R. McNAMARA
Minä en tiedä, miten teillä siellä Hakalassa nyt on, mutta koita
voittaa itsesi. Taistelun kautta päästään uuteen elämään.
*****
— Kyllä sinä meillä työtä saat, jos vain teet sitä niinkuin mies.
Osaat kai sinä ojaa kaivaa?
— Kuulehan Liisa, minä olen nyt juuri keksinyt jotain. Anna nyt sen
olla ja tule tänne istumaan, että saan puhua. Minä perustan
työkoulun.
— No?
— Sinä olet niin hyvä… kunpa minä voisin siinä auttaa sinua.
— Niin kyllä, muta työtä ei ole koskaan liian paljon, eikähän sinun
aina tarvitse.
— Kun nyt sinä vain onnistuisit siinä, sanoi Liisa kuin toteuttamista
epäröiden.
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