the navy’s posture and force structure were not even driven by South Africa’s own needs. In terms of the Simon’s Town Agreement of 1955, it was the British who decided what kind of navy South Africa would have, and it had to fit in with their global Cold War strategy. According to the agreement, Britain turned the Simon’s Town naval base over to South Africa, in return for the country’s playing a role in safeguarding the strategic Cape sea route. The agreement also allowed the navy to purchase anti-submarine frigates and minesweepers from Britain.[43] This was the main reason why many in the SADF regarded the navy “as a bit of an ‘oddball’ ” and others even “as a complete anachronism” in the words of Vice Admiral Glen Syndercombe, Chief of the Navy in the 1980s.[44]
But four factors changed all of that. The first was the cancellation of the Simon’s Town Agreement by the British Labour government in 1975. The second was the loss of Angola as a buffer territory, which focused strategic thinking very much on the country’s continental war needs. Thirdly, there was the retirement, in late 1976, of the Chief of the SADF, Admiral Hugo Biermann, under whose long leadership the navy had fared rather well. He was succeeded by General Magnus Malan who – as did other army generals – viewed the navy and its expensive ships as something of an unaffordable luxury. The fourth factor was the imposition of a UN arms embargo against South Africa. This meant that France cancelled a contract for two corvettes and two submarines, and refused to sell further aircraft as well. Most of the available resources were thereafter used for the development of army and air force weapons systems.
Against this background, the SADF, with input from navy officers, produced two documents, the so-called Mandy and Hogg reports. These questioned the navy’s role as custodian of the Cape sea route and, in effect, recommended that the force be transformed to concentrate on coastal defence. At about the same time, Minister of Defence PW Botha announced that South Africa would no longer defend the Cape sea route on behalf of the West.[45] This meant that the navy’s frigates would be phased out, and it would concentrate on its new Israeli fast missile strike craft and submarines.[46] As Admiral Syndercombe wrote,
the frigates, fine ships though they were, were not what we required in our existing operational scenario. We needed small, fast ships with massive surface to surface firepower to present an effective counter to the missile-armed fast attack craft being supplied to the Angolan Navy by the Soviet Union. Their small size also meant that they were difficult to detect, either visually or by radar, while their shallow draft, speed and manoeuvrability gave them the ability to penetrate into restricted waters where other vessels dared not go.[47]
The strike craft and submarines would play a substantial but unsung role in inserting and extracting special force operators behind enemy lines.
Angola: the political objectives
The fact that the proposals in General Malan’s strategic reviews of 1979 about an offensive posture towards Angola were formally accepted by the State Security Council elevated them to the level of official, albeit clandestine, policy. That, at least, was the case in 1979. In some SADF documents, there are casual comments that show that the military saw a regime change in Luanda as their eventual goal.[48] But none of these documents presented any operational plan to achieve it. Did it ever go beyond mere proposals? Several considerations suggest it did not.
Firstly, one should remember that the South African state was not a single, monolithic entity. From the outside, US Secretary of George Shultz remarked to President Ronald Reagan that “[t]he South African leadership is of several minds and the military, in particular, is disinclined to take chances or to favour negotiated solutions”.[49] Malan’s aggressiveness, for instance, was not greeted with whoops of joy by Foreign Affairs officials.
Secondly, the SADF’s military strategy shows that all operations up to 1985 were not primarily aimed at FAPLA, the Angolan army, but at SWAPO. In at least one instance, the South African government warned its Angolan counterpart in diplomatic language of an impending SADF cross-border operation, and assured Luanda of South Africa’s “consistent policy” that these actions were aimed “solely against SWAPO terrorists and any contact with forces of the People’s Republic of Angola is avoided”.[50] (Of course, UNITA’s guerrilla operations against the MPLA necessitated the deployment of about 50% of SWAPO’s forces to help the MPLA, which meant that far fewer SWAPO fighters were available to infiltrate SWA.)[51] The first SADF operations specifically aimed at FAPLA took place only in 1985 and 1986, and then they were on a small, clandestine scale. As we shall see later, the 1987 operation started the same way, suggesting that a forcible regime change in Luanda was not on the immediate military agenda.
Documents in the archive of the Department of Foreign Affairs tend to support this conclusion. In 1984, Pik Botha told Chester Crocker that peace in southern Africa would be impossible if the Soviets took over Angola, as this would help them to take over the entire region. Therefore, it was necessary to achieve “reconciliation” between the MPLA and UNITA; the two had to be forced to talk to each other.[52] On the face of it, it seemed as if South Africa was still committed to the Alvor Agreement of January 1975, according to which the MPLA, the FNLA and UNITA had to form an interim government of national unity to prepare for free elections. But things were not quite that simple.
Although it never happened, President PW Botha and Pik Botha at times actively considered the unilateral recognition of UNITA as the sovereign government of Angola.[53] As Pik Botha explained to a sympathetic Namibian interim government in 1985:
You can only get Cuban withdrawal if there is reconciliation in Angola. If you get reconciliation in Angola, [President José Eduardo] Dos Santos is finished. The moment they start talking to [UNITA leader Jonas] Savimbi, and this is Dr Savimbi’s own assessment, we agree, then this present regime in Luanda is finished, and then SWAPO will be finally finished as well.[54]
The South Africans were thus in favour of “reconciliation”, of talks between the MPLA and UNITA in the hope of replacing the Marxist MPLA with the friendly UNITA by peaceful means. Not that the South Africans had very much hope of this happening; they and the Americans agreed that “no Angolan party can achieve an outright military victory”. If the Cubans were withdrawn, they thought that UNITA could control maybe 60 to 70% of Angola, less if the Cubans stayed on.[55] By 1979, the Directorate of Military Intelligence estimated that UNITA had the support of about 45% of the Angolan population, against 25% for the MPLA.[56] Regardless of its accuracy, the point is that the South Africans were expecting that an election would put UNITA into power in Luanda.
The picture emerging from all of this, then, is that the National Party government would very much have preferred a friendly, anti-communist government under UNITA. Malan’s very aggressive stance of 1979, however, was never implemented. It seems as if the South Africans were realistic enough to realise that they did not have the military means to topple the MPLA.
Conversely, South Africa’s aid to UNITA proved to be counterproductive in one important regard. The MPLA feared that South Africa was bent on regime change, and therefore aided all South African enemies – SWAPO, the ANC, Zimbabwe and others – in the hope that the fall of the NP government would ease the pressure on Luanda.[57]
The South African strategy was shared, by and large, by the Reagan administration. In a 1987 review of its policy, the White House decided to continue with its attitude, which was “[t]o achieve an equitable internal settlement of the Angolan conflict that affords UNITA a fair share of power”. Also, “Soviet and Soviet-proxy influence, military presence and opportunities in Angola and southern Africa” had to be reduced or, if possible, eliminated.[58]
The presence of some 30 000 Cuban troops in Angola obviously complicated things. Fidel Castro, we now know, intervened in 1975 on his own initiative and without informing the Soviets, much less asking their permission.[59] Thereafter, Castro’s main reason for staying on was to “protect” the Angolan revolution from the “racist” South Africans, and not so much to help the MPLA win its struggle
