08-04-02 The Chevron oil tanker Condoleezza Rice sailed into the sunset one day in April 2001 and never was seen again.
No problem, however: The 129,000-ton vessel returned shortly thereafter as the Altair Voyager, safely renamed after a real star in the galaxy instead of a political star on President George W. Bush's national-security team.
As Chevron spokesman Fred Gorell told: "We made the change to eliminate the unnecessary attention caused by the vessel's original name."
The tanker had been named for Rice in 1995 when she was a member of the Chevron board of directors. She resigned from Chevron on Jan. 15, 2001, when she was appointed President Bush's national-security adviser.

Chuck Lewis of the Centre for Public Integrity, a Washington-based think tank, first pointed out the incongruity of a tanker named for the national-security adviser. But "I saw no reason to be exercised or concerned because she had already severed her official Chevron ties, resigned from the board and that sort ofthing," Lewis tells Insight. "It is hard to tell the story without laughing."
Nevertheless, Chevron at first had declined to rename the vessel, and did so only after the issue had been raised with White House spokesman Scott McClellan. The matter "has already been addressed," said McClellan in the daily briefing. "She will uphold the highest ethical standards in office."
Yet Lewis wonders whether any official who has held high-level positions in multinational corporations such as Chevron can really disentangle themselves from the corporate point of view.

Chevron is a company that has thrived by doing business with every kind of oil-rich dictatorship in the world, including the former Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China and Indonesia. In Africa, Chevron has been a major client of the Nigerian kleptocracy and of the late tyrant Laurent Kabila, whose regime in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) now is headed by his son, Joseph.
But it is in Angola where Chevron has struck it rich. New discoveries in deep waters off the province of Cabinda in the mid-nineties made a dramatic shift in Angola's importance to the corporation's revenues and to the regime of José Eduardo dos Santos and his revolutionary Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola (MPLA).
That movement was founded by hard-line communist Agosthino Neto, who went to Moscow for medical treatment in 1979 and died on the operating table. His successor, dos Santos, remained committed to Neto's Marxist-Leninist ideology but in recent years has retooled MPLA's image, downplaying Marxism but giving no sign that it has surrendered the Leninist heritage of acquisition and maintenance of total power by the elimination of all opponents.

In its 26-year war with rival Jonas Savimbi's Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), MPLA well may have given the coup de grace to its political and military opposition by killing Savimbi on Feb. 21, six days before dos Santos' face-to-face meeting in Washington with President George W. Bush -- a meeting supposedly intended to encourage reconciliation between the warring factions.
Intelligence sources tell Insight that dos Santos personally gave the command to kill Savimbi. Whether that can be corroborated, it is clear that while dos Santos had it almost within his power to kill Savimbi since October 2001, the prospect of the Bush visit encouraged him to give orders for the kill as soon as possible, the sources said.

Despite oil revenues amounting to some $ 3.5 bn a year, the Angolan government is chronically broke. The Economist magazine reported in January 2000 that "the bulk of the money bypasses the budget, disappearing straight into the hands of the presidency."
Indeed, the magazine said that the oil revenues for the next three years "had already been spent." According to Alexander's Gas & Oil Connections, an industry data source, in July 1999 the oil companies, including Chevron, paid Angola $ 900 mm in "secretive signature bonuses" for exploration leases.
Such up-front payments are not based on production, but are an on-the-books way to get around the anti-bribery provisions of the Corrupt Practices Act, US officials suggest. As for the need for a signing bonus, an intelligence source tells Insight: "They used the money to buy tanks, armament, MiGs, chemical weapons and foreign advisers to hunt down and kill Savimbi."

For many years the military arm of the MPLA, the Angolan Armed Forces (FAA), had been frustrated in its attempts to take out UNITA's leader because Savimbi's troops had broad support among the local population and had been well-trained in rapid guerrilla movements by the man they called the "Black Cockerel."
"The fish swim in the ocean of the people," says the guerrilla maxim. Moreover, the coalition of tribal peoples that formed the basis of his support deeply distrusted the mesticos, the detribalised and assimilated minority that ruled in Luanda.
"MPLA decided to drain the ocean," a congressional-staff African expert tells Insight. "When they learned that Savimbi was in the northern province of Mexico, they instituted a scorched-earth policy. They used chemical weapons to defoliate the trees and kill the crops. Then they burned the villages. The people had no food and no houses, so they fled. MPLA forces then rounded up columns of as many as 700 refugees when they could and confined them to camps near the provincial capital. The FAA especially targeted groups trying to get across the border into the Congo [Zaire], because they assumed that the women and children included dependents of UNITA soldiers."

Once the area was depopulated, the FAA could assume that any movements picked up by satellite imagery would be those of UNITA forces, the source says. After that, it was just a matter of time. Lisbon's Diario de Noticias gave an account of Savimbi's death through the eyes of the enemy FAA commander, Brig. Simao Carlitos Waly, according to a Foreign Broadcast Information Service text.
The Lisbon report says Savimbi wascornered with the assistance of foreign commandos. Nevertheless, even the brigadier's account could not avoid a kind of professional admiration of the gallantry of his enemy's last stand.
"By travelling to the Luvuei region, Savimbi would have to pass through dense bush," said Waly. "We continued to pursue him. As soon as he reached the Luvuei River he was caught in an ambush set up by our forces. Upon arriving in the area, Savimbi thought he had lost us. He tried to let his troops rest and reorganize. ... Through reconnaissance missions we learnt that he passed through the area. We began to fire all our artillery. We used all the information we had at our disposal. During the first phase we shot Savimbi seven times. He [still] tried to pick up a weapon and defend himself when he saw all his guards were dead."

On the same day that Waly gave his account, Robert Boucher, the US State Department spokesman, released a statement in Washington. "Jonas Savimbi has been killed," Boucher said. "The death of theUNITA leader is yet another casualty in a war that should have ended long ago. We call upon both sides, in conjunction with the peaceful opposition, civil sectors and international community, to fulfil their obligation to bring peace to the Angolan people."
At the White House press briefing, Ari Fleischer, the White House press spokesman, was asked what impact the Savimbi killing would have on the talks with dos Santos. "Does the White House think that the dos Santos government set Savimbi up for assassination, in effect, to get him out of the way before dos Santos gets here?" he was asked.
Fleischer, a master of the non-answer, was at his smoothest: "Well, the United States is still committed to achieving peace development through equitable solutions in Angola. And the president calls upon all Angolans to fulfil their obligations to peace there."

The next day, President Bush met with dos Santos and the presidents of Mozambique and Botswana and issued a brief statement: "Today I met with three presidents who can help bring peace and prosperity to southern Africa. The three presidents also discussed the tragic wars in Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We agreed that peace is within reach of both countries. I urged President dos Santos to move quickly toward achieving a cease-fire in Angola. And we agree that all parties have an obligation to seize this moment to end the war and develop Angola's vast wealth to the benefit of the Angolan people."
UNITA's political leaders immediately turned to Savimbi's second-in-command, Vice President Antonio Dembo, as their man to negotiate reconciliation with the MPLA. Four days after dos Santos met with Bush, FAA forces in Angola encountered Dembo, who had escaped the original massacre, and shot him down like a dog.

Angola watchers were not surprised at the administration's mild response to these dramatic events. Last October, former US ambassador Paul Hare, now executive director of the US-Angolan Chamber of Commerce which represents US corporations operating in Angola, put it bluntly: "It appears the new American administration wants to pursue a policy of active engagement with the Angolan government. The emphasis will be on practical results and not rhetorical statements. The reasons for this approach are several fold. Angola's present and potential energy resources are becoming more important every day. The oil is plentiful and accessible, and is also the type of crude which the United States needs."
Now such matters are in the domain of National Security Adviser Rice, late of the Chevron board. Lewis, of the Centre for Public Integrity, says: "These multibillion dollar oil interests are active all over the world. So how in the world do you recuse yourself from the interests of a company like Chevron? This may be more of an issue about the recusal process and how it works. I don't see any way at all honestly that she can serve as national-security adviser and fully, 100 %, take herself out of matters that may pertain to Chevron. I think it would virtually be impossible for her to function, in all honesty."

Certainly Rice is very gifted. She attended the University of Denver, entering at age 15 and taking Soviet studies with Joseph Korbel, the father of former secretary of state Madeleine Albright. Rice earned a master's degree at the University of Notre Dame and a doctorate from Denver's Graduate School of International Studies.
She went to Stanford University in 1981 to study arms control and, in 1986, joined the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a Council on Foreign Relations fellow. Rice was named to the Chevron board in 1991 after leaving her post on the staff of President George H.W. Bush's National Security Council, where she served as director of Soviet affairs. Now she eagerly was sought after by the establishmentarian intelligentsia.
In addition to her call to serve the board of Chevron, she was chosen to serve on the boards of Charles Schwab, Transamerica, Hewlett Packard, the international advisory council of J.P. Morgan, the Carnegie Corporation, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Rand Corporation. She also was on the board of Notre Dame and provost and vice president of Stanford, as well as on the boards of a number of other educational institutions.

This résumé was a good fit with the moderate conservatism of George W. Bush, whom she had served as foreign-policy adviser during the presidential campaign. When nominated, she filed papers indicating that she had more than $ 250,000 in Chevron stock and an income in excess of $ 550,000 per year. Insight attempted many times to reach Rice's office to ask for comment on her service with Chevron, but received no reply.
During the decade that Rice served on the Chevron board, the corporation prospered, according to its annual reports, going from total revenues of $ 38.9 bn in 1991 to $ 50.6 bn in 2000, with net income rising from $ 1.2 bn in 1991 to $ 5.2 bn in 2000. On Oct. 10, 1991, Chevron acquired Texaco, resulting in combined revenues inexcess of $ 100 bn.

Chevron's role in Angola dates back to the days of Portuguese colonial rule, when Gulf Oil Corp. opened fields in the Atlantic Ocean just offshore from the province of Cabinda. (Gulf was acquired by Chevron in 1984.) Cabindans claim that Cabinda never has been part of Angola. Geographically, it is an exclave separated from Angola by a narrow slice of the Congo (Zaire) and the mighty Congo River delta.
In the late sixties three revolutionary groups contended to control Angola: MPLA in Luanda and the west, UNITA in the east and the south and Holden Roberto's Front for the National Liberation of Angola (FNLA), a smaller group headquartered in the northern provinces.
The MPLA called on Portugal for assistance, then ruled by a friendly Marxist military junta, and brought in some 30,000 Cuban troops and Soviet advisers and arms. The first thing MPLA did was to march into the Cabinda exclave and seize the prize: the offshore oil fields that, according to recent statements by Chevron, constitute 50 % of the Angolan government's gross domestic product.

The people of Cabinda, more closely related to ethnic groups in the Congo than Angola, have received a mere pittance of the oil revenues taken from their territory. They live in great poverty. A fourth, much-splintered, revolutionary group known as the Front for the Liberation of the Cabinda Exclave (FLEC) has sought independence for Cabinda, conducting a low-level insurgency of harassment and sabotage of oil facilities, seizing villages for a brief time as a demonstration and kidnapping oil-company employees.
Maybe the issue has been those oil royalties; maybe it has been freedom. In 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan, the new administration backed the MPLA's pro-Western rival, Savimbi. A charismatic leader who spoke nine languages, Savimbi represented the vast majority of Angolans who lived in tribal societies in the countryside. The new US president saw Savimbi as an anticommunist fighting for freedom.
"Reagan was an admirer of Jonas Savimbi," Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Reagan's ambassador to the United Nations at the time, said recently. "Ron Reagan cared a very great deal about freedom. He detested tyranny. He detested imperialism and colonialism, and he detested communism because it stood for these things. And wherever there were people who had been or were about to be sucked into the Soviet empire and conquered by Soviet forces, who were struggling to preserve or to establish their freedom, Reagan said, 'I want us to stand with those people who are struggling for freedom and independence.'"

Savimbi was able to support his movement by taking over the diamond mines in the north, exporting the diamonds through friendly Zaire and by getting supplies via Namibia to the south. The first Bush administration, listening carefully to Chevron and the oil industry, did little to disturb the status quo but kept pushing for "free and fair elections" between the communist and anticommunist factions.
Savimbi reluctantly agreed, and the elections were held on Sept. 29-30, 1992, in the waning months of the Bush administration. The international diplomatic elite rushed to pronounce the elections a success, among them US Ambassador Herman Cohen, who was then assistant secretary of state for African affairs. "They were free and fair," Cohen tells Insight.
But some election observers had a different conclusion. Margaret Hemenway, a long-time Hill staffer who was part of the UN-authorized official delegation, tells Insight: "The first one to report fraud was Holden Roberto. We saw polling places in the morning with no voters. We went in and said 'What's going on?' The ballot boxes were already full. We went back to Luanda and UNITA candidates saw their computer vote tallies actually descending as they watched the screen. They couldn't believe it."

A report issued in November 1992 by the Washington-based Centre for Security Policy, headed by former top Pentagon official Frank Gaffney, gave more details: Registration of voters was closed 40 days before the election; large numbers of polling stations reported identical numerical results; only the MPLA was allowed access to government-controlled television; pre-election bribery of voters by MPLA was rife; in some areas as many as 25 % of the ballots cast were nullified; and electricity blackouts took place in a number of key provinces as the votes were being tabulated. Finally, according to the report, UN special envoy Margaret Anstee stated that she "had never witnessed a more unfair election, even in Latin America."
Cohen says Savimbi refused to accept the outcome from the start. "He told me he was going back to war because he had to save the Ovambindu people from being ruled by the Marxists," Cohen says today. "He made that decision early on. He even told me that he had enough troops around the country that he could easily win the war, and he almost did. He went pretty far."

But Hemenway says Savimbi told her that, "Even though there was massive fraud and I was cheated, I will accept." In fact, the terms of the election called for a runoff if neither presidential candidate achieved more than 50 % of the vote. Savimbi sent his vice president, Jeremias Chitunda, a Western-educated diplomat well-known in Washington and other capitals, to go to Luanda to arrange the terms for the runoff election. But on Oct. 31, 1992, the capital descended into chaos.
Amnesty International's 1996 report stated: "Intense fighting broke out in Luanda. Government forces attacked UNITA offices and residences. The [Rapid Intervention Police] and ordinary police, assisted by civilians to whom they had distributed arms in the preceding weeks, carried out house-to-house hunts for UNITA supporters.
Many hundreds died in the crossfire or were deliberately killed. Hundreds of others were taken into police or military custody. Prisoners were taken in truckloads to the Camama cemetery on the outskirts of the city where they were shot and buried in shallow graves. Another mass grave is reported to be at Morro da Luz, a steep ravine in the Samba area of Luanda where suspected UNITA members were taken to be pushed off."

The most prominent victim of this ethnic cleansing was Chitunda. His official convoy, travelling with a white flag of peace, was ambushed and forced off the road. Chitunda was pulled from the car and shot in the face. Another member of the party also was shot in the head; a third, although wounded, got away to tell the tale.
Both the US State Department and Human Rights Watch have reported that the dos Santos government consistently has refused to return Chitunda's body to his family for burial. Hemenway says that this betrayal was the root cause of Savimbi's subsequent distrust in dealing with Luanda.
Cohen's version is more benign: "I don't know whether Chitunda's death had any impact on Savimbi. I didn't speak to him after that. From what I heard, they were killed in an automobile accident when their car went off the road. I didn't hear that they were deliberately murdered, but I don't have firsthand evidence. But anyway, it didn't seem to change Savimbi's point of view -- he wanted to go on with the war."

In 1993, Cohen resigned from the State Department and registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent for the Luanda regime. Although the Angolan contract has expired, his firm most recently registered as an agent for the Robert Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe, which has just completed a ruthless election based on the Angolan Leninist model.
In 1993 the Clinton administration proclaimed sanctions against UNITA "to deal with the unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United States by the actions and policies of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA)."
The nature of this unusual and extraordinary threat was not specified. Some say that a key player behind the sanctions was the international entrepreneur and investment banker Maurice Templesman, whose diamond interests in Angola had been compromised by Savimbi.

Templesman was very close to the Kennedy family, and indeed frequently was seen as the companion of Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Onassis and Templesman even entertained Hillary and Bill Clinton aboard Templesman's 70-foot yacht Relemar. But his closest influence may have been on the late Michael LeMoyne Kennedy, who was operating Citizens Energy in Massachusetts, a non-profit set up by Michael's brother, Joseph Kennedy II, to get cut-rate fuel oil to the needy. And never mind that Citizens Energy had a for-profit affiliate, Citizens Energy International, where the Kennedy brothers were wheeling and dealing in the oil business.
The Boston Globe reported in 1998 that Michael Kennedy earned more than $ 622,000 in salary and stock options in two years on the for-profit side. A cornerstone of this for-profit business was an oil concession in the Cabinda field that Templesman persuaded dos Santos to award to Kennedy, the Globe says. In turn, Kennedy was the founder of the US-Angolan Chamber of Commerce, that glittering roster of US firms operating in Angola, and the main advocate of stabilizing the dos Santos regime by forcing the surrender of Savimbi.

Although UNITA (unlike FLEC) never attacked the oil installations and, in fact, had pledged not to do so, the goodwill of the Marxist regime was about to assume greater importance. Until the mid-nineties, Chevron was operating from the continental shelf off Cabinda; but now it was about to move 40 miles offshore to the deep ocean.
"Reserves have been in proportions far exceeding anything on shore," commented Alexander's Gas & Oil Connections. All during this decade of tightening relationships between Chevron and the Angolan regime, Condoleezza Rice sat in the catbird seat as developments were placed before the board. Last September, President Bush renewed the sanctions against UNITA, using language identical to Clinton's about "the unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United States" posed by Savimbi.

The renewal of sanctions sent a message to dos Santos that he would not be penalized for eliminating the leadership structure of UNITA. In October 2001, the scorched-earth policy began, dislocating thousands of civilians and destroying their livelihoods. In February the need to accommodate Savimbi was ended with seven bullets. Dos Santos shook hands with the president, had a photo-op and a three-minute speech and went home to enjoy his victory.