‘The Privileged Friendship’: Reassessing the Central Intelligence Agency Operation at Zaire’s Kamina Airbase

ABSTRACT

From 1986 to 1991, the United States Central Intelligence Agency funnelled arms to the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola through Zaire’s Kamina Airbase. Recently declassified documents cast new light on the ways that facilitating this operation and protecting its covert status provided invaluable bargaining leverage for Zaire’s president, Mobutu Sese Seko, who demanded political and economic concessions from Washington. As a rare Cold War precedent for the types of covert, temporary basing agreements that the United States is now establishing throughout Africa, the Kamina case thus warrants a substantive reappraisal.