The Jamboree in Jamba

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
A very strange meeting took place in June of nineteen
eighty five. This was long before the days of email
and video conferencing. If you wanted to hammer out an agreement,
you had to get everyone in the same room. Perhaps
you could invite everyone to your office or rent a
conference room at the Marriott, But the attendees at this

(00:31):
meeting would have had a hard time booking flights to Washington,
d C. So they settled on something a little less orthodox.
And they couldn't exactly just call up the men on
their invite list either. The logistics were going to be
a nightmare. Dana Rohrabacher, President Ronald Reagan's speechwriter, personally flew

(00:52):
to a safe house into Gusagalpa to hand deliver an
invitation to Adolfo Calero, leader of the Nicaraguan Contras. Anti
communist activist Jack Wheeler was in touch with the Mujahadeen
in Afghanistan and Laotian rebel leader Pauka Her and Grover
Norquist had plenty of contacts who could get him in
touch with Jonas Savimbi, leader of the Angolan Insurgent Force UNIDA.

(01:17):
Given the guest list, they had pretty limited options when
it came to finding a venue. State Department officials made calls.
Only two governments were willing to offer their public support
for such a summit, Israel and South Africa. Politically, that

(01:38):
was a minefield, so one of the attendees offered to host.
They could hold the meeting at the UNITA base camp
in the Angolan town of Jamba. American Assistant Secretary of
State for African Affairs, Chester Crocker arranged for the South
African military to handle security. It was all coming together.

(02:01):
With funding from the President of Right Aid, Jack Abramoff
was going to get the world's leading anti communists into
one room. I'm not sure this meeting accomplished much in
terms of advancing the Reagan doctrine. But at that rebel
base in southern Angola, Jack Abramoff reconnected with an old friend,

(02:23):
a South African military intelligence operative he'd first met on
a visit to Johannesburg in nineteen eighty three, and while
Oliver North met with armed men in the sweltering heat,
Abramoff was brainstorming his next project and meeting with the
man who would fund it. Whether or not Jack Abramoff's
strange summit had any impact on the course of the

(02:45):
Cold Wars A question for someone else. I can only
tell you about the time the South African government secretly
paid an ambitious young American lobbyist to make one of
the worst movies I've ever seen. I'm Molly Conger, and this.

Speaker 1 (03:05):
Is weird Little Guys.

Speaker 2 (03:23):
This is a side story. I really couldn't resist it.
I think you'll understand. I've been writing this story, this
story about Monica Huggett, about South Africa, about the Apartheid International.
I've been writing it for so long that I'm having
trouble letting it go, so I will try to wrap
it up next week. I know there are so many

(03:45):
other weird little guys I've promised to tell you about,
and we'll get to them, but I've invested so much
in this story that I want to make sure I
end it properly. And I could tell I just didn't
have that this week. I don't talk a lot about
my personal life in public online because as an expert

(04:06):
on weird little guys, I really hate to think about
them thinking about my personal life. But I guess I'm
going to have to let you all in on this
one eventually. Anyway, I'm actually getting married in a couple
of weeks, and it turns out that having a wedding
is kind of a whole ordeal. I'm not really the
arts and crafts type. I really would rather be watching

(04:27):
grainy videos of old Area Nations World Congress meetings than
making place cards and seating charts and trying to figure
out how to do floral arrangements. But here we are. Nevertheless, honestly,
I'm really lucky that I have a job where I
can just follow my heart and let my curiosity lead

(04:48):
me wherever we happen to end up. Because if I
have to write a seven thousand word research project every week,
my heart's got to be in it. And this week
I could not resist the siren song of a bad
eighties action movie. It was just too weird to only
mention in passing. It had to be its own episode.

(05:10):
Because as I was writing the conclusion to this long,
strange saga of Monica Huggett Stone, I had originally planned
to devote just a little bit of time to the
political connections of the far right in the United States
and the pro apartheid activist movements in South Africa. But
I was wrapping up my research connecting Monica to David

(05:31):
Duke's nineteen ninety six Senate run when I realized I'd
overlooked something massive.

Speaker 1 (05:39):
It wasn't just.

Speaker 2 (05:40):
The likes of David Duke who were terribly interested in
the continuing success of apartheid. No, it wasn't just the
extreme fringes at all. There were large swaths of Reagan
Conservatives who were deeply embedded in this. The deeper I dug,
the more obvious it became that a lot of the

(06:00):
very big names in American conservative politics are tied up
in this story. Not with Monica, not directly. Like I said,
this is a side story. But in the nineteen eighties,
Sub Saharan Africa was a battleground in the Cold War,
and the South African government was a big player in

(06:20):
this perceived fight against Soviet influence on the continent. So
even as public discussed with apartheid complicated having open dealings
with the country, American conservatives saw South Africa as a
critical partner in the ideological struggle against communism. And we'll
get into some more about those connections in the next episode,

(06:43):
because they continue into present day politics. In the time
it's taken me to write these episodes, that situation has
continued to evolve, and there's certainly some strange connections to
the past in the story of South African Ambassador Ibrahim
Razul's recent expulsion from the United States. But today we're
not talking about Ibrahim Razul. We're talking about Red Scorpion,

(07:09):
the nineteen eighty eight action movie starring Dolph Lundgren. I
guess we have to do a little background first. I'm
not too proud to admit that when I started poking
around the edges of this story, I only knew enough
about Jack Abramoff to tell you that's that lobbyist who
got into trouble when I was in high school. I think,

(07:33):
and we don't really have to get into the thing.
Abramoff is most famous for his two thousand and six
conviction for mail fraud, tax evasion, and conspiracy to bribe
public officials. He did a little time in federal prison
for crimes he committed in connection to his work as
a lobbyist for Native American tribes seeking to influence legislation
on gambling. That happened later in his life. But I

(07:56):
did want to mention it because that's the only thing
I knew about him, And I just want to reassure you,
yes that Jack Abramoff. And obviously you have to start
somewhere in politics. You don't just find yourself in the
center of a web of corruption involving multiple sitting congressmen.

Speaker 1 (08:13):
Right out of the gate.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
And Abramoff got his start in politics in college, working
as a volunteer on Ronald Reagan's nineteen eighty presidential campaign
and serving as the chairman of the Massachusetts Alliance of
College Republicans. After graduation, he was elected as the chair
of the College Republican National Committee with the help of
a man who had become his close friend and longtime collaborator,

(08:36):
Rover Norquist. Together the pair made it their mission to
transform the College Republicans from a resume padding social club
into a vicious, militant political tool. They pushed out the
old car the men they considered wishy, washy country clubbers,
and they remade the organization into what Abramoff called the

(09:00):
sword and the Shield of the Reagan Revolution. And he
was a busy man in the early eighties. In addition
to his duties as the chair of the College Republicans,
he was the frontman of a group called the USA Foundation,
and that group mainly appears in a couple of news
stories in nineteen eighty four in connection to a series

(09:22):
of rallies that he organized celebrating the anniversary of the
US invasion of Granada. And maybe it's because the name
is so generic, but it's hard to find old news
articles about the USA Foundation. They don't really seem to
have done much public facing work that was perhaps by design.

(09:44):
The foundation seems to have mostly existed to raise money. Traditionally,
the College Republicans had relied almost exclusively on their Republican
National Committee for their budget, but Abramov had something bigger
in mind. He wanted autonomy, and he wanted an immunity
from the nagging oversight of the old guard, so he

(10:06):
made his own money. I once again find myself appreciating
the work of an unsavory source. The archivists at the
Liberty University Jerry Folwell Library have done a really phenomenal
job of digitizing their collection of old documents related to
the Conservative Caucus, a lobbying group whose board Abramof served on,

(10:31):
and one of the documents in that collection is a
memo that Abramof sent to a big donor listing off
his accomplishments as chair of the College Republicans in nineteen
eighty four in hopes of securing a big check, and
he says the USA Foundation, under his leadership, had hosted
a delegation of South African student leaders on a trip
to Washington in January of nineteen eighty four, and at

(10:54):
that meeting they'd made plans with those South African students
from a group called the Students Moderate Allay Alliance to
co host an international student conference later that year at
a resort in the South African Bantustan of both with
the Swana. That same archive contains a nineteen eighty four
letter from one of Abramoff's colleagues, a right wing think

(11:16):
take veteran named Amy Moritz, and it's a letter to
William F. Buckley, And in that letter, Moritz openly admits
to operating multiple front groups and then she opines on
the effectiveness of various other right wing groups operating around
the country. And one of the groups she offers an
opinion on is Abramoff's USA Foundation, and she describes it

(11:40):
as operating out of the Heritage Foundation, which is an
intriguing aside that I can't offer you any explanation for.
But through his USA Foundation, it seems that Abramoff had
finally found a way to pair his ideological inclinations with
personal profit. The USA Foundation took in hefty donations from

(12:02):
corporations in exchange for seeking the College Republicans on student
groups that were bad for business. So landlords in San
Francisco paid to have student groups organizing for rent control
pushed off California campuses. Campbell's Soup paid them to undermine
student support from migrant farm workers unions. It was, I guess,

(12:27):
another front group with the added bonus of being able
to solicit tax exempt contributions, which he could then use
to fund the political activities of the College Republicans. So
these companies, they're not just donating to some think tank.
They're not donating to awareness raising or policy papers. They're investing.

(12:50):
They were buying fake grassroots organizing to compete in the
marketplace of ideas on their behalf. But Jack Abramoff wasn't
to sit in Washington and hold fundraisers. He was, after all,
the sword and shield of the Reagan Revolution, and in
the early eighties that meant getting out there and fighting

(13:12):
Soviet influence wherever it existed or wherever it was imagined
to exist. For some conservatives, the growing bad press about
apartheid was just a highly effective KGB propaganda operation. And
so it was as chair of the College Republican Committee
that Jack Abramaw first visited South Africa in nineteen eighty three.

(13:36):
The trip was an effort to strengthen ties between student
groups internationally, and as part of that mission, he met
with Russell Cristel, the leader of a group calling itself
the Student's Moderate Alliance. It wouldn't be officially revealed until
nineteen ninety two, so nine years after this meeting that

(13:57):
the Student's Moderate Alliance had been entirely a project of
the South African Security Police designed to discredit and disrupt
student organizing by groups like the National Union of South
African Students or NUSAS, a primarily English speaking anti apartheid
group on university campuses. But even more than a decade

(14:17):
before the truth was exposed, student groups in South Africa
saw right through Russell Crystal. I found newspapers and zines
put out by college students dating as far back as
the organization's founding in nineteen eighty. Mocking the obvious charade
of this organization calling itself moderate, they immediately spotted what

(14:38):
was obvious National Party propaganda. Old issues of a NUSAS
aligned student newspaper published by the South African Students Press
Union Don't Hold Back. A nineteen eighty issue covering the
student council election at the University of viitvatersrund And Johannesburg
usually just shortened to Vits University, it calls the Student's

(15:00):
Moderate Alliance a neo fascist group, and it dismisses them
as joke candidates, although one of those joke candidates did win,
Russell Cristel's brother Lance. By nineteen eighty three, the same
paper reported that Russell Cristel, also a student at Fitfadder's Front,
had offered to help right wing student groups at other

(15:22):
schools pay the cost of printing their anti NUSUS pamphlets.
It was also widely believed that Cristel's Student's Moderate Alliance
was behind some mysterious pamphlets that had been popping up
at campuses all over the country. The pamphlets were made
to appear as though NUSUS had authored them. They bore

(15:43):
the organization's name at the bottom, and they mimicked the
style of real NUSIS flyers, but they misrepresented the group's
views and attempted to link the group to illegal activity.
They were such an obvious attempt to discredit the group
that the vice chancellor at its university issued a statement
that whoever had created the flyers quote does not have

(16:05):
the best interest of students or of the country at heart.
The university administration also noted that quote the nature and
countrywide method of their distribution suggests that the persons responsible
for them command resources beyond those typically available to student organizations,

(16:28):
and throughout the nineteen eighties, student newspapers in South Africa
ran stories about the impossible level of funding the Student's
Moderate Alliance seemed to have access to. They had unlimited
numbers of these glossy, expensive looking, professionally made pamphlets, and
in one case, there was even proof that the pamphlets

(16:48):
had been printed in a National Party office. In nineteen
eighty two, a student newspaper obtained a sworn statement from
someone who had been detained under Section twenty two. That's
the provision that allowed for preventive detention without charges largely
a tool used to harass and intimidate anti apartheid activists,

(17:10):
and on this particular occasion, this detainee was taken up
to the tenth floor of the Johannesburg Police station to
be questioned. The tenth floor was occupied by the security
branch of the police, the police who were tasked with
intelligence gathering, handling informants and running death squads. And there

(17:30):
on the tenth floor, this detainee saw a familiar face.
It was Russell Cristel, and the sworn statement read, in
part quote I saw Cristel on the tenth floor of
John Forster Square. He was neither handcuffed nor accompanied by
the security police. He appeared calm and under no duress.

(17:55):
When his brother Lance Cristel was elected to the VIT
Student Council in nineteen eighty, he refused to sign a
statement that all student representatives were asked to agree to
that they would not involve themselves in espionage on campus.
Lance Cristel reportedly said, quote, I do not want to
be held responsible for any patriotic urge that might occur

(18:19):
during my term of office. An official university inquiry from
the mid eighties determined that the Student's Moderate Alliance clearly
had quote lavish funding from anonymous sources. In addition to
his Student's Moderate Alliance, Russell Cristel also founded the National
Students Federation. The Vitz student newspaper sent a reporter to

(18:40):
the group's conference in nineteen eighty four. It was held
at a luxury hotel in downtown Johannesburg, with little Finger
sandwiches served on silver platters. Russell Cristel was elected as
the group's president and the leader of the Student's Moderate
Alliance chapter at the University of Cape Town was elected
to the group's executive board and named its media officer.

(19:04):
That student, a young Arthur Kemp is someone whose name
might sound familiar if you listen carefully. He would later
author the hit list found in the possession of Chris
Hani's assassin in nineteen ninety three. That student newspaper reporter
in nineteen eighty four concluded the article about the conference

(19:24):
with a quote from a nusa's student leader. They aren't
just making wild accusations when they speculate about possible state
funding for crystal student groups. Just a few years earlier,
something called the Information Scandal had broken and the government
had been forced to admit to the existence of something

(19:44):
called Project Anne Marie, a year's long propaganda campaign aimed
at undermining anti apartheid activism at home and anti apartheid
opinion abroad. Four high ranking government officials were forced to
resign in disgrace, including Prime Minister Forster. The Secretary of
Information not only resigned but fled the country, only to

(20:09):
be extradited back from France to face fraud charges. It
turned out that throughout the seventies, millions of dollars had
been spent from the defense budget to do, in part,
exactly what these students feared was happening again, form front
groups to disseminate propaganda and disrupt and discredit anti apartheid

(20:31):
groups like NUSUS and so that student organizer told the paper.
While we would want to shy away from individualizing political
differences where the true motives of people are being obscured,
it has at times been necessary to draw the links
between such individuals and the National Party and Security Police.

(20:54):
We believe that the NSF represents a growing attempt to
stifle opposition to APARTHEIPE. It would take almost a decade
to get the government to admit it, but.

Speaker 1 (21:06):
She was right.

Speaker 2 (21:08):
Russell Crystal's National Student Federation and Student's Moderate Alliance were
both entirely the creation of the apartheid government. While I

(21:30):
was researching this segment, I found a small collection of
old issues of the Student, that student newspaper at the
University of the vit vadders Rund. It's such a fascinating
window into the past. It's just a college newspaper. It's
written by twenty year olds and there are articles about
how to get more information about university sponsored insurance. There

(21:53):
are articles about the tennis team's latest matchups and reviews
of David Bowie albums and John Irving not There's gossip
about student groups and classified ads for bicycles and piano lessons.
But in those same pages, those same student journalists are
writing stories about the editor of another student paper disappearing

(22:15):
at the hands of the security police, held in detention
without charges. There are headlines like twentieth vis student detained
and the police won't say why and they don't know
when they'll be back. Mixed in with these write ups
about student theater productions, there are images of riot police

(22:36):
with dogs and shotguns marching through campus.

Speaker 1 (22:41):
Anyway.

Speaker 2 (22:42):
All that to say, it's possible that Jack Abramoff didn't
know he was meeting with a government funded front group
led by an intelligence asset when he visited Johannesburg in
nineteen eighty three. Again, the actual facts wouldn't come out
until nineteen ninety two. Maybe he didn't know. It was
sort of an open secret, though, and he would have

(23:05):
been able to figure it out had he spent five
minutes doing his due diligence. But if we take his
word for it, he never had any idea. It was
obvious to those teenagers in Johannesburg and to the university administrators.
Crystal himself never refuted allegations that he was connected to
the security police, even allegations that surfaced in nineteen eighty two.

(23:30):
But maybe Abramoff never asked. Maybe he's just an idiot.
But despite his later insistence to the contrary, there are
some clues here that might lead you to suspect that
he did know. Not long after returning from this trip,
the National College Republican Committee formally adopted a resolution pledging

(23:52):
their support to the student's Moderate alliance in their fight
against communism. The resolution condemned Soviet aggression and claimed that
South Africa was plagued by deliberate KGP propaganda, but it
didn't actually mention apartheid at all. When Abramov gave a

(24:13):
speech to the Republican National Convention in August of nineteen
eighty four, that was his parting message that he's mobilizing
college age voters to reelect Ronald Reagan because America can
only be free if Ronald Reagan is free to fund
the anti communist death squads.

Speaker 3 (24:33):
And a students know that support of anti Soviet freedom
fighters and victory over communism guarantees us security for our nation.
And so it is to our party that they come.
It is with us that they trust our dreams, and

(24:53):
it is in us that they place their hopes, and
so it is for them that we must win in November,
So them that we must re elect Ronald Reagan, and
it's for them that we must restore liberty and righteousness
throughout the world. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (25:15):
By nineteen eighty five, Jack Abramoff had a new gig.
He was the executive director of Citizens for America, a
lobbying group funded by Write eight Heir, Lewis Lherman This
was very explicitly just a privately funded mouthpiece for Ronald Reagan.
Lahirman was the founder, funder, and leader of CFA, but

(25:40):
it hadn't actually been his idea. It was Reagan, mega
donor and producer of most of the world's instant mashed potatoes,
a man named Jack Hume, who approached Reagan in nineteen
eighty three with the idea of forming a group that
could shape public opinion in his favor. But they needed
the right man for the job. It was President Reagan

(26:01):
himself who called up Lahirman and sold him on the idea.
Lherman later described the call saying, quote, our first purpose
is to induce a mutation in the climate of opinion
in America among opinion leaders. So about a year and
a half into the existence of CFA, Lherman hired Jack

(26:22):
Abramoff as its executive director, and in that role, Jack
Abramoff was meeting almost daily with Oliver North. You see,
Ronald Reagan very much wanted to fund the anti communist
forces in Nicaragua, but because of their horrific and ongoing

(26:43):
human rights abuses, Congress had passed a series of ever
tightening restrictions on the kind of US aid that they
could receive, and by nineteen eighty five, Ronald Reagan couldn't
legally send the Contras any US money at all. So
they put theirs together and they found what they thought
was a creative little loophole. Congress didn't actually say that

(27:07):
they couldn't send the Contrasts any money. They said that
they couldn't send them any US government money, money that
had been appropriated by Congress, money from the budget of
a US agency. There are other kinds of money, and
so the Reagan administration illegally sold weapons to Iran, and

(27:28):
they used that money, money that had never been appropriated
by Congress, to fund the Contrasts. It's a lot more
complicated than that. Don't email me to explain it.

Speaker 3 (27:40):
I know.

Speaker 2 (27:41):
I just don't want to write a thousand words about
the Iran Contra affair. But I don't think anyone wants
to hear that anyway. So if this story is new
to you, all you need to know right now is
that Ronald Reagan was absolutely unwilling to let Congress stand
in the way of his desire to overthrow the Nicaraguan government,
and a lot of people eventually got into some trouble

(28:04):
when that loophole idea turned out to be pretty illegal.
And here's where we finally picked back up with that
strange story we opened with. As director of the CFA,
Abramoff convinced his boss, Lewis Lherman that this summit of
anti communist rebel leaders would be a public relations victory

(28:26):
for Ronald Reagan. Congress had just shut down the last
bit of USA to the contras in Nicaragua, and they'd
soon be hearing a bill on aid to Jonas Savimbi's
unit of forces in Angola. Reagan insisted that arming what
he called freedom fighters was actually self defense for the
United States. The idea is that these rebel groups are

(28:49):
fighting Soviet influence abroad, and that's a necessary thing in
these last days of the Cold War. So Abramov's plan
was to get them all in one room and brain
storm a strategy for convincing the world that these notorious
human rights abusers are indeed Reagan's freedom fighters. And that's

(29:10):
how Jack Abramoff ended up on a South African charter
plane to Angola to spend four days in a tent
with Oliver North, Grover Norquist, and the leaders of the
Contras and the Mujahadeen.

Speaker 1 (29:25):
The whole affair.

Speaker 2 (29:26):
Sounds like it would make for a darkly funny comedy,
and apparently someone did make a movie about Jack Abramoff
in twenty ten. It's called Casino Jack. I think Kevin
Spacey plays Jack Abramoff. I didn't watch it, but apparently
there is a scene in that movie depicting this event.
On their flight from Johannesburg to Angola, the plane they

(29:48):
took had to fly very low and change course frequently
to avoid detection by the Cubans who were in Angola,
and this left the entire delegation just miserably sick. There
were several reporters along for the ride, and I found
multiple accounts that almost everyone on the plane spent the
entire flight taking turns vomiting in the plane's filthy toilet.

(30:12):
And after they landed on a makeshift airstrip somewhere in
the bush and southern Angola, they endured a two hour
car ride and old jeeps over unpaved roads before arriving
at the secret location of the United Base camp. Jack
Abramoff later wrote that because he couldn't travel on the Sabbath,
he had actually departed for Jamba a day earlier than

(30:33):
the rest of the delegation, and so he wouldn't have
to travel alone. Adolfo Colero volunteered to go with him,
and that just seems so thoughtful, doesn't it. I'm sure
he was just being polite, he was just trying to
make a new friend. There's no source that indicates a
reporter was on that flight. I can't find anything written

(30:57):
about what they might have talked about, so we can
only guess what a rabid Reaganite and the leader of
the Nicaraguan Contras might have talked about during five hours
alone in May of nineteen eighty five. As bad as
the journey was, it wasn't much better after they'd arrived.

(31:17):
This was Jamba, not DC. There was no Ritz Carlton,
There was no plumbing, there was no air conditioning. They
slept on cots in thatched huts. The delegation from the
Mujahadeen was using Abdul Rahim Mardak's son as a translator,
and Abramoff would later claim that he seemed to be struggling,

(31:38):
often offering only a few words in translation for very
long statements. A write up in The New York Times
says the Laotian translator kept referring to their Angolan host,
Jonas Savimbi as mister Zimbabwe. And when the group's wealthy patron,
Lewis Lherman, presented these rebel leaders, each with their own

(32:00):
framed copy of the United States Constitution, they didn't even
pretend to be impressed.

Speaker 1 (32:08):
When the group was sat down.

Speaker 2 (32:09):
To get to business, Lherman read them a letter from
Ronald Reagan appearing to endorse the summit, and it read,
in part, we have to be moved by the example
of men and women who struggle every day at great
personal risk, for rights that we have enjoyed since birth.
Their goals are our goals. But in reading this letter aloud,

(32:34):
Lherman omitted a pretty important line. In the President's letter,
it wasn't addressed to this group. It was addressed to
Lahirman alone, and it was not intended to convey the
President's endorsement of or promised of aid to anyone there.

(32:55):
In Jack Abramoff's memoirs, though he claims quote there wasn't
a dry eye in the house at the end of
the letter, he goes on to say the words of
Ronald Reagan meant the world to this group. That particular
characterization of this moment is notably absent from every other

(33:16):
account I read. One account published in the conservative Washington
Examiner says there wasn't even enough food for everyone there.
Jack abramof keeps kosher, so he packed an entire suitcase
with his own provisions for the trip, and he departed
from Angola a little bit early before the event was
entirely over, and the Washington Examiner reports that as he's leaving,

(33:39):
he's auctioning off his remaining cans of tuna fish, reportedly
for as much as twenty dollars a can. Grover Norquis
dubbed the event the Democratic International. The press called it
the Jamboree in Jamba, and the attendees signed a pack

(33:59):
to read, we free peoples fighting for our national independence
and human rights assembled at Jamba declare our solidarity with
all freedom movements in the world and state our commitment
to cooperate to liberate our nations from these Soviet imperialists.
In a later piece in Harper's Magazine, columnist Thomas Frank
called the declaration a bit of high flown foldol written

(34:23):
by Grover Norquist that aimed for solemnity, but sounded more
like the work of a fifth grader who had been
forced to memorize the Gettysburg Address and the Declaration of
Independence and has gotten them all jumbled up somehow, I mean,
honestly sick burn On Grover Norquist. Adolpho Kolero, the representative
from the Contras, clarified to reporters that the pact didn't

(34:46):
call for any exchanges of troops or weapons. It was
kind of just vibes. When the American delegation got home,
Lewis Lherman discovered that Abramoff and Norquist had been blowing
through money with reckless abandon and they'd spent nearly three
million dollars out of the budget of Citizens for America.

(35:08):
Lherman claims he fired them. Abramoff says he quit. Who knows,
But by the end of the summer of nineteen eighty five,
Jack Abramoff and Grover Norquist no longer worked at Citizens
for America. But luckily for Abramoff, he'd used his time
in Angola to reconnect with an old friend. That summit

(35:29):
had also been attended by representatives from right wing student
groups from South Africa, led by none other than Russell Crystal.

(35:51):
Abramoff soon found himself as the head of a newly
founded DC based think tank called the International Freedom Foundation,
the same sort of nebulous, meaningless mission statement as any
number of think tanks. They promoted freedom and democracy and
the free market. It looked like just another slick lobbying

(36:11):
organization designed to bring in high dollar donations for newsletters
about the evils of communism, and I guess that's kind
of what it was, except almost all of the money
came directly from the South African government. It was given
the code name Project pac Man by South African military intelligence,

(36:32):
and Abramov's new think tank received one point five million
dollars per year every year from nineteen eighty six through
nineteen ninety two to fund Operation Babushka, the code name
given to this propaganda campaign aimed at undermining the African
National Congress, shaping international opinion about apartheid, and combating efforts

(36:54):
by American politicians to impose sanctions on South Africa. The
truth didn't come out until nineteen ninety five. That's when
former South African security policeman Paul Erasmus testified before the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission about the existence of the strapcom
unit short for Strategic Communications, which I guess is kind

(37:17):
of a cute name for propaganda and disinformation. Erasmus admitted
to his own role in a year's long disinformation campaign
smearing Winnie Mandela, and he's spoken publicly over the years
about the close relationships traccom had with US based Conservatives,
people like Edwin Fulner, one of the founders of the

(37:37):
Heritage Foundation, and people like prominent Council of Conservative Citizens
member Robert Slim. Slim, interestingly enough, is someone whose name
I found twice, once in the nineteen eighties when he
was sending faxes to leaders of the Conservative Caucus offering
to set up meetings for them with Eugene terre Blanche

(37:59):
on their next time trip to South Africa, and then
again in twenty twelve. His name comes up in connection
with Monica Stone's South Africa Project rallies. So now I
wonder how far back those two go. But in nineteen
ninety five, a spokesman for the South African Military did

(38:21):
confirm in a statement that quote the International Freedom Foundation
was a former South African Defense Force project. Former South
African spy Craig Williamson explained to a reporter in nineteen
ninety five that the IFF was a tool of political
warfare meant to undermine the African National Congress, but that

(38:42):
they'd taken care to run the operation to prevent the
people they dealt with from realizing that quote. They were
involved with a foreign government. They ran their organization, but
we steered them. Craig Williamson is not a good man.
He personally murdered several prominent anti apartheid activists, and he

(39:06):
ordered the killings of many others. One bomb he sent
was meant for a married couple critical of the apartheid regime,
but it owing to have the job. It killed Jeanette
Shun and her six year old daughter. Her husband, Marius Shun,
returned home to find their two year old son had
been alone in the house with their bodies for hours. No,

(39:31):
Craig Williamson is not an honorable man, but I do
think he's telling something close to the truth here. He
had to if he wanted amnesty for all those murders,
and he did have a rather astute observation about the
particular gullibility of American conservatives saying to a reporter in

(39:53):
nineteen ninety five, we decided that the only level we
were going to be accepted was when it came to
the Soviets and their surrogates. So our strategy was to
paint the A and C as Communist surrogates. The more
we could present ourselves as anti communist, the more people
looked at us with respect. People you could hardly believe

(40:15):
cooperated with us politically.

Speaker 1 (40:17):
When it came to the.

Speaker 2 (40:17):
Soviets, all they had to do was slap anti communism
on the top of the page, and Republican leaders would
sign on to a project without any follow up questions.
Senator Jesse Helms served as chairman of the iff's advisory board,
but when this news came out, his spokesman claimed that
Helms had never even heard of such an organization and

(40:40):
certainly wasn't involved in it. Congressman Dan Burton led a
delegation to observe the nineteen eighty nine elections in Namibia,
and that trip was paid for by the IFF. Both
Burton and Congressman Robert Dornan frequently attended and spoke at
and wrote for IFF events in publications. They too denied

(41:05):
having any idea that their tabs had been paid by
the South African government. Congressman and Philip Crane served on
the organization's board for three years, but when the news
broke in nineteen ninety five, his spokesman claimed that he'd
never actually attended any meetings, And honestly, it is kind

(41:27):
of possible that those congressmen just never asked where the
money came from. Maybe they had a feeling they didn't
want to know the answer. They probably could have figured
it out if they tried. An article written in nineteen
eighty nine in Covert Affairs, a magazine founded by a
former CIA officer turned critic of the agency, noted that

(41:49):
the International Freedom Foundation managed to establish itself very quickly
and in under two years. They were very clearly well
funded and had well established ties to both the international
extreme right wing and to the intelligence communities in multiple countries.
The group's support for both the South African government and

(42:12):
the Nicaraguan contras earned them the designation of quote an
organization to watch from the magazine's editors, and the author
is careful here he doesn't make any outright allegations, but
the implication is very strong that this isn't a grassroots organization,

(42:32):
but maybe they didn't know. I can accept that that's possible,
But Jack Abramoff would also vehemently deny that he'd had
any clue that money wasn't clean, and I find that
a lot harder to believe. Russell Kristel, the South African
intelligence asset who'd helped Abramov start the iff in the

(42:54):
first place, ran the organization's branch office in Johannesburg, and
Crystal would like to admit that the Johannesburg office was
less of a branch and more of a nerve center.
It was really the center of the operation, and he
was the one deciding how much money would get sent
to DC, and sometimes when the book keeping got a

(43:14):
little sloppy, he would just have the Military Intelligence Office
make those wire transfers directly. In nineteen eighty nine, the
state of New York asked the nonprofit to just provide
an accountant statement that their financial records were accurate. That's
not terribly unusual for a nonprofit bringing in a lot
of money, but they couldn't do it or wouldn't, and

(43:40):
they were subsequently legally barred from soliciting donations in the
state of New York. Financial records that were produced later
showed that in nineteen ninety two, the organization's revenue dropped
to half of the level in prior years. That was
not coincidentally the year that South African President to Clerk

(44:01):
ended funding for such programs as a show of good
faith during negotiations with the African National Congress. The end
of that official funding didn't end the IFF right away.
In nineteen ninety three, the IFF commissioned a report that
was designed to paint the ANC as the true villains.
You know, things are really almost over in nineteen ninety three,

(44:23):
the election is coming, apartheid is falling, but they commissioned
this report to say, well, aren't those the bad guys?
Should we really be compromising with these people who are
doing these terrible things? And the funding for that report
was funneled through a slush fund operated by Lucas Mangope

(44:43):
the apartheid collaboration as president of the semi sovereign Bantustan
of Bofu Tatswana. The IFF would close its doors for
good later that year. But that's really quite enough about
old memos buried in the archives of conservative think tanks.
I promised you I was going to tell you about
the nineteen eighty eight cinematic abomination Red Scorpion to give

(45:09):
you a brief idea of what the movie is about.
It stars Dolph Lundgren as a Soviet Special Forces operative
assigned to assassinate the leader of an anti communist guerrilla
force in the fictional African country of Mombaka. And the
movie opens with Lundgren called before this sinister cabal of
communist military leaders from Cuba and the Soviet Union, and

(45:31):
they show him this slide show of these evil freedom fighters.
It's totally very odd because the movie is from the
perspective of Dolph Lundgren's character, a Soviet Special Forces soldier,
and he is a Communist, and he is our protagonist,
and he is going to kill these anti communists. But
Abrarov has trouble sort of settling into a perspective because

(45:56):
he's writing this derisively. It's satirically right, because the anti
communists are the heroes in his world. So it's a
little difficult to tell what the movie is trying to
achieve because he doesn't successfully right satire. For much of
the movie, Dulph Luangren is just sort of roaming the
African bush dressed in a rather striking manner. He's removed

(46:21):
his outer shirt and he's ripped his khaki pants into
these tiny little shorts. And on the surface level, this
is just that sort of eighties action movie aesthetic where
you're seeing the sort of shining, sweaty pecks of this
enormous muscle man. But I think there's more to this
particular choice. We have this gigantic blonde Swede and he's

(46:43):
been outfitted in what I have to assume as a
very intentional recreation of the iconic uniform of the Selo Scouts,
the notoriously brutal Rhodesian Special Forces. And when I sat
down to watch this movie, I realized almost immediately that
Abramov had based the film on his own experience in Angola,

(47:08):
just backwards right the men he paid to write the
actual screenplay based on his notes, A man named arn Olsen,
later said that Abramoff explicitly told him that Mombaka is
supposed to be Angola, and he'd written the character of
the rebel leader Sundata to represent Jonas Savimbi. So Abramoff

(47:30):
obviously came up with the plot of this movie in
nineteen eighty five when he met with those anti communist leaders.
So he just took that story and he inverted it
because we know now for a fact that South African
operatives assassinated leaders of the Soviet supported social estate of
the People's Republic of Angola throughout that conflict. So he

(47:54):
just took what he knew and he reversed it to
make the bad guys in his mind the bad guys
of his movie, regardless of who the bad guy was
in real life. Some of the actions taken in the
film by these villainous Cuban soldiers are things that we
know South African special forces did in multiple conflicts throughout

(48:15):
the region. Russian soldiers in the movie drop some sort
of toxic chemical from a plane on innocent civilians of Mombaka,
and in real life there were later revelations about something
called Project Coast, South Africa's chemical and biological warfare program.
There were horrific tales of chemical agents being tested on detainees,

(48:39):
specifically detainees from the Ankle And conflict, and they used
biological weapons to wipe out villages in Mozambique, Angola, and
Namibia spanning years. But in the movie, these anti communist rebels,
led by this Savimbi stand in are noble freedom fighters
and this Soviet killing has been sent to destroy them,

(49:01):
but he has second thoughts and et cetera. I don't
know why it's an hour and forty minutes long. There
is an extended sequence with no dialogue where a Kalahari
bushman is teaching Dolph Lundgren to hunt or hogs.

Speaker 1 (49:18):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (49:18):
I was kind of looking at my phone at that point.
Dolph Lungren is basically just playing Ivan Drego again. He's
fresh off playing that Russian boxer in Rocky four. I
guess he's just kind of a one note guy. The
only interesting character in the whole movie is that Kalahari
bushman who rescues our protagonists from certain death in the desert.

(49:41):
He's played by rekhobstan an elder in the Komani clan
of the San People. He was ninety five years old
when the movie was filmed, and I was kind of
curious about who they got to play this role, and
so I looked him up and Rekhobe's son's son, David
would years later, after the fall of apartheid, successfully win
a legal battle for the return of their ancestral lands.

(50:05):
So the movie sucked, but at least it gave me
the opportunity to read a little bit about this rightful
restoration of the Komani lands, which are now protected as
a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is hard to say
exactly how Red Scorpion came to be. Abramoff's version of

(50:25):
events doesn't pass the smell test. He was outraged at
the allegation that the South African government had played any
part in his movie, but Craig Williamson, that South African
spy is on record claiming the film was absolutely quote
funded by our guys, and it would certainly be hard

(50:48):
to explain away everything about the film if that's not true.
Extras are played by South African soldiers. South African military
hardware is used for props. Vehicles with South African military
license plates were seen on set by cast and crew
and reporters. The South African military provided the production with

(51:12):
an old Soviet tank that they'd captured earlier in the
Angolan conflict, and South Africa allowed Abramoff to film the
entire movie in Namibia in nineteen eighty eight and nineteen
eighty eight was the last year that the South African
military was actively occupying much of Namibia before the UN

(51:32):
arrived in nineteen eighty nine to facilitate the ceasefire and
the transition to Namibian independence. Carmen Aargenziano, the American actor
cast as the Cuban colonel, later told reporters that actors
knew during filming that most of the extras in the
movie were South African soldiers, and during filming there were

(51:54):
rumors on set that there was some kind of intelligence operation.
Argenza called it very fishy quote. We heard that very
right wing South African money was helping fund the movie.
It wasn't very clear. We were pretty upset about the
source of the money. We thought we were misled. We

(52:14):
were shocked that these brothers who we thought were showbiz liberals,
Beverly Hill's Jewish kids were doing this. Argenziano recounted one
incident at the hotel where all the actors were staying.
Some black Namibian children were playing on the escalator and
the South African soldiers working for the production were shouting
racial slurs of the children, chasing them away. Unnamed sources

(52:39):
close to apramoff told Ken Silverstein, writing for Harper's in
two thousand and six, quote, Yes, some people were duped
by the iff, but Jack wasn't one of them. As chairman,
he understood where the money was coming from. He knew
exactly who he was playing with. Another source told Silverstein

(53:01):
that Red Scorpion had absolutely been a propaganda project, and
Abramoff certainly knew it. Asked in nineteen eighty seven by
The New York Times if the film, which was still
in production at that point, was being financed by the
South African government, Abramoff gave the incredibly normal sounding answer
that he had raised the money from quote normal film investors.

(53:25):
In his own memoirs, Abramoff repeats his claim that the
film had been financed by private investors, but the only
investor he names is quoting from the book, Robert Hall,
a retired physician turned investor who owned a vineyard on
the cape of South Africa. And that's true. Robert Hall

(53:45):
was a retired doctor of sorts who was now an
investor of sorts and did own a vineyard on the
cape of South Africa. That's true, but Abramoff neglects to
include that Robert Hall was actually an American oral so virgin.
He'd invented a variety of high speed drills used in
dental and orthopedic surgical procedures, but he fled the United

(54:07):
States in the late nineteen seventies to avoid paying millions
of dollars.

Speaker 1 (54:12):
To the IRS.

Speaker 2 (54:15):
It's a little hard to google a generic sounding name
like Robert Hall. There are a lot of guys called
Robert Hall who might be a doctor and might live
in South Africa. But luckily for us this Robert Hall
unsuccessfully sued a South African magazine in the nineteen nineties.
A judge in the Cape of Good Hope ruled that
the magazine had in fact only been reporting the facts,

(54:38):
not defaming Hall, when they reported, among other things, that
he'd pressured a South African bank in nineteen eighty three
to allow him to engage in currency exchange transactions that
would be illegal for someone who is a permanent resident
of South Africa, and as part of his strategy to
convince the bank to let him keep doing these transactions,

(55:00):
he told the bank manager that he was a personal
friend of President Ronald Reagan. So yeah, just normal investors.
He raised money the normal way. Jeff Pandon who worked
under Abramoff at the International Freedom Foundation, says that Abramoff
hired Russell Kristel as an executive producer on the film,

(55:23):
and Krystal, in addition to being a state intelligence asset
running front groups throughout the nineteen eighties, was at this
time serving on President de Clerk's Presidential Council, and Abramoff
absolutely would have known that there's just no good faith
explanation that can possibly leave you believing that Jack Abramoff
had no idea that his movie was South African state propaganda.

(55:49):
The film flopped Warner Brothers pulled out of the agreement
to distribute it after pressure from anti apartheid activists led
mainly by Tennis Legend Arthur Ashe. Shooting delays left the
movie wildly over budget, and several actors claim they never
got paid. The International Freedom Foundation folded in nineteen ninety

(56:10):
three when the South African funding dried up, apartheid ended,
and by nineteen ninety five, Jack Abramoff was working as
a lobbyist for the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, one
of the clients that he would eventually go to prison
for defrauding out of millions of dollars and that, I

(56:31):
guess is the story of how apartheid funded a bad
action movie and Jack abramoff Ate Cantuna at the Mujahadeen
and half the conservative think tags in Washington.

Speaker 1 (56:42):
D C.

Speaker 2 (56:43):
Secretly collaborated with South African military intelligence. Weird Little Guys
as a production of Kolzone Media and iHeartRadio. Its researched,
written and recorded by me Nelly Conger. Our executive producers
are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited

(57:07):
by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was
composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird
Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely
read it, but I almost certainly will not answer it.
It's nothing personal. I don't answer any of my emails.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post

(57:30):
anything that's going to make you one of my Weird
Little Guys.

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