04 OPERATIONAL ELEMENTS AND INSTITUTIONS IN THE ANGOCHE ATTACK

THE ‘JORGE JARDIM’ CONSTELLATION IN THE ANGOCHE CASE

JJ, Jorge Jardim, at the time, the main portuguese state agent and businessman.  

Jardim reported directly to SALAZAR and CAETANO, former Portuguese Prime-ministers

ORLANDO CRISTINA, in Mozambique, is Jorge Jardim operational 'right arm', his 'General'

Orlando Cristina and Jorge Jardim

MR HERBERT LESTER Englishman from South Africa, special agent and adviser of Salazar and partner of Mr. Zoio at NIL:

Mr. Herbert A. Lester

ZOIO aka Count of PAVULLO, owner of NIL - NORTE IMPORTADORA LDA. (arms import and export):

José Joaquim Morais Zoio, Count of Pavullo,
the main arms dealer in Portugal

AGINTER PRESS - INCLUDES SPECIAL ELEMENTS FROM PORTUGUESE SECRET POLICE PIDE-DGS SUCH AS CASIMIRO MONTEIRO AND OTHERS FROM 'PORTUGUESE LEGION': 

Casimiro Monteiro, special operations, PIDE-DGS and AGINTER

AGINTER is not really a press agency but an hub for mercenaries recruitment and training and for informational and psychological warfare. Former elements from the French OAS were present at its foundation:

Yves Guérin Sérac / Yves Guillou ex-OAS one of the Aginter founders

AGINTER is the Portuguese branch, included in the web of NATO's 'secret armies', each one had codenames according to their country, for example:

Italy - Gladio

Belgium - ARDS8

Denmark - Absalon

Germany - TD BJD

Ireland - Taca na hÉireann

Greece - LOK

Luxembourg - Stay-behind

Netherlands - I&O

Norway - ROC

Portugal - Aginter

Switzerland - P26

Türkiye - Counter-Guerrilla

Sweden - AGAG

Austria - OWSGV

But often anyone of these different services is called as 'Gladio', then we have Aginter as 'the Portuguese branch of Gladio'.

THE ALCORA EXERCISE

Alcora Exercise (Portuguese: Exercício Alcora, Afrikaans: Alcora Oefening) or simply Alcora was a secret military alliance of South Africa, Portugal, and Rhodesia, formally in force between 1970 and 1974. The code name "Alcora" being an acronym for "Aliança Contra as Rebeliões em Africa" (Portuguese expression meaning: "Alliance against the rebellions in Africa").

The official goal of Alcora Exercise was to investigate the processes and means by which a coordinated tripartite effort between the three countries could face the mutual threat to their territories in Southern Africa. The immediate goal was to face the African revolutionary movements that fought guerrillas wars against the Portuguese authorities in Angola and Mozambique, to limit the spread of the action of these movements in South West Africa and Rhodesia and to prepare the defense of the Portuguese, South African and Rhodesian territories against an expected conventional military aggression from the hostile governments of the African neighbor countries.

SEII - SPECIAL INFORMATION AND INTERVENTION SERVICES. Private information and intervention group of Jorge Jardim. + Portuguese army GEs GEPs (GEs Special Groups / GEPs Parachutists' Special Groups)

MIGUEL MURUPA and Marcelino Murupa. Miguel the would be the black president of a Mozambique once in the future under auspices of Mr. Jardim. Marcelino is Miguel Murupa nephew and used at this time, saying that he saw Angoche crew detained in Tanzania, one more hoax.

Other intervenients belonging to the information web of Jorge Jardim:

Information services as South African BOSS - civilian state police, Rhodesian CIO, SDECE (France)

Journalists and agents BRUCE LOUDON, DOMINIQUE DE ROUX, RICARDO SAAVEDRA, CARLOS PINTO COELHO, CHINA MAIL in HONG KONG, ARTUR LINHA (Arthur Ligne), VERA LAGOA, just to name a few.

THE OPERATIONAL ONES

‘Angoche’ can only exist and subsist over time the mystery this way, once the same ones are its planners, authors and vectors of the respective information (or disinformation). 

The same group and its organizers control and manage all segments. Special agents

from PIDE/DGS, SEII, Aginter and parachutists from GEPs in the operational phase. 

In the media control phase, you have a vast suit that encompasses diplomatic agents, ‘testimonies’ on the ground and distinguished journalists.

Jorge Jardim and, on the ground, its 'general' Orlando Cristina

Casimiro Monteiro and the PIDE-DGS special operations office, with elements of the 'Portuguese' Legion Naval Branch

Aginter-Press (men from Gladio, then) as stated before, - and as had already happened in FRELIMO's Mondlane's death on February 3rd 1969

South African Special Naval Forces

Portuguese pilots who had already participated in the Biafra Operation (Nigeria, but based in Saint Tomé island)

WEB OF DISINFORMATION

The ‘Angoche case’ would never have been possible in the manner in which that occurred without the collaboration of an entire constellation of various agents including military personnel, diplomats and a certain press.

Manage all this concealment or transmutation of reality, and its inherent secrecy and disinformation, was the work of a network with centralized command.

We spoke briefly about Mr. Girão, the Portuguese consul in Durban,

aligned with Jardim against Kaúlza (chief of general staff of Portuguese forces in Mozambique at the time, but who also listened to the first officer of cargo-ship S. Mamede who reported about Esso Port Dickson's (oil ship) movements. Would have him a deeper knowledge of the case? We refer what the ‘No. 2’ at the German consulate in Lourenço Marques said, always mysterious, taking advantage of the almost permanent alcoholic state, the consul’s ‘illness’, and which suggested knowing something more concrete about how Angoche was sabotaged.

We have operational men, on one hand, already appointed throughout all this book. Diplomats, on the other. Also not forgetting, the messengers who appeared next to the crew family members, and began insinuating that there were splits and betrayals among the crew, which led to that outcome. That was part of the equation.

There are then, and of no less importance, the ‘journalists’, another strand. This ‘front’, even broader, has to do with manipulation of the press that was then operated. In Portugal and beyond, with a network of foreign correspondents, some at important news agencies, and they all end up quoting each other, or by hiding behind ‘diplomatic sources’, ‘military sources’, etc., etc.

In the background, we have as a dense ‘smoke screen’, as happened also already in the death of Mondlane. Inspector Gomes Lopes, from PIDE sub-delegation in Beira, and also in charge of controlling Casimiro Monteiro's special operations brigade, he said at the time to a US journalist: ‘Either the Russians planned the assassination or it was an ingenious trap set up by the Chinese’, and corroborated the very same, later, before the author José Freire Antunes.

And he also adds something more, that Jorge Jardim had stated, which Banda attributes the death of Eduardo Mondlane due to ‘maneuvers by Chinese agents’.

Metzner Leone, he too, always, always present, with his his articles in ‘O Diabo’ (The Devil) newspaper directed by Mrs. Vera Lagoa, later compiled in the book ‘Caso Angoche - another unpunished crime’. 

But we have several other examples that end up pointing to the same central point. And the fulcrum, the heart of this nebula, is called Jorge Jardim. 

We try to understand Metzner Leone. It's actually him the creator of the group that never existed as such, the ‘Ericeira group’. This time, pushing Angoche skipper Bernardino and quartermaster Estrela as the main suspects. 

Jorge Rodrigues, family member of the commander and representative of the crew family members in both commissions of inquiry, explained to us why: Leone, the group of ‘O Diabo’, and the most right-wing sectors, intended to use the Angoche case as a throwing weapon against the Council of the Revolution, and

wanted family members or their representative to make statements in this sense, that it was the counselors who knew the truth and fought the unraveling of the process. These were just fortuitous statements and without

bases and Jorge Rodrigues never lent himself to this propagandistic aspect. So, from then on, he would be demonized, as well as the group of Ericeira, made scapegoats of ‘Angoche’, and this was in fact also a main lever for splitting the crew families group.

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Here, in this ‘Angoche case’, I can also deservedly mention and highlight journalist Bruce Loudon, but Jardim's web is great, we don't stop at him, as there is also Ricardo Saavedra, dependent on Loudon at a later time, and succeeding to Carlos Pinto Coelho heading the Government Information Office tuned by Jorge Jardim, the JAPRESS. And there is also a CITMO, the Mozambique Information and Tourism Center. What else do we have in the pipeline? The local hubs of the ANI and Lusitânia news agencies. An Italian ‘correspondent’, Giancarlo Coccia, who I met in South Africa with the military intelligence services in Pretoria.

After April 25th, when people talks again about Angoche, will appear in bold an Arthur Ligne, ‘commercial’ name of Artur Linha, director of the so-called ‘ultra-reactionary’ newspapers ‘ABC’ and ‘Retornado’. Now, I managed to talk to Artur Linha a while ago. Curiously, I had some clients in what I do professionally - Tourism of Nature, in Sintra - a British couple and, conversation starts, about writings, adventures, Africa, and the lady says they often talk about these too with one of their neighbors in Algarve, South of Portugal, who is an ‘adventurer’ and writer, journalist, a ‘maverick’, nonconformist, far left and suddenly says a name. Me myself who precisely two days ago just finished leafing through bundles of newspapers from 1971 and 1974-75-76 with articles about Angoche... I hear the English woman pronounce ‘Arthur Ligne’. Far left… Damn!!! Where did I read this… the director of ‘ABC’ and the ‘Retornado’! Far left?! Holy shit!!!

The covers used by Gladio and Aginter, this is what I review: left-wing journalist, right-wing operative work, ‘camps of training in the Algarve’… it’s not enough, but… On the road again! We come back at the same? Well, maybe the man wasn't even Aginter, we can't see them hidden in very corner. But there's no need to pretend to be extreme left, or we are facing a great conversion?

I send an email to the Lagoa newspaper (in Algarve) and they give a direct contact to Mr. Ligne. It was a pleasant conversation, about the books he edited, the escape from Angola to Southwest Africa, he was the one who in the trunk of his car hid the former director of PIDE in Angola, São José Lopes, to cross the border safely. 

In short, it comes with the usual talk of the yellow and red submarines, and when I ask him to stop the joking and I tell him what we have achieved, he says that it is actually a military case, of Portuguese military secret, or of State, and which he will not speak about, despite the past on of 45 years. As a matter of principle. I make him see that there are no secrets, not even State ones, that last that long, nor is it known whether anyone has ever subscribed the case as State secret and revalidated it over decades and under what pretext.

He reaffirms that he doesn't talk, despite I tell him that everything he wrote at the time was false, and he would have been aware of it. Obviously it would have. Mr. Linha or Ligne says he has granddaughters and wants to see them grow up. And in my case, he's seen cases like this, where things are taken as a joke, with people not attending warnings and... appearing with their throats open in a gutter. Good. Talk is done!

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Another card, journalist Giancarlo Coccia, who I met personally at a RENAMO base in South Africa, in 1983, refers in these terms of Loudon, in his novel ‘The Scorpion’s Tail’ (‘The Scorpion’s Tail’, by Giancarlo Coccia, Ed. Vertente, 2011), and quoting a Luiz: 

He spent half an hour in my room and told me what was happening in 'the North's Capital', Nampula (North of Mozambique). The previous day he had been there in Nampula, with his colleague Bruce Loudon of the London Daily Telegraph. ‘He is a very special journalist’ - said Luiz. ‘He had a well-known connection with many politicians and military personnel before April 25’. 

I asked him what would be his relationship with the MFA.

‘You have to remember, Giancarlo, that in 1973, when Jorge Jardim and the Zambians played the Wiriamu card, it was Bruce Loudon and the French photographer Patricke 'something', that supported their plan. They screwed up Colonel Videira and other senior officers but, more importantly, they forced Jaime Neves in collaborating with the rebels because he was threatened with a War Council in the future’.

Yes I understand. But now what is Jorge Jardim doing? - I asked.

‘It’s in his twilight... but wait a bit...’’.