The Jamboree in Jamba

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 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. 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 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.

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, 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

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.

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 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 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 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. 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 Duke's nineteen ninety six Senate run when I realized I'd overlooked something massive.

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 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,

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, 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, 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 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.

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 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 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. 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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.

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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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.

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 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 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. 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 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 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

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 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. 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.

how to get more information about university sponsored insurance. There 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 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 with dogs and shotguns marching through campus.

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. 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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.

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. 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 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 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. 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, 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 framed copy of the United States Constitution, they didn't even pretend to be impressed.

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. 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

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, 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 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 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

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

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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 cooperated with us politically.

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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, 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, 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.

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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 States in the late nineteen seventies to avoid paying millions of dollars.

A judge in the Cape of Good Hope ruled that the magazine had in fact only been reporting the facts, 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, 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, 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. 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 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 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.

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