Rebels With a Cause : Guerrilla Groups Use Lobbyists to Win U.S. Aid

Howard W. Pollock, big game hunter, former Alaska congressman and past president of the National Rifle Assn., takes his orders these days from a guerrilla leader deep in the African bush.

As executive director of the Free Angola office, Pollock says his duties are to educate the public to the dangers of communism in Angola, where Jonas Savimbi’s rebels are fighting the Soviet-backed government.

He is a lobbyist for a revolution. And he is one of a growing number of people who represent resistance movements in Washington.

Often supported by American conservatives, these rebels with a cause spend their time talking with lawmakers, answering reporters’ questions and arranging visits for guerrilla leaders.

Washington Office Is Vital

They range from the well-organized, well-financed Free Angola operation to a one-man, cubbyhole office of the Mozambican National Resistance, or Renamo, which is trying to overthrow Samora Machel’s leftist government in Maputo.

A Washington office is vital for any group hoping to attain U.S. backing, according to Jack Wheeler, founder of the Freedom Research Foundation, a La Jolla, Calif., group that studies insurgencies.

“What matters is support in Washington,” he said. “The United Nations is basically irrelevant.”

Pollock, 66, is one of the thousands of longtime Washington hands with connections all over town. He served two terms as a Republican congressman. He waged a failed bid for the Alaska governor’s seat in 1970, then was given a job in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Highly Effective

“We need to wake up America to the dangers of communism,” Pollock said in an interview at his plush suite, which he shares with Jeremias Chitunda, Savimbi’s foreign minister, and two other Angolans.

With its hunt club prints and reproduction antiques, the suite feels farther than 8,000 miles away from Savimbi’s Jamba headquarters.

Wheeler gives the Free Angola office high marks for effectiveness. Savimbi’s 10-day blitz to Washington in January was a success--he met Reagan and received wide media exposure--in part because Chitunda had cultivated the right people, Wheeler said.

More important, the Administration reportedly has committed $15 million in secret military aid for Savimbi’s National Union for Total Independence of Angola.

Costly Promotion

The effort, however, was not cheap. The group spent $100,000 over three months starting last January, according to reports filed with the Justice Department. Pollock refuses to divulge his salary, but describes it as adequate.

Savimbi is not the only rebel leader with whom Reagan has talked. He has seen Nicaraguan contra leaders twice this year, and, last month, met Afghan guerrillas and assured them of continued U.S. support.

Unlike the Free Angola office, Thomas W. Schaaf Jr., Renamo’s representative, has a shoestring operation. The 32-year-old former missionary and horticulturist is the Mozambique Information Office’s executive director.

He lives with his parents, draws no salary, lunches on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and shares space with Andrew Eiva of the Federation for American Afghan Action and Christianne Lemon of the American Angolan Public Affairs Council. The rent is paid by Free the Eagle, a conservative group.

Supporters Not Unified

While the Reagan Administration supports anti-communist guerrillas in Afghanistan, Angola and Nicaragua, it opposes Renamo as an illegal insurgency. Instead, the United States gives aid to Machel.

Like the rebels they represent, Washington supporters don’t always present a unified front.

Most obvious is the feud between Eiva’s Afghan organization, which tracks military aid to the rebels battling the Soviet-backed Kabul regime, and Karen McKay, executive director of the Committee for a Free Afghanistan. Both groups are located in the same building, but a bitter rivalry keeps Eiva and McKay from working in tandem.

The alliance of Afghan fighters, Islamic Unity, is represented by M. Nabi Salehi, but some people in private organizations say Salehi’s role is murky because of the various Afghan factions.

Smaller Operations

Lesser-known groups also have their people dotted around town.

The non-communist Khmer People’s National Liberation Front, part of an alliance fighting Cambodia’s Vietnam-backed government, has Dr. Gaffar Peangmeth, who operates out of his home.

Congress has agreed to provide $1.5 million to $5 million in aid to the alliance.

And the Tigre People’s Liberation Front, a secessionist group fighting for more than a decade to gain independence from the Marxist government of Ethiopia, runs a small, two-person operation.

Tewolde Gebru, a TPLF spokesman, said the office is strained for money, but has branches around the United States, made up of Tigrean exiles.