COLUMN ONE : Hired Guns Turn Tide in Angola : A motley crew of mercenaries and combat veterans from Africa’s battles has helped put tenacious UNITA rebels on the ropes in a bitter civil war. One result could be a new peace accord.

Trim and tan, polished and polite, former South African secret agent and commando Eeben Barlow is the very model of a modern mercenary.

At 38, he heads Executive Outcomes, a multimillion-dollar corporation that employs 500 or so fellow soldiers of fortune, including a motley crew of former assassins, spies, saboteurs and scoundrels. They hail from half a dozen nations and are veterans of combat around the globe.

Most fought in losing battles to save colonial reigns and racist regimes in countries such as Congo, Kenya, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and especially South Africa. Many worked for apartheid’s most sinister security forces.

But this is no ordinary band of rogues.

“We are dynamic, professional and work to achieve success,” Barlow explained at his bush headquarters here, a former Cuban air base. “We are profit-driven, and our profit depends on the satisfaction of the client.”

The company logo--emblazoned on calling cards, not to mention tie tacks and cuff links--is a paladin, the same chess knight featured on the old TV series “Have Gun, Will Travel.”

These hired guns have traveled to what the United Nations has called the world’s deadliest war. Now, under their second $20-million contract from the Angolan government, Barlow’s men have spent 14 months helping to train a ragtag army of conscripts, and they plan and coordinate fighting in key battles.

Even their critics concede that the self-described “military consultants” have helped the long-beleaguered government of President Jose Eduardo dos Santos gain territory and a decided advantage in the long, bitter war against Jonas Savimbi’s rebel UNITA movement.

Other factors were also critical. Independent analysts say UNITA has been hard pressed by an international arms and oil embargo and the loss of lucrative diamond-producing areas, which paid for the war effort.

The result is that the rebels are increasingly on the ropes.

“There’s no doubt FAA (Forcas Armadas de Angolanas, the government army) has the upper hand now,” said Yvon Madore, a senior U.N. official in Luanda, the refugee-clogged capital. “UNITA has lost momentum.”

That explains why the government and UNITA may sign a U.N.-brokered peace pact next month after almost a year of stormy talks in neighboring Zambia. It calls for demobilization of combatants, U.N. peacekeeping troops and ultimately a government based on power-sharing.

But many doubt that the “Lusaka Accord” will bring lasting peace--or even a cease-fire--in a 19-year-old war that the world has largely forgotten.

UNITA, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, now controls about a third of the countryside, less than half what it held a year ago. It has signed peace pacts before but used the time to resupply and regroup forces. In 1992, Savimbi even ran in U.N.-supervised elections. When he lost, he cried fraud and resumed the war with a vengeance.

But for the first time, the Dos Santos government is in a position of strength. It has international legitimacy from winning democratic elections, plus an estimated $2 billion in new arms and equipment. The air force, now able to bomb at night, controls the skies. Morale has improved.

As a result, government hard-liners insist that Savimbi can now be beaten, or at least pushed back to the bush. They want to force UNITA from diamond-producing areas and cut its supply lines to Zaire.

Heavy fighting along the border last week after months of calm suggests that the hawks are getting their way.

“Why should the government share power if they can beat them militarily?” asked Mike McDonagh, country director for the Irish aid group Concern.

Government troops are entrenched about 30 miles outside of Savimbi’s last urban stronghold, the central highlands city of Huambo, and slowly closing in from three sides. Losing Huambo would be a decisive defeat for UNITA, which captured the battered city last year after a fierce 55-day siege.

As always, civilians have borne the brunt. The United Nations estimated last year that up to 1,000 Angolans were dying each day of war-related wounds, hunger and disease.

Aid officials say the toll probably has not fallen much. They say one-third of the population of 11 million is directly affected by the war.

Until recently, aid groups and the United Nations were unable to fly badly needed food and medicine to most major cities because of fighting or other problems. Kuito, where an estimated 25,000 people died last year, was especially hard hit. Relief flights, stopped since May, resumed only in mid-October.

“The problem now is a lot of bodies are buried in people’s gardens,” said Sarah Longford, spokeswoman for the U.N. Humanitarian Assistance Coordination Unit in Luanda. “When the rains come, there will be a real health risk.”

Angola is potentially one of Africa’s wealthiest countries. It is a fertile land rich with oil and diamonds. But millions of land mines still in the soil will ensure heavy casualties for years to come.

Barlow planted at least some of those mines. Trained as a combat engineer, he rose through the ranks of the “32 Battalion,” an infamous force of black troops led by white South African commandos deployed in Angola in the 1980s. Many of Barlow’s current colleagues fought under him then, although he insists that none were involved in the battalion’s reported atrocities.

The irony is they fought on behalf of UNITA--the group that is now their enemy. Barlow speaks poorly of his former comrades in arms.

“We could never understand why we had an ally like UNITA,” he said. “They stole our equipment. . . . And they wouldn’t fight.”

But UNITA was anti-Communist and heavily backed by Washington, as well as Pretoria. On the other side, Cuba sent 50,000 troops and the Soviet Union shipped supplies to prop up the then-Marxist Angolan government in Luanda.

The Cold War ended, but unfortunately, the proxy war did not.

In 1983, Barlow said, he joined South Africa’s Directorate of Covert Collection, one of the apartheid regime’s most infamous security units.

“I was responsible for espionage operations against so-called ‘front-line’ states,” the black-ruled countries around South Africa that led the campaign against apartheid.

After six years, he said, he moved to the Civil Cooperation Bureau. Run by the military, the innocent-sounding group ran death squads against political foes. Barlow said only that he headed a five-man cell that set up front companies in Cyprus and seven other countries.

That’s when he formed Executive Outcomes in Pretoria.

So when the Civil Cooperation Bureau closed in 1991, he began selling “specialist security services” across Africa, offering everything from espionage to encryption. Angola’s oil company hired them to protect its huge coastal facility at the town of Soyo. And that, in turn, led to a unique offer last year to restructure and retrain Angola’s military.

The company’s military commander, former South African Lt. Col. Nick van der Bergh, promoted himself to brigadier. Applications came from as far away as Germany and Australia, drawn in part by monthly salaries ranging from $2,500 to $10,000.

Some cited service with legendary Irish mercenary Michael (Mad Mike) Hoare, who once tried to take over the Seychelles. A helicopter pilot who listed his work as “shooting Tamils out of trees” in Sri Lanka. A father who enlisted with his son and boasted he’d never lost a war. “I always killed someone,” he said.

Today, Executive Outcomes works from three major bases in Angola. The largest and closest to the front is at Saurimo, a provincial capital now surrounded by UNITA forces. Most of the company’s 15 killed or captured employees in Angola were working there.

Flying the firm’s chartered Boeing 727 into Saurimo last week, the pilot opted for caution. “We’ll fly a left spiral down,” he announced cheerfully. “Nothing to be alarmed about. Just a precaution against SAMs, Stingers and other heat-seeking missiles. . . . Hope you enjoy the flight.”

With that, he cut power to the engines and the jet dropped from the sky, cork-screwing from 17,500 feet at a gut-wrenching angle to a runway lined with shot-up planes and bombed-out buildings. No missiles were fired.

The company’s other major training area is at Longa, 125 miles south of Luanda, along a crocodile-infested river inside a national park. Monkeys scamper in branches overhead, scorpions race over the dirt, and malaria is endemic.

About 100 trainers live in tents there, and on a recent muggy morning they reviewed several hundred fresh Angolan conscripts. Most of the new troops wore only rags, some were barefoot; they drilled with sticks for weapons. They will be issued guns and uniforms after several months of training.

Out on a dusty field, however, Wynand du Toit had organized a display by newly trained Angolan special forces. It was not a good day. They failed twice to detonate a string of explosives that Du Toit had explained was “good for destroying a car park.” An instructor finally set the charge.

Next, a 10-man squad spoiled a mock assault when they fired their AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades into the ground as they ran, rather than at a target. But the final exercise went off without a hitch.

Du Toit, 36, is perhaps South Africa’s best-known soldier. He spent 2 1/2 years in a Luanda military jail after he was captured trying to destroy an Angolan oil facility in 1985. Shot in the neck, he almost died in prison and came home a war hero.

Burly and bearded, he said it felt “funny” to return to Angola to work for those who almost killed him. But he insisted that he has no regrets: “I feel liberated. I don’t work for any political party. I don’t work for any government.”

That’s the problem, say critics in South Africa’s new government. Rusty Evans, director general of the Department of Foreign Affairs, has condemned Executive Outcomes as mercenaries and a “dangerous, criminal and destructive force in Africa.”

Not so, Barlow said. “We are a stabilizing force and we have broken no laws.” And he hates being called a mercenary. His men don’t fight, loot or maraud, he insisted. “We are military advisers.”

But that may be a matter of semantics.

About 100 “advisers” were in the attacking column of 1,500 Angolan troops when they captured Cafunfo, center of the diamond trade in the north, in July after a six-week offensive. By then, UNITA had fled.

One South African, who roared into Cafunfo on a tank, smiled as he recalled the victory--and the party that followed. “We plundered the town,” he said. His only regret, he added, was that he and his friends got too drunk to find any diamonds.