The author of the book from which the below excerpts are taken, Elaine Mokhtefi née Klein, is a US American of Jewish origin born in 1928 in New York. She became politically involved there in the late 1940s. In 1951, she moved to Paris, where she worked as a translator for various anti-racist and anti-colonial movements. It was in the French capital that she met Algerian independence activists and became involved with the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), which was founded in November 1954 and started Algeria’s independence war. She participated in the 1958 All-African People’s Conference in Ghana (for which see also the entry on Frantz Fanon’s FLN speech). In 1960-1962, she worked in New York for the FLN. FLN representatives stationed in the United States sought to contact US politicians and officials, and in New York successfully lobbied at the United Nations headquarters during its war against France, as Matthew Connelly showed inA Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (2002). Moreover, already at this time the FLN was deeply involved with various other anticolonial liberation movements, as Mokhtefi’s fascinating book illustrates. When Algeria became independent, in 1962, she moved there. She worked in various official capacities, inter alia for the Algeria Press Service. And due to her New York experience and command of English, she often was asked to work with representatives of foreign independence movements, including the US Black Panther Party (BPP), whose presence in Algeria in 1969 and its effect on the BPP’s take on the Arab-Israeli conflict has been studied in Michael Fischbach’s Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color (2018). Many such movements were assisted by the Algerian government, which saw itself as a player in multiple overlapping anticolonial and postcolonial frameworks, including African unity, Arab unity, Afro-Asianism, and Third Worldism, as Jeffrey Byrnes has shown in his Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (2016). Mokhtefi was for political reasons forced to leave Algeria in 1974, accompanied by her Algerian husband, the former FLN member Mokhtar Mokhtefi. They settled in Paris, and in 1994 moved to New York.

The CIA’s National Intelligence Daily for 12 August 1989 describes the latest developments in Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Somalia, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, South Africa, Ecuador, Namibia, and Cuba.

M.S. Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher discuss global geopolitical issues, particularly growing terrorist organizations across Africa.

Led by USSR Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, L. F. Ilyichev, the delegation met with southern African leaders to discuss the situation in Zimbabwe and Namibia.

Overview of meeting with Nkomo and his concerns about the stationing of South African forces in Rhodesia, specifically Beit Bridge. An overview is then provided of the major black parties competing in the upcoming elections.

Discussion of British involvement in Rhodesian conflict resolution, whether domestic British politics is a driving force of Foreign Secretary Owen's recent ovetures.

Botha describes that neither South Africa nor Rhodesia can count on much support from the United States.

Press release describing a tripartite meeting between delegations from Angola, South Africa, and Cuba about troop withdrawal from Namibia. South African and SWAPO forces are restricted to their respective bases.

SWAPO press release dismissing South African claims of instigation of violence as an attempt to influence the United Nations Transition Assistance Group
(UNTAG) against SWAPO. SWAPO asserts that South Africa hopes to encourage UNTAG to let South African forces off of their bases so that they can attack SWAPO without reprimand.

Letter from South African President P. W. Botha to Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda asserting that SWAPO is the aggressor in excalation tensions between SWAPO and South African forces, and that South Africa is responding in measured and restrained ways. Asks for Zambia's assistance in convincing SWAPO to cease hostilities.