Operation Green Sea: Portugal's secret night raid on Conakry in 1970

At a quarter to two on the morning of Sunday 22 November 1970, men dressed in copies of Guinean army uniforms climbed down from the patrol boat Orion into rubber dinghies. The Orion lay at anchor half a mile off the breakwater of Conakry, the capital of the Republic of Guinea. Most of the city was asleep; only the bars and nightclubs were still open.2 sources2 sources

The dinghies made for the pier where the PAIGC guerrillas' fast patrol boats were moored. The team killed the sentry, boarded the boats and dropped hand grenades through the hatches, starting fires. Then they ran along the pontoon and did the same to three Guinean navy boats tied up at the north wharf.1 source1 source

Most of the raiders were black African marines and commandos of the Portuguese forces, recruited in Portuguese Guinea, the colony next door that is now Guinea-Bissau. They carried Soviet-type weapons and nothing that could tie them to Portugal, and the few white men who went ashore had darkened their faces and hands. Other boats were carrying Guinean exiles who planned to overthrow their president before daybreak.2 sources2 sources

Elsewhere in the city, in a prison the Portuguese reports call La Montaigne, 26 Portuguese servicemen were being held. One of them, the air force sergeant pilot António Lobato, had been a prisoner since 22 May 1963, when his T-6 was hit on a mission over the island of Como, in Portuguese Guinea, and came down in a rice field: seven and a half years.2 sources2 sources

Portugal in 1970 was still a dictatorship, the Estado Novo founded by António de Oliveira Salazar and led since 1968 by Marcelo Caetano. It refused to give up its African colonies, and was fighting independence movements in Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea at the same time.1 source1 source

The Republic of Guinea mattered most. Its president, Ahmed Sékou Touré, let the PAIGC keep its headquarters, a prison and its boats in his capital, Conakry. The PAIGC's P6 patrol boats and the Guinean navy's Komar boats were much faster than the Portuguese navy's, though easy targets while tied up in port.1 source1 source

Since May 1968 the colony had been run by General António de Spínola, governor and commander-in-chief. He tried to win over the population with a policy he called “for a better Guinea”, held “people's congresses” in 1970 and asked Lisbon again and again for more aircraft and men. His officers had orders to cross the borders only in extreme situations, quickly, and as discreetly as possible, so that Portugal could never be blamed.2 sources2 sources

The idea began small. In August 1969 the command in Bissau first considered a raid to free the Portuguese prisoners of war held by the PAIGC in Conakry, and to sink the fast boats while they lay defenceless at their moorings. The man who proposed it and would lead it was Guilherme Alpoim Calvão, a naval officer from Chaves, 33 at the time of the raid, who had first commanded marines in Guinea in 1963 and whom the navy later called its most decorated officer.4 sources4 sources

By the end of 1969 Spínola learned that the government in Lisbon had been talking since the summer of 1968 to exiled opponents of Sékou Touré (José Matos's later research puts the first contacts in 1966), chief among them the Front National de Libération de la Guinée (FNLG). They wanted money and weapons for a coup. In return they offered diplomatic relations with Portugal and an end to the PAIGC's bases in their country. The raid became the military half of a plan to change the government of a sovereign state.2 sources2 sources

The declassified Portuguese report gives the mission in two parts: a coup in Conakry to bring to power a government favourable to the “high interests of the Nation”, and an attack on the PAIGC to cause casualties, destroy equipment and free the 26 prisoners. Portuguese planners also hoped to capture or kill PAIGC leaders; historians still disagree over whether Cabral himself was meant to be killed.2 sources2 sources

Calvão went to look for himself. On the night of 17 September 1969 the patrol boat Cassiopeia, disguised as a fishing boat, slipped into the channel between the Îles de Loos and Conakry and spent an hour mapping the new piers by radar. In January 1970 a secret training camp opened on Soga, an island in the Bijagós archipelago, and FNLG volunteers were collected by sea from Sierra Leone, the Gambia and Senegal. Their Soviet weapons were bought in Bulgaria.3 sources3 sources

Spínola staked his name on it. On 12 November 1970 he wrote to Caetano that he took full personal responsibility. Caetano approved the operation, on condition that nothing be left behind in Conakry that could compromise Portugal. His ministers of defence and of the overseas territories were against it, fearing the international fallout.2 sources2 sources

Spínola visited Soga on 19 November to speak to the troops. At eight the next evening Task Group 27.2 sailed: four Argos-class patrol boats, the Orion, Cassiopeia, Dragão and Hidra, and two large landing craft, the Montante and the Bombarda. A Portuguese air force patrol plane flew over to check the route. The ships reached the waters off Conakry unseen at about eight on the evening of 21 November and split up: the Orion anchored off the harbour, three ships took station north of the city's peninsula and two went to the south.2 sources2 sources

Each objective had its own team, named with the phonetic alphabet. In the city centre most targets fell with little resistance, though the gendarmerie barracks held out at first. The power station was seized and the lights went out across Conakry, which threw the defenders into confusion. At the Republican Guard barracks the attackers won a hard fight and freed about 400 prisoners held there.1 source1 source

Guinea admitted part of this. On 23 November Radio Conakry said the invaders had taken the Camayenne prison and released political prisoners, among them Colonel Kaman Diaby, a former army chief of staff who had been sentenced to death in 1969, and had wrecked the PAIGC headquarters.1 source1 source

Team Zulu came ashore from the Dragão and Cassiopeia in ten rubber boats at 02:15 and split three ways. One group stormed La Montaigne prison and, after a short, violent fight with the guards, brought out all 26 Portuguese prisoners. A second group shot up the PAIGC headquarters. A third hit Villa Silly, Touré's other residence, but he was not there either.1 source1 source

At 09:10 that morning a secret signal from the force read, in translation from the Portuguese: “I have on board 26 prisoners including Sergeant Lobato.” Not every count agrees: on 30 November Lisbon was reported to have received 25 freed prisoners of war, and a Guinean account drawing on Portuguese officers' papers gives 23.3 sources3 sources

Almost everything else that mattered went wrong. Touré was not at the presidential palace. Amílcar Cabral was abroad, which the planners had not known. The Portuguese officer leading the radio team lost his way, so the exiles' proclamation was never broadcast. According to Matos and Matos e Lemos, one team went to the archbishop's residence in place of the house where it thought Touré was. The planners had struggled to find up-to-date maps of the city and had fallen back on magazines and tourist leaflets.2 sources2 sources

Then team Sierra reached the airport and found no MiG fighters there. Calvão now feared an air attack on his ships at first light. On the march to the airport a lieutenant of the African Commandos, named in the reports as Januário, went over to the Guineans with about twenty of his men. The exiles' promised uprising had not come either. At about 04:30 Calvão ordered his forces back on board.2 sources2 sources

Re-embarkation dragged on towards dawn. Portuguese military reports claim that a crowd on the shore applauded, believing Touré had fallen; the claim comes from the Portuguese side only. Some of the FNLG fighters stayed behind and fought on for days, without success.1 source1 source

That morning Guinea's ambassador to the United Nations asked for an emergency meeting of the Security Council. His letter said Portuguese forces had attacked at about 2 a.m. GMT and asked for UN airborne troops to help the Guinean army. Radio Conakry reported “mercenaries” landing from Portuguese Guinea, and Touré said he was directing the defence in person.2 sources2 sources

Spínola denied it in Bissau the same day. Yet on 30 November it was reported from Lisbon that 25 Portuguese prisoners of war freed during the invasion had arrived from Bissau and been placed in guarded seclusion.1 source1 source

When a Lieutenant Lopes, named by Keesing's as João Janeiro Lopes, was presented to the UN investigators as a leader of the invaders, the Bissau command said he had deserted in September after being accused of murdering a black soldier in his unit. The Portuguese operational report, declassified decades later, has the commando lieutenant Januário changing sides during the raid itself.3 sources3 sources

The Council moved quickly. Resolution 289, dated 23 November and adopted unanimously in the early hours of the 24th, demanded an end to the attack and the withdrawal of all foreign forces and mercenaries, without naming Portugal, and sent a special mission to Conakry. Its five members, chaired by a Nepalese general and including diplomats from Colombia, Finland, Poland and Zambia, arrived on 25 November and interviewed about a dozen captured attackers, all of them Africans, in a military prison.2 sources2 sources

Their report, published on 4 December, found that 350 to 400 men in Guinean uniforms with green armbands had landed from two troop transports and three or four smaller patrol boats. The ships had been manned mostly by white Portuguese crews under white Portuguese officers; the landing parties were mainly Africans from Portuguese Guinea under white officers, with dissident Guineans trained on Portuguese territory. The aims, it said, were to overthrow Touré, weaken the PAIGC and free the Portuguese prisoners.1 source1 source

On 8 December the Council adopted Resolution 290 by 11 votes to none. France, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States abstained. It strongly condemned Portugal for the invasion, demanded full compensation, and declared that Portuguese colonialism in Africa was a serious threat to the peace and security of independent African states. It urged all states not to give Portugal military and material help that would let it continue its “repressive actions” in its colonies and against independent African states, and warned that any repeat would bring “appropriate effective steps or measures”.2 sources2 sources

The resolution also cited a second armed attack on 27 and 28 November. Radio Conakry had said about 200 “mercenaries” crossed the land border from Portuguese Guinea near Koundara, and that 30 were killed and 18 captured. That incursion is not part of the Portuguese accounts of Green Sea.3 sources3 sources

Portugal rejected the report on 7 December as “unilaterally made”, and on 9 December called the resolution an “incitement to acts of violence and unrest”. The resolution imposed no sanctions, although the Soviet delegate had demanded them. Touré, for his part, asked the UN not to send a mission to assess the damage, which he said could not be measured in money: the only acceptable reparation was immediate independence for Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau.2 sources2 sources

In Guinea the raid set off one of the largest waves of arrests of Touré's rule. Amnesty International later put the arrests after the attack at some 3,500, among them government ministers, provincial governors and most of the army's senior officers. Confessions extracted under torture were broadcast on the radio.1 source1 source

In January 1971 the National Assembly sat as a Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal and sentenced at least 92 people to death without hearing them. A “popular trial”, in which meetings across the country voted on the penalties, opened on 18 January and its sentences were read on 24 January. Public hangings followed: at dawn on 25 January four officials were hanged under a bridge in Conakry, and a spokesman for the victims' families speaks of more than 80 people hanged across Guinea.2 sources2 sources

Many others arrested in 1970 and 1971 simply disappeared. An association of the victims of Camp Boiro, the regime's political prison, has campaigned since 1985 for the return of their remains.2 sources2 sources

In Bissau, the failure changed Spínola's mind. At the Superior Council of National Defence on 7 May 1971 he argued that the war could not be won by arms.2 sources2 sources

The PAIGC kept its foreign backers and its bases, and the war grew harder for Portugal. Cabral was assassinated in Conakry on 20 January 1973. The PAIGC proclaimed independence at Madina do Boé on 24 September 1973, and Portugal recognised it on 10 September 1974, after the revolution of 25 April had ended the dictatorship.3 sources3 sources

No Portuguese government has officially acknowledged the operation or apologised for it. Calvão said in 2012 that he had a letter from Spínola and Caetano's authorisation, but that Caetano would not take responsibility once the UN reacted. Spínola said in 1989 that the official file had been destroyed. The few surviving papers, the operational report among them, were declassified after 2000, and historians have filled the gaps from other archives and testimonies.5 sources5 sources

As a military operation it was a tactical success and a strategic failure. The prisoners came home and the patrol boats burned, at a cost of three Portuguese dead. But Touré stayed in power, the PAIGC kept its sanctuary, and Portugal's standing abroad sank to a new low.2 sources2 sources

Its people went on to shape what followed. Spínola later made his case for a political answer in public, in his book Portugal and the Future. Calvão, after the revolution, fled on foot to Spain and in 1975 helped found the MDLP, a far-right movement against the new revolutionary government; the Communist leader Álvaro Cunhal called him the “number one operative” of the counter-revolution's bombing network. He later divided his time between Cascais and Guinea-Bissau, where he had a cashew-processing factory, and died in Cascais in 2014.4 sources4 sources

Lobato flew again, published a memoir of his captivity at the end of 1995 and, in Praia in 1975, embraced former PAIGC guerrilla leaders who had held him prisoner.1 source1 source

In Guinea the raid is remembered as “the aggression of 22 November 1970”. Each anniversary a public debate on it is held at the Palais du Peuple in Conakry, and families of those who vanished in Camp Boiro after the raid still ask what became of them. The Guinean historian Sidiki Kobélé Keita has argued that the attack and the repression cannot be judged apart, since it was the attack that radicalised the repression.1 source1 source