American companies also have flocked to tiny Equatorial Guinea, investing $5 billion in a country where poverty is pervasive and the regime is notorious for torturing dissidents and suppressing civil liberties.
Industry lobbying won U.S. support for a controversial World Bank-backed pipeline in Chad, a country that has been racked by warfare for decades and that the World Economic Forum, a Geneva-based business organization, ranked as the most corrupt of 21 African countries it surveyed last year. ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco are lead companies in the consortium that built and operates the pipeline, which opened last summer.
Most of Central and West Africa's oil is offshore, which can insulate oil companies from political turmoil. For example, oil was pumped without interruption during the 27-year Angolan civil war.
Dozens of former senior U.S. officials use their experience and connections to promote the oil industry's interests in these countries and advocate closer ties to the U.S.
Members of the U.S.-Angola Chamber of Commerce, which receives financial support from American oil companies, include five former State Department officials, two former U.S. ambassadors to the U.N., a former deputy U.S. trade representative, a former Defense Department official and a former U.S. ambassador to Angola. Their memberships are personal or through their company affiliations.
The chamber led the successful lobbying push to include Angola in the U.S. trade program. "I firmly believe in engagement with Angola," Executive Director Paul Hare told The Times. "Transparency and accountability are part of the dialogue. You can never say what the results will be, but the trend line is positive."
The Angolan government has paid more than $6 million to lobbyist Robert Cabelly, a former State Department and National Security Council official, according to his foreign agent disclosure filings with the Justice Department. Cabelly declined to comment on his work for Angola.
During his three-day stay in Washington, Dos Santos is to be honored at a reception at the Ritz-Carlton hotel co-hosted by Andrew Young, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who has lobbied for Angola in the effort to strengthen ties to the U.S.
Eugenio Ngolo Manuvakola, an Angolan opposition leader, says the former officials play a significant role in shaping U.S.-Angolan ties.
