The roots of "Red Scorpion" took hold in the early 1980s, when interventionist-minded folk in Washington had an array of global conflagrations to obsess over. The mujahedin were battling the Soviets in Afghanistan and the Contras were fighting the Sandanistas in Nicaragua. Some circles felt the United States was not doing enough to help them. The gripe heard in the office of CIA chief William Casey and among Oliver North's cabal in the National Security Council was that Reagan was not fully Reagan when it came to foreign policy. A cottage industry of think-tank intellectuals and private crusaders sprouted up to build support for one or another set of freedom fighters. Abramoff was among the most active.

In Angola, the rebel group du jour, the National Union of Total Independence for Angola, or UNITA, had been taking on the Soviet- and Cuban-backed government since the 1970s. UNITA's leader, a savvy warlord named Jonas Savimbi, had become a darling of the right. Savimbi received millions in aid and had even retained Washington lobbyists to press his case. Abramoff was interested in Angola, too. So was Lewis E. Lehrman, the millionaire behind the Rite Aid drugstore chain and the founder of the right-wing group Citizens for America, who made an unsuccessful run for governor of New York in 1982. Through Republican circles, Abramoff met Lehrman at some point in the early '80s, and in 1985 Lehrman hired him. Abramoff came to Lehrman with an idea: What about a convention of disparate anti-communist rebel leaders, put together and paid for by Americans? It screamed of Abramoff's cartoonishly outsized ambitions and worldview, and Lehrman liked it.

Jack Wheeler, a California entrepreneur and anti-communist activist who enjoyed deep entree in Washington at the time, had met Abramoff through the College Republicans in 1984. He immediately took to Abramoff, who had charmed him with a story about scandalizing fellow members of a Beverly Hills athletic club by wearing a T-shirt that read "I'd Rather Be Killing Communists."

Wheeler and Abramoff began discussing the idea of the rebel convention. "The whole point of the Reagan Doctrine was to fight the phenomenon of communism, and if one regime fell, they'd all fall," Wheeler said. "No Afghan knew where Nicaragua was, and no Contra knew where Angola was."

Amazingly, they made it happen, and quickly. In the first week of June 1985, mujahedin, Contras and Laotian rebels joined Savimbi and his men in Jamba, Angola, UNITA's jungle headquarters, for the Democratic International, as Lehrman had titled the event. For several days they commiserated and compared notes, huddling together in thatched huts and signing an anti-Soviet pact. Wheeler organized transportation, and Abramoff dealt with the money and logistics from Lehrman's end. Lehrman himself read a letter of support from Reagan and handed out framed copies of the Declaration of Independence. It received some press coverage. Abramoff had pulled off his first far-right adventure.

In the eyes of many in the administration, particularly in the State Department, Abramoff and groups like Citizens for America were only serving to subvert years of careful negotiation. "These people were trying to undercut and divert official policy," said Chester "Chet" Crocker, assistant secretary of state for African affairs from 1981 to 1989. "Our policy worked because we got Castro to decide the jig was up and go home -- not because of the conservative activists." (Cuba began pulling out of Angola in 1989.)

Loved or hated, Citizens for America was short-lived. Not long after the Democratic International -- or the Jamboree in Jamba, as it was pejoratively known -- funding for the group dried up. "Lehrman pulled the money out all of a sudden, and then Jack dropped out of it, and that was that," Wheeler said. "Then Jack went to make his movie."

According to Pandin, who went to work for Abramoff in 1986, Abramoff and Lehrman had had a falling out. "He was always looking to push the envelope," Pandin said. "It was seen among Jack's friends as a coup -- he got stabbed in the back by people who weren't comfortable with him." When contacted by Salon, Lehrman submitted a short statement via a representative: "I was recruited by President Reagan to set up Citizens for America in 1983. It was a voluntary, part-time position which I held for about three years. Among the paid staff, Jack Abramoff came in well after CFA was started, was there only for a short while, before his termination."

But Lehrman may have also gotten cold feet because it had become clear by the mid-1980s that Savimbi was not a paragon of democratic ideals. There were allegations of murderous purges in his own ranks. It is commonly agreed in Washington that it was Savimbi himself, and not the government of Angola, who in July 1991 had UNITA's envoys to the United States and the United Kingdom, Tito Chingunji and Wilson dos Santos, and their families, killed.

Crocker described Savimbi, who was killed in 2002, as "a brilliant military warlord who operated by the gun, lived by the gun, and died by the gun and ultimately had a failure of judgment, like warlords often do."

Others are less charitable. "He was the most articulate, charismatic homicidal maniac I've ever met," said Don Steinberg, ambassador to Angola during the first Clinton administration.

With Citizens for America disbanded, and law school done, Abramoff moved to Los Angeles. He came up with the premise for "Red Scorpion" and hired Arne Olsen, a young screenwriter with no credits to his name, to write it. The Abramoffs told Olson they wanted to base the fictional African country in the film, Mombaka, directly on Angola, and the rebel leader on Savimbi. Olsen said he churned out a baldly propagandistic script.

"It definitely was an anti-Soviet thing," Olsen said. "It was an easy target."

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