On 25 April 1974 a group of Portuguese military officers overthrew the last fascist dictatorship in Europe. Three days later, Wilfred Burchett was in Lisbon meeting with the leaders of what would be known as the Carnation Revolution to find out how sincere they were about granting independence to their African colonies of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, whose peoples were fighting their own anti-colonial resistance wars.

Predictably, once Portugal washed her hands of these former colonies, including East Timor, other forces vied to fill the vacuum. East Timor was invaded by Indonesia while Australia looked the other way. In oil- and mineral-rich Angola and Mozambique, anti-colonial resistance soon turned to civil war, with the USSR and Cuba supporting one faction and China, the US, South Africa, Rhodesia and her former colonial master Great Britain backing another.

In Angola, Cuba sent troops to support the MPLA against a South African-led military intervention. The US and UK covertly sent mercenaries to assist the forces of FNLA–UNITA, backed by South Africa. Most of the mercenaries ended up killed – many by their own side – or captured and on trial in a people's court in Angola's capital Luanda. Burchett's book The Whores of War, written in collaboration with Derek Roebuck, an expert on international law, tells their story.