Dingo Firestorm (14 page)

These socialist policies had ruined both countries, and so, once again, Ian Smith was being coerced into accepting a solution guaranteed to fail.

To stir things further, Mugabe told the journalist: ‘None of the white exploiters will be allowed to keep an acre of their land.’

Mugabe’s demands were absolute blockers for Ian Smith and his delegation. And another factor was working against Mugabe. This was 1976, the height of the Cold War, and the American and British governments had no wish to see pro-communist nationalists come to power in Rhodesia.

But the main stumbling block for Smith was that Vorster and Kissinger had categorically assured him that once he accepted Kissinger’s proposals, Kaunda and Nyerere would ensure that the nationalists fell in line and accept them too. In spite of these hurdles, the conference dragged on for weeks before eventually running out of steam just before Christmas 1976.

While the ZANU leaders were negotiating in Switzerland, discipline in the guerrilla camps was falling apart. The worst case was the ZANLA HQ complex at New Farm, Chimoio. Rugare Gumbo, a member of the ZANU high command, spoke of a breakdown of strategy, discipline and organisation at the camps.

He told journalist David Martin in an interview that ‘camp life had broken down at Chimoio. It was like a village. We had to reshape it and return discipline and structure … you don’t wander about doing as you please. It’s a military camp.’

And ZANLA had another headache – too many people were pouring in from Rhodesia to join the struggle. Many were too old or too young for training, and, in any event, there wasn’t enough capacity to train even the suitable ones. ZANLA tried sending them back, but with little effect. By 1977, the numbers, excluding those selected for training, had swelled to 30 000. These surplus people, often with families in tow, were moved out of the ZANLA Chimoio complex and squeezed into three makeshift refugee camps at Gondola, Chibabawa and Mavudzi, where living conditions were bad.

Samora Machel also criticised the poor ZANLA discipline. The Mozambican president frequently received reports of heavy boozing and womanising in the nightclubs of Maputo. In the camps, senior commanders were known to arrive at night and demand ‘warm blankets’, meaning females for sex. This had a demoralising effect on the guerrillas.

When Tongogara, Mugabe and the rest of the huge delegation returned from Geneva, they started re-establishing discipline. First they arrested Mhanda and the
vashandi
leaders, who would spend the rest of the war in jail near Nampula. Then Mugabe used the poor discipline to make his mark. The teetotaller introduced a strict new disciplinary code that forbade drinking and loose living. Disciplined life slowly returned to the Chimoio base at New Farm. Parade-ground drills, physical exercise, lectures, rifle-range practice and the usual military activities replaced the unrestrained behaviour. Mugabe and his senior commanders started spending more time at Chimoio to show presence and to direct the war.

But Mugabe and Tongogara were naively taking a huge risk. New Farm was barely 70 kilometres from the Rhodesian border. Nevertheless, they believed that with civilians and their children dotted all over the complex and a large FRELIMO force with Russian tanks and Strela anti-aircraft missiles at Chimoio, only 17 kilometres away, they were safe from a Rhodesian attack. In fact, they felt so secure that they brought the entire ZANU and ZANLA hierarchy to New Farm for nearly two weeks in late August 1977 for a marathon meeting.

The objective of this meeting was to hammer out a new organisational structure and elect a supreme leader. The military members of ZANU wanted a military man in charge; the politicians thought that political acumen was paramount. Over and above these considerations, there were tribal issues, particularly between the Manyika and Karanga clans. After nine days of intense debate and much lobbying, the leaders opted for compromise by electing a clan-neutral Zezuru politician they had grudgingly come to trust, Robert Mugabe.

Mugabe’s triumph as leader of both party and army was acclaimed by the entire leadership organisation under the lush trees planted many years before by the Antonio family to provide a shady garden around the farmstead. This man, who, as a shy and awkward boy, stood up at his primary-school graduation at Kutama Mission, saying, ‘When I am a man, I’ll be a teacher, if I can’, was now leader of both ZANU and ZANLA. Little did the cheering party executive know that Mugabe would cling to that position for more than three decades. He would also ostracise many of those supporters in that garden.

As Mugabe celebrated, he would have seen the blue-tinged mountains to the west, Rhodesia’s Eastern Highlands, unaware that across those beautiful mountains, a plan had long since been hatched to wipe out his headquarters at New Farm. It was a daring plan, codenamed after the free-roaming wild dog of Australia, the dingo.

There is little doubt that the unsung heroes of the Rhodesian War were the small band of police detectives known as the SB (Special Branch). This group worked tirelessly, gleaning pieces of intelligence, or ‘int’, from the field, which eventually formed a mosaic that would shape the strategy and tactics of most military operations in the war, not least Operation Dingo.

Int was gathered in two basic ways – urgent field intelligence for immediate follow-up and strategic intelligence gained over the longer term. The data came from a wide variety of sources – captured documents and aerial pictures; from sources in other countries and sources at home.

But without a doubt, the best int came from captured guerrillas; dead ones were not of much use. Gathering and processing intelligence requires patience, persistence and the ability to persuade people to disclose truthful information. The SB operative must use psychological techniques to get captives to speak willingly.

Detective Inspector Peter Stanton describes the art of getting int simply as ‘knowing where to get it. Information comes in dribs and drabs, and over time a picture starts emerging; that’s when it becomes intelligence.’

Stanton does not believe in the word ‘interrogation’ because ‘it denotes cruelty or using force, whereas the true art of getting information is interviewing a person in such a way that he relates a story to you in the correct order. For example, if the captive has just been in battle and is full of adrenalin, the objective is to bring him down gently, because if you don’t, he will tell you anything. So you look after his wounds and give him a bit of assurance, no matter who he is.’

Detective Superintendent Keith Samler, the SB officer attached permanently to the Selous Scouts in the Thrasher operational area at the time of Operation Dingo, explains it further:

As policemen and criminal detectives, all SB personnel have received training in the technique of interrogation. Here’s a simple example: I can quickly tell if someone is lying by looking at their carotid artery. A sudden, pronounced pulsing indicates the person is undergoing mental stress, probably caused by lying or covering something up. However, soldiers do not have this training, so it was very important that SB did the initial interrogation of captures.

Samler preferred wounded captives because they were generally easier to ‘turn’, a term used when a guerrilla would willingly switch sides, usually after a short period of acclimatisation. Whenever possible, Samler would move the wounded captives to his Selous Scouts’ ‘fort’, at the end of the airstrip at Rusape:

Wounded captures would be taken to the medical tent and attended to by a ‘doctor’, actually an army medic with a stethoscope, and given an immediate injection of saline. They loved injections – the instant cure for all ills. I would give the capture a cigarette. His eyeballs would pop out, and you could almost hear him thinking ‘where is the noose and the firing squad?’ If he could eat, a white waiter would appear with the biggest plate of food imaginable and a Coke; questioning would begin a few minutes later. The answers flowed like a torrent.

Usually, the captured guerrilla would be met by turned comrades, who would accuse him of being a
skuze a’ po
(Selous Scout). This was a dreadful accusation, implying he was the worst possible type of traitor, and in most cases it motivated the captive to assert his true credentials by revealing as much as he could about his life with ZANLA. This subtle double-crossing worked extremely well.

Samler tells a story of a brilliant sting operation in his area:

After a contact near the Mozambique border, a Selous Scout callsign ‘recovered’ a ZANLA cadre who had become detached from his comrades during a contact and was disorientated. He was blindfolded and brought back to the fort at Rusape by truck and put into a tent with no other outside contact. Waiting to meet him in the tent were former ZANLA comrades who had been through the ‘turning’ process and were now members of the Selous Scouts.

While he was receiving over-the-top medical treatment, I was lighting his cigarette and holding it for him to puff on. I was wearing East German rice-fleck camouflage kit with a Cuban-style military forage cap, as were my colleagues. After the cigarette, Coke and sticky-bun treatment, we debriefed him over four days. The whole time, the ZANLA man believed friendly forces had taken him back to Mozambique.

The intelligence we obtained had a significant bearing on subsequent contacts with the remainder of his group. It also provided information which assisted in formulating plans to attack terr bases in Mozambique, especially Chimoio.

When the capture discovered he had been duped, apart from being somewhat shell-shocked, he was thoroughly impressed and his induction into the Selous Scouts had begun.

It was during this time, in 1976, that Samler started hearing about a major base in Mozambique called Chimoio, sometimes referred to as Vanduzi East or New Farm. Captured political commissars often revealed they had attended Chitepo College at the base. Samler fed this information back to his HQ. There were similar reports coming in from the Repulse (south-east) and Hurricane (north-east) operational areas. All the signs pointed to a large and very important camp in, or near to, the town of Chimoio.

Peter Stanton was attached to the SAS and worked closely with Major Brian Robinson, the SAS commanding officer, and Captain Scotty McCormack, Robinson’s SAS intelligence officer. Robinson was itching to continue neutralising ZANLA camps in Mozambique, building on his success in Tete Province. ‘Find the camp, quickly’ was Robinson’s simple request.

McCormack engaged high gear, often accompanying Stanton and other SB officers to interrogate captures, particularly if a link to Chimoio was suspected. The information they were gathering was slowly turning into real int. Now all they needed to do was find this camp.

Stanton explains how there were three ways to locate the camp: ‘We could take a captured gook with us to show us the camp, but managing the gook in the field has all sorts of risks. Another way would be to send in our own recce team to find the camp, but the chances of being compromised in a heavily populated area were high. The third method is to fly it, take aerial shots.’

Stanton and McCormack went to meet Bill Buckle of the Joint Services Photographic Interpretation Staff to put in a bid for photographic support, competing with many other requests. McCormack and Stanton told a compelling story, with the result that soon a Canberra jet bomber from No. 5 Squadron was on its way to photograph the area the captives had indicated. When flying very high, a Canberra is virtually invisible to the naked eye and barely audible. Stanton hoped that No. 5 Squadron would hit the jackpot, as they had for the Selous Scouts over Nyadzonia.

And they did. The Canberra returned with lots of good pictures. When the photographs were developed, they shocked everyone. The camp complex was far bigger than the intelligence had suggested. It was occupied by thousands of personnel.

The pictures debunked the belief that ZANLA was cohabiting with FRELIMO at their brigade HQ in Chimoio Town. Instead, they revealed the autonomous, integrated complex that Edgar Tekere had started developing 18 months earlier. There were parade grounds, rifle ranges, admin buildings, hospitals, facilities for vehicle servicing and repair, and a host of support structures linked by roads and wellmaintained pathways. There were hundreds of mud-and-thatch huts used for sleeping accommodation and bigger ones used as support infrastructure, which were supplemented by canvas marquees. Defence trenches and anti-aircraft pits criss-crossed the area. It was pretty obvious this was the New Farm or Chimoio that ZANLA captives had been telling SB about.

The SAS now had high-resolution pictures of the ZANLA nerve centre in Mozambique. This was the largest staging post in Mozambique for trained guerrillas arriving from China, Ethiopia and Tanzania before entering Rhodesia. It was also the main reception centre for new recruits heading the other way for training.

The astonishing fact was that ZANLA was brazenly running its main HQ barely 70 kilometres from the Rhodesian border. The HQ was fully staffed. Mugabe, Tongogara, Tekere and Nhongo spent much time there. Oppah Muchinguri, who survived the war to become one of Mugabe’s most loyal ministers, was a secretary there. ‘I was a member of the general staff,’ she told the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) in November 2010, ‘where I worked as secretary of the high command. We had several bases at Chimoio – farming, medicine, commissariat, etc. … Chimoio was the headquarters.’

Chimoio was without any doubt
the
ZANLA target in Mozambique, and where the most damage could be inflicted on the guerrilla movement. Brian Robinson wasted no time. His first port of call was the office of his good air force friend, Group Captain Norman Walsh.

Walsh had long seen the big picture, realising early on that simply waiting for ever-increasing numbers of enemy to enter the country was the wrong strategy. As air staff director of operations, Walsh had the ear of the Operations Coordinating Committee (OCC), essentially a high command made up of the commanders of the army, air force and police, and the heads of Internal Affairs and the CIO.