Death Flight: Apartheid's secret doctrine of disappearance

By Michael Schmidt

In the late 1970s, as the apartheid government fought a desperate and dirty battle to stay in power, its security forces devised a chilling new tactic. A shadowy, top-secret unit called Delta 40 was established, tasked with the murder of hundreds of ANC, PAC, and SWAPO members. Victims’ bodies were flung from aircraft into the Atlantic Ocean. Based on the detailed analysis of flight logs and numerous interviews, Death Flight sheds shocking new light on one of apartheid’s darkest chapters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: Jul 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9780624088615

Michael Schmidt

Michael Schmidt is an award-winning, best-selling African non-fiction author with six books published and another four in the pipeline. With a career spanning 35 years, he is the author of several monographs and innumerable journal and newspaper articles, with a focus on global subaltern (especially anarchist movement) history and politics, human rights, artistic freeddoms and transitional justice, and African affairs including in the military, space tech, and maritime environments. His last book, Death Flight: Apartheid's Secret Doctrine of Disappearance (Tafelberg, Cape Town, 2020), detailed for the first time the operations over 1979-1987 of an ultra-secret Special Forces unit which murdered hundreds of anti-apartheid detainees and dumped their bodies in the ocean from light aircraft, Argentine-style. He is a 2009 Fellow of the Academic Leaders’ Programme at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico, a 2011 Fellow of the International Institute for Journalism (IIJ), Germany (since absorbed into the Deutsche Welle Akademie), a 2011 Clive Menell Media Fellow at the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy at Duke University, USA, and a 2017 Fellow of the inaugural Arts Rights Justice Academy (ARJA) at Universität Hildesheim, Germany.

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Michael Schmidt

DEATH

FLIGHT

Apartheid’s secret doctrine of disappearance

TAFELBERG

To the families of the hundreds

of men – and one woman –

who were ‘disappeared’

under Operation Dual

from 12 July 1979 to 12 December 1987

Style Note: Translations from the original French, Afrikaans, Portuguese, or other language sources are by the author. I have attempted to accurately reflect characters’ correct ranks at the relevant periods under discussion and to indicate where these changed as they were promoted; I have, however, continued using the ranks of pseudo-operators after they went ‘civilian’ so as to indicate their hierarchy. Lastly, contemporary geographic names are used throughout. For example, South West Africa and Rhodesia only become Namibia and Zimbabwe, respectively, after independence. This may conflict with current Namibian and Zimbabwean sensibilities but is historically accurate. The airfield codes in South West Africa (which all changed on independence) are cited as per the pilots’ logbooks.

List of abbreviations

ANCAfrican National Congress

AZAPOAzanian People’s Organisation

BOSSBureau of State Security

BSAPBritish South Africa Police

CBWchemical and biological warfare

CCBCivil Cooperation Bureau

CIACentral Intelligence Agency

CICCoordinating Intelligence Committee

CIOCentral Intelligence Organisation

ConCourtConstitutional Court

CSIChief of Staff Intelligence

D40Delta 40

DSTDirectorate of Special Tasks

EMLCElektroniese, Meganiese, Landboukundige en Chemiese Ingenieursvaardighede

EOExecutive Outcomes

FAFforward airfields

FAPLAPeople’s Armed Forces of Liberation of Angola

FBIFederal Bureau of Investigation

FNLANational Front for the Liberation of Angola

FPLMPeople’s Forces of Liberation of Mozambique

FRELIMOMozambique Liberation Front

IFPInkatha Freedom Party

IWBIrregular Warfare Branch

JMCsJoint Management Centres

KIKCo-ordinating Intelligence Committee

MIMilitary Intelligence

MKuMkhonto we Sizwe

MPLAPeople’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola

NISNational Intelligence Service

NPANational Prosecuting Authority

NSMSNational Security Management System

PACPan Africanist Congress

PCLUPriority Crimes Litigation Unit

PLANPeoples’ Liberation Army of Namibia

RARRhodesian African Rifles

RENAMOMozambican National Resistance

RLIRhodesian Light Infantry

SAAFSouth African Air Force

SACPSouth African Communist Party

SADFSouth African Defence Force

SANDFSouth African National Defence Force

SAPSouth African Police

SASSpecial Air Service

SBSpecial Branch

SFSpecial Forces

SPOSection of Pseudo-Operations

SSCState Security Council

SWAPOSouth West African People’s Organisation

SWAPOLSouth West African Police

SWATFSouth West Africa Territorial Force

TRCTruth and Reconciliation Commission

TREWITSTeen-Rewolusionêre Inligtingstaakspan

UANCUnited African National Council

UDFUnited Democratic Front

UNUnited Nations

UNITANational Union for the Total Independence of Angola

USUnited States

ZANLAZimbabwe African National Liberation Army

ZANUZimbabwean African National Union

ZAPUZimbabwe African People’s Union

ZCIOZimbabwean Central Intelligence Organisation

ZIPRAZimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army

ZSOUimbabwe Special Operations Unit

Foreword by Nkosinathi Biko

This book will make your stomach turn. Do not avert your eyes.

Our efforts to understand and document exactly how wide the footprint of apartheid’s atrocities stretched, how far its violence travelled within and beyond our borders, have not gone far enough. Death Flight shines a much-needed light on some of the darkest corners of a regime waging a desperate and dirty fight against the inevitable. It is the first detailed exploration of the horrendous practice of flinging murdered prisoners into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.

By following the thread of apartheid’s violence into Namibia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Angola, Swaziland, and Zambia, Death Flight elucidates the transnational nature of this crime against humanity. In so doing, it raises fascinating questions about the role of international law in the attainment of hitherto evasive justice.

The general callousness with which apartheid’s henchmen treated human life is an assault on one’s senses. In the process, the book demolishes the supremacist argument central to apartheid, that at its core lay a desire to bring enlightenment to a ‘backward’ people.

I found it disturbing that most of the death flight victims in the book could not be identified because the interviewees chose ‘not to remember’ details. It is unimaginable that a system ostensibly operating on the basis of security intelligence would have disposed of people without knowledge of the risk (real or imagined) that they presented and, most importantly, without knowing their identities – the basic construct of the world of intelligence.

One hopes that the names that did make it into the book will bring some closure to many a family who, to date, may have had little idea of what happened to their beloved.

And for those whose identities remain unverified, one hopes that, by turning the light on this hitherto ‘concealed’ class of victims, Death Flight will invite further scholarship and activism probing this issue. It appears that this important task escaped even the TRC.

Adding to the contemporary relevance of the book is the disturbing revelation of a covert, post-TRC process of exemption for perpetrators, as well as an inexplicable (if not unconstitutional) change to the policy of the National Prosecuting Authority. One hopes that this may provide impetus for the wheels of justice to once again start turning.

This part of the book resonates with the recent progressive judgment handed down in the Ahmed Timol matter by Judge Billy Mothle. The case has re-energised the efforts of many families in South Africa seeking justice for the unresolved political killings of their loved ones. The court proceedings, aimed at ensuring that João Rodrigues is held accountable for the murder of Timol, have exposed the conniving role played by some structures of the democratic government in protecting the perpetrators of apartheid.

The recent denial by former president FW de Klerk that apartheid was a crime against humanity triggered an outcry and a national debate about our past. The contents of this book make an irrefutable case confirming the commission – in the most brutal of ways – of such a crime. Furthermore, it raises serious questions about the role of members of the State Security Council, which at one stage included De Klerk himself, along with a broad network of other senior members of government.

Death Flight is a daring mission to salvage the ghosts of those who were thought to have been eternally dissolved, by apartheid Special Forces, deep in the oceanic waters off our shores. It is destined to become an invaluable tool, connecting the dots in the quest to ensure that no victim of the deadly hand of apartheid is left unaccounted for.

Nkosinathi Biko

May 2020

Prologue

Disappeared men tell no tales

In early May 1947, a group of six to eight villagers were herded onto a French military plane in eastern Madagascar.¹ The captured men were about to become unwilling participants in a crude and cruel display of power by the colonial forces.

With the Junkers Ju 52 travelling slowly at 170–180 km/h, the prisoners were thrown from the door of the plane in mid-air, tumbling to a horrifying death – ‘demonstrative bombs’ in the words of one Malagasy parliamentarian.

Flying Officer Guillaume de Fontanges and Lieutenant Hervéou, who commanded the small garrison of Mananjary, wanted to teach the rebellious population a lesson. Tribal ‘wizards’ had been encouraging an uprising against French colonial rule by claiming that their magic would change the bombs of the French to paper. By dropping the rebels over their home villages, the officers were hoping to demonstrate the superiority of French technology over wizardry.²

The atrocity in Madagascar is the first recorded instance of a death flight, a practice that would eventually become an integral part of a secret military doctrine used against insurgencies world­wide.

More than five decades later, on 12 July 1979, Major Neil Kriel, commander of a shadowy and deadly apartheid military unit called Delta 40, woke up in Otjiwarongo, South West Africa. On his high-powered, high-frequency radio he received an order directly from his superior officer, Major-General Fritz Loots, the man in charge of the Recces, South Africa’s renowned Reconnaissance Commandos: fly north to Oshivelo and pick up two packages for ‘disposal’.

It would be no ordinary cargo.

Upon arrival in Oshivelo, Kriel and his partner, Colonel Johan Theron, received the ‘packages’ – two dead SWAPO guerrillas. Following a few further stops, they headed towards the Skeleton Coast with their human cargo, landing at Meob Bay, deep in the northern region of the Sperrgebiet, the famous ‘Forbidden Area’.

There, at a deserted beach, the two operators established the chilling routine that would become common over the following eight and a half years. They took off the bodies’ clothes, removed the rear door of their Piper Seneca II aircraft, and hid the door and the clothing in the sand. They took off into the fading afternoon with their two naked, dead passengers, Kriel pointing the Piper’s nose out over the Atlantic Ocean.

By the time they returned to Meob Bay two hours later, the back of their plane was empty …

This book traces the story of how South Africa’s security forces came to embrace the death flight doctrine and examines the pivotal role played by Delta 40, the ultra-secret South African Special Forces unit with elements of Rhodesia’s famous Selous Scouts embedded in its DNA. Delta 40 would soon become Project Barnacle, before later morphing into the feared Civil Cooperation Bureau.

In adding death flights to its arsenal of dirty tricks, South Africa’s apartheid regime joined the odious ranks of the far-right French colonial forces in Algeria and the Argentine generals waging a dirty war against their own citizens.

De Fontanges, the French architect of the first known death flight in 1947, boasted openly of the new tactic he had invented. He was never censured and went on to become a celebrated pilot in France’s ultimately disastrous war in Indochina, where his death flight doctrine was rumoured to have been taken up with enthusiasm. It was also exported to Algeria, where it supplemented a broader black-ops strategy against pro-independence insurgents.

The strategy included torture, extrajudicial killings, and the deployment of pseudo-gangs – the practice of turning the enemy into one’s own deadly instrument. Many of the extrajudicial killings in Algeria were carried out by a team led by former-parachutist-turned-intelligence-agent Major Paul Aussaresses, which he nicknamed the ‘Squadron of Death’, arguably the origin of the term ‘death squad’ as it was widely copied in Latin America. Those who fell into the Squadron’s clutches would often, after surrendering any valuable information acquired by torture, be disappeared by death flight over the Mediterranean by General Bruno Bigead’s helicopters. Algeria also saw the use of pseudo-gangs of civilians and security forces organised by the far-right Secret Army Organisation (OAS) as ‘Delta Commandos’ under Foreign Legion defector Lieutenant Roger Degueldre to commit perhaps 2 000 insurgent killings; the Delta designation would later find a deadly echo in South Africa’s own counterinsurgency war. Despite its popularity among counterinsurgency forces, the use of pseudo-gangs as assassins (though not as intelligence-gatherers) had since 1907 been outlawed under international law. It is classified as the war crime of ‘perfidy’ where an attacker disguises himself, either in his enemy’s colours or uniform, or as a neutral or civilian party, in order to capture or kill his enemy.

The French counterinsurgency doctrine was codified by General André Beaufre, whose ‘total strategy’ would one day have a profound influence on South Africa’s military. Beaufre argued for a holistic – one could say totalitarian – battlespace. It involved dissolving the boundaries between military and civilian life, with the military omnisciently co-ordinating social, economic, civil, psychological, and propaganda aspects of a ‘total’ war against the insurgency.³

In the 1950s, a young officer in the South African Defence Force named Magnus André de Merindol Malan visited Beaufre as a military observer and learned total strategy at his knee.

The French may have invented the death flight doctrine, but it was taken to its extreme by Lieutenant-General Jorge Rafael Videla, the longest-serving chief of the Argentine military junta. The junta killed up to 30 000 people from 1976 to 1983,⁴ of whom perhaps 4 000 were thrown into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean and the Río de la Plata. Videla’s irritated response to a journalist’s question at the height of the death flights in 1979 was telling. Leaning aggressively into the microphone, he said: ‘The disappeared are just that: disappeared. They are neither alive nor dead. They are disappeared.’

The general’s words betray something of the evil logic underpinning the death flight doctrine.

With prisoners simply vanishing beneath the waves, the authorities can claim to have never had the missing persons in custody at all, directing families and friends to search fruitlessly elsewhere. The likelihood of the victims’ bodies ever being recovered for forensic evidence is practically zero. The wounds of detainees who have been mutilated by torture will never be seen. The victims would no longer have to be fed, housed, and clothed. The possibility of well-known prisoners becoming celebrated rallying points for resistance – à la Nelson Mandela – is eliminated. Lastly, there would be no proper gravesite for the dead, preventing it from being turned into a political shrine by their comrades.

In effect, death flights guaranteed immunity to the perpetrators of war crimes and gross human rights violations, allowing a culture of impunity to fester. It is one of the most efficient methods of erasing knowledge of the victims’ existence and, by extension, the very ideas they stood for.

PART I:

The Rhodesian roots of SA’s dirty war

1

A youth in the shadow of an insurgent war

Cornelius Ignatius Johannes Kriel, better known to his later com­rades as Neil Kriel, was born in the tiny valley of Klaasvoogds, situated 16 km from the Langeberg mountain hamlet of Robertson in the Cape Province, on 8 September 1947.¹ Despite his staunchly Afrikaans name, the fully bilingual Kriel was very ‘English’ in his speech and manners.

In 1959, when Kriel was twelve, his family moved to Southern Rhodesia, where he completed his schooling at the Umtali Boys’ High School. Umtali, the British crown colony’s fourth-largest city, was perched on the far eastern border of the country flanking Mozambique, giving the school’s pupils their nickname of Borderers.

At the time, Southern Rhodesia was in the grip of a disobedience campaign by the unenfranchised black population. As their campaign became more militant, it would provoke a strong counter-insurgency response. But it is likely that, in his early days, Kriel lived the idyll of a white Rhodesian schoolboy. Developing into a strapping, dark-haired lad, Kriel demonstrated athletic prowess and threw himself into running, water polo, and especially rugby, a sport that would provide an additional bond with his future comrades.

Meanwhile, the spark for the Rhodesian Bush War was lit with the murder of a white foreman, Andrew Oberholzer, at the Silver­streams Wattle Company on 4 July 1964. He was killed by guerrillas of the newly formed Zimbabwean African National Union (ZANU) and its armed-wing-in-embryo, the Chinese-backed Zim­babwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA). Although the killing outraged white and moderate black Rhodesia, Kriel was seemingly secure in his schoolboy bubble. That year, according to his school’s alumni magazine, The Borderer, ‘Neil Kriel took the 880 yards (2 min. 3.4 sec), and the Mile (4 min. 46.7 sec.) records … In the Inter-Schools meeting, Kriel ran two excellent races to lower his personal best records in the 880 yards (2 min. 1.5 sec.) the Mile (4 min. 36.5 sec) …’²

A 1964 photograph of Kriel and the Umtali Boys’ water polo team shows a handsome lad whose levity gives no hint of the grave role he would later play in the escalating regional conflict: sitting relaxed in his blazer and shorts with a broad, engaging grin, he sports a dark V-shaped quiff that seems to owe more to the rockabilly style of the previous decade. In the same year, Kriel proved ‘outstanding’ in his rugby team’s tour of South Africa, The Borderer enthused. The team was unbeaten in all but one match, a run which included ‘a magnificent 30–21 victory over Selborne College. It was schoolboy rugby at its best …’.

However, storm clouds were steadily accumulating. Lawrence Cline writes of the era: ‘The Rhodesian insurgency developed gradually, initially appearing to be more of a law enforcement problem than an organised insurgency. It took considerable time for the Rhodesian government to acknowledge the severity of the insurgent threat it faced and to develop a coherent response.’³

Soon, added to ZANLA’s insurgency was that of the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA), the military arm of the Soviet-backed Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU). The guerrillas roughly divided the country between ZANLA, based in the east and operating out of Tanzania and Mozambique, and ZIPRA, based in the west and operating out of Northern Rhodesia and the British Protectorate of Bechuanaland (to become independent Botswana in 1966). Despite this informal partition, the two competing guerrilla forces often battled among themselves.

In 1965, Kriel’s second-to-last school year, Southern Rhodesia made its dramatic Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from Britain, because of an impasse over Whitehall’s refusal to allow independence. The sticking point was that Southern Rhodesia wanted to maintain white minority rule – unlike Northern Rhodesia, which had been granted independence the previous year as Zambia.

Kriel’s school had an ingrained tradition of military service. The school chapel was built on a grassy hill to honour the memory of the Umtali Old Boys who had paid the ultimate price in World War II. An Old Boy who had graduated from Umtali Boys’ several years previously, Bert Sachse, had gone on to train as an officer at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst in England. Pictured early in his military career with jug ears, a cleft chin, and a gnomishly winning smile, Sachse returned to Rhodesia after graduating. In 1966, at the age of 23, he underwent a forward airstrike and ground-to-air control course run by the Rhodesian Air Force along­side another soldier who would later play an important counterinsurgency role, Garth Barrett. Barrett would become a lieutenant-colonel in the famed C-Squadron, Special Air Service (SAS), Rhodesia’s airborne commando force.

In 1966, his final year at Umtali Boys’, Kriel captained the first rugby team and was picked as vice-captain of the Rhodesia Schools’ team. At the subsequent Craven Week – South Africa’s annual schoolboy rugby proving ground, named after Springbok great Dr Danie Craven – he was selected as one of the best players of the tournament. He followed his passion for rugby after graduating, playing for Stellenbosch University in 1967 – the year in which some 2 000 South African Police (SAP) members were deployed to the northern border of Rhodesia to assist the British South Africa Police (BSAP, Rhodesia’s police force) to combat a ZIPRA insurgency backed by uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC).

Kriel’s rugby dreams were cut short when he was injured in the same year and his academic career at Stellenbosch was also short-lived. The following year, he returned to Rhodesia where he joined the Rhodesian Light Infantry (RLI), becoming a commissioned officer in 1969 and taking on duties as an RLI troop commander.

Meanwhile, in 1969, Sachse earned his wings on a parachute course alongside several other soldiers and one civilian, Hamish Murray, the mayor of Umtali – an indication of how the developing conflict was starting to militarise Rhodesian everyday life. Sachse was a member of Rhodesia’s C-Squadron of the British Special Air Service, one of only two foreign squadrons of the fearsome SAS. The squadron was founded in 1961 from a core of the thousand Rhodesian volunteers who had fought in the SAS’s counterinsurgency campaign in Malaya from 1951 to 1953. Its staunch anti-communism would prove as influential as its unconventional warfare tactics.

The roots of Rhodesian pseudo-operations

During late 1971 and early 1972, Sachse, by then a lieutenant, was briefed to conduct pseudo-operations against ZAPU in Zambia, under a Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) controller named Jack Berry, assisted by Detective Inspector Michael ‘Mac’ McGuinness of the Terrorist Desk of Special Branch of the BSAP.⁴ These were the first of many Rhodesian pseudo-operations against enemy targets in Zambia, Botswana, and Mozambique that increasingly shifted from pure intelligence-gathering to com­bat strikes.

The Special Branch (SB) was the section of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) that tracked potential threats to law and order and collaborated closely with the South African, colonial Portuguese, and – prior to UDI – British and American intelligence services. Initially, the C-Squadron was the Rhodesians’ only special forces unit and the SB/CIO the only entities flirting with experimental pseudo-operations. As Cline writes, ‘Police made an early attempt to use pseudo-operations in October 1966, but the effort was stillborn. The first formal pseudo-team was formed in January 1973 as an all-African team, with two African policemen and four turned insurgents. The early teams did succeed in bringing in some valuable intelligence, but their overall impact was slight.’

Then, in November 1973, in the midst of a lengthy Rhodesian counter-infiltration campaign in the north of the country called Operation Hurricane, a new special forces unit built specifically for pseudo-operations was set up. It was founded by Captain Ron Reid-Daly, who was coaxed out of retirement after a two-decade-long career. The unit was named the Selous Scouts, in honour of the colourful colonial-era explorer Frederick Courteney Selous, on whom novelist H Rider Haggard had modelled his Allan Quatermain character.

‘The original strength of the Selous Scouts was about 120,’ Cline writes, ‘with all officers being white and with the highest rank initially available for Africans being colour sergeant,’ though one founding member, Sergeant-Major 1st Class (WO1) M Stanlake Mavengere, started out as company sergeant-major for the ‘African Scouts’. He would later become the black troops’ regimental sergeant-major, a formidable position in any combat regiment. The colour distinction appears to have been primarily for motivational and cultural-linguistic reasons, though the men ate, slept, fought – and died – alongside one another.

‘One major recruiting incentive for African volunteers,’ Cline writes, ‘was that their pay was nearly doubled from their normal army salaries due to special bonuses … Ultimately, the unit reached a strength of somewhere around 1 500.’ This pool of counter-insurgency expertise would later be drawn on in South Africa’s own evolving Border War.

Former operative Winston Hart recalled that the Selous Scouts were formed at an ad hoc tented base erected around a small farmhouse at the Trojan Nickel Mine. The remote location was chosen with security concerns in mind because the unit would in part consist of turned terrorists. At the base, Reid-Daly and his sidekick Jerry Strong, later a major, were ‘busy recruiting new officers: Neil Kriel, Dale Collett, Tim Bax, Keith Noble and Mick Hardy’.⁵

Tall, with fluffy blond hair and big, dark sideburns, Hart was to form the core of a small group of counter-terrorism Special Branch police permanently attached to the Scouts as intelligence-gatherers and interrogators. Hart had joined the uniformed branch of the Rhodesian police in 1958 and, in 1963, had transferred to the Special Branch. He said that on the SB’s Terrorist Desk, Detective Inspector Pete Stanton, nicknamed Stroppy (for obstreperous), had been ‘building up a database which included a card system on which he manually recorded all known terrorists, complete with code names and weapons’ serial numbers, a system which would later prove invaluable in the formation of the Selous Scouts.’

After four years in the field, Hart had joined Stanton and his colleagues Vic Opperman, Peter Dewe, and John ‘Bomber’ Davison on the Terrorist Desk commanded by Peter Tomlinson and reporting to Brigadier John Hickman. Hart says the use of pseudo-terrorists was one of the suggestions offered to counter terrorist infiltration, using as example the Kenyan operations run by Special Branch officer Ian Henderson. Henderson had been instrumental in the development of pseudo-gangs to undermine the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya from 1952 to 1960. Military experts have argued that it was the introduction of these gangs that turned the war in the authorities’ favour.⁶

The Rhodesian military had given the green light for the Terrorist Desk’s idea and three small Special Branch pseudo-operations teams were formed by white trackers and black soldiers from the Rhodesian African Rifles (RAR). They were trained in ‘the ways of terrorists’ by Stanton and given unmarked Land Rovers, Soviet AK-47 assault rifles and Tokarev pistols, and communications equipment. To get rid of the ‘scent of the city’, the men were made to sit in a smoke-filled hut.

Although largely ineffective, this early pseudo-ops concept was incorporated into the new Selous Scouts. In the Scouts, Hart and his SB team reported to Mac McGuinness, by then a superintendent. Hart himself was later trained as a parachutist by the South African Recces at Fort Doppies in the Caprivi Strip. He was personally handed his wings by Major-General Fritz Loots, commander of the Recces.

The idea for the Recces had originated with Commandant Jan Breytenbach, whose military career included stints in South Africa’s Union Defence Force tank corps and the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm. He resigned his commission as a second lieutenant in the Royal Navy when South Africa exited the Commonwealth and became a republic in 1961. He was persuaded to join the new South African Defence Force (SADF) as a parachutist.

In 1967, Breytenbach convinced SADF Chief of the Army Lieutenant-General Willem Louw to allow him to start an experimental special operations team of himself and eleven men – the ‘Dirty Dozen’ – who were then trained by the Rhodesian SAS. From June 1970, the unit was stationed at the Oudtshoorn infantry base as the Irregular Warfare Branch (IWB). It employed several cover names, including the Operational Experimental Team⁷ and the Alpha (later Delta) Operational Test Group.⁸ In 1972, it transferred to the Bluff in Durban and was formalised as 1 Reconnaissance Commando, or 1 Recce. In 1975, Breytenbach, by now a colonel, was transferred to form what became 32 Battalion, the famous deep-raiding light infantry battalion that, after the Recces, was the second-most decorated unit of the Border War.

As the Selous Scouts conducted reconnaissance of ZAPU, ZANU, and ANC bases deep into anti-white-rule Frontline States such as Zambia, the connections between the Rhodesian pseudo-operators and South African Recces would strengthen.

How to turn an insurgent

Recruits for the new Scouts – mostly black RAR soldiers – were put through their paces at the Wafa Wafa base on the shores of Lake Kariba where they had to pass a gruelling endurance-and-bushcraft qualifying course. Many of the successful candidates were put through parachute courses to earn their wings either in Rhodesia or in South Africa.

Hart said the initial intention was to recruit guerrillas already in detention, but after interviewing several, he realised none had knowledge that was sufficiently current, so he and Reid-Daly abandoned the idea in favour of gaining new potential recruits.⁹

The freshly minted Selous Scouts soon relocated to new barracks at Inkomo, named the André Rabie Barracks after one of Hart’s Special Branch pseudo-terrorists killed in a friendly-fire accident. Two corrugated-iron ‘forts’ were built for them to operate out of at Bindura and Mount Darwin in the northeast of the country, then at other locales.

The forts, with walls between 4,3 m and 5,3 m high, were based on a rectangular floor plan with a courtyard in the centre, around which were clustered (in the example of the Buffalo Range fort) a mess hall and kitchen, ops room with neighbouring radio room, six bedrooms with their own ablutions for the officers and non-commissioned officers, a barracks for the troops with their own ablutions, a guard room next to the sliding entrance gate, a small operating theatre