by Ian Pringle
Reid-Daly was delighted. He took the pictures and McGuiness’s dossier to his commander, an old colleague from the Malaya campaign days, Lieutenant General Peter Walls. Reid-Daly outlined his plan for 60 men to go into Mozambique by vehicle, disguised as FRELIMO, and then attack the camp. The element of surprise, backed up by 20-mm Hispano cannons mounted on Unimog trucks and armoured cars, meant the risky plan should be achievable.
‘Peter Walls tends to whistle through his teeth when he is anxious,’ recalled Reid-Daly. ‘Jesus, Ron, this is a hell of a risk’ was his response. ‘Peter Walls was supportive, but he had to go to South Africa the next day on urgent government business, so he asked me to brief the heads of the army, air force, CIO, SB and Foreign Affairs.
‘I was called to Milton Building by Walls’s second in command, General John Hickman. I told the assembled gathering that trying to stop the gooks in Rhodesia was like emptying a bath with a teacup with both taps fully open. What is needed is to tackle the problem at its source,’ said Reid-Daly. ‘John Hickman and Archie Wilson (air force) were supportive, but the CIO, SB and Foreign Affairs weren’t.’
There was serious concern that the political fallout from the raid might exceed the gains. If no trace of a Rhodesian presence was left, however, maybe it could work. Hickman dismissed Reid-Daly and had a private discussion with the chiefs about the audacious plan.
When Reid-Daly got back to his HQ at Inkomo Barracks, the phone rang. It was Hickman: ‘It’s a go, Ron, you owe me a beer, good luck!’
There was one condition: no air support would be provided, so Reid-Daly’s men would have to fight their way out of trouble.
The Unimog trucks were painted in FRELIMO camouflage and the men kitted in FRELIMO uniforms, manufactured in the tailor shop at Inkomo Barracks. Captain Rob Warraker, formerly with the RLI and SAS, would lead the raid.
‘After I bade my men farewell, I was very anxious,’ recalled Reid-Daly. ‘I slept on a hard bench near the radio, only leaving for a pee or a crap.’
Keeping away from main roads as much as possible, Warraker’s convoy of 10 Unimogs and four armoured cars threaded its way across the border into Mozambique. They drove into the camp in the early morning, singing a FRELIMO song. The inhabitants, assembled on the parade square, welcomed them enthusiastically. The Scouts opened up, wreaking death and destruction. Only four Selous Scouts were injured when fire was eventually returned.
Reid-Daly’s radio receiver remained silent until later that morning.
‘The first news I heard was when one of my men manning an OP [observation post] on Mount Inyangombe radioed to report a massive explosion in Mozambique. I knew then that Robbie Warraker and the team had blown the Pungwe River bridge to prevent a FRELIMO follow-up. They were on their way home.’
As it turned out, the column did get air support as they were threading their way out of the now well-alerted Mozambican countryside. Two Hawker Hunter jets blasted a troublesome FRELIMO mortar position.
‘Rob Warraker’s callsign was Zero Whisky, so I made sure I had plenty of Bell’s Scotch whisky waiting for him and his men when they eventually got back to Inkomo,’ said Reid-Daly. But the men were so dog-tired that only superficial damage was done to the whisky stocks.
A FRELIMO board-of-inquiry document, found a year later at the ZANLA HQ at Chimoio by Detective Superintendent Keith Samler, confirmed 1 026 had been killed. It also confirmed that Nyadzonia was indeed a camp for combatants and recruits.
Nevertheless, Reid-Daly was castigated by some senior military figures for engaging in an external operation, which was the domain of the SAS. ‘I said to them, “Listen, we can do things externally that you can never do because you haven’t got black troops.”’
The man who had chosen the Nyadzonia site for ZANLA regretted his choice: ‘We lost more than 700 people,’ wrote Edgar Tekere in his memoirs. ‘What had attracted me was the Nyadzonia River, which flowed in a horseshoe shape around the camp. The Rhodesian forces attacked from the west, at the narrow entrance, forcing our soldiers into the deep river where they were either drowned or eaten by crocodiles.’
Vorster fumes
The political fallout after the Nyadzonia raid was serious. Much of the world press took the ZANU line and instantly judged that Nyadzonia was a refugee camp. John Vorster was extremely embarrassed and let Ian Smith know in no uncertain manner how angry he was. Vorster made sure Smith understood his anger by sending his air force commander, Lieutenant General Bob Rogers, to Salisbury to tell the Rhodesians that all helicopter crews and signals technicians would be withdrawn immediately. The South African pilots flying on Fireforce duties around Rhodesia were astounded when they were told to pack up and leave immediately for home.
The Nyadzonia raid took place while Kissinger, Vorster, Kaunda, Nyerere and the British government were finalising a new Rhodesian settlement deal. That explained, in part, Vorster’s anger. He soon summoned Smith to South Africa to tell him about a ‘reasonable plan’ the South Africans and Henry Kissinger had worked out for Rhodesia. Vorster let Smith know early on that the stakes were high.
Smith recalled Vorster’s warning to him: ‘If we were not prepared to accept this offer of the hand of friendship from our only friends in this world, then we would be on our own, with sanctions tightening, terrorism increasing and finally the Russians coming in.’
Vorster explained the plan, which, in a nutshell, meant full majority rule in two years, with various guarantees, including a $2 billion trust fund to secure pensions and foreign exchange for those who wished to leave Rhodesia.
‘After lunch,’ recalled Smith, ‘we came to the conclusion that it would probably be a good thing to bring the Americans in, since this might have a stabilising effect on the South Africans.’ The scene was set for Smith to meet Kissinger a week later.
Smith arrived for the meeting in Pretoria a day early, on 18 September 1976, to watch the Springbok rugby team play the New Zealand All Blacks at Ellis Park. The home side prevailed by one point, winning 15–14. The celebration of the victory was brief; Ian Smith’s mind was on the next day.
While the rugby game was being played and to demonstrate his determination and the gravity of the situation, Vorster closed the rail bridge over the Limpopo River at the Rhodesian–South African border town of Beitbridge. With Mozambique’s ports closed to Rhodesia, the landlocked country’s main supply line was suddenly throttled.
Sunday 19 September 1976 was a warm, dry, hazy day in Pretoria. Smith turned up at the US ambassador’s house in the pleasant suburb of Waterkloof for his fateful meeting with Kissinger.
‘On the Sunday morning, after the introductions, Kissinger suggested that he and I go into a small adjoining room,’ recalled Smith. ‘He told me that, as he saw it, he was being asked to participate in the demise of Rhodesia.’ After the one-to-one meeting, and then a joint meeting, Kissinger made Smith walk the plank.
A dejected Ian Smith and his team flew back to Salisbury to explain the deal to cabinet, discuss it and then make the toughest television announcement of his life. The man who had proclaimed that one-man-one-vote majority rule would not happen in Rhodesia ‘for a thousand years’ had to announce to his people that he now accepted the very principle of majority rule.
In that historic broadcast on Friday 24 September 1976, Smith made it quite clear he had been told what to do: ‘The American and British governments, together with major Western powers, have made up their minds as to the kind of solution they wish to see in Rhodesia, and they are determined to bring it about.’
The fact that Smith made no secret of the fact that this plan had been imposed by external parties made it all the more shocking to Rhodesians. Many people’s conclusion was that their friends had all deserted them, including South Africa.
Wing Commander Prop Geldenhuys, then forward airfield (FAF) commander of the Buffalo Range (FAF 7) base in the south-east, summed up the feelings of many military personnel in his book Rhodesian Air Force Operations: ‘Genera
l Walls briefed us, psychologically persuading the field commanders while Ian Smith was meeting with his full cabinet. I can unashamedly record that the tears ran down my cheeks – the end was in sight – it was capitulation.’
The Kissinger plan called for a conference in Geneva between leaders of both sides.
16
Geneva
With all the bravado of his ‘meat-axe diplomacy’, Kissinger had simply not grasped the fundamental issue: the serious divisions within the black nationalist movement. Who would represent them in Geneva?
The front-line states (Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia and Botswana), countries that were suffering terribly from the effects of the Rhodesian War, desperately wanted a settlement, so it fell to them to galvanise an effective alliance to negotiate with Smith in Geneva.
The front-line leaders tried a number of combinations, but eventually decided to summon Nkomo and Mugabe to Dar es Salaam and bang their heads together, forcing them to negotiate as one, as the Patriotic Front. This was a bittersweet turning point for Mugabe. Although he would have to sit at the negotiating table with his archenemy, Nkomo, he was for the first time being recognised as a leader. Not the ZANU leader, but at least a leader. The front-line leaders invited Sithole too, so ZANU would be a two-headed beast.
When Mugabe left for the meeting in Dar es Salaam, ZANU divisions were opening up again. This time it was a clash between the new educated and old uneducated classes. A group of young Marxist– Leninist idealists called the vashandi, or workers’ group, publicly rejected Mugabe’s leadership. Mugabe was deeply worried that his quest would be derailed. So he reacted to this challenge in a way that would become his hallmark – first outsmart and then snuff out his opponents.
With very few cards to play, Mugabe then produced his ace. His main military colleague, Rex Nhongo, sympathised with the vashandi, so Mugabe demanded the release of Josiah Tongogara as a precondition to attending Geneva. Kaunda could hardly refuse, so after 18 months in a Zambian jail, Tongogara and his colleagues were set free.
Mugabe got ZANU’s most effective military leader on his side in return for allowing him to resume his role as supreme military commander of ZANLA, and Tongogara now supported Mugabe’s bid as party leader. Samora Machel, a great fan of Tongogara, accepted this alliance, which gave Mugabe at least some recognition.
Mugabe knew that he had to be seriously radical if he were to win over the vashandi and keep the party together. He wasted no time letting everyone know, not least his own party, that he was in no mood to compromise. Soon after arriving in Switzerland, a journalist asked Mugabe what sort of Rhodesia he wanted. ‘What I am saying is that we are socialists and we shall draw on the socialist systems [state control of the economy] of Tanzania and Mozambique’ was his reply.
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.
Discipline issues at New Farm
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.
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Finding Chimoio
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 basi
c 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.