Barrel of a Gun

by Al Venter

  Very few counter-insurgency units in any country involved in counter-terrorism operations have managed to achieve such remarkable results. Part of the reason was that this ‘organised and extremely lethal bunch of hooligans’, as one Salisbury newspaper referred to them, were prepared to take the kind of risks needed. Another is that all the men were well trained, extremely fit and young enough to be bold – and more often than not, impetuous – in the face of the enemy and think nothing of it.

  It is notable that many of the tactics instituted by a succession of RLI commanders – as well as by Ron Reid-Daly’s Selous Scouts – are today regularly studied by military institutions abroad, including those in Britain and the United States. Small-unit operations originally evolved during World War II, initiated by David Sterling’s Long Range Desert Group, and were later applied in Malaya and by British SAS Colonel Jim Johnson in Yemen while fighting an invading Egyptian Army. Yet, it was RLI tactics that all but perfected this methodology.

  The Rhodesian Army spread its troops about, even though they were somewhat thin on the ground. This observation post was on a river in the south-east of the country, adjacent to the Mozambique border. (Author’s collection)

  The RLI became adept at this type of military operation. An RLI ‘troopie’ was trained to shoot by double-tapping on semi-automatic: fully automatic fire was almost unheard of. In contrast, the MAG gunner would customarily let rip with short, sharp bursts from the hip that clearly had more stopping power, especially at short range. With time, the gunners would hone this skill to achieve astonishing accuracy. Interestingly, a fair proportion of the RLI complement was composed of foreigners who over the years included many British and American volunteers. They were paid the same as regular Rhodesian soldiers for their efforts.

  All these mercenaries saw a good deal of action during the course of the war. Major Nigel Hensen, who commanded the RLI’s Support Commando for 30 months, reckoned that his guys were called out hundreds of times in that period, of which only six operations resulted in no contact with the enemy or, as it is militarily phrased, ‘lemons’.

  When the fighting was done for the day, these off-duty American freebooters would make their way to one of the most exclusive clubs in the country run by American author Robin Moore of Green Berets fame. Moore established his Crippled Eagle Club as a kind of unofficial United States Embassy in Salisbury in response to Washington’s acquiescence in the face of Soviet encroachment in Africa.

  This group of adventurers also managed to ensconce themselves with other American vets who, after service with regular Rhodesian battalions, sometimes ended up guarding farms or were employed by anti-stock-theft units in the country’s interior.

  The war in Rhodesia started slowly. Having infiltrated the Centenary area in the early 1970s, most guerrilla groups, not eager for direct confrontation, for a long time appeared to be intent on laying mines and attacking the occasional vehicle not in convoy. There were raids on farms, like the one in which Arthur Cumming was murdered, but the biggest effort went towards trying to subvert the locals. This wasn’t difficult in the bush where few of the Shona people had any real contact with Europeans anyway.

  Significantly, their support in the cities was muted, though obviously, in a bid to portray the war as strictly African against European (even though black troops far outnumbered their white counterparts in the ranks of the regular army), they were bound to have some success. For their part, the Rhodesians reacted by initiating a lesson they’d learnt in Malaya: many rural people were relocated into protected villages, a move designed to cut the insurgents off from supplies of food and the kind of succour they’d formerly enjoyed.

  Incredible stories were to emerge from the Rhodesian War, like the one that historian Richard Wood tells of Vic Cook who, with a medic on board, was flying an Alouette helicopter to a local church mission station when a volley of AK rounds slammed into it.

  At an insurgent base camp below – as security forces were to discover later – were about 30 enemy soldiers doing their best to bring them down. A quick survey of the damage told Cook that his gunner was semi-conscious after being hit by two rounds that had penetrated his body armour. Also, the Alouette’s tail rotor shaft was all but severed.

  Landmines were a problem both to civilians and the security forces throughout the Rhodesian War. Some curious anti-mine hybrid vehicles evolved, such as this ‘Pookie’, some of which were eventually adapted to serve in South Africa’s escalating hostilities along the Angolan border to the west. (Author’s collection)

  Cook took his craft down to tree-top level, but he was still taking fire because he was almost on top of the enemy.

  A lot more rounds hit us and it was fierce. I felt the controls going, there was vibration and I realized that I had to bring the machine down.

  More rounds hit us when I lost tail rotor control and the chopper swung violently. Because it would have started to cartwheel if I did nothing, I pulled it up sharply on its tail to knock off forward momentum… and while the speed came down, we continued to yaw. It was then that I saw them: there was the equivalent of two rugby teams and they just kept on shooting at us.

  At that point Cook saw a group of five or six terrs ahead and decided to aim his helicopter right at them. ‘We thumped into the ground nose-first and lost sight of them… which was when a piece of the control column came of in my hand.’

  The impact jerked Cook forward, knocking his jaw onto the top of the control stick, savagely gashing his chin and stunning him. His foot was also badly cut and in trying to get around, he kept stumbling. Only when he looked down did he see a deep gash with the bone protruding. Worse, his Uzi had taken a hit and was inoperable.

  Aware that the engine was still idling – which led the terrs to think they were okay – Cook realized that if the two of them were to survive, he’d need a weapon. Just ahead of him lay a prostrate insurgent who’d been hit by a rotor when the Alouette crash-landed. Alongside him was an AK.

  ‘I knew that if I didn’t get to that weapon and fast, we’d all be killed. Though the tech had meantime come to, he said he couldn’t move. So essentially, it was up to me.’

  Victor Cook then did what he never believed would have been possible. He recovered the Kalashnikov and started firing at the rest of the insurgent group who were about 100 yards away, all the while moving from one bit of cover or clump of rock to the next in what had suddenly become a very personal war. Meanwhile, a Rhodesian Army call sign that had called Cook from Rutenga (in south-east Rhodesia) had heard the crash – as well as the subsequent firing – and summoned help.

  That help came almost an hour later in the shape of a Rhodesian Air Force Cessna FTB, which laid down a curtain of fire around the crippled chopper. The RLI dropped its Fire Force into the area not long afterwards and immediately launched a follow-up.

  For his efforts, Vic Cook was awarded the Silver Cross. His comment at the time was that he didn’t deserve it. ‘I only did what was needed to keep us alive’, were his words.

  At best, the Rhodesians throughout the war were never able to field more than 50 Alouette III’s and Augusta-Bell 206s (the latter bought illicitly from the Israelis). In addition, the Rhodesian Air Force had perhaps a dozen Hawker-Hunter fighter-bombers, as well as a handful of Canberras. This wasn’t much when it is accepted that the country’s entire army, apart from Special Forces, consisted of a single armoured car regiment, one artillery regiment, a regular infantry regiment (the RLI) which would grow to three over-strength battalions, backed by eight battalions of territorial and reserve troops. All these units were multi-racial and included whites, a huge preponderance of blacks, limited numbers of ‘coloured’ troops (of mixed-blood origin) as well as Asians.

  Though Rhodesian aviation assets were precious, helicopters were often used to ferry casualties to hospital after a contact or a landmine incident. (Author’s collection)

  In addition, the paramilitary British South Africa Police or BSAP played a semina
l role throughout the war, usually working in close conjunction with the military. Its Special Branch invariably came up trumps with intelligence gathered while working close to the ground in the interior.

  The war was restricted not only to Rhodesian soil. Both the Selous Scouts and the Rhodesian SAS (many of whose members ended up serving in Hereford in the UK after the war) took the conflict well beyond the country’s borders.

  Apart from routine strikes in Botswana (where insurgent leaders became fair game for small Special Forces strike groups), Colonel Reid-Daly would send his men deep into Mozambique to strike at that country’s road and rail infrastructure. One such attack involved a clandestine unit successfully destroying a substantial section of Mozambique’s largest oil terminal at Beira, one of the biggest ports along that stretch of the Indian Ocean.

  Prior to that, a combined operation involving South African Special Forces – with SAAF Puma choppers, this time in Rhodesian livery – blew up bridges on the main railway line out of Maputo. Because it was the principal insurgent supply line, it set the revolution back about a year.

  Then came the cross-border ‘Green Leader’ strike into Zambia that involved Rhodesian Air Force Canberra jet bombers and choppers, the RLI as well as elements of the SAS and the Selous Scouts. It was launched in an attempt to neutralize ZIPRA’s regional command structure near Lusaka. That operation failed, in part because British intelligence agents had infiltrated Milton House where much of the military planning originated. In turn, London tipped-off ZIPRA leader Joshua Nkomo in Zambia and he wasn’t home when the Rhodesian Army called.

  Another time, the Scouts blew up bridges along the Tanzam Railway in Tanzania more than a thousand miles north of the border. The line ran from Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam – the biggest single staging port for supplies needed by the revolutionary armies – to Zambia. Routinely, Selous Scouts ‘sticks’ would range deep into all these countries, sometimes staying ‘external’ for a month or two at a time.

  Meanwhile, the Rhodesians proved remarkably adept at improvising with their extremely limited resources. They were able to develop the first of many mine-protected vehicles, which saved lives in the war. Subsequent variants of these vehicles eventually saw service in South Africa’s border war in Angola and South-West Africa. In the Honde Valley, immediately adjacent to the Mozambique frontier, several times we went operational in the ‘Pookie’, a mine detector built by a local engineer. It was constructed from Volkswagen parts and used ultra-wide Formula One racing tyres to achieve minimal ground pressure. That was followed by a bicycle-mounted version that, for a while, was deployed to clear bush airstrips in the interior.

  For their domestic and external air strikes, the Rhodesians designed and built a wide range of weapons including flechete bombs and napalm-wielding ‘Frantans’. At a more mundane level, the country’s technicians also developed the ‘Road Runner’, a transistor radio that emitted a signal only when it was switched off. That allowed the air force to drop their bombs accurately.

  This was the same device which, decades later, allowed SAS troops to home in on rebels in Sierra Leone who were holding 11 British soldiers hostage. Calling themselves the West Side Boys, their leader was offered one of these radios as a gesture of goodwill during preliminary meetings to discuss the fate of the hostages.

  The gift was accepted with alacrity and two days later the British attacked and managed to rescue all their countrymen.

  In the end, it was the distinct paucity of troops on the ground that proved to be the undoing of the Rhodesian military effort. The economy too, was in trouble, as might have been expected when some business, industrial and factory personnel were spending four – and sometimes six months of the year – in the bush.

  The RLI’s Fire Force could strike at as many targets as it wished. It could notch up incredible numbers of kills, which it did. However, if the country’s security forces didn’t have the manpower to follow up and maintain a presence in those same disputed areas, the guerrillas would just move right back in again. Which they did…

  Prime Minister Ian Smith also suffered severely from a UN-imposed arms ban. Whatever sophisticated material his forces needed had to be bought in surreptitiously, usually at much-inflated prices. South Africa’s apartheid regime helped where it could of course, but Pretoria had to tread a very careful path. More than once Washington warned the South African government that if it continued to support the ‘Rebel Smith regime’, the country would face sanctions.

  One of the threats included withholding spares for that country’s civilian Boeing passenger jet fleet. Another might have been the refusal to allow South Africans entry to the United States. None of this was ignored, which was one of the reasons why, in a bid to force Ian Smith to the negotiating table, Pretoria at one stage threatened to cut off Salisbury’s oil supplies.

  It was one of several killer ultimatums. Cumulatively, in the end, this sort of pressure had the required effect. It has led to the position Zimbabwe finds itself in today with a psychopath as Head of State and an economy in freefall.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Zaire: Road to an African War

  Covering conflicts in Africa is one thing. However, if you are doing your job and have people firing at you, or are arrested on suspicion of espionage, it is another thing altogether and you tend to take a jaundiced view of the whole situation.

  MY EXPERIENCES IN COVERING ZAIRE – today, the Democratic Republic of the Congo – included being accused of espionage, robbed, roughed-up during daily interrogation sessions and locked in a filthy cell. It was done, as one of our jailers commented, ‘to await your execution’.

  That brush with the Reaper came soon after I left Angola towards the end of 1975. Back on less dangerous turf, I was asked by one of my editors to go into the Sharp End again, which at that stage meant the Angolan War. Since I’d survived numerous encounters there in the past, going back all the way to the Portuguese colonial wars of the 1960s and 1970s, there was no reason to believe that I wouldn’t survive again, he argued.

  Of course I would, I said. Anyway, those jaunts into the unknown were better than work…

  The problem just then, however, was that almost overnight every scribe and aspiring cub reporter was eager for a piece of the action. Following British journalist Fred Bridgland’s scoop in The Scotsman that the South African Defence Force had moved into Angola, the civil war was where everyone wanted to be. However, it wasn’t easy to get in there. Suddenly, all sorts of restrictions were imposed on the media by governments bordering on the embattled region. In fact, the acquisition of an Angolan visa at the time was like getting an invite to visit North Korea.

  There were clearly other ways of going in. I’d been doing it for years – into Kenya with South African stamps in my passport, into Sudan without the necessary documents, on to Nigeria, whose borders were porous but weren’t supposed to be, and then to Lebanon with my second British passport, the one without any Israeli stamps.

  We were all aware that Zaire shared common frontiers with half a dozen other states, and, after all, this was Africa! What the bureaucrats of the day had imposed could easily be unravelled by stuffing a few $20 bills into the hands of a prospective obscurantist, or so I thought, though arriving in Liberia once cost me a single $100 bill that I slid into my passport at Robertsfield Airport immigration control.

  Essentially, each of the major participants in the Angolan Civil War – the South Africans, Soviets, Cubans, the Americans and obviously the perilously unstable Angolan government itself – all had very good reason for pulling down the shutters, especially as any kind of conflict was likely to deter investors.

  For a start, the main Angolan opposition was led by an alcoholic opportunist who called himself Holden Roberto or Roberto Holden, depending on the time of day. He headed the Congo-based Frente Nacionale de Libertação de Angola (National Front for the Liberation of Angola) – or FNLA – and for reasons best known to Langley, was backed by the CIA. Whoeve
r made that decision must have been in on some deal because Holden, who died in 2007, was probably the most inept, corrupt and inefficient revolutionary on that side of the pond. The man was also the ultimate blagger and could lie as fluently as one of the old horse traders from the Bronx.

  At that time Washington didn’t want anybody taking pictures of the weapons then flowing into a region still under their protégé’s control, or, for that matter, of the Americans who were assisting this right-wing guerrilla group. The FNLA just then was being portrayed by the media as passionately anti-communist and Roberto and his men were getting all the military hardware they would need to ‘fight the commies’ in Luanda.

  What also emerged afterwards was that South Africa was very much in cahoots with Washington’s intelligence services, the CIA included. Much of the weaponry being channelled to the FNLA came from Pretoria, having been flown into South Africa from Europe by USAF transport planes. The last thing the South Africans needed was the kind of international attention – at the United Nations, especially – that was likely to result from exposing these multifarious activities.

  Everything was somewhat convoluted and confused, similar to what was happening, or about to happen, in places like Nicaragua, Chile, East Germany, Chad, North Vietnam, Lebanon and elsewhere. The difference was that Angola was involved another of those intricate Cold War manoeuvres where points were scored in blank spaces on the map and the local inhabitants were of no consequence at all.

  Total secrecy was paramount to the success of the venture. As with a later adventure involving Colonel Oliver North – who emerged in another potentially revolutionary situation involving Nicaragua in Central America – there were people in senior positions in Washington who, at all costs, didn’t want anybody, the US Congress especially, to become aware that their country was getting cozy with the South Africans. They were the dreaded racists and, for some time already, apartheid had been a dirty word. More to the point, Pretoria’s racial intolerance was unacceptable at all levels, irrespective of whether the South Africans were countering Moscow’s presence in Angola and, more often than not, doing the CIA’s dirty work.