Death Flight. Michael Schmidt
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 next to a bedroom for the medics, two SB offices, an SB rest room, and two SB bedrooms – and right next to that, six cells for captured guerrillas. Mount Darwin differed from Buffalo Range and Bindura in that there were no cells for prisoners and no medical facilities.10
Captured guerrillas played a critical role in the intelligence operations of the Scouts, according to Cline. ‘For a prisoner to be of any use to us, it was absolutely vital that his identity was totally protected and that neither the locals in the area of the contact, nor anyone back at the security force base, knew of his capture or even of his existence,’ Cline writes.
The first priority was to give a captured insurgent the best possible medical care. The initial communication with the detainee would only concern his health and physical welfare. ‘The captive was usually astonished to see that everything had been done to ensure his life was saved. And because of this, whether consciously or unconsciously, a feeling of gratitude would begin to permeate his mind, according to Cline.’
Around 800 turned insurgents were eventually recruited in this manner, their salaries paid by Special Branch. The original intention had been for Selous Scouts helicopters to deploy from the courtyard of each fort, but the tumultuous, dusty downdraft proved disastrous. Still, the model was replicated elsewhere – including at the Buffalo Range Forward Airfield (FAF) at Chiredzi in the southeast of the country.
The practice of beguiling, interrogating, and attempting to turn guerrillas in cells at Special Forces bases would later be copied in South Africa and South West Africa, particularly at 5 Reconnaissance Commando’s home base at Phalaborwa and its forward base at Fort Rev at Ondangwa in the South African-controlled territory of South West Africa.
Forward airfields were locations from which small action squads (known as ‘fire-force sticks’) of the Rhodesian Light Infantry, Special Air Service, or Selous Scouts could rapidly deploy into battle by helicopter, often once the Rhodesian Air Force had bombed an enemy target. The Buffalo Range FAF would later become the site of a dramatic scene that demonstrated the strengthening relationship between the Rhodesian SAS and Selous Scouts and the South African Recces.
Meanwhile, like many of the Scouts’ pseudo-terrorists, Kriel grew a full, bushy beard that gave a sudden menace to his looming bulk. But he had a wicked sense of humour and revelled in his unit’s somewhat frightening, unconventional appearance. Sergeant Rob ‘Wings’ Wilson tells of one mission to Mapai in southern Mozambique ‘to blow up as much of the town as we could’. Wilson, Kriel (then a captain), some other Scouts, and four national-service mechanics were on the flight to Mapai, their Douglas C-47 loaded with explosives. Dressed in their guerrilla gear and armed with AK-47s, Kriel casually told the unknowing conscripts that they were bound for an enemy country – and shouldn’t smoke as they would blow themselves to kingdom come due to the explosives they were transporting, leaving