Death Flight. Michael Schmidt
‘As luck would have it, just as we were heading over the final ridge overlooking Mapai, the charges detonated. As we were out of the danger area, it was great to be able to watch the town disintegrate into a pile of rubble, with the highlight being the warehouse which looked like Hollywood special effects.’11
Kriel also carried his passion for rugby into the Selous Scouts. In a tale told by Colour Sergeant Noel Robey – later to become a covert operative in South Africa’s pseudo-operations – Sergeant Joe Lewis arrived at the Scouts’ André Rabie home base with his head bandaged. It turned out Lewis had got into an argument at an army club for claiming the Scouts could whip any other armed forces rugby team; in the ensuing brawl, part of his ear had been bitten off. Outraged, Reid-Daly recalled a number of Scouts teams from their operational deployments and formed them into a rugby team to teach the army a lesson. Robey said ‘the war stopped for a week’ as a team, including bulky, bearded players like Hart and Kriel, was assembled. Kriel and the Selous Scouts XV ‘overran’ the Army XV, and Lewis’s honour was restored.12
2
From Pretoria bar to Rhodesian bush
In late 1975, two former Rhodesian Special Air Service soldiers who had been running a rough bar in central Pretoria, which became a watering hole for serving and former SAS members, came up with the idea of returning to Rhodesia and forming a small recce unit.
With Sergeant Dave Scales left behind to run the pub, South African-born Chris ‘Schulie’ Schulenburg,1 a tall, dark-haired introvert, met with and pitched the idea to Major Brian Robinson in early 1976. In 1970, Robinson had been the first commander of the Army School of Infantry’s newly formed Tracking Wing, the ‘Tackies’, and its Tracker Combat Unit. In April 1974, this was absorbed into the Selous Scouts, giving it a crucial bushcraft and tracker capacity.
Robinson nixed the plan for a new recce unit – but before Schulenburg left Rhodesia, he paid a call on the Scouts’ Major Ron Reid-Daly, who was aware of the failed pitch to the SAS. Two days later, Reid-Daly told Schulenburg that he could accommodate a specialised recce team in the Selous Scouts.
This team, known as the Recce Troop, initially only consisted of two men – Schulenburg and Scales – but they soon recruited Lieutenant Tim Callow of the SAS, who had been attached to the School of Infantry in Gwelo. Prior to this, reconnaissance teams had usually consisted of four soldiers, but Schulenburg came up with the novel idea of only two men, one white and one black, allowing a much smaller footprint in the bush. The black recce would engage with the population in the guise of a guerrilla, while the blacked-up white recce would hide out in the bush and handle communications with a dedicated Recce Troop signals element back at their small Scouts-based tactical HQ.
As Scales recalls, the idea was that two-man teams ‘would be more secure and more clandestine and have greater mobility. When lying up in a hide, camouflage and concealment would be easier and each man’s culture would also complement the other.’2 This innovation and his dramatic subsequent career would secure Schulenburg’s place in the annals of long-range recon operations.
Scales formed a two-man team with Captain Robert Warraker of the SAS, commander of the Recce Troop. Schulenburg and the Scouts’ Sergeant Stephen Mpofu, an experienced pseudo-operations team leader, were the second team, while the towering Callow, who stood as high as the ox-horns on the Scouts’ famous unit standard, and Corporal Martin Chikondo, a former operational tracker turned Scout, teamed up for the third.
The teams would parachute into the operational area either through low-altitude static-line drops, or high-altitude-low-opening (HALO) drops from a Dakota specially adapted to fly at 20 000 ft above sea level, that is, roughly 15 000 ft above ground level in Rhodesia. One drawback of having only two men in a team was that they had exceptionally heavy loads to share when carrying their weapons, night sights, radios, and batteries. As they were operating in dry regions where they had to steer clear of water sources used by the locals, they had to cache food and water in the bush to enable them to operate for between 10 and 21 days. But several successful operations demonstrated the effectiveness of this long-range recon method – one that was concurrently being devised by the SADF in Angola.
Although Schulenburg, Mpofu, and Chikondo preferred their hair neat – Schulenburg sporting a goatee, Mpofu a pencil moustache, and Chikondo a cropped beard – the other white troopers went bush, letting their hair grow out. A 1976 formal group photograph3 in Scouts camouflage uniforms taken at Schulenburg’s pub, known as the ‘Tambuti Lodge’, at the Scouts’ André Rabie base, shows Schulenburg, Mpofu, and Chikondo sitting with Scales and Callow, the last two sporting bushy, unkempt beards. An undated field shot shows Schulenburg in his most common guise: grubby guerrilla overalls, gripping his precious water bottle, with matted hair and blacked-up face and neck, his staring eyes evincing the exhaustion of a long deployment.4
On 12 January 1977, during an operation at Madulo Pan, Warraker was killed when a Rhodesian Air Force Canberra was shot down. According to Scales, a request was submitted to Reid-Daly for Major Neil Kriel to be the new operational commander of the Recce Troop, with Schulenburg as his second-in-command. Reid-Daly approved the request.
The core of the specialist soldiers who would within a few years form the SADF’s most clandestine operational unit and its operational intelligence unit had now been consolidated: Schulenburg’s Recce Troop commanded by Neil Kriel, and Winston Hart’s anti-terrorism Special Branch team attached to the Scouts. An undated photograph5 shows a smiling Reid-Daly in browns and a camo shirt at a cookout with Hart’s boss, Mac McGuinness, in a business suit and a glowering, full-bearded, full-bellied Kriel in civvy short-sleeved shirt and checked pants. Operating in a twilight zone on the edge of legality, Kriel’s pseudo-operations was starting to inch further into the shadows as it increasingly embraced insurgent weapons and civilian clothing.
An undated photograph of Schulenburg and Kriel6 at what appears to be a roadblock, in front of one Army and two civilian Land Rovers, shows Schulenburg in a long-sleeved checked shirt, shorts, and running shoes, sporting long locks, his goatee overgrown into a full beard, his right hand casually gripping his wood-handled AK-47, while Kriel, in brown bell-bottoms and a similar checked shirt, is in a half-crouch as if he has just heard a shot, his dark glasses and beard masking his expression. Kriel’s weapon is apparently a Russian drum-fed RPD 7.62 mm light machine gun, modified by being shortened and painted black for clandestine, close-quarter battle by the Selous Scouts’ armourer, Sergeant-Major 2nd Class Phil Morgan – a man who would also later play a key role in the SADF’s pseudo-operations. Morgan would also produce weapons such as an AK-47 with a collapsible wire stock, straight FN-style magazine and a short barrel with forward grip suitable for paratrooper operations. A rare photograph of Morgan7 shows him dressed in a grey suit and loud 1970s tie while all but one of his comrades are in Scouts camouflage.
After members of 5 Recce had attended a course on two-man reconnaissance in Rhodesia, apparently around early 1979, Schulenburg was invited to 5 Recce’s forward base at Ondangwa in South West Africa to present a similar course to operators, including one whom we will encounter again, Lieutenant André Diedericks. It was followed by a parachute deployment of the trainees into southern Angola to determine the volume of traffic on the road between Cahama and Villa Roçadas. The mission was a success, but the small-teams concept had a troubled inception in the SADF, Diedericks recalled. On the one hand, some operators resisted the idea of ultra-specialised recon-only teams; on the other hand, some unit commanders competed to have their ‘own’ decentralised small teams, undermining the concept of ‘a strategic reconnaissance capability’.8
3
Behold a pale horse: Rhodesia’s biochemical warfare
Another element was thrown into the clandestine counter-insurgency mix with the use of chemical and biological warfare agents, what I shall term the ‘pale horse’.1 It coincided with a retreat by the Rhodesian state – a process echoed in South Africa and its de facto colony of South West Africa – from legal due process in dealing with opponents. ‘From 1976, all normal mechanisms of justice were abandoned by the Rhodesian government,’ Chandré Gould and Peter Folb write.2
‘Special