Death Flight. Michael Schmidt
referral to district courts or the Supreme Court. Defence for the guerrillas was often provided by the Rhodesia security forces from legally trained conscripts. Some executions were carried out in situ and no records were available for who was tried and when executions were carried out,’ raising the question of whether these ‘special courts’ and their brutal justice were de facto extrajudicial. A crematorium found in the bush outside the Chikurubi maximum security prison after independence in the 1980s suggests that bodies of those executed were covertly disposed of.
It is clear that the threat of secret, summary execution convinced many guerrillas to turn – especially when complemented by kind treatment from the Scouts and the offer of decent pay. Captives were also promised that their families would be protected from reprisals by their former comrades.
The chemical and biological warfare capacity developed in the late 1970s by the Rhodesian forces often tended indiscriminately to target innocent populations suspected of harbouring guerrillas. ‘By the late 1970s,’ Gould and Folb write, ‘the Rhodesian security forces were involved in unconventional warfare and a number of devices were released into the community, for example, booby-trapped radios. An armourer, Phil Morgan [introduced in the previous chapter], was involved in the manufacture of these devices.’
According to researcher Glenn Cross, it appears that other explosives were provided to the Selous Scouts and Rhodesian SAS by Elektroniese, Meganiese, Landboukundige en Chemiese Ingenieursvaardighede (EMLC),3 a specialised weapons division under the South African state arms firm Armscor’s Department of Special Acquisitions (DSA). The DSA’s task was to acquire specialised equipment abroad, while the EMLC’s was to manufacture locally that which could not be purchased by the DSA. It was specifically dedicated to fulfilling Special Forces’ unique requirements. The EMLC was run by chemical engineer Dr Jan Coetzee, assisted by Fred Slabbert, Barry Paul, and Peet du Preez, and was initially based in a small workshop at Lyttelton Ingenieurswerke (Lyttelton Engineering Works), south of Pretoria.4
According to Gould and Folb, three substances were used in Rhodesia’s ‘amateurish and short’ foray into chemical and biological warfare. Organophosphates were applied to clothes, especially parts of the fabric that would touch the soft parts of the skin, for example the underarms and groin areas. They were also put into tinned food and drink ‘or other substances to be ingested, such as aspirin’. Additionally, cholera was twice released into the Ruwenya River, while anthrax was deposited near Plumtree, inside the Botswana border.
Gould and Folb received documents from author Peter Stiff that record the use of poisons by the Rhodesian Police’s Special Branch and the Selous Scouts. ‘These documents indicate that the use of poisons began in 1977. Former Special Branch operatives have said they were aware of the use of poisons as early as 1973.’
Mac McGuinness is identified as the man who facilitated the chemical programme at the Scouts’ Bindura fort and the most senior Special Branch officer seconded to the Central Intelligence Organisation. He was given the title Officer Commanding Counter Terrorist Operations. McGuinness told the authors that ‘the distribution of contaminated items, e.g. clothing and food, was not as a general rule carried out by the Scouts but by the Projects Section of the British South Africa Police, Special Branch. Scouts in the field acted in a reconnaissance role, calling in strike forces to engage the enemy where this was feasible …’
McGuinness claimed that Reid-Daly had at one point refused permission for the Scouts to be involved in an anthrax drop by aircraft and that the SAS had conducted the operation instead. A 1978–1980 anthrax outbreak in Rhodesia, one of the largest such epidemics in human history, has been attributed by some analysts to this operation and Cross examines this in detail. McGuinness’s direct command of Winston Hart’s Special Branch unit attached to the Scouts means the Scouts were at least aware of the chemical and biological warfare programme.
The chief scientist behind the poisoning programme was Professor Robert Symington of the Anatomy Department at the University of Rhodesia, who apparently used the nom de guerre Sam Roberts. According to Peter Stiff, guerrillas were sometimes poisoned using thallium: ‘It was said that there were some months when Sam Roberts had killed more terrorists than the Rhodesian Light Infantry.’5 Gould and Folb note that Symington later moved to South Africa, where he worked as a lecturer at the University of Cape Town.
According to Cross, Symington maintained close ties with the EMLC head Dr Jan Coetzee, SAP Forensic Laboratory chief Dr Lothar Neethling, and Dr Wouter Basson, who would go on to head South Africa’s own chemical and biological warfare programme. In a 2011 email, Basson says he had contact with Symington on academic matters while the latter was lecturing at Salisbury, but only met him in person in his capacity as an external examiner in anatomy after Symington had moved to Cape Town.
The line of command in the Rhodesian poison operations was not clear, according to Gould and Folb. Reid-Daly told them that Ken Flower, Director-General of the Central Intelligence Organisation, was in charge overall, but it would take Glenn Cross to produce the first comprehensive study of the Rhodesian chemical and biological warfare (CBW) programme. It was published in 2017 after almost two decades of research. Cross provides a diagram ‘showing the approval chain to establish the CBW effort’ that has Prime Minister Ian Smith running two lines of authorisation: one to Symington in charge of his small team at the Bindura fort, via Minister of Defence PK van der Byl; and the other via Flower to McGuinness who also wielded authority over the CBW team at the fort.6
The real-life operational chains of command were more complex, because of interservice rivalry: McGuinness informally reported to Flower, who in turn reported to Smith, bypassing his official reporting line to the head of Special Branch, possibly because, Cross speculates, he preferred to avoid the scrutiny of BSAP Commissioner Peter Kevin Allum, an old-school policeman who loathed Flower and had little understanding of clandestine work. Reid-Daly likewise earned himself a cowboy reputation for bypassing his official chain of reporting to Lieutenant-General John Hickman, chief of the Rhodesian Army, in favour of a back channel, reporting directly to Lieutenant-General Peter Walls, the Minister of Combined Operations in the War Cabinet, who in turn reported directly to Smith. Cross notes the co-ordinating link between Reid-Daly and McGuinness.
Cross writes that the bushy-browed Symington was born in 1925 in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he read agricultural chemistry. Emigrating to Rhodesia, he rose to become an anatomy professor at the Godfrey Higgins School of Medicine at the University of Rhodesia, with a reputation as an excellent neuroanatomist. Cross notes that opinion on his character varies widely among those who knew him, from ‘charismatic … with an excellent sense of humour’, to a ‘hateful man’ and a ‘racist’.
In October 1975, the Rhodesian CBW programme was initiated and, by late 1976, Symington had assembled a small CBW team. Special Branch allegedly built a research lab at his home in the upmarket Salisbury suburb of Borrowdale, where he experimented with producing ‘large numbers of intriguing poisons’, in Stiff’s words, ‘many of them forgotten since the Middle Ages’.7 Under Rhodesia’s emergency draft, with all men aged between 16 and 60 called up to serve as ‘territorials’, Symington served in the Intelligence Corps, and was then seconded to Special Branch.
Cross names Symington’s CBW team as consisting primarily of Vic Noble and two other men. Noble, who was Symington’s varsity lab assistant, had a patchy academic record, having obtained a diploma in medical technology at the Witwatersrand Technical College but then failing to complete his BSc Honours at the University of the Witwatersrand. He jumped at the chance to do his patriotic duty by joining the professor’s CBW team, as a childhood heart condition excluded any combat role.
The second man had been a University of Rhodesia student when he was called up to serve eighteen months as a territorial. He was attached first to the BSAP training school, then transferred to the Selous Scouts, where Reid-Daly told him to report to McGuinness at Bindura where, Cross notes, ‘he and Vic Noble were the major producers of CBW agents’.
The third man is more mysterious, but Cross states that, like the Scouts’ Phil Morgan, ‘he was a weaponeer who specialised in the construction of explosive devices – notably letter bombs and the “roadrunner” radios – at Bindura fort’. Roadrunner radios were either weaponised with