Death Flight. Michael Schmidt
would provide the Scouts with location information when the radio was turned on. The fort’s weaponeer was severely injured by shrapnel when a device being built by BSAP explosives expert David Perkins detonated prematurely. Perkins was killed in the incident. Cross adds two part-time assistants to the list of Symington’s team: Detective Chief Inspector Henry Wolhuter, McGuinness’s Special Branch liaison to the Scouts at Bindura, and, astoundingly, Wolhuter’s wife, who occasionally also prepared CBW substances.
Somewhere between June 1977 and February 1978, the team relocated to the Bindura fort, 2 km down the Mtepatepa road heading northwest out of the small agricultural town of Bindura, 88 km northeast of Salisbury. Though it was only occupied by Scouts irregularly when on intelligence-gathering or counter-insurgency operations – with the exception of McGuinness’s Special Branch component – Cross states that the Bindura fort was the Scouts’ effective field HQ, having direct telex links not only to the CIO’s ‘Red Bricks’ HQ in Salisbury but also to the South African Police’s Security Branch HQ and the SADF’s Directorate of Military Intelligence (MI), both in Pretoria. He stresses that there was a steady stream of exchanges between the CBW team and a select group of South African military officers and scientists, many of whom visited the Bindura fort and the Selous Scouts’ André Rabie base as they weighed up the necessity of establishing their own CBW programme in the light of the 1976 Soweto uprising and the arrival of Cuban troops in newly independent Angola.
Reciprocally, Symington frequently visited the EMLC and the SAP Forensic Laboratory, while Noble visited the EMLC. At Bindura, members of the tiny CBW team were each paid US$900 by McGuinness. According to Cross, the funds were most likely derived from sums of between US$750 000 and US$800 000 paid to the CIO by ‘South African Intelligence’8 to sustain McGuinness’s operations. Occasionally, the payments even reached US$1 million per month. The CIO is believed to have skimmed some US$250 000 per month off the top for its own purposes.
Cross states that, based on a heavily redacted interview with a former Special Branch officer by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), an operative used to make several trips a month from Rhodesia to South Africa to pass on and receive intelligence and to take back sums of between US$100 000 and US$500 000 – with an astounding ceiling of US$8 million accessible if needed – to pay salaries. This ‘money was provided [to the Rhodesians] by the Saudi government’, the FBI report read. Cross can find no rationale for Saudi funding of the Rhodesian war effort, but the likely answer is that Saudi Arabia was itself a blind and that the money was in fact clandestinely supplied by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and only routed via the Arab state, a firm anti-communist US ally in the Cold War.
The funds were used to pay extra salaries, such as those of Symington and his CBW team, and ‘to purchase CBW materials (including goods to be contaminated) and raw materials from South Africa’, Cross writes. ‘Death bonuses,’ amounting to 1 000 Rhodesian dollars9 for every guerrilla killed, were also paid from these funds.
‘The Special Branch also used the funds to entertain Selous Scouts, hold dances and braais10 for the local population in Bindura, and to sponsor Bindura’s local soccer team in matches across Rhodesia. These expenses were approved by CIO chief Flower.’
In addition, according to former Special Branch officer Henrik Ellert, quoted by Cross, Scouts themselves regularly couriered significant sums from South African Intelligence via the CIO station in Pretoria to the Rhodesian Central Bank. There it was converted into Rhodesian dollars and deposited in a secret CIO account controlled by Ian Smith. At some point, after initially being politely rebuffed, General Magnus Malan, the South African Minister of Defence, came up with the ‘novel idea’ of paying for the information gleaned from McGuinness’s clandestine CBW programme, according to Ellert. ‘The offer was gratefully accepted and members of SA’s Recce Units were thereafter trained alongside Scouts who had been selected for the programme’s “dark side”. It can be said that SA bankrolled the Scouts and their associated SB intelligence effort.’
The sheer scale of SADF financial and military support – which included the loan of heavy equipment such as Eland armoured cars and Alouette light helicopter gunships – meant that Rhodesia effectively became a South African client state.
Cross writes that Rhodesia’s primitive CBW programme, located in a single room at Bindura, probably produced the liquid chemical organophosphate Parathion, which, embedded into clothing, could induce death ‘within a few hours after the onset of symptoms’.
There is little doubt that it also used the Shell organochloride pesticide Telodrin – originally intended to poison baboons – on clothing. Prior to death, Telodrin caused ‘convulsions, seizures, coma, and respiratory depression’. Chillingly, the poisoned clothing was wrapped in bundles and distributed to stores, whose owners were instructed to put the items on their top shelves and never under any circumstances sell them. The intention was that when guerrillas raided the stores, as frequently occurred, they alone would take the contaminated clothing, but the deadly risk to the general population is obvious.
To poison canned food, maize meal, beverages (especially beer), medicine, and virility tablets, the CBW operatives used thallium sulphate, ‘a mercury-based poison which caused a terrible and painful death’, and most probably Warfarin, a blood-thinning agent that in sufficiently large doses causes death by severe haemorrhage. Cross notes a dramatic increase in Harari Hospital medical reports of Parathion poisoning of unknown origin in 1977. He also details the admission of 35 ZANLA insurgents to the Central Hospital at Beira in Mozambique in April 1978. Fifteen of them subsequently died, apparently of Warfarin poisoning.
Biological pathogens were also produced – but not at Bindura. These included cholera, botulinum, and, allegedly, anthrax. Wells and rivers were poisoned, mostly in Mozambique, with security forces given frequent updates on which ones to avoid.
The Rhodesian CBW programme tested its products at the Mount Darwin fort after it fell out of operational use by the Scouts, and from 1979 botulinum was produced there. According to Cross, ‘indications are that the Rhodesians certainly did experiment on captured guerrillas who could not be turned’. He mentions the Zimbabwean government’s announcement of the discovery in mid-2004 of some 5 000 bodies in a disused mine shaft 28 km from Mount Darwin and in mass graves found in the area – though the bodies reported probably included previously undiscovered combat remains.11
Cross estimates, using a 28 June 1977 Combined Operations report of 809 guerrilla deaths due to poisoning until that date, that insurgent deaths due to poisoning were between 1 239 and 2 427 from 1977 to 1979. However, civilians, including farm workers, were also often the victims, mostly after finding and wearing abandoned contaminated clothing, eating poisoned canned food, or drinking infected water, and the death toll in Mozambique and southeastern Rhodesia soared into the hundreds. Death bonuses were regularly paid to those who distributed poisoned items, based on verified resulting deaths.
Cross notes, however, that indigenous knowledge of natural toxins far surpassed the knowledge of the CBW team and was used both to punish guerrilla gangs who extorted villagers, and to take vengeance on civilian rivals in ‘muti’ and witchcraft killings.
Based on clinical and epidemiological data, Cross did a detailed study of the Rhodesian anthrax outbreak. He concluded that it was in fact a natural outbreak exacerbated by the collapse of rural health and veterinary services in the closing phase of the war.
Several members of the Rhodesian CBW programme would seemingly reap a bitter harvest later in their lives.
Wolhuter and his wife emigrated to South Africa when Rhodesia gained independence as Zimbabwe in 1980. Cross states that she ‘died of a cancer she believed was due to her handling of chemicals in Rhodesia. Wolhuter died of a similar cancer soon after. Before his death, Wolhuter passed on documents related to the Rhodesian CBW effort to Peter Stiff.’
Secretive and embittered at having lost both of his legs, allegedly due to the poisonous chemicals he handled at Bindura, Vic Noble went on to work at the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg. He mostly refused to discuss his CBW work, dying in Cape Town on 8 December 2011 after a long illness.
Robert Symington, Rhodesia’s ‘Professor Death’, moved to Cape Town