The next day we drove back to the UNITA base and were picked up by a Puma soon after our arrival. At Rundu we were met on the runway by Ormonde Power and Colonel Murphy and were sneaked off to Fort Foot in an enclosed van. We had the customary welcoming dinner with champagne and all, but for Diedies and me the evening was overshadowed by the fact that we hadn’t succeeded. At the back of my mind I was already considering what we would do next.
Shortly afterwards, we received confirmation via the intelligence channel that FAPLA evacuated the fighters every afternoon from Menongue to Huambo, which was much further from the border and thus considered safer. This was excellent information, fresh and accurate, but unfortunately three weeks too late.
7
Operation Angel
August 1987
AFTER THE ANC was banned by the National Party government, in 1960, many of its leaders went into exile. The organisation opened offices in several African countries, including Zambia, Tanzania, Angola, Botswana, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the ANC’s armed wing, also established a series of offices and training camps in the frontline states from where guerrilla operations into South Africa were launched.
The 1980s saw the ANC taking the armed struggle against the apartheid regime to the next level, with an increase in attacks on civilian targets and a determined attempt to make the townships ungovernable. In 1985 the National Party government invoked the first state of emergency, and began to employ a variety of measures, some highly controversial, to counter the ANC.
One day late in 1986 Diedies and I were ordered to report to Special Forces HQ where we met Frans Fourie, a highly capable and very experienced officer from 4 Recce. A secluded intelligence meeting room had been prepared for our briefing. As a special measure to secure the venue, it was cordoned off and swept for bugs. Only once we were inside and introduced to representatives from the Department of Foreign Affairs and the National Intelligence Service did we realise the gravity of the moment. It soon turned out that we were to deploy with Frans on a highly sensitive secret mission. The operation clearly received the highest level of attention.
The meeting commenced with an intelligence overview of ANC deployments in countries neighbouring South Africa and a summary of events depicting the escalation of the threat against the state. Then the mission was conveyed to us: a raid was to be conducted in Tanzania, aimed at wiping out the entire top structure of the ANC. The operation had already been approved at the highest level and preparations had to commence immediately.
Our target was the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College (SOMAFCO) in Mazimbu, near Morogoro in central Tanzania, where a special meeting of the ANC national executive committee would take place. The conference would be attended by all the significant leaders, including Oliver Tambo, then president of the ANC, Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma and Chris Hani.
Our mission was to penetrate SOMAFCO and set explosive charges in the Hector Pieterson Conference Hall, the main venue at the facility. The plan was a rather elaborate but executable one. The team would be flown to Malawi’s Blantyre International Airport, and from there to the Nyika National Park in the northeast of the country. A secret base would be established at the Chelinda camp within the reserve for final preparation and E&E planning. It would also serve as Tac HQ and final staging point for the raid into Tanzania.
From Nyika, the team would be taken by civilian aircraft to a DZ in the Morogoro Crater. The plane would be guided in by an agent, known to us only by the code name Angel, for a parachute drop at low altitude. Angel had been recruited by Military Intelligence because of his intimate knowledge of the area and his ability to access African countries. After landing, the three-man team would meet up with Angel, who would orientate us and guide us in towards the target. Once in proximity to SOMAFCO, the agent would withdraw and the team would commence with the penetration. Charges would be planted in the main venue and the timing mechanisms set for 09:30 the next morning, when the conference was expected to be in full swing.
The team would withdraw to a remote airfield and would be picked up by fixed-wing aircraft and taken back to Malawi. If the pick-up was compromised and the team had to go into escape and evasion mode, the Tanzam railway line would be used as the escape and evacuation route, with predetermined RVs at landing strips along the line.
My first reaction was that the mission would be impossible due to the vast distances involved. My second thought was that the operation, if successful, would spark massive international criticism. But on both accounts a broad plan had already been drawn up.
With the briefings concluded, we started our planning and preparations. Hannes Venter, OC 4 Recce, was selected as the mission commander, and Dave Scales would act as Tac HQ coordinator. We worked through every available piece of information, studying maps and photos the intelligence officers managed to produce. The aerial photos were outdated but invaluable to the planning of our final penetration. We had to rely mostly on reports from secondary sources, with the result that detailed information about the target was lacking.
One thing that became clear from most sources was that the facilities were locked during the night and that we needed to establish a way of silently breaching the locked doors to the main building.
Looking back today, I realise that the information was sketchy, the aerial photography vastly inadequate and the reports from agents on the ground severely lacking. But we had a job to do and we assumed that we would be able to do a recce of the target before the penetration.
Frans and I went on a lock-picking course to master the trick of gaining access through locked doors. After five days of picking locks, I was ready to work my way into just about any vault in the country. Once we breached the perimeter, it would be my job to get us inside the conference hall, so I spent lots of time picking the locks of every door in Special Forces HQ at night.
After extensive brainstorming sessions between the team and explosives experts from EMLC, an ingenious device was designed. Explosive charges were fitted to the back of six large blocked photos of Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki and other high-ranking ANC leaders. The photos, which were obtained through Special Forces Intelligence, were old and grainy, but they looked authentic enough to pass casual scrutiny. The photos were glued on to a moulded frame of sheet explosives with a layer of ball bearings in front, transforming the innocent-looking posters into lethal Claymore mines. A timing device would be fitted in a gap at the back of the explosives.
Our job would be to arm the timers and glue the deadly posters to the inner walls of the conference venue. They would explode the next day when the majority of conference-goers would be in the hall.
Rehearsals were done in and around Pretoria. At Ditholo, a small military air base north of the city, we practised parachuting at low level from the aircraft, a Cessna Caravan II, which had been modified for static-line parachuting as well as to conceal our weapons and equipment. For the parachute drop, the door was refitted for easy removal. A cable was fixed to the inner starboard side for the parachute static lines to be attached to. Initially we considered freefall parachuting, but this was ruled out for a number of reasons, the most important being that we needed to approach the target area at low level to avoid detection by radar. At the time, the three of us were also too inexperienced to guarantee accurate regrouping and landing at night. In the final instance, landing a high-velocity freefall parachute on an unprepared and unmanned DZ at night was too high a risk.