Although a member of Air Staff, I had been deployed from June right through to the end of September to teach many pilots visual recce; there being no one else to do the job. When eventually I returned to Salisbury, hoping to commence work on a few projects I had lined up, I learned that four South African pilots were on their way to Rhodesia for recce training.
Jan Mienie, Francois du Toit, Eugene Coetzer and Don Jordaan were by far the most willing pilots I had flown with. This made teaching them, even in the most trying dry conditions with no terrorists around, a much easier task than expected.
These four men could not get over the living conditions at FAF 5, Mtoko. They considered this to be a place of luxury and found the food equal to the best of home cooking. They were right I suppose, because we tended to take for granted the efforts of Squadron Leader Murray Hofmeyr and other members of Air HQ staff. They went to great lengths to provide the best possible accommodation and comforts, including swimming pools, from the meagre funds allocated for each forward air base.
Regular caterers from the various messes at New Sarum and Thornhill did two-week stints in the field where they did wonders with the regular run of fresh rations for their kitchens. The squadron technicians always praised the quantity and quality of food served by preceding caterers to ensure that the current staff would compete for higher accolades.
Jan, Francois, Eugene and Don flew with me in pairs for three sorties each before launching off on their own to cover ground allocated to them. Every fourth day one of them flew with me so that I could check out the places they had marked on their maps. By Christmas they had covered the entire operational area from Mount Darwin eastward to the border and had pinpointed every old CT base and feeding-point previously recorded in the dry season.
The rains had set in and the bush was thickening when I took the opportunity to take my four South African charges to Salisbury for a grand Christmas luncheon with my extended family. The next day we returned to Mtoko believing that ZANLA’s return was imminent.
At about this time Shell & BP installed underground fuel tanks for Avtur and Avgas at FAF 5. Amazingly the engineer responsible for the work was a very good-looking woman, Di Edmunds. In the evening she was beautifully dressed and trimmed, every bit a lady. By day she was something else. In overalls and wielding a heavy pipe wrench with the ease of a tough rigger, she drove her team of four black men relentlessly to keep up with the high rate at which she worked. In doing this, she employed the foulest language I have ever heard. This not only amazed the men at FAF 5; it caused them to keep well clear of her in daylight hours.
Détente and SB
FOUR MONTHS EARLIER, ON 25 AUGUST 1975, a much-publicised South African and Zambian détente-generated meeting between the Rhodesian Government, ZAPU and ZANU took place in a South African Railways carriage on the Victoria Falls Bridge midway between Rhodesia and Zambia. The meeting was another détente failure despite the assurances given Ian Smith by Prime Minister Vorster and President Kaunda that ZAPU and ZANU were ready and willing to meet formally with the Rhodesian Government leaders. To facilitate this meeting, leading men of ZAPU and ZANU had been released, on parole, from Rhodesian prisons; another huge political error forced on Rhodesia by Vorster.
The object of the meeting had been to give the parties opportunity to express, publicly and without preconditions, their genuine desire to negotiate for an acceptable settlement. This was to be followed by the disengagement of forces and talks between the parties on Rhodesian soil.
As expected from past bitter experience, preconditions were raised in the very first statement that was made on behalf of ZANU and ZAPU by Bishop Abel Muzorewa. At the luncheon recess, ZANU and ZAPU delegates cleaned out the vast liquor holdings of the South African Railways bar before making a drunken departure back to Zambia. They were totally incapable of returning for the afternoon session. Later a message from Zambia indicated that neither ZAPU nor ZANU had any intention of honouring their agreements with Kaunda and Vorster. So that was the end of Vorster’s ‘guaranteed’ détente initiative.
At the time it was clear that ZAPU had one undisputed leader, Joshua Nkomo, who continued to be wrongly viewed by Kaunda as the leader of all Rhodesia’s African people. Within ZANU there was turmoil with three people claiming to be its leader. They were Bishop Abel Muzorewa, the Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole and Robert Mugabe. Not only was there confusion in political ranks; there existed huge rifts in the ZANLA ranks between members of the Karanga, Manyika and Chizezuru factions. Such is the nature of African politics.
A Special Branch agent in Zambia had used a custom-made bomb to assassinate ZANLA’s operations chief, Herbert Chitepo, to engineer more confusion. Chitepo’s VW Beetle activated the bomb’s electrical firing mechanism when he reversed out of the driveway of his rented home in Lusaka. The assassination had been rigged in a manner that fingered members of ZANLA’s DARE (military high command) and led to the arrest and imprisonment of Josiah Tongogara and other senior military personnel; leaving ZANLA headless.
It was all very well to be content with a high attrition rate amongst ZANLA’s numbers inside the country, but as I have said, most Rhodesian officers realised that the best place to fight the enemy was beyond one’s borders. With reducing numbers of ZANLA personnel inside Rhodesia and troubles in ZANLA’s command structures, it was the perfect time to strike hard and in depth to stem the inward flow of replacements. However, as has been stated already, South Africa made overt action impossible.
Frustrating political constraints on the military desire to take the war into hostile Mozambique and Zambia continued to be, so far as we could see, the consequence of Vorster’s obsession with his détente initiatives. Ian Smith’s book The Great Betrayal released over twenty years later confirms these suspicions.
However, because of the nature of its operations Special Branch had never been constrained in the same way as the military, and SB was determined to make the best of this unique situation. They had no intention of sitting back and waiting for increased troubles with intensified bloodshed when détente initiatives for the December 1974 ceasefire were seen to be against Rhodesia’s interests. The SB knew that this and future détente initiatives would fail; so they aimed to capitalise on ZANLA’s confused situation by intensifying it. Inside Mozambique, no great distance from Mukumbura, SB and Army intelligence officers managed to set up meetings with Thomas Nhari. He was a ZANLA field commander and member of the DARE. Meetings with Nhari and his lieutenants occurred on three or four occasions between September and November 1974. This was a period when ZANLA was already pretty punch-drunk from our mounting successes inside the country and from the SAS’s continued attacks along their ‘safe routes’ in Mozambique.
Thomas Nhari, like Rex Nhongo, had been a Russian-trained member of ZAPU before defecting to ZANU in 1971. For the SB and Army officers, posing as white left-wing agitators, it was easy to persuade Nhari that ZANLA was failing inside Rhodesia because they were following Chinese philosophies and using light weapons when what they really needed were heavy weapons, as advocated by the Russians.
The enormous casualties suffered by ZANLA seemed to give credibility to the lie and Nhari and his followers were fired by these thoughts. They accepted as truth many accusations that pointed to the fact that all ZANLA’s weaknesses lay squarely with ZANU politicians and senior DARE members. These people lived lives of luxury in Lusaka, never caring a damn for the lives of armed ZANLA comrades who suffered immense dangers and hardships in blind support of selfish ‘fat cats’. Nhari was persuaded that he could secure power to himself and his followers and then come to an accommodation with the Rhodesian Government.