visit Zimbabwe at that stage.’9
Basson and his counsel have failed to respond to several requests by this author to respond to Pessarra’s claims.10 Basson’s sole response over the past 20 years has been to approach this author during his trial – in defiance of the judge’s orders not to speak to the press – on 19 October 1990, after the Sunday Times published Pessarra’s allegations, saying, ‘That guy Pessarra’s mad, you know? He’s been treated in psychiatric hospitals.’
But the evidence for Basson operating in Rhodesia in the late 1970s – contrary to his denial in court – is strengthened by the interview the former medic gave for this book. He says Basson, whom he had previously met on one or two occasions at 1 Military Hospital, had visited his post at Messina in the far Northern Transvaal in October or November 1979. ‘It was a field hospital and triage set-up at Messina right next to the airport, on the runway in the grass.’ At the time of Basson’s inspection visit, the former medic was a 21-year-old national-service private.11 He later rose to become a commandant in the reservist Citizen Force and said he met Basson on several subsequent occasions at social and military events.
The field hospital at Messina had been set up in anticipation of an expected influx of Rhodesian refugees as the Bush War reached its climax. The former medic says Basson stayed for a couple of days. ‘I think he took a shining to me as I was a bit older than the other troopies and could hold an intelligent conversation.’
According to the medic, Basson asked him to accompany him as an aide on a covert flight into Rhodesia: ‘I went on one excursion sometime in November [1979] to meet with the Rhodesian security forces, but my memory fails me and it could have been October. We flew in a Dak from Messina; we were in civilian clothing – we never flew in uniform – and went in at night, flying low. I don’t know where we landed but there was no fanfare, and I wasn’t privy to the meeting as I was a troopie and was made to wait outside. We flew back the same night.’
He said it appeared as if Basson had made several such trips to meet with his Rhodesian colleagues. In addition, at Basson’s trial, a senior former Selous Scouts member, who testified on the condition that his identity be protected by the court, said that he had met Basson among a SADF delegation in the communal mess at the Scouts’ André Rabie base ‘in the late seventies …’12 Although this was challenged by Basson’s counsel, the witness was indemnified against prosecution by Judge Willie Hartzenberg, which means that the judge accepted his testimony as true. And yet, Bert Sachse strongly denied ever having seen Basson – whom he later got to know well at Special Forces HQ in South Africa – at Buffalo Range or in Rhodesia at all. Not only that, he said, but he had never seen any combat medics like Basson in Rhodesia, only the Recces themselves.13
Returning to his narrative, Pessarra indicated that there was evidently a flurry of telecommunications going back and forth at this time, presumably with the Selous Scouts HQ. The para fire-force pilot told Pessarra they wanted to have five Scouts jump out of the airplane. ‘But they didn’t want us to know anything about it, and Desblé was going to take care of the [jump] procedures and obviously bring in the [parachute lines], check in the equipment, the whole mess; just him and [a Scouts officer] and five Scouts.’
This was highly irregular, as the PJI always accompanied a parachute drop; that was his job. But Desblé was insistent – and they also ‘wanted to black out the first part of the aircraft … they didn’t want the pilots and crew seeing what was going on behind them.’ So Pessarra asked Desblé – Legionnaire to Legionnaire – what was going on. ‘Look,’ Desblé said, ‘the bodies are in the back, the terrs are in the back of the covered Land Rover; they’ve been doctored.’
‘Doctored’ was the Legionnaire way of saying they had been poisoned. However, according to Desblé, the men were ‘still alive, they’re just unconscious … they are going to throw them out on parachutes.’ Pessarra said it then became obvious to him that this was a CBW operation. The plan was apparently to drop the unconscious guerrillas, dressed and armed as Scouts, over enemy territory for them to be found by either FRELIMO or ZANLA forces, their infected bodies taken back, possibly ‘as a trophy into an echelon’s headquarters section … they are going to be taken someplace and this contamination would be continuous as they were passed down the line.’
At about 6:30 pm, the pilot informed Pessarra: ‘We’re going to capitulate, but we want you to get on the flight … and we want you to come with us and take care of our safety.’
‘Which I did. I simply got on the Dak through the navigator’s door [in the nose] when nobody was looking … [and] stayed pushed to one side; the two pilots got on, they came in, they sealed the door.’ Pessarra had said in an earlier tape-recorded message to me that the ‘aircraft interior windows were all blanked out. They had sealed the pilot’s cabin off with canvases so they could not see what was going on in the hold.’
In the primary tape, he continued: ‘And I told [the pilot] I wanted to sneak a peek … by this time, the pilot’s pretty pissed; I mean he’s been told to do this, he knows this is dangerous for the aircraft because he now knows there’s something pretty hinky; I haven’t told him that there’s five terrs there. Anyways, there’s a couple of screws on a plate that I pulled; even though they had a blanket over the door, I was able to look through the side window; saw them load the bodies, they were still unconscious.’
According to Pessarra, they flew according to a map that was given to them outside the window by Sachse. No logbooks are available for this flight, so the route is unknown. But it is most likely that they flew south-southeast, heading for a drop zone that was near Mapai in Gaza province, Mozambique, some 180 km from Buffalo Range.
Such a route would have taken them over the Hippo Valley North Estate, the Matimbi No 2 Tribal Trust land and the Sabi-Lundi Controlled-Hunting Area – this border zone was nicknamed the ‘Russian Front’ – before crossing the border into Gaza province. I am proposing a speculative drop zone near Mapai, as it was the heavily defended headquarters of the FPLM’s No 2 Brigade and the control centre for ZANLA – which perfectly fits the apparent objective of the flight: to poison the ZANLA and FPLM intelligence chains of command. Whatever the actual drop zone was, Pessarra’s tale continued: ‘They made the drop, returned to the air-field …14 They dropped the terrs out on the parachutes; Desblé pulled the stuff [static lines] in. They never spoke to the pilots again.’
Pessarra would leave the Rhodesian Army in about 1980 and, like many parachute-qualified foreigners in Rhodesian service, joined the SADF’s 44 Parachute Brigade at its Tempe base in Bloemfontein. After a brief career there in the early 1980s, which I confirmed with the retired former Officer Commanding 1 Parachute Battalion, Pessarra claims he then became a police informant on the far right, providing information on the murder of two soldiers during the theft of weapons from the Tempe base by the shadowy Die Volk (The Nation) group in June 1998. He then returned home to Texas where he adopted the lifestyle of a heavyset biker.
Asked about the Buffalo Range incident, Sachse said: ‘Jean Desblé? It’s starting to ring a bell … I know we did things like that; we actually dropped guys … I know the parachute thing, it’s ringing some sort of bell … Ja, it’s ringing a bell, but sorry, it’s not very clear. I can remember something like that in fact, but I don’t think that particular operation … on that date was actually planned from where we were [at Buffalo Range].15 We did similar sorts of operations where people were “left behind”, if one can use that expression, in various states. And this one you’re talking about now does start ringing a bell – but I’m not too sure of the facts, and why it was done … or whether they were actually dropped … I can recall an incident where we actually put guys in by helicopter … you can call them doped … it’s very hard to talk about this sort of thing … the guys who were left behind were people that were already, put it this way, gone to meet their maker, and dressed up and sorted out and disposed of or dispatched [i.e. dropped by parachute]
