South African forces methods used in Rhodesia …’4 Clearly, Kriel needed a couple of hard men with extensive expertise in counterinsurgency pseudo-operations, reconnaissance, and intelligence.
His founding partner was Trevor Floyd, a dark-haired, big-chinned soldier who had joined the SADF in 1961 after attending Florida Park High School in Roodepoort, on Johannesburg’s West Rand. He first trained as an infantry instructor, then in 1965 as a parachute instructor at 1 Parachute Battalion. In 1967, he passed the Rhodesian SAS selection after a series of actions supporting the SAS in its counterinsurgency operations. One of Jan Breytenbach’s ‘Dirty Dozen’ who founded what later became Special Forces in 1970, Floyd had engaged in legendary early proto-Recce and Recce operations as far afield as Biafra and Tanzania, and had been appointed 1 Recce Commando’s regimental sergeant-major (RSM) upon its establishment at the Bluff in 1972. Floyd stayed on as 1 Recce RSM while the new unit was being set up, only officially surrendering his post on 11 January 1980 and becoming a ‘civilian’.5
Kriel later stated: ‘Trevor and I basically started it together.’6 Working as Kriel’s adjutant, Floyd helped the Rhodesian navigate the complexities and significantly different systems and culture of the SADF. According to Gould and Folb, Kriel ‘testified that during the first few months of 1980, he and Trevor Floyd spent three weeks in trucks driving from Broederstroom to Rhodesia, bringing back “everything” that had been supplied to the Rhodesian forces by [SADF] Special Forces, including “special equipment”.’
Floyd told this author: ‘On the very day that Mugabe took over, I drove a ten-ton truck with a five-ton trailer up to Bindura and packed it full, then drove it down to the border and passed right through without any problems; it was amazing what weaponry was being moved about in those days.’7
Peter Stiff details what was delivered: ‘Much of it comprised weapons captured by the Selous Scouts and Rhodesian SAS but also special equipment too … powerful SSB radio sets, Zimbabwean police and army uniforms and other kit, explosives and so on.’8 Some equipment was even flown into South Africa by C-130 and C-160 transport planes, but the SADF had to abandon plans to repatriate a squadron of Eland armoured cars fitted with 9 mm cannon that it had given on permanent loan to the Rhodesian Army, and also had to leave behind 800 brand-new Belgian FN MAG machine guns. Stiff noted that, in the aftermath of Zimbabwean independence, much of the ‘special equipment’ was sneaked back into Zimbabwe by the new unit – where it was cached for future use by a stay-behind network of agents who spent much time feverishly copying everything from the blueprints of Zimbabwean bridges to the keys of police vehicles.
Floyd says that the original intention had been for 1 Recce to establish a pseudo capability, but although, as Paul Mathyssen and his fellow authors state, 1 Recce’s ‘Guerrilla Warfare Group’ was the first to train and utilise black soldiers within the ranks of the SADF for pseudo-operations, this function were soon taken over by 5 Recce as it had a larger black operator complement who could pass for guerrillas, as they knew the regional dialects and geography of Ovamboland and southern Angola.9
‘The aim in the beginning was more to capture as many people [as possible] and to turn them for own use, for use in pseudo-ops, which is always better as he knows the area, he knows the people, he knows the habits,’ Floyd said. Yet the rationale, he said, for creating the SPO as an entirely separate pseudo-ops unit was the need to differentiate between the tasks of purely military Recce ops and pseudo-ops (or black ops), which he termed ‘covert ops’.10
Stiff claimed that the founding of the SPO was somewhat of an afterthought by Loots because ‘the original idea had been to form all the men recruited from Rhodesian Intelligence into one unit to work with and provide operational intelligence for 3 and 6 Reconnaissance Commandos – the former Selous Scouts and the Rhodesian SAS. The plan had been for the Rhodesians to work on their own without South African involvement.’
According to Stiff, Kriel secretly visited Rhodesia after the March 1980 elections and persuaded several former Selous Scouts and Special Branch detectives to fly to Pretoria for interviews with Loots, who was familiar with their backgrounds.
‘He expressed interest in recruiting a team of professional clandestine operators from the Rhodesian Security Forces … It was too early to detail exactly how things would work. Nor had he figured out how he would keep the unit clandestine once its members [joined] the Permanent Force. Would it be feasible, he asked, for them to persuade some of their black subordinates, Special Branch detectives, black Selous Scouts, and turned guerrillas to come to South Africa with them?’11
By 1979, the Scouts’ Recce Troop had been renamed its Recce Group and had grown to 35 Recces, 10 of them white and 25 black, with Captain Andy Samuels as its commanding officer, and Captain Tim Bax as his second-in-command. It was divided into two troops: A-Troop, commanded by Lieutenant Edward Piringondo,12 and B-Troop, by Captain Tim Callow.13
It was from among these and other Scouts ranks that Kriel recruited the initial SPO members – a hand-picked pseudo-ops team the likes of which had not been seen in South Africa since the days of the ‘Dirty Dozen’. The SPO would soon be renamed Delta 40, or more commonly D40.
Floyd and Theron confirmed that, in D40’s first year, only Major Chris Schulenburg and his former Scouts Recce Group comrade Captain Tim Callow comprised its initial long-range recon and pseudo-ops capacity – its Operations wing.14 Schulenburg and Callow focused on getting the Ops wing established and conducted no operations in that first year (logical, as Schulenburg’s doctrine called for white operators to be paired with black, and as yet they had no black team members). The Ops wing’s task was to gather intelligence deep in enemy territory and to strike at specific targets via sabotage or assassination. Although earlier SADF assaults had occurred in neighbouring countries – notably by a Recce team (including Floyd) off the SAS Emily Hobhouse submarine against the ANC in Dar es Salaam in 1972 – this can be considered to be the escalation of the SADF’s cross-border raids and targeted assassinations on foreign soil.
In mid-1979, the nucleus of D40 was five pseudo-operators: Kriel, Floyd, Callow, Schulenburg, and Major Gray Branfield, a former Special Branch detective inspector. According to Floyd’s evidence in court, the unit grew rapidly in its first year to about 25 members, most of them black.15 According to Kriel, relations between D40’s black and white pseudo-operators were characterised by ‘total trust’, as ‘they lived in each other’s pockets’, an assertion that is belied by his later actions in D40. Only about two-thirds of the 25 members of D40 were actual field operators, including the long-range recon teams and black ops men.
By December 1980, according to an organisational diagram of the unit marked ‘Top Secret’ and produced in court,16 D40’s Operations wing – consisting of ‘operators throughout’ and reporting directly to Kriel – was divided by task: those engaged in long-range recon (‘2 white, 4 non-white operators’) were tasked with ‘primary operations’, while those who would be dedicated to other pseudo-ops work (four teams of two operators each, one white and one black in each team) were tasked with other ‘small-teams’ operations disguised as civilians. This was confirmed by Johan Theron.17
By the time the organogram was drawn up, twenty months after D40’s founding, the Operations wing thus consisted of a set of fourteen (perhaps sixteen) veteran reconnaissance operators18 organised into two-man teams consisting of one white and one black operator each, working according to the pseudo-ops doctrine laid down by Schulenburg.
Конец
