to bring enlightenment to a ‘backward’ people.
I found it disturbing that most of the death flight victims in the book could not be identified because the interviewees chose ‘not to remember’ details. It is unimaginable that a system ostensibly operating on the basis of security intelligence would have disposed of people without knowledge of the risk (real or imagined) that they presented and, most importantly, without knowing their identities – the basic construct of the world of intelligence.
One hopes that the names that did make it into the book will bring some closure to many a family who, to date, may have had little idea of what happened to their beloved.
And for those whose identities remain unverified, one hopes that, by turning the light on this hitherto ‘concealed’ class of victims, Death Flight will invite further scholarship and activism probing this issue. It appears that this important task escaped even the TRC.
Adding to the contemporary relevance of the book is the disturbing revelation of a covert, post-TRC process of exemption for perpetrators, as well as an inexplicable (if not unconstitutional) change to the policy of the National Prosecuting Authority. One hopes that this may provide impetus for the wheels of justice to once again start turning.
This part of the book resonates with the recent progressive judgment handed down in the Ahmed Timol matter by Judge Billy Mothle. The case has re-energised the efforts of many families in South Africa seeking justice for the unresolved political killings of their loved ones. The court proceedings, aimed at ensuring that João Rodrigues is held accountable for the murder of Timol, have exposed the conniving role played by some structures of the democratic government in protecting the perpetrators of apartheid.
The recent denial by former president FW de Klerk that apartheid was a crime against humanity triggered an outcry and a national debate about our past. The contents of this book make an irrefutable case confirming the commission – in the most brutal of ways – of such a crime. Furthermore, it raises serious questions about the role of members of the State Security Council, which at one stage included De Klerk himself, along with a broad network of other senior members of government.
Death Flight is a daring mission to salvage the ghosts of those who were thought to have been eternally dissolved, by apartheid Special Forces, deep in the oceanic waters off our shores. It is destined to become an invaluable tool, connecting the dots in the quest to ensure that no victim of the deadly hand of apartheid is left unaccounted for.
Nkosinathi Biko
May 2020
Prologue
Disappeared men tell no tales
In early May 1947, a group of six to eight villagers were herded onto a French military plane in eastern Madagascar.1 The captured men were about to become unwilling participants in a crude and cruel display of power by the colonial forces.
With the Junkers Ju 52 travelling slowly at 170–180 km/h, the prisoners were thrown from the door of the plane in mid-air, tumbling to a horrifying death – ‘demonstrative bombs’ in the words of one Malagasy parliamentarian.
Flying Officer Guillaume de Fontanges and Lieutenant Hervéou, who commanded the small garrison of Mananjary, wanted to teach the rebellious population a lesson. Tribal ‘wizards’ had been encouraging an uprising against French colonial rule by claiming that their magic would change the bombs of the French to paper. By dropping the rebels over their home villages, the officers were hoping to demonstrate the superiority of French technology over wizardry.2
The atrocity in Madagascar is the first recorded instance of a death flight, a practice that would eventually become an integral part of a secret military doctrine used against insurgencies worldwide.
More than five decades later, on 12 July 1979, Major Neil Kriel, commander of a shadowy and deadly apartheid military unit called Delta 40, woke up in Otjiwarongo, South West Africa. On his high-powered, high-frequency radio he received an order directly from his superior officer, Major-General Fritz Loots, the man in charge of the Recces, South Africa’s renowned Reconnaissance Commandos: fly north to Oshivelo and pick up two packages for ‘disposal’.
It would be no ordinary cargo.
Upon arrival in Oshivelo, Kriel and his partner, Colonel Johan Theron, received the ‘packages’ – two dead SWAPO guerrillas. Following a few further stops, they headed towards the Skeleton Coast with their human cargo, landing at Meob Bay, deep in the northern region of the Sperrgebiet, the famous ‘Forbidden Area’.
There, at a deserted beach, the two operators established the chilling routine that would become common over the following eight and a half years. They took off the bodies’ clothes, removed the rear door of their Piper Seneca II aircraft, and hid the door and the clothing in the sand. They took off into the fading afternoon with their two naked, dead passengers, Kriel pointing the Piper’s nose out over the Atlantic Ocean.
By the time they returned to Meob Bay two hours later, the back of their plane was empty …
This book traces the story of how South Africa’s security forces came to embrace the death flight doctrine and examines the pivotal role played by Delta 40, the ultra-secret South African Special Forces unit with elements of Rhodesia’s famous Selous Scouts embedded in its DNA. Delta 40 would soon become Project Barnacle, before later morphing into the feared Civil Cooperation Bureau.
In adding death flights to its arsenal of dirty tricks, South Africa’s apartheid regime joined the odious ranks of the far-right French colonial forces in Algeria and the Argentine generals waging a dirty war against their own citizens.
De Fontanges, the French architect of the first known death flight in 1947, boasted openly of the new tactic he had invented. He was never censured and went on to become a celebrated pilot in France’s ultimately disastrous war in Indochina, where his death flight doctrine was rumoured to have been taken up with enthusiasm. It was also exported to Algeria, where it supplemented a broader black-ops strategy against pro-independence insurgents.
The strategy included torture, extrajudicial killings, and the deployment of pseudo-gangs – the practice of turning the enemy into one’s own deadly instrument. Many of the extrajudicial killings in Algeria were carried out by a team led by former-parachutist-turned-intelligence-agent Major Paul Aussaresses, which he nicknamed the ‘Squadron of Death’, arguably the origin of the term ‘death squad’ as it was widely copied in Latin America. Those who fell into the Squadron’s clutches would often, after surrendering any valuable information acquired by torture, be disappeared by death flight over the Mediterranean by General Bruno Bigead’s helicopters. Algeria also saw the use of pseudo-gangs of civilians and security forces organised by the far-right Secret Army Organisation (OAS) as ‘Delta Commandos’ under Foreign Legion defector Lieutenant Roger Degueldre to commit perhaps 2 000 insurgent killings; the Delta designation would later find a deadly echo in South Africa’s own counterinsurgency war. Despite its popularity among counterinsurgency forces, the use of pseudo-gangs as assassins (though not as intelligence-gatherers) had since 1907 been outlawed under international law. It is classified as the war crime of ‘perfidy’ where an attacker disguises himself, either in his enemy’s colours or uniform, or as a neutral or civilian party, in order to capture or kill his enemy.
The French counterinsurgency doctrine was codified by General André Beaufre, whose ‘total strategy’ would one day have a profound influence on South Africa’s military. Beaufre argued for a holistic – one could say totalitarian – battlespace. It involved dissolving the boundaries between military and civilian life, with the military omnisciently co-ordinating social, economic, civil, psychological, and propaganda
