a bedroom for the medics, two SB offices, an SB rest room, and two SB bedrooms – and right next to that, six cells for captured guerrillas. Mount Darwin differed from Buffalo Range and Bindura in that there were no cells for prisoners and no medical facilities.10
Captured guerrillas played a critical role in the intelligence operations of the Scouts, according to Cline. ‘For a prisoner to be of any use to us, it was absolutely vital that his identity was totally protected and that neither the locals in the area of the contact, nor anyone back at the security force base, knew of his capture or even of his existence,’ Cline writes.
The first priority was to give a captured insurgent the best possible medical care. The initial communication with the detainee would only concern his health and physical welfare. ‘The captive was usually astonished to see that everything had been done to ensure his life was saved. And because of this, whether consciously or unconsciously, a feeling of gratitude would begin to permeate his mind, according to Cline.’
Around 800 turned insurgents were eventually recruited in this manner, their salaries paid by Special Branch. The original intention had been for Selous Scouts helicopters to deploy from the courtyard of each fort, but the tumultuous, dusty downdraft proved disastrous. Still, the model was replicated elsewhere – including at the Buffalo Range Forward Airfield (FAF) at Chiredzi in the southeast of the country.
The practice of beguiling, interrogating, and attempting to turn guerrillas in cells at Special Forces bases would later be copied in South Africa and South West Africa, particularly at 5 Reconnaissance Commando’s home base at Phalaborwa and its forward base at Fort Rev at Ondangwa in the South African-controlled territory of South West Africa.
Forward airfields were locations from which small action squads (known as ‘fire-force sticks’) of the Rhodesian Light Infantry, Special Air Service, or Selous Scouts could rapidly deploy into battle by helicopter, often once the Rhodesian Air Force had bombed an enemy target. The Buffalo Range FAF would later become the site of a dramatic scene that demonstrated the strengthening relationship between the Rhodesian SAS and Selous Scouts and the South African Recces.
Meanwhile, like many of the Scouts’ pseudo-terrorists, Kriel grew a full, bushy beard that gave a sudden menace to his looming bulk. But he had a wicked sense of humour and revelled in his unit’s somewhat frightening, unconventional appearance. Sergeant Rob ‘Wings’ Wilson tells of one mission to Mapai in southern Mozambique ‘to blow up as much of the town as we could’. Wilson, Kriel (then a captain), some other Scouts, and four national-service mechanics were on the flight to Mapai, their Douglas C-47 loaded with explosives. Dressed in their guerrilla gear and armed with AK-47s, Kriel casually told the unknowing conscripts that they were bound for an enemy country – and shouldn’t smoke as they would blow themselves to kingdom come due to the explosives they were transporting, leaving them ashen-faced. The town, captured earlier by the Scouts, had been primed for detonation by Kriel and his team.
‘As luck would have it, just as we were heading over the final ridge overlooking Mapai, the charges detonated. As we were out of the danger area, it was great to be able to watch the town disintegrate into a pile of rubble, with the highlight being the warehouse which looked like Hollywood special effects.’11
Kriel also carried his passion for rugby into the Selous Scouts. In a tale told by Colour Sergeant Noel Robey – later to become a covert operative in South Africa’s pseudo-operations – Sergeant Joe Lewis arrived at the Scouts’ André Rabie home base with his head bandaged. It turned out Lewis had got into an argument at an army club for claiming the Scouts could whip any other armed forces rugby team; in the ensuing brawl, part of his ear had been bitten off. Outraged, Reid-Daly recalled a number of Scouts teams from their operational deployments and formed them into a rugby team to teach the army a lesson. Robey said ‘the war stopped for a week’ as a team, including bulky, bearded players like Hart and Kriel, was assembled. Kriel and the Selous Scouts XV ‘overran’ the Army XV, and Lewis’s honour was restored.12
2
From Pretoria bar to Rhodesian bush
In late 1975, two former Rhodesian Special Air Service soldiers who had been running a rough bar in central Pretoria, which became a watering hole for serving and former SAS members, came up with the idea of returning to Rhodesia and forming a small recce unit.
With Sergeant Dave Scales left behind to run the pub, South African-born Chris ‘Schulie’ Schulenburg,1 a tall, dark-haired introvert, met with and pitched the idea to Major Brian Robinson in early 1976. In 1970, Robinson had been the first commander of the Army School of Infantry’s newly formed Tracking Wing, the ‘Tackies’, and its Tracker Combat Unit. In April 1974, this was absorbed into the Selous Scouts, giving it a crucial bushcraft and tracker capacity.
Robinson nixed the plan for a new recce unit – but before Schulenburg left Rhodesia, he paid a call on the Scouts’ Major Ron Reid-Daly, who was aware of the failed pitch to the SAS. Two days later, Reid-Daly told Schulenburg that he could accommodate a specialised recce team in the Selous Scouts.
This team, known as the Recce Troop, initially only consisted of two men – Schulenburg and Scales – but they soon recruited Lieutenant Tim Callow of the SAS, who had been attached to the School of Infantry in Gwelo. Prior to this, reconnaissance teams had usually consisted of four soldiers, but Schulenburg came up with the novel idea of only two men, one white and one black, allowing a much smaller footprint in the bush. The black recce would engage with the population in the guise of a guerrilla, while the blacked-up white recce would hide out in the bush and handle communications with a dedicated Recce Troop signals element back at their small Scouts-based tactical HQ.
As Scales recalls, the idea was that two-man teams ‘would be more secure and more clandestine and have greater mobility. When lying up in a hide, camouflage and concealment would be easier and each man’s culture would also complement the other.’2 This innovation and his dramatic subsequent career would secure Schulenburg’s place in the annals of long-range recon operations.
Scales formed a two-man team with Captain Robert Warraker of the SAS, commander of the Recce Troop. Schulenburg and the Scouts’ Sergeant Stephen Mpofu, an experienced pseudo-operations team leader, were the second team, while the towering Callow, who stood as high as the ox-horns on the Scouts’ famous unit standard, and Corporal Martin Chikondo, a former operational tracker turned Scout, teamed up for the third.
The teams would parachute into the operational area either through low-altitude static-line drops, or high-altitude-low-opening (HALO) drops from a Dakota specially adapted to fly at 20 000 ft above sea level, that is, roughly 15 000 ft above ground level in Rhodesia. One drawback of having only two men in a team was that they had exceptionally heavy loads to share when carrying their weapons, night sights, radios, and batteries. As they were operating in dry regions where they had to steer clear of water sources used by the locals, they had to cache food and water in the bush to enable them to operate for between 10 and 21 days. But several successful operations demonstrated the effectiveness of this long-range recon method – one that was concurrently being devised by the SADF in Angola.
Although Schulenburg, Mpofu, and Chikondo preferred their hair neat – Schulenburg sporting a goatee, Mpofu a pencil moustache, and Chikondo a cropped beard – the other white troopers went bush, letting their hair grow out. A 1976 formal group photograph3 in Scouts camouflage uniforms taken at Schulenburg’s pub, known as the ‘Tambuti Lodge’, at the Scouts’ André Rabie base, shows Schulenburg, Mpofu, and Chikondo sitting with Scales and Callow, the last two sporting bushy, unkempt beards. An undated field shot shows Schulenburg in his most common guise: grubby guerrilla overalls, gripping his precious water bottle, with matted hair and blacked-up face and neck, his staring eyes evincing the exhaustion of a long deployment.4
On 12
