down. According to Scales, a request was submitted to Reid-Daly for Major Neil Kriel to be the new operational commander of the Recce Troop, with Schulenburg as his second-in-command. Reid-Daly approved the request.
The core of the specialist soldiers who would within a few years form the SADF’s most clandestine operational unit and its operational intelligence unit had now been consolidated: Schulenburg’s Recce Troop commanded by Neil Kriel, and Winston Hart’s anti-terrorism Special Branch team attached to the Scouts. An undated photograph5 shows a smiling Reid-Daly in browns and a camo shirt at a cookout with Hart’s boss, Mac McGuinness, in a business suit and a glowering, full-bearded, full-bellied Kriel in civvy short-sleeved shirt and checked pants. Operating in a twilight zone on the edge of legality, Kriel’s pseudo-operations was starting to inch further into the shadows as it increasingly embraced insurgent weapons and civilian clothing.
An undated photograph of Schulenburg and Kriel6 at what appears to be a roadblock, in front of one Army and two civilian Land Rovers, shows Schulenburg in a long-sleeved checked shirt, shorts, and running shoes, sporting long locks, his goatee overgrown into a full beard, his right hand casually gripping his wood-handled AK-47, while Kriel, in brown bell-bottoms and a similar checked shirt, is in a half-crouch as if he has just heard a shot, his dark glasses and beard masking his expression. Kriel’s weapon is apparently a Russian drum-fed RPD 7.62 mm light machine gun, modified by being shortened and painted black for clandestine, close-quarter battle by the Selous Scouts’ armourer, Sergeant-Major 2nd Class Phil Morgan – a man who would also later play a key role in the SADF’s pseudo-operations. Morgan would also produce weapons such as an AK-47 with a collapsible wire stock, straight FN-style magazine and a short barrel with forward grip suitable for paratrooper operations. A rare photograph of Morgan7 shows him dressed in a grey suit and loud 1970s tie while all but one of his comrades are in Scouts camouflage.
After members of 5 Recce had attended a course on two-man reconnaissance in Rhodesia, apparently around early 1979, Schulenburg was invited to 5 Recce’s forward base at Ondangwa in South West Africa to present a similar course to operators, including one whom we will encounter again, Lieutenant André Diedericks. It was followed by a parachute deployment of the trainees into southern Angola to determine the volume of traffic on the road between Cahama and Villa Roçadas. The mission was a success, but the small-teams concept had a troubled inception in the SADF, Diedericks recalled. On the one hand, some operators resisted the idea of ultra-specialised recon-only teams; on the other hand, some unit commanders competed to have their ‘own’ decentralised small teams, undermining the concept of ‘a strategic reconnaissance capability’.8
3
Behold a pale horse: Rhodesia’s biochemical warfare
Another element was thrown into the clandestine counter-insurgency mix with the use of chemical and biological warfare agents, what I shall term the ‘pale horse’.1 It coincided with a retreat by the Rhodesian state – a process echoed in South Africa and its de facto colony of South West Africa – from legal due process in dealing with opponents. ‘From 1976, all normal mechanisms of justice were abandoned by the Rhodesian government,’ Chandré Gould and Peter Folb write.2
‘Special courts were gazetted which allowed captured guerrillas to be tried in situ, without referral to district courts or the Supreme Court. Defence for the guerrillas was often provided by the Rhodesia security forces from legally trained conscripts. Some executions were carried out in situ and no records were available for who was tried and when executions were carried out,’ raising the question of whether these ‘special courts’ and their brutal justice were de facto extrajudicial. A crematorium found in the bush outside the Chikurubi maximum security prison after independence in the 1980s suggests that bodies of those executed were covertly disposed of.
It is clear that the threat of secret, summary execution convinced many guerrillas to turn – especially when complemented by kind treatment from the Scouts and the offer of decent pay. Captives were also promised that their families would be protected from reprisals by their former comrades.
The chemical and biological warfare capacity developed in the late 1970s by the Rhodesian forces often tended indiscriminately to target innocent populations suspected of harbouring guerrillas. ‘By the late 1970s,’ Gould and Folb write, ‘the Rhodesian security forces were involved in unconventional warfare and a number of devices were released into the community, for example, booby-trapped radios. An armourer, Phil Morgan [introduced in the previous chapter], was involved in the manufacture of these devices.’
According to researcher Glenn Cross, it appears that other explosives were provided to the Selous Scouts and Rhodesian SAS by Elektroniese, Meganiese, Landboukundige en Chemiese Ingenieursvaardighede (EMLC),3 a specialised weapons division under the South African state arms firm Armscor’s Department of Special Acquisitions (DSA). The DSA’s task was to acquire specialised equipment abroad, while the EMLC’s was to manufacture locally that which could not be purchased by the DSA. It was specifically dedicated to fulfilling Special Forces’ unique requirements. The EMLC was run by chemical engineer Dr Jan Coetzee, assisted by Fred Slabbert, Barry Paul, and Peet du Preez, and was initially based in a small workshop at Lyttelton Ingenieurswerke (Lyttelton Engineering Works), south of Pretoria.4
According to Gould and Folb, three substances were used in Rhodesia’s ‘amateurish and short’ foray into chemical and biological warfare. Organophosphates were applied to clothes, especially parts of the fabric that would touch the soft parts of the skin, for example the underarms and groin areas. They were also put into tinned food and drink ‘or other substances to be ingested, such as aspirin’. Additionally, cholera was twice released into the Ruwenya River, while anthrax was deposited near Plumtree, inside the Botswana border.
Gould and Folb received documents from author Peter Stiff that record the use of poisons by the Rhodesian Police’s Special Branch and the Selous Scouts. ‘These documents indicate that the use of poisons began in 1977. Former Special Branch operatives have said they were aware of the use of poisons as early as 1973.’
Mac McGuinness is identified as the man who facilitated the chemical programme at the Scouts’ Bindura fort and the most senior Special Branch officer seconded to the Central Intelligence Organisation. He was given the title Officer Commanding Counter Terrorist Operations. McGuinness told the authors that ‘the distribution of contaminated items, e.g. clothing and food, was not as a general rule carried out by the Scouts but by the Projects Section of the British South Africa Police, Special Branch. Scouts in the field acted in a reconnaissance role, calling in strike forces to engage the enemy where this was feasible …’
McGuinness claimed that Reid-Daly had at one point refused permission for the Scouts to be involved in an anthrax drop by aircraft and that the SAS had conducted the operation instead. A 1978–1980 anthrax outbreak in Rhodesia, one of the largest such epidemics in human history, has been attributed by some analysts to this operation and Cross examines this in detail. McGuinness’s direct command of Winston Hart’s Special Branch unit attached to the Scouts means the Scouts were at least aware of the chemical and biological warfare programme.
The chief scientist behind the poisoning programme was Professor Robert Symington of the Anatomy Department at the University of Rhodesia, who apparently used the nom de guerre Sam Roberts. According to Peter Stiff, guerrillas were sometimes poisoned using thallium: ‘It was said that there were some months when Sam Roberts had killed more terrorists than the Rhodesian Light Infantry.’5 Gould and Folb note that Symington later moved to South Africa, where he worked as a lecturer at the University of Cape Town.
According to Cross, Symington maintained close ties with the EMLC head Dr Jan Coetzee, SAP Forensic Laboratory chief Dr Lothar Neethling, and Dr Wouter Basson, who would go on to head South Africa’s own chemical and biological warfare programme. In a 2011 email, Basson says he had contact with Symington on academic matters
