had moved to Cape Town.
The line of command in the Rhodesian poison operations was not clear, according to Gould and Folb. Reid-Daly told them that Ken Flower, Director-General of the Central Intelligence Organisation, was in charge overall, but it would take Glenn Cross to produce the first comprehensive study of the Rhodesian chemical and biological warfare (CBW) programme. It was published in 2017 after almost two decades of research. Cross provides a diagram ‘showing the approval chain to establish the CBW effort’ that has Prime Minister Ian Smith running two lines of authorisation: one to Symington in charge of his small team at the Bindura fort, via Minister of Defence PK van der Byl; and the other via Flower to McGuinness who also wielded authority over the CBW team at the fort.6
The real-life operational chains of command were more complex, because of interservice rivalry: McGuinness informally reported to Flower, who in turn reported to Smith, bypassing his official reporting line to the head of Special Branch, possibly because, Cross speculates, he preferred to avoid the scrutiny of BSAP Commissioner Peter Kevin Allum, an old-school policeman who loathed Flower and had little understanding of clandestine work. Reid-Daly likewise earned himself a cowboy reputation for bypassing his official chain of reporting to Lieutenant-General John Hickman, chief of the Rhodesian Army, in favour of a back channel, reporting directly to Lieutenant-General Peter Walls, the Minister of Combined Operations in the War Cabinet, who in turn reported directly to Smith. Cross notes the co-ordinating link between Reid-Daly and McGuinness.
Cross writes that the bushy-browed Symington was born in 1925 in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he read agricultural chemistry. Emigrating to Rhodesia, he rose to become an anatomy professor at the Godfrey Higgins School of Medicine at the University of Rhodesia, with a reputation as an excellent neuroanatomist. Cross notes that opinion on his character varies widely among those who knew him, from ‘charismatic … with an excellent sense of humour’, to a ‘hateful man’ and a ‘racist’.
In October 1975, the Rhodesian CBW programme was initiated and, by late 1976, Symington had assembled a small CBW team. Special Branch allegedly built a research lab at his home in the upmarket Salisbury suburb of Borrowdale, where he experimented with producing ‘large numbers of intriguing poisons’, in Stiff’s words, ‘many of them forgotten since the Middle Ages’.7 Under Rhodesia’s emergency draft, with all men aged between 16 and 60 called up to serve as ‘territorials’, Symington served in the Intelligence Corps, and was then seconded to Special Branch.
Cross names Symington’s CBW team as consisting primarily of Vic Noble and two other men. Noble, who was Symington’s varsity lab assistant, had a patchy academic record, having obtained a diploma in medical technology at the Witwatersrand Technical College but then failing to complete his BSc Honours at the University of the Witwatersrand. He jumped at the chance to do his patriotic duty by joining the professor’s CBW team, as a childhood heart condition excluded any combat role.
The second man had been a University of Rhodesia student when he was called up to serve eighteen months as a territorial. He was attached first to the BSAP training school, then transferred to the Selous Scouts, where Reid-Daly told him to report to McGuinness at Bindura where, Cross notes, ‘he and Vic Noble were the major producers of CBW agents’.
The third man is more mysterious, but Cross states that, like the Scouts’ Phil Morgan, ‘he was a weaponeer who specialised in the construction of explosive devices – notably letter bombs and the “roadrunner” radios – at Bindura fort’. Roadrunner radios were either weaponised with explosive devices or fitted with tracking beacons. The former would detonate to kill suspected insurgents, while the latter would provide the Scouts with location information when the radio was turned on. The fort’s weaponeer was severely injured by shrapnel when a device being built by BSAP explosives expert David Perkins detonated prematurely. Perkins was killed in the incident. Cross adds two part-time assistants to the list of Symington’s team: Detective Chief Inspector Henry Wolhuter, McGuinness’s Special Branch liaison to the Scouts at Bindura, and, astoundingly, Wolhuter’s wife, who occasionally also prepared CBW substances.
Somewhere between June 1977 and February 1978, the team relocated to the Bindura fort, 2 km down the Mtepatepa road heading northwest out of the small agricultural town of Bindura, 88 km northeast of Salisbury. Though it was only occupied by Scouts irregularly when on intelligence-gathering or counter-insurgency operations – with the exception of McGuinness’s Special Branch component – Cross states that the Bindura fort was the Scouts’ effective field HQ, having direct telex links not only to the CIO’s ‘Red Bricks’ HQ in Salisbury but also to the South African Police’s Security Branch HQ and the SADF’s Directorate of Military Intelligence (MI), both in Pretoria. He stresses that there was a steady stream of exchanges between the CBW team and a select group of South African military officers and scientists, many of whom visited the Bindura fort and the Selous Scouts’ André Rabie base as they weighed up the necessity of establishing their own CBW programme in the light of the 1976 Soweto uprising and the arrival of Cuban troops in newly independent Angola.
Reciprocally, Symington frequently visited the EMLC and the SAP Forensic Laboratory, while Noble visited the EMLC. At Bindura, members of the tiny CBW team were each paid US$900 by McGuinness. According to Cross, the funds were most likely derived from sums of between US$750 000 and US$800 000 paid to the CIO by ‘South African Intelligence’8 to sustain McGuinness’s operations. Occasionally, the payments even reached US$1 million per month. The CIO is believed to have skimmed some US$250 000 per month off the top for its own purposes.
Cross states that, based on a heavily redacted interview with a former Special Branch officer by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), an operative used to make several trips a month from Rhodesia to South Africa to pass on and receive intelligence and to take back sums of between US$100 000 and US$500 000 – with an astounding ceiling of US$8 million accessible if needed – to pay salaries. This ‘money was provided [to the Rhodesians] by the Saudi government’, the FBI report read. Cross can find no rationale for Saudi funding of the Rhodesian war effort, but the likely answer is that Saudi Arabia was itself a blind and that the money was in fact clandestinely supplied by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and only routed via the Arab state, a firm anti-communist US ally in the Cold War.
The funds were used to pay extra salaries, such as those of Symington and his CBW team, and ‘to purchase CBW materials (including goods to be contaminated) and raw materials from South Africa’, Cross writes. ‘Death bonuses,’ amounting to 1 000 Rhodesian dollars9 for every guerrilla killed, were also paid from these funds.
‘The Special Branch also used the funds to entertain Selous Scouts, hold dances and braais10 for the local population in Bindura, and to sponsor Bindura’s local soccer team in matches across Rhodesia. These expenses were approved by CIO chief Flower.’
In addition, according to former Special Branch officer Henrik Ellert, quoted by Cross, Scouts themselves regularly couriered significant sums from South African Intelligence via the CIO station in Pretoria to the Rhodesian Central Bank. There it was converted into Rhodesian dollars and deposited in a secret CIO account controlled by Ian Smith. At some point, after initially being politely rebuffed, General Magnus Malan, the South African Minister of Defence, came up with the ‘novel idea’ of paying for the information gleaned from McGuinness’s clandestine CBW programme, according to Ellert. ‘The offer was gratefully accepted and members of SA’s Recce Units were thereafter trained alongside Scouts who had been selected for the programme’s “dark side”. It can be said that SA bankrolled the Scouts and their associated SB intelligence effort.’
The sheer scale of SADF financial and military support – which included the loan of heavy equipment such as Eland armoured cars and Alouette light helicopter gunships – meant that Rhodesia effectively became a South African client state.
Cross writes that Rhodesia’s primitive CBW programme, located in a single room at Bindura, probably produced the
