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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 while the latter was lecturing at Salisbury, but only met him in person in his capacity as an external examiner in anatomy after Symington 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 liquid chemical organophosphate Parathion, which, embedded into clothing, could induce death ‘within a few hours after the onset of symptoms’.

There is little doubt that it also used the Shell organochloride pesticide Telodrin – originally intended to poison baboons – on clothing. Prior to death, Telodrin caused ‘convulsions, seizures, coma, and respiratory depression’. Chillingly, the poisoned clothing was wrapped in bundles and distributed to stores, whose owners were instructed to put the items on their top shelves and never under any circumstances sell them. The intention was that when guerrillas raided the stores, as frequently occurred, they alone would take the contaminated clothing, but the deadly risk to the general population is obvious.

To poison canned food, maize meal, beverages (especially beer), medicine, and virility tablets, the CBW operatives used thallium sulphate, ‘a mercury-based poison which caused a terrible and painful death’, and most probably Warfarin, a blood-thinning agent that in sufficiently large doses causes death by severe haemorrhage. Cross notes a dramatic increase in Harari Hospital medical reports of Parathion poisoning of unknown origin in 1977. He also details the admission of 35 ZANLA insurgents to the Central Hospital at Beira in Mozambique in April 1978. Fifteen of them subsequently died, apparently of Warfarin poisoning.

Biological pathogens were also produced – but not at Bindura. These included cholera, botulinum, and, allegedly, anthrax. Wells and rivers were poisoned, mostly in Mozambique, with security forces given frequent updates on which ones to avoid.

The Rhodesian CBW programme tested its products at the Mount Darwin fort after it fell out of operational use by the Scouts, and from 1979 botulinum was produced there. According to Cross, ‘indications are that the Rhodesians certainly did experiment on captured guerrillas who could not be turned’. He mentions the Zimbabwean government’s announcement of the discovery in mid-2004 of some 5 000 bodies in a disused mine shaft 28 km from Mount Darwin and in mass graves found in the area – though the bodies reported probably included previously undiscovered combat remains.11

Cross estimates, using a 28 June 1977 Combined Operations report of 809 guerrilla deaths due to poisoning until that date, that insurgent deaths due to poisoning were between 1 239 and 2 427 from 1977 to 1979. However, civilians, including farm workers, were also often the victims, mostly after finding and wearing abandoned contaminated clothing, eating poisoned canned food, or drinking infected water, and the death toll in Mozambique and southeastern Rhodesia soared into the hundreds. Death bonuses were regularly paid to those who distributed poisoned items, based on verified resulting deaths.

Cross notes, however, that indigenous knowledge of natural toxins far surpassed the knowledge of the CBW team and was used both to punish guerrilla gangs who extorted villagers, and to take vengeance on civilian rivals in ‘muti’ and witchcraft killings.

Based on clinical and epidemiological data, Cross did a detailed study of the Rhodesian anthrax outbreak. He concluded that it was in fact a natural outbreak exacerbated by the collapse of rural health and veterinary services in the closing phase of the war.

Several members of the Rhodesian CBW programme would seemingly reap a bitter harvest later in their lives.

Wolhuter and his wife emigrated to South Africa when Rhodesia gained independence as Zimbabwe in 1980. Cross states that she ‘died of a cancer she believed was due to her handling of chemicals in Rhodesia. Wolhuter died of a similar cancer soon after. Before his death, Wolhuter passed on documents related to the Rhodesian CBW effort to Peter Stiff.’

Secretive and embittered at having lost both of his legs, allegedly due to the poisonous chemicals he handled at Bindura, Vic Noble went on to work at the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg. He mostly refused to discuss his CBW work, dying in Cape Town on 8 December 2011 after a long illness.

Robert Symington, Rhodesia’s ‘Professor Death’, moved to Cape Town in 1981 and died a year later at the age of 57, reportedly of a heart attack. According to Cross, Symington was on sabbatical from the University of Zimbabwe (as it had been renamed) and was working at the University of Cape Town (UCT). He apparently had no plans to return to Zimbabwe at the time of his death. ‘According to a former BSAP officer, Symington experimented extensively (“tinkered”) with poisons and toxins and had nearly died once of a laboratory accident involving a poison … The officer further stated that Symington’s death in South Africa was due to another laboratory accident involving poisons.’