Читать книгу Death Flight - Michael Schmidt - Страница 13

Neo-Nazis and mercenaries enter the fray

As the Rhodesian Bush War neared its peak, a number of colourful and sinister characters entered the scene, attracted for a wide variety of reasons to the white redoubt’s grand finale. They included soldiers of fortune, white supremacists, thrill-seekers, opportunists, criminals on the run, Algeria and Vietnam vets with an adrenaline addiction – and soldiers wanting to sharpen their black-ops skills.

Starting in 1974, Major Nicholas Lamprecht of the Rhodesian Light Infantry drove the recruitments and also trained the Rhodesian mercenaries.1 According to Stuart Christie’s probing study of neo-fascist networks, many were drawn from the ranks of the German Soldiers’ Combat League, a 1 500-strong, Frankfurt-based neo-Nazi organisation.2

By 1977–1978, it is estimated that there were some 1 500 foreigners serving with the Rhodesian armed forces.3 Apart from the outright neo-Nazis keen to blood themselves in what they viewed as a race war, they brought with them a wide range of opinions and military experience. Influential in Rhodesia for a short period of time were mercenaries, largely French, who had served under the infamous Bob Denard in attempting to thwart Moïse Tshombe’s anti-communist secessionist government of Katanga in the southeastern mining belt of the Congo (later Zaire) in 1961. Denard’s mercenaries at times reportedly wore Nazi swastika armbands in the field.4

Among the few Frenchmen who stayed on was Lieutenant Jean-Michel Desblé, who had first seen service in Africa in 1965 as a slender, handsome young officer with the 1st Shock (1er Choc) of the 6th Foreign Commandos, consisting of Frenchmen, Belgians, and Italians, all former parachutists or Foreign Legionnaires – loyal to the Congo’s US-backed president, Mobutu Sese Seko – under then-‘Commandant’ Denard. ‘At the end of the contract, he [Desblé] returned to France. In 1967, he saw news of his comrades besieged in Bukavu,’ these being Denard’s 1er Choc plus Belgian mercenaries of the ‘Leopard Battalion’ under Lieutenant-Colonel Jean Schramme and Katanganese rebels. ‘He decided to join them, passing alone and clandestinely via the border of Burundi [to where] 15 000 soldiers of the ANC [Armée National du Congo] were besieging 120 mercenaries and a thousand Katanganese who resisted [for] three months. He would be wounded during the last fighting but would remain on the ground until surrender to the Red Cross.’

Back in the 1er Choc, Desblé had got to know Roger Bruni, a former French paratrooper and veteran of the disaster at Dien Bien Phu in Indochina in 1954. By late 1977, Bruni was the Paris-based recruiter for a new Francophone unit of volunteers to fight in the war in Rhodesia.

The volunteer unit was formed in November 1977 under Major Roland de l’Assomption, an ex-officer of the 11th Shock Parachute Regiment, who had served on the presidential guard of Gabon’s Omar Bongo; Major Mario La Viola, a veteran of the 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment; and then-‘Colonel’ Denard. It was attached to the Rhodesian Army as the 7th Independent Company. Desblé appears to have signed up not so much for the untaxed pay of R$245 than for the adventure and camaraderie of serving once again with Denard. In the end, the 7th was only deployed twice. The experiment was a disaster, partly because the Frenchmen knew no Shona and their English was poor; discipline was as irregular as one might expect of mercenaries; and their interrogation methods were brutal and alienated potentially friendly black populations. The unit was disbanded in May 1978, and Denard went off to stage one of his periodic coups d’état in the Comoro Islands, which provided both Rhodesia and South Africa with a weapons-shipment route to evade international arms embargoes. Desblé had already signed up to the Selous Scouts, the sole Frenchman to do so.

Also among the mercenaries who became specialist soldiers in Rhodesia were men from the USA, many of them veterans of the Vietnam War ill at ease with their indifferent or hostile treatment at home following the end of that unpopular war. One of them was Sergeant Chris Pessarra, a tall former Legionnaire with tousled blond hair. He had been blooded as a paratrooper with the Foreign Legion’s renowned 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment, its sister regiment, the 1st Foreign Parachute Regiment, having been forcibly disbanded after its key role in the failed Generals’ Putsch in Algeria in 1961.

Pessarra joined the Rhodesian war in about 1975. By March 1978, he was serving as the parachute jump instructor at the Buffalo Range Forward Airfield at Chiredzi. In that role, he was naturally conversant with characters such as Buffalo Range’s commanding officer, Major Bert Sachse, still sporting the clean-shaven chin of a British-styled officer, as well as with fellow ex-Legionnaire Desblé, who by that stage had developed the greasy, bearded appearance of the Selous Scouts that earned them the nickname ‘Walking Armpits’.

Pessarra was secretly an informant for the CIA, which he jokingly called ‘Christians In Action’ or simply ‘the Christians’. The CIA ran a clandestine intelligence-gathering operation in Rhodesia through an unofficial ‘US Consulate’ in Salisbury under Charles Robert Moore. Moore was the supposedly retired former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs and former Ambassador to Mali, Cameroon, and Guinea. Although the US withdrew most of its consular staff in 1965 after UDI and shut its Salisbury consulate in March 1970 after Rhodesia declared itself a republic, the administration of President Jimmy Carter assisted Britain in seeking a peaceful solution to the Bush War in the late 1970s.

The Washington Post reported that, in November 1978, ‘Britain signalled its concern about the rapid deterioration [of conditions in Rhodesia] by informally proposing to Washington a joint emergency evacuation plan to airlift out the roughly 165 000 British passport-holders and the 2 000 Americans now in Rhodesia …’5 As Gerald Horne notes, perhaps thousands of US mercenaries flooded into Rhodesia to gain experience in fighting the communists. He writes that Robert Moore was ‘the mercenaries’ best friend’.6

Horne, citing The Rhodesia Herald, states that ‘both the John Birch Society and the American Nazi Party developed linkages in post-UDI Rhodesia’. Hence the need for a skeleton, hush-hush US presence in Rhodesia.