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Prologue

Disappeared men tell no tales

In early May 1947, a group of six to eight villagers were herded onto a French military plane in eastern Madagascar.1 The captured men were about to become unwilling participants in a crude and cruel display of power by the colonial forces.

With the Junkers Ju 52 travelling slowly at 170–180 km/h, the prisoners were thrown from the door of the plane in mid-air, tumbling to a horrifying death – ‘demonstrative bombs’ in the words of one Malagasy parliamentarian.

Flying Officer Guillaume de Fontanges and Lieutenant Hervéou, who commanded the small garrison of Mananjary, wanted to teach the rebellious population a lesson. Tribal ‘wizards’ had been encouraging an uprising against French colonial rule by claiming that their magic would change the bombs of the French to paper. By dropping the rebels over their home villages, the officers were hoping to demonstrate the superiority of French technology over wizardry.2

The atrocity in Madagascar is the first recorded instance of a death flight, a practice that would eventually become an integral part of a secret military doctrine used against insurgencies world­wide.

More than five decades later, on 12 July 1979, Major Neil Kriel, commander of a shadowy and deadly apartheid military unit called Delta 40, woke up in Otjiwarongo, South West Africa. On his high-powered, high-frequency radio he received an order directly from his superior officer, Major-General Fritz Loots, the man in charge of the Recces, South Africa’s renowned Reconnaissance Commandos: fly north to Oshivelo and pick up two packages for ‘disposal’.

It would be no ordinary cargo.

Upon arrival in Oshivelo, Kriel and his partner, Colonel Johan Theron, received the ‘packages’ – two dead SWAPO guerrillas. Following a few further stops, they headed towards the Skeleton Coast with their human cargo, landing at Meob Bay, deep in the northern region of the Sperrgebiet, the famous ‘Forbidden Area’.

There, at a deserted beach, the two operators established the chilling routine that would become common over the following eight and a half years. They took off the bodies’ clothes, removed the rear door of their Piper Seneca II aircraft, and hid the door and the clothing in the sand. They took off into the fading afternoon with their two naked, dead passengers, Kriel pointing the Piper’s nose out over the Atlantic Ocean.

By the time they returned to Meob Bay two hours later, the back of their plane was empty …

This book traces the story of how South Africa’s security forces came to embrace the death flight doctrine and examines the pivotal role played by Delta 40, the ultra-secret South African Special Forces unit with elements of Rhodesia’s famous Selous Scouts embedded in its DNA. Delta 40 would soon become Project Barnacle, before later morphing into the feared Civil Cooperation Bureau.

In adding death flights to its arsenal of dirty tricks, South Africa’s apartheid regime joined the odious ranks of the far-right French colonial forces in Algeria and the Argentine generals waging a dirty war against their own citizens.

De Fontanges, the French architect of the first known death flight in 1947, boasted openly of the new tactic he had invented. He was never censured and went on to become a celebrated pilot in France’s ultimately disastrous war in Indochina, where his death flight doctrine was rumoured to have been taken up with enthusiasm. It was also exported to Algeria, where it supplemented a broader black-ops strategy against pro-independence insurgents.

The strategy included torture, extrajudicial killings, and the deployment of pseudo-gangs – the practice of turning the enemy into one’s own deadly instrument. Many of the extrajudicial killings in Algeria were carried out by a team led by former-parachutist-turned-intelligence-agent Major Paul Aussaresses, which he nicknamed the ‘Squadron of Death’, arguably the origin of the term ‘death squad’ as it was widely copied in Latin America. Those who fell into the Squadron’s clutches would often, after surrendering any valuable information acquired by torture, be disappeared by death flight over the Mediterranean by General Bruno Bigead’s helicopters. Algeria also saw the use of pseudo-gangs of civilians and security forces organised by the far-right Secret Army Organisation (OAS) as ‘Delta Commandos’ under Foreign Legion defector Lieutenant Roger Degueldre to commit perhaps 2 000 insurgent killings; the Delta designation would later find a deadly echo in South Africa’s own counterinsurgency war. Despite its popularity among counterinsurgency forces, the use of pseudo-gangs as assassins (though not as intelligence-gatherers) had since 1907 been outlawed under international law. It is classified as the war crime of ‘perfidy’ where an attacker disguises himself, either in his enemy’s colours or uniform, or as a neutral or civilian party, in order to capture or kill his enemy.

The French counterinsurgency doctrine was codified by General André Beaufre, whose ‘total strategy’ would one day have a profound influence on South Africa’s military. Beaufre argued for a holistic – one could say totalitarian – battlespace. It involved dissolving the boundaries between military and civilian life, with the military omnisciently co-ordinating social, economic, civil, psychological, and propaganda aspects of a ‘total’ war against the insurgency.3

In the 1950s, a young officer in the South African Defence Force named Magnus André de Merindol Malan visited Beaufre as a military observer and learned total strategy at his knee.

The French may have invented the death flight doctrine, but it was taken to its extreme by Lieutenant-General Jorge Rafael Videla, the longest-serving chief of the Argentine military junta. The junta killed up to 30 000 people from 1976 to 1983,4 of whom perhaps 4 000 were thrown into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean and the Río de la Plata. Videla’s irritated response to a journalist’s question at the height of the death flights in 1979 was telling. Leaning aggressively into the microphone, he said: ‘The disappeared are just that: disappeared. They are neither alive nor dead. They are disappeared.’

The general’s words betray something of the evil logic underpinning the death flight doctrine.

With prisoners simply vanishing beneath the waves, the authorities can claim to have never had the missing persons in custody at all, directing families and friends to search fruitlessly elsewhere. The likelihood of the victims’ bodies ever being recovered for forensic evidence is practically zero. The wounds of detainees who have been mutilated by torture will never be seen. The victims would no longer have to be fed, housed, and clothed. The possibility of well-known prisoners becoming celebrated rallying points for resistance – à la Nelson Mandela – is eliminated. Lastly, there would be no proper gravesite for the dead, preventing it from being turned into a political shrine by their comrades.

In effect, death flights guaranteed immunity to the perpetrators of war crimes and gross human rights violations, allowing a culture of impunity to fester. It is one of the most efficient methods of erasing knowledge of the victims’ existence and, by extension, the very ideas they stood for.