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A youth in the shadow of an insurgent war

Cornelius Ignatius Johannes Kriel, better known to his later com­rades as Neil Kriel, was born in the tiny valley of Klaasvoogds, situated 16 km from the Langeberg mountain hamlet of Robertson in the Cape Province, on 8 September 1947.1 Despite his staunchly Afrikaans name, the fully bilingual Kriel was very ‘English’ in his speech and manners.

In 1959, when Kriel was twelve, his family moved to Southern Rhodesia, where he completed his schooling at the Umtali Boys’ High School. Umtali, the British crown colony’s fourth-largest city, was perched on the far eastern border of the country flanking Mozambique, giving the school’s pupils their nickname of Borderers.

At the time, Southern Rhodesia was in the grip of a disobedience campaign by the unenfranchised black population. As their campaign became more militant, it would provoke a strong counter-insurgency response. But it is likely that, in his early days, Kriel lived the idyll of a white Rhodesian schoolboy. Developing into a strapping, dark-haired lad, Kriel demonstrated athletic prowess and threw himself into running, water polo, and especially rugby, a sport that would provide an additional bond with his future comrades.

Meanwhile, the spark for the Rhodesian Bush War was lit with the murder of a white foreman, Andrew Oberholzer, at the Silver­streams Wattle Company on 4 July 1964. He was killed by guerrillas of the newly formed Zimbabwean African National Union (ZANU) and its armed-wing-in-embryo, the Chinese-backed Zim­babwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA). Although the killing outraged white and moderate black Rhodesia, Kriel was seemingly secure in his schoolboy bubble. That year, according to his school’s alumni magazine, The Borderer, ‘Neil Kriel took the 880 yards (2 min. 3.4 sec), and the Mile (4 min. 46.7 sec.) records … In the Inter-Schools meeting, Kriel ran two excellent races to lower his personal best records in the 880 yards (2 min. 1.5 sec.) the Mile (4 min. 36.5 sec) …’2

A 1964 photograph of Kriel and the Umtali Boys’ water polo team shows a handsome lad whose levity gives no hint of the grave role he would later play in the escalating regional conflict: sitting relaxed in his blazer and shorts with a broad, engaging grin, he sports a dark V-shaped quiff that seems to owe more to the rockabilly style of the previous decade. In the same year, Kriel proved ‘outstanding’ in his rugby team’s tour of South Africa, The Borderer enthused. The team was unbeaten in all but one match, a run which included ‘a magnificent 30–21 victory over Selborne College. It was schoolboy rugby at its best …’.

However, storm clouds were steadily accumulating. Lawrence Cline writes of the era: ‘The Rhodesian insurgency developed gradually, initially appearing to be more of a law enforcement problem than an organised insurgency. It took considerable time for the Rhodesian government to acknowledge the severity of the insurgent threat it faced and to develop a coherent response.’3

Soon, added to ZANLA’s insurgency was that of the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA), the military arm of the Soviet-backed Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU). The guerrillas roughly divided the country between ZANLA, based in the east and operating out of Tanzania and Mozambique, and ZIPRA, based in the west and operating out of Northern Rhodesia and the British Protectorate of Bechuanaland (to become independent Botswana in 1966). Despite this informal partition, the two competing guerrilla forces often battled among themselves.

In 1965, Kriel’s second-to-last school year, Southern Rhodesia made its dramatic Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from Britain, because of an impasse over Whitehall’s refusal to allow independence. The sticking point was that Southern Rhodesia wanted to maintain white minority rule – unlike Northern Rhodesia, which had been granted independence the previous year as Zambia.

Kriel’s school had an ingrained tradition of military service. The school chapel was built on a grassy hill to honour the memory of the Umtali Old Boys who had paid the ultimate price in World War II. An Old Boy who had graduated from Umtali Boys’ several years previously, Bert Sachse, had gone on to train as an officer at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst in England. Pictured early in his military career with jug ears, a cleft chin, and a gnomishly winning smile, Sachse returned to Rhodesia after graduating. In 1966, at the age of 23, he underwent a forward airstrike and ground-to-air control course run by the Rhodesian Air Force along­side another soldier who would later play an important counterinsurgency role, Garth Barrett. Barrett would become a lieutenant-colonel in the famed C-Squadron, Special Air Service (SAS), Rhodesia’s airborne commando force.

In 1966, his final year at Umtali Boys’, Kriel captained the first rugby team and was picked as vice-captain of the Rhodesia Schools’ team. At the subsequent Craven Week – South Africa’s annual schoolboy rugby proving ground, named after Springbok great Dr Danie Craven – he was selected as one of the best players of the tournament. He followed his passion for rugby after graduating, playing for Stellenbosch University in 1967 – the year in which some 2 000 South African Police (SAP) members were deployed to the northern border of Rhodesia to assist the British South Africa Police (BSAP, Rhodesia’s police force) to combat a ZIPRA insurgency backed by uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC).

Kriel’s rugby dreams were cut short when he was injured in the same year and his academic career at Stellenbosch was also short-lived. The following year, he returned to Rhodesia where he joined the Rhodesian Light Infantry (RLI), becoming a commissioned officer in 1969 and taking on duties as an RLI troop commander.

Meanwhile, in 1969, Sachse earned his wings on a parachute course alongside several other soldiers and one civilian, Hamish Murray, the mayor of Umtali – an indication of how the developing conflict was starting to militarise Rhodesian everyday life. Sachse was a member of Rhodesia’s C-Squadron of the British Special Air Service, one of only two foreign squadrons of the fearsome SAS. The squadron was founded in 1961 from a core of the thousand Rhodesian volunteers who had fought in the SAS’s counterinsurgency campaign in Malaya from 1951 to 1953. Its staunch anti-communism would prove as influential as its unconventional warfare tactics.

The roots of Rhodesian pseudo-operations

During late 1971 and early 1972, Sachse, by then a lieutenant, was briefed to conduct pseudo-operations against ZAPU in Zambia, under a Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) controller named Jack Berry, assisted by Detective Inspector Michael ‘Mac’ McGuinness of the Terrorist Desk of Special Branch of the BSAP.4 These were the first of many Rhodesian pseudo-operations against enemy targets in Zambia, Botswana, and Mozambique that increasingly shifted from pure intelligence-gathering to com­bat strikes.

The Special Branch (SB) was the section of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) that tracked potential threats to law and order and collaborated closely with the South African, colonial Portuguese, and – prior to UDI – British and American intelligence services. Initially, the C-Squadron was the Rhodesians’ only special forces unit and the SB/CIO the only entities flirting with experimental pseudo-operations. As Cline writes, ‘Police made an early attempt to use pseudo-operations in October 1966, but the effort was stillborn. The first formal pseudo-team was formed in January 1973 as an all-African team, with two African policemen and four “turned” insurgents. The early teams did succeed in bringing in some valuable intelligence, but their overall impact was slight.’

Then, in November 1973, in the midst of a lengthy Rhodesian counter-infiltration campaign in the north of the country called Operation Hurricane, a new special forces unit built specifically for pseudo-operations was set up. It was founded by Captain Ron Reid-Daly, who was coaxed out of retirement after a two-decade-long career. The unit was named the Selous Scouts, in honour of the colourful colonial-era explorer Frederick Courteney Selous, on whom novelist H Rider Haggard had modelled his Allan Quatermain character.

‘The original strength of the Selous Scouts was about 120,’ Cline writes, ‘with all officers being white and with the highest rank initially available for Africans being colour sergeant,’ though one founding member, Sergeant-Major 1st Class (WO1) M Stanlake Mavengere, started out as company sergeant-major for the ‘African Scouts’. He would later become the black troops’ regimental sergeant-major, a formidable position in any combat regiment. The colour distinction appears to have been primarily for motivational and cultural-linguistic reasons, though the men ate, slept, fought – and died – alongside one another.

‘One major recruiting incentive for African volunteers,’ Cline writes, ‘was that their pay was nearly doubled from their normal army salaries due to special bonuses … Ultimately, the unit reached a strength of somewhere around 1 500.’ This pool of counter-insurgency expertise would later be drawn on in South Africa’s own evolving Border War.

Former operative Winston Hart recalled that the Selous Scouts were formed at an ad hoc tented base erected around a small farmhouse at the Trojan Nickel Mine. The remote location was chosen with security concerns in mind because the unit would in part consist of turned terrorists. At the base, Reid-Daly and his sidekick Jerry Strong, later a major, were ‘busy recruiting new officers: Neil Kriel, Dale Collett, Tim Bax, Keith Noble and Mick Hardy’.5

Tall, with fluffy blond hair and big, dark sideburns, Hart was to form the core of a small group of counter-terrorism Special Branch police permanently attached to the Scouts as intelligence-gatherers and interrogators. Hart had joined the uniformed branch of the Rhodesian police in 1958 and, in 1963, had transferred to the Special Branch. He said that on the SB’s Terrorist Desk, Detective Inspector Pete Stanton, nicknamed Stroppy (for obstreperous), had been ‘building up a database which included a card system on which he manually recorded all known terrorists, complete with code names and weapons’ serial numbers, a system which would later prove invaluable in the formation of the Selous Scouts.’

After four years in the field, Hart had joined Stanton and his colleagues Vic Opperman, Peter Dewe, and John ‘Bomber’ Davison on the Terrorist Desk commanded by Peter Tomlinson and reporting to Brigadier John Hickman. Hart says the use of pseudo-terrorists was one of the suggestions offered to counter terrorist infiltration, using as example the Kenyan operations run by Special Branch officer Ian Henderson. Henderson had been instrumental in the development of pseudo-gangs to undermine the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya from 1952 to 1960. Military experts have argued that it was the introduction of these gangs that turned the war in the authorities’ favour.6

The Rhodesian military had given the green light for the Terrorist Desk’s idea and three small Special Branch pseudo-operations teams were formed by white trackers and black soldiers from the Rhodesian African Rifles (RAR). They were trained in ‘the ways of terrorists’ by Stanton and given unmarked Land Rovers, Soviet AK-47 assault rifles and Tokarev pistols, and communications equipment. To get rid of the ‘scent of the city’, the men were made to sit in a smoke-filled hut.

Although largely ineffective, this early pseudo-ops concept was incorporated into the new Selous Scouts. In the Scouts, Hart and his SB team reported to Mac McGuinness, by then a superintendent. Hart himself was later trained as a parachutist by the South African Recces at Fort Doppies in the Caprivi Strip. He was personally handed his wings by Major-General Fritz Loots, commander of the Recces.

The idea for the Recces had originated with Commandant Jan Breytenbach, whose military career included stints in South Africa’s Union Defence Force tank corps and the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm. He resigned his commission as a second lieutenant in the Royal Navy when South Africa exited the Commonwealth and became a republic in 1961. He was persuaded to join the new South African Defence Force (SADF) as a parachutist.

In 1967, Breytenbach convinced SADF Chief of the Army Lieutenant-General Willem Louw to allow him to start an experimental special operations team of himself and eleven men – the ‘Dirty Dozen’ – who were then trained by the Rhodesian SAS. From June 1970, the unit was stationed at the Oudtshoorn infantry base as the Irregular Warfare Branch (IWB). It employed several cover names, including the Operational Experimental Team7 and the Alpha (later Delta) Operational Test Group.8 In 1972, it transferred to the Bluff in Durban and was formalised as 1 Reconnaissance Commando, or 1 Recce. In 1975, Breytenbach, by now a colonel, was transferred to form what became 32 Battalion, the famous deep-raiding light infantry battalion that, after the Recces, was the second-most decorated unit of the Border War.

As the Selous Scouts conducted reconnaissance of ZAPU, ZANU, and ANC bases deep into anti-white-rule Frontline States such as Zambia, the connections between the Rhodesian pseudo-operators and South African Recces would strengthen.

How to turn an insurgent

Recruits for the new Scouts – mostly black RAR soldiers – were put through their paces at the Wafa Wafa base on the shores of Lake Kariba where they had to pass a gruelling endurance-and-bushcraft qualifying course. Many of the successful candidates were put through parachute courses to earn their wings either in Rhodesia or in South Africa.

Hart said the initial intention was to recruit guerrillas already in detention, but after interviewing several, he realised none had knowledge that was sufficiently current, so he and Reid-Daly abandoned the idea in favour of gaining new potential recruits.9

The freshly minted Selous Scouts soon relocated to new barracks at Inkomo, named the André Rabie Barracks after one of Hart’s Special Branch pseudo-terrorists killed in a friendly-fire accident. Two corrugated-iron ‘forts’ were built for them to operate out of at Bindura and Mount Darwin in the northeast of the country, then at other locales.

The forts, with walls between 4,3 m and 5,3 m high, were based on a rectangular floor plan with a courtyard in the centre, around which were clustered (in the example of the Buffalo Range fort) a mess hall and kitchen, ops room with neighbouring radio room, six bedrooms with their own ablutions for the officers and non-commissioned officers, a barracks for the troops with their own ablutions, a guard room next to the sliding entrance gate, a small operating theatre next to a bedroom for the medics, two SB offices, an SB rest room, and two SB bedrooms – and right next to that, six cells for captured guerrillas. Mount Darwin differed from Buffalo Range and Bindura in that there were no cells for prisoners and no medical facilities.10

Captured guerrillas played a critical role in the intelligence operations of the Scouts, according to Cline. ‘For a prisoner to be of any use to us, it was absolutely vital that his identity was totally protected and that neither the locals in the area of the contact, nor anyone back at the security force base, knew of his capture or even of his existence,’ Cline writes.

The first priority was to give a captured insurgent the best possible medical care. The initial communication with the detainee would only concern his health and physical welfare. ‘The captive was usually astonished to see that everything had been done to ensure his life was saved. And because of this, whether consciously or unconsciously, a feeling of gratitude would begin to permeate his mind, according to Cline.’

Around 800 turned insurgents were eventually recruited in this manner, their salaries paid by Special Branch. The original intention had been for Selous Scouts helicopters to deploy from the courtyard of each fort, but the tumultuous, dusty downdraft proved disastrous. Still, the model was replicated elsewhere – including at the Buffalo Range Forward Airfield (FAF) at Chiredzi in the southeast of the country.

The practice of beguiling, interrogating, and attempting to turn guerrillas in cells at Special Forces bases would later be copied in South Africa and South West Africa, particularly at 5 Reconnaissance Commando’s home base at Phalaborwa and its forward base at Fort Rev at Ondangwa in the South African-controlled territory of South West Africa.

Forward airfields were locations from which small action squads (known as ‘fire-force sticks’) of the Rhodesian Light Infantry, Special Air Service, or Selous Scouts could rapidly deploy into battle by helicopter, often once the Rhodesian Air Force had bombed an enemy target. The Buffalo Range FAF would later become the site of a dramatic scene that demonstrated the strengthening relationship between the Rhodesian SAS and Selous Scouts and the South African Recces.

Meanwhile, like many of the Scouts’ pseudo-terrorists, Kriel grew a full, bushy beard that gave a sudden menace to his looming bulk. But he had a wicked sense of humour and revelled in his unit’s somewhat frightening, unconventional appearance. Sergeant Rob ‘Wings’ Wilson tells of one mission to Mapai in southern Mozambique ‘to blow up as much of the town as we could’. Wilson, Kriel (then a captain), some other Scouts, and four national-service mechanics were on the flight to Mapai, their Douglas C-47 loaded with explosives. Dressed in their guerrilla gear and armed with AK-47s, Kriel casually told the unknowing conscripts that they were bound for an enemy country – and shouldn’t smoke as they would blow themselves to kingdom come due to the explosives they were transporting, leaving them ashen-faced. The town, captured earlier by the Scouts, had been primed for detonation by Kriel and his team.

‘As luck would have it, just as we were heading over the final ridge overlooking Mapai, the charges detonated. As we were out of the danger area, it was great to be able to watch the town disintegrate into a pile of rubble, with the highlight being the warehouse which looked like Hollywood special effects.’11

Kriel also carried his passion for rugby into the Selous Scouts. In a tale told by Colour Sergeant Noel Robey – later to become a covert operative in South Africa’s pseudo-operations – Sergeant Joe Lewis arrived at the Scouts’ André Rabie home base with his head bandaged. It turned out Lewis had got into an argument at an army club for claiming the Scouts could whip any other armed forces rugby team; in the ensuing brawl, part of his ear had been bitten off. Outraged, Reid-Daly recalled a number of Scouts teams from their operational deployments and formed them into a rugby team to teach the army a lesson. Robey said ‘the war stopped for a week’ as a team, including bulky, bearded players like Hart and Kriel, was assembled. Kriel and the Selous Scouts XV ‘overran’ the Army XV, and Lewis’s honour was restored.12