Nkosinathi Biko opens his Death Flight foreword with chilling words: “This book will make your stomach turn. Do not avert your eyes.” If you thought you knew the worst excesses of apartheid’s depravity, you will find yourself challenging the facts in Death Flight.
The book painstakingly reveals a story of how our military expedited an extermination policy for guerrillas.
This “doctrine” involved drugging hundreds of guerrillas, loading them into a light civilian-marked aircraft, and flying out over the ocean, where they were murdered by an injected drug cocktail, and then their naked corpses heaved out to plunge 3.6km into the deep icy Atlantic currents, their bodies to disappear forever.
The covert dirty wars against insurgents fighting to liberate Zimbabwe, Namibia and SA that stretched over nearly four decades have many dark and illegal corners. Secrets and atrocities lie quietly waiting to be discovered in archive boxes and buried trommels, and in the memories of ageing Special Forces “operators” who are increasingly taking their secrets to the grave.
Author Michael Schmidt, an investigative journalist and human rights rapporteur, traces the shrouded origins of the death flight policy to French colonialists in Madagascar. It later became a secret military doctrine in Argentina, Algeria and Indochina, and was adopted by the SA Defence Force in 1979, which then “disappeared” hundreds of Swapo, ANC and PAC guerrillas.
The executioners were a secret section of D40, a covert unit of the SADF’s Special Forces, operating parallel to the Reconnaissance units (Recces) to provide deep cover intelligence for foreign military operations, using “pseudo operations”.
During pseudo ops, disguised government forces, often using guerrilla defectors or askaris, operate as teams infiltrating insurgent areas. Using pseudo ops to capture or kill an enemy is classified as the war crime of perfidy. However, it was the founding rationale of D40, which evolved into Barnacle and, finally, into the Civil Co-operation Bureau.
During the Rhodesian War, SA military and police elements gained early counterinsurgency experience with the brutal Selous Scouts and were involved in a secret chemical and biological warfare unit.
When Rhodesia fell to Zanu-PF’s Robert Mugabe, Schmidt shows how operatives, including mercenaries, were recruited to the SA Special Forces in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Special Forces were formed in 1970 with only a “Dirty Dozen” operators, and evolved into 1 Recce Commando.
In 1979, a Rhodesian, Major Neil Kriel, was a death flight pilot and also ran D40. He committed suicide in 2018. Captured guerrillas who refused to be “turned” into askaris were “packages” to be “eliminated” under Operation Dual’s secret death flights that began in 1979 and ended in 1987.
One of the drugged guerrillas woke up on a death flight, leading to a life-and-death struggle behind the cockpit, with the operator finally strangling the soldier with a cable tie.
Using exclusive face-to-face interviews with former operators and reconstructing pilot logbooks and court records, Schmidt has done an incredible research study exposing the unit’s operations from 1979 to 1990, and, importantly, the post-apartheid “Pact of Forgetting”.
He details the failed attempts to hold alleged perpetrators of war crimes, such as Dr Wouter Basson and high-ranking officers and politicians, to account. Elements such as the Hammer Unit, C1 (Vlakplaas), Koevoet and the National Intelligence Service also largely escaped accountability.
Death Flight reveals the failed deal between the ANC’s top leaders and the SADF and SAPS (1997-2003) that prevented any post-TRC prosecutions. The ANC’s fear of prosecution led to political interference in the NPA, delaying prosecutions for more than 20 years.
Schmidt’s book is a timely marker of current efforts to bring perpetrators to justice.
Death Flight is published by Tafelberg.
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