Free Dingo Firestorm by Ian Pringle Page A

70 kilometres north of Salisbury, and kicked off intelligence-gathering operations in the north-east and Tete. It soon became apparent to the SB, by working with the Portuguese military and intelligence services, that FRELIMO had firmly established itself along the Rhodesian border. More alarming was the discovery of ZANLA reconnaissance groups in the same area.
    Detective Section Officer Peter Stanton, who was seconded to help Hart, recalls: ‘One of the most important features of the ZANLA reconnaissance missions was to establish contact with the local Rhodesian border populace and gauge its standing and reception.’
    Stanton soon learnt of a FRELIMO camp at Matimbe, just across the Rhodesian border, and strongly suspected that ZANLA would be there too. The Portuguese, still sceptical about a ZANLA presence in Tete, reluctantly allowed the Rhodesians to recce and then attack the camp. In March 1972, the SAS, under Lieutenant Bert Sachse, attacked Matimbe and killed a number of defenders, but it was impossible to establish whether the dead were from FRELIMO or ZANLA. The SAS brought all the documents they could find for Stanton and his SB colleagues to sift through, but most of them were written in Portuguese or the local border dialect. Nevertheless, Stanton managed to find something: ‘I came across a small note written in English indicating that the “comrades” had arrived. The message was for a local inhabitant in Rhodesia.’
    This was the first documented evidence of a ZANLA presence in the north-east border area. That single note galvanised the intelligencegathering process, which became more intensive. It soon became apparent that ZANLA had already politicised vast numbers of local peasants, yet no hard evidence emerged of a ZANLA presence within Rhodesia. The cat-and-mouse game continued until three black members of the uniformed BSAP arrested three trained ZANLA insurgents in the Kotwa area, 20 kilometres west of Nyamapanda, a town on the border with Mozambique.
    Stanton, described by fellow SB officer Keith Samler as a ‘walking memory with an incredible knack for remembering names, places and circumstances’, interrogated the three and they were soon singing like canaries.
    They told him about a large arms cache north-east of Mtoko. Stanton took one of the captives with him and after much tramping about in the bush, they came to some small koppies on the edge of the Nyangwa mountain range on the border. ‘We found plaited bark and vine straps that had been made to carry weapons of war,’ recalls Stanton.
    The ZANLA captive also spoke about a ZANLA ‘letter box’ in a prominent tree. Stanton found the tree, and copied and replaced the letters before setting up an ambush. In the night, an unknown number of ZANLA walked into the trap and one perished. The next day, a wide search of the area revealed a massive cache of weapons, landmines and ammunition, which Stanton describes as ‘one of the largest arms caches of the war’. As Flight Lieutenant Dick Paxton recalled: ‘I flew heavy loads of war material in my helicopter to Mtoko.’
    Stanton’s efforts led to Operation Tempest, the precursor to Operation Hurricane. News of the setbacks to the ZANLA effort in the far north-east as a result of Tempest reached Nhongo at his secret base near St Albert’s Mission, and he decided he could wait no longer. He quickly chose targets, the first being Altena Farm in the Centenary area, owned by a 37-year-old tobacco farmer, Marc de Borchgrave. Nhongo’s primary objective of the first attacks was to study the reaction of the Rhodesian security forces. He delegated the initial attack to his deputy, who used the nom de guerre Jairos.
    The group of eight left Chiweshe under cover of darkness, marching in the night for 16 kilometres from the sparse TTL to the heavily cropped commercial farmlands of Centenary. Nhongo split from the group to observe the reaction of the Rhodesian forces. The main group arrived at