The Sunday News
IN the past weeks our Assistant Editor Mkhululi Sibanda (MS) has been talking to former Zapu senior intelligence officer, Cde Macleod Tshawe, who served in the party’s intelligence unit as the chief intelligence officer for the southern front, a Zipra operational area that covered the whole of Matabeleland South, parts of Midlands and had been envisaged to cover Masvingo and Manicaland provinces if the war had continued. Cde Tshawe who operated under the pseudo name Cde Jabulani Cele has spoken about how he joined the armed struggle, training in intelligence in the then Soviet Union and then deployment in the NSO department of recruitment and training where he served under the now late Cde Nephat Madlela. The interview continues below:
MS: Besides being in charge of training, did you have any other duties.
Cde Tshawe: I also used to visit camps and one day immediately after our arrival at MTD the camp was bombed. We had just arrived with a man we called Umdala. The shock wave lifted me from the ground and I fell onto Bitwell, you know Bitwell, he was the son of Zapu senior official, Vote Moyo. We also monitored the movement of the enemy, we also kept a keen eye on the recruits because the enemy that we were dealing with was very sophisticated and so would sent its spies to infiltrate us. In some cases some of the spies could be detected as soon as they arrived in Botswana en-route to Zambia.
If such kind of a person got into Botswana there was a need to quickly send him to Zambia. He would think it’s a special treatment but he would have already been identified. He would then be interrogated and would tell us more, would even reveal some of his colleagues, some who would have slipped through our system. Some of them would have been deployed to the front. Information would then be passed to the units at the front to deal with that person, we did not kill them. We kept them somewhere, sasilawo amagodi. There was a way of getting information but we did not kill, babengabulawa. However, to show that some of those people were really spies, when the Rhodesian forces attacked the Freedom Camp, they went straight to the detention pits and picked their people, the same happened at Mboroma.
MS: Do you still remember the names of some of those spies, you are talking about who were rescued by the Rhodesians?
Cde Tshawe: I do, but I cannot mention names because some of those people are still alive. In fact after the war, I know some who were taken to Umtata in South Africa where they served the apartheid government, those two guys were trained at Morogoro and had managed to fool our system. Those things happened in any war situation.
MS: Then there are attacks that critics believe you guys in the intelligence were found wanting, a good example is the attack on the NSO headquarters deep in Lusaka. May you please tell us what happened?
Cde Tshawe: Yes, the attacks on our camps were a cause for concern. But I will have to be brutally clear here, when those attacks happened the intelligence would have warned about the pending attacks. There was an attack on Mwembeshi where officials were warned and one person who knew about the pending danger was Cde Quick who unfortunately was also hit there, we had warned them of the intended attack, but the guys relaxed. Quick was an intelligence guy.
MS: Then the attack on Roma, the NSO HQ.
Cde Tshawe: The attack on Roma, our NSO headquarters, it was a disaster. I used to stay there, the reason why I survived that attack was because our boss, Dumiso Dabengwa had sent me on an assignment in Botswana. My assignment had been pending for two weeks. In the first week when I was supposed to go to Botswana I missed my flight because the plane was fully booked and the second week it was the same story.
Then on the third week I remember very well it was on a Wednesday, DD himself came to me and strongly reprimanded me for deliberately avoiding going to Botswana. Wathi ngenza ngabomo, izinto ngale zisonakala. When he came to me he was being accompanied by Cde Vusa who is now working in Canada, for a local authority there and there was also Fiso, the younger brother to Professor Clever Nyathi, he also is based in Canada.
I then left immediately after that for Botswana where I got hooked up with Vela who was working there. Then we were supposed to go to Selibe-Phikwe to visit refugees and when we got to Madinara on our way there we heard over the radio that there had been an attack on Roma, the notorious NSO headquarters headed by the notorious terrorist Dumiso Dabengwa. It was mentioned over the radio that some terrorists and intelligence officers had been captured. That shocked me and angikaze ngiqhuqhe so, ngathi madoda lapha kuhambe njani. We then tried to reach some comrades but it was difficult because people were trying to avoid ukukhuluma emoyeni. I then did my assignment, which was successfully done within that week and returned to Lusaka.
MS: So how was the attack engineered?
Cde Tshawe: When I got to Lusaka, I went to Roma or what used to be headquarters. I was even more shocked to see that the house at Roma was razed to nothing. One of the intelligence officers, Mbizo, he is around here took me to where I used to sleep and showed me that the bullet had gone through my pillow. The wardrobe was something else.
MS: But did you consider any precautionary measures before, considering that was the intelligence headquarters.
Cde Tshawe: Time and again we had asked for the fortification of the facility, we had called for the deployment of heavy weapons to defend the HQ and ourselves, but other people just brushed it aside. It never dawned on them that we could come under attack especially considering the location of the facility as it was deep inside the middle of Lusaka. It was a residential part of the city.
- To be continued next week
