Vukutu

One has to wonder if Robert Mugabe was ever on the payroll of the US Central Intelligence Agency, or was an informant for them.    Consider these facts:

• According to Larry Devlin’s account of his time as CIA Chief of Station in the newly-independent Zaire, CIA sought in the 1960s to recruit agents and paid informants inside the black nationalist political parties and liberation movements in African states.  Why would Southern Rhodesia be different?   Certainly, according to the memoir of Ken Flower, CIA had people stationed in Rhodesia in the 1960s and 1970s.
• The New York Times reported in 1990 (1990-06-09) that the CIA had played a part in the arrest of Nelson Mandela by the apartheid regime of South Africa in 1962, using an agent the CIA had within the South African ANC.
• According to Tom Lodge’s history of post-war black politics in South Africa, the South African Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), which was aligned with ZANU (PF), received financial support from the USA.  Lodge gives no sources for this statement.
• According to Heidi Holland’s biography of Mugabe, the Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organization (CIO) facilitated his and Edgar Tekere’s escape across the border from Rhodesia into Mozambique in 1975 (Holland, pp. 175-6).  Was the CIO acting under advice from CIA?
• Following Zimbabwean Independence in 1980, the newly-elected Government of Robert Mugabe took two years before permitting the USSR to open an embassy in Zimbabwe.  The USA, the UK and the PRC were each permitted to open embassies immediately.  Mugabe’s party, ZANU (PF), of course had been aligned with (and mainly received support and training from) the Chinese Communist Party and the PLA during the Second Chimurenga while its main rivals, Joshua Nkomo’s PF-ZAPU, had been aligned with (and mainly received support and training from) the CPSU and the Soviet military.    The first Zimbabwean (and before that, Rhodesian and Zimbabwe-Rhodesian) Director of Central Intelligence, Ken Flower, says in his memoir:  “the early advice I received from [Minister of State Security, Emerson] Mnangagwa:  to accept foreign missions as friendly or ‘non-aligned’ until proved otherwise, but in the first instance to make life as difficult as possible for the Russians.” (page 273).
• For almost two years following Independence, Mugabe met weekly with Ian Smith, the racist and duplicitous Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia who had made the illegal Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1965, and who resisted majority rule until forced to agree to it by the South African regime of John Vorster.
• Following Independence, Mugabe retained Ken Flower as head of the CIO until his retirement 18 months later, and then kept him on as a consultant for a period after that.  Flower had been head of the CIO from its foundation in 1963 under Rhodesian Prime Ministers Winston Field and Ian Smith, and Zimbabwe-Rhodesian PM, Bishop Abel Muzorewa.
• According to a report in Newsweek in February 1982, Joshua Nkomo told a press conference in the then Salisbury (renamed Harare later that year) following his dismissal from the Cabinet, that he had sought South African Government assistance to stage a coup against Mugabe and ZANU (PF), but this request had been refused.
• For at least several years following Independence, the counter-espionage unit of the Zimbabwe CIO had only two divisions:  one seeking to identify and counter South African espionage activities, and the other seeking to identify and counter Soviet espionage activities.  No staff of the CIO were devoted to identifying or countering US espionage activities.  I was told by various CIO officers (including Flower himself) during the 1980s that this was because the USA was not perceived by the Mugabe Government to pose a threat to the country or to the ruling party.  Such a position was, on the surface at least, quite odd, given the (then) avowedly socialist nature of the ZANU (PF) administration, its communist and anti-colonialist rhetoric, and its ostensibly close links to the regimes of Angola, Cuba, the DDR, the DPRK, Libya and Mozambique.  It should also be recalled that during its first decade of Independence, Zimbabwe experienced regular bombings and other acts of terrorism by agents of the apartheid regime of South Africa; these acts included the destruction by terrorist bombs in 1982 of most of the nation’s airforce.   Moreover, some of the white staff of the Zimbabwe CIO, including some in counter-espionage, were themselves South African agents, as was demonstrated when some of these people subsequently defected to RSA.  Zimbabwe had considerable reason to fear foreign espionage at this time.
• Western Governments, including the administrations of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, were remarkably quiet about Mugabe’s genocidal campaign of violence against the people of Matabeleland in 1983-1987, the Gukurahundi.   Indeed, the UK and the USA expressed far more concern for the fate of the white commanders of the Zimbabwean Airforce, arrested, held illegally, and tortured following the bombings of 1982.  The Reagan administration had added Zimbabwe to its list of countries eligible to receive US military aid in December 1982.
• Members and supporters of PF-ZAPU, most recently the brave Judith Todd, have long suggested that some senior members of ZANU (PF) were paid CIA agents.

Unless someone like Larry Devlin writes his memoirs, I doubt we will ever know the facts in this case.

Latest revision of this post:  2010-01-04.   Further speculations on Mugabe’s personality here.

References:

Larry Devlin [ 2007]:  Chief of Station, Congo. New York, NY, USA:  Public Affairs.

Ken Flower [1987]: Serving Secretly: Rhodesia’s CIO Chief on Record.  Johannesburg, RSA:  Galago.

Heidi Holland [2008]:  Dinner with Mugabe. Johannesburg, RSA:  Penguin.

Tom Lodge [1983] : Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945. Longman.

Judith Garfield Todd [2007]:  Through the Darkness:  A Life in Zimbabwe. Cape Town, RSA:  Zebra Press.