Serving Secretly - An Intelligence Chief on Record: Rhodesia into Zimbabwe, 1964-81 [Hardcover]

When I joined the B.S.A.P. as a raw recruit, Ken Flower was then Captain Flower so I never got to know him on a personal level. Although my stay in the Force was relatively short, I maintained contact with my colleagues, many of whom became high ranking officers, and when the problems really kicked off I was pulled back into the fray as a police reservist and became again for all intents and purposes a full time policeman. I mention this only to give background to the opinions I express.
Reading the book it comes as a surpise to someone who lived through those days that Flower is ever ready to criticise end denigrate those who Rhodesians regarded as their heroes - Smithy, The Selous Scouts et al. He seems prepared always to amplify the view taken by certain elements of the British and international press rather tha those expressed by his colleagues in the security services. Typical of this is his version of the brilliantly executed raid carried out by the Selous Scouts at Nyadzonya when he echoes the view that the camp may have been mainly populated by refugees or at best a low level training camp. This, despite the fact that ZANLA documents captured in a subsequent raid showed that ZANLA's analysis of the raid was virtually identical to the account given by the Scouts. In his position Flower had to be aware of this similarity.
I found his lauding of Mugabe in the closing chapters of the book quite sickening given that he was better placed than most to know the detail and extent of the atrocities sanctioned by Mugabe.
There ia another aspect. I know that senior members of the Rhodesian Special Branch believed that Flower had acted as an agent for British Intelligence and I believe that this book lends credence to that belief.

Ken Flower had some English (Cornish) southern African roots, because his father was, he says "a parson", who did hold livings in Salisbury (now "Harare") and elsewhere sometime after WW1. Flower himself was brought up in Cornwall in the 1920's (he says little of this period of his life) became a Customs officer (the Board said he was the first Cornishman to apply for 500 years!) for three years, was turned down for a post as a trapper in Canada, but succeeded in applying for a cadet training position with the BSAP (British South Africa Police), which was in fact the name of the Rhodesian police service until 1980. The harsh training did not break him and he became a mounted officer, serving both in Rhodesia and then, from 1940, for a year or two, in the Ogaden (Ethiopia/Somalia) and Somaliland (now Somalia). As Magistrate, he sentenced (to death, presumably, though he does not say) a number of the Somali youths who brutally massacred 40 Italian civilians when they realized Italian rule was over. He then returned to Rhodesia, eventually becoming Deputy Commissioner of the BSAP. In 1964 he was appointed head of the Rhodesian Secret Service, the CIO (Central Intelligence Organization), which at the time did not exist! He had to build it despite having no idea about modern Intelligence techniques and methods (or recuitment, for that matter).

Such is the effect of a high "Intelligence" appointment on someone that, by the time of UDI (independence) in 1966, he was laughing at Intelligence "amateurs" and calling his SIS and CIA contacts his "colleagues"...In a way, it was an odd appointment for Ian Smith's Rhodesia Front government to continue: Flower does not conceal that he was no supporter of the RF though he says he tries to be "politically neutral". One wonders, though, whether that is possible in a situation where a country of a couple of hundred thousand white European people is fighting for survival against internal and external threats funded by the Soviet Union and Cuba and where the ratio of Europeans to black Africans was 1:20 (later, greater).

One looks in vain in this book for interesting tales of well-placed agents, or intelligence stunts and coups. Of them have we none...instead, we have a lot of bureaucratic-political discussion at the top level of Rhodesian affairs and a lot of criticism of those who were actually fighting and having, on occasion, huge successes against the tide of African insurgency across the borders. Colonel Ron Reid Daly of the Selous Scouts comes in for some venom, as do the Scouts themselves. Yet they were a vital part of trying to stop the insurgency. Flower thought that political moves were the way forward and was key to the arrangements made for semi-enfranchisement of the Africans. He arranged for people like Bishop Muzorewa and the "Reverend" Ndabaningi Sithole (whose name was a gift to the satirists, of course!) to receive large disbursements in cash (sithole went with Flower to Marrakesh so that Sithole could meet the King of Morocco and receive a million dollars US; it seems that the CIA was behind this). Yet in the end, the point was that the military struggle would decide the end, though the British managed to broker the deal in 1979 whereby "elections" of sorts were held and (thanks to his thousands of commissars in the rural areas) Mugabe won. We all now know the results.

I have to say that Flower does not strike me as a very good Intelligence chief: apart from learning from scratch, he seems a bit naive to say the least: British Intelligence is an "honest broker" he says...What?! And he also (sort of) trusts the CIA. He evidently thinks that the Africans would eventually take over (and thinks this right--- why? just because they are more numerous?).

It has to be said that right through the bush war, there were indications that there were leaks from the top of the combined operations staff, enabling major targets to escape, notably Joshua Nkomo. Flower denies that he was a "traitor", but what does that mean? Was Canaris a "traitor"? A grey area, a moot point. It does seem to me that the Intelligence people in Rhodesia could have done more, though they obviously did more than Flowers details here (which is a pity). For example, there is no mention of the famous suborning of a Downing Street girl clerk in one of Harold Wilson's periods of UK government. Why no stories of this kind? The book would have been a lot more interesting. And I do wonder at his criticism of the successful raids into Zambia and Mozambique, carried out from 1977-1979 by the Selous Scouts, Rhodesian SAS and Rhodesian Light Infantry. Those people (including the many female soldiers/terrorists of ZIPRA and ZANLA) were legitimate targets. He seems to think not and is uninterested by the fact that dozens of prisoners of the terrorists were rescued from a lingering African-style death).

Flower cuts a poor figure in the photos here, looking like a bit like the Israeli prime minister Shamir. He says that he forgot his jackets when flying to Teheran to see the Shah, but that the Shah was "understanding". Nice to see that the rather petit bourgeois reputation of the Rhodesians was kept up lol!

The book ends with the author's hopes that Mugabe and Zimbabwe (and, in its turn, South Africa) would go forward to some kind of bright future under African rule. How can someone who lived in Africa for half a century be that naive? No answer...