via CIO: A history of politicisation, division and internal suspicion – The Zimbabwe Independent March 18, 2016
THIS is the second installment of an article titled State Intelligence and the Politics of Zimbabwe’s Presidential Succession which first appeared in the African Affairs Journal published last month by Oxford University Press of the United Kingdom on behalf of the Royal African Society.
African Affairs Journal Oxford univeristy
As can be seen in the work of Timothy Scarnecchia, political witch-hunts have long-established roots in Zanu PF. Historian Gerald Mazarire has also written about how civilians and guerrillas in Zanla camps lived under close surveillance and fear of the guerrilla army’s security department. Mazarire demonstrates how this security division often summarily targeted perceived sell-outs and conducted witch-hunts that used violence, torture and public humiliation during parades in Zanla camps.
This article also draws a distinction between military and civilian intelligence institutions, which refines Ibbo Mandaza’s analysis of the 2014 political upheavals in Zanu PF. Mandaza presents the liquidation of former vice-president Joice Mujuru’s faction as marking the ascent and “triumph” of an integrated “securocratic state”, but, as shown here, this “securocratic state” was hardly unified. It is therefore more precise to write of a triumph of the military intelligence (MI) section of a “securocratic state”.
Scholar John Hughes Wilson contends that the distinction between military and civilian intelligence is misleading because “all intelligence is government intelligence; it tends to become a military (intelligence) problem only when it (security/events) goes horribly wrong”. However, as this article will demonstrate, there is a real distinction between civilian and MI, and the division is deepened in contexts of militarisation (the appointment of military officers to the leadership of civilian intelligence institutions), politicisation of security institutions and an acutely factionalised ruling party.
Intelligence failures
The Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) has a long history of politicisation, internal division and distrust in its uppermost stratum. CIO is an intelligence vestige of the colonial Rhodesian state. It was formed in 1963 and had Ken Flower as its founding director-general while the internal director (responsible for domestic intelligence gathering) was Derrick Robinson.
Flower’s institutional design of CIO was such that “CIO, and only CIO, should co-ordinate all intelligence acquired from internal, external and liaison sources”, which meant that MI was merely a division within CIO responsible for amassing intelligence in the military, whose director reported to the director-general.
From its inception, the CIO was highly politicised because one of its functions was to act as a political instrument in the colonial state’s resistance against pressure for black majority rule.
According to Dan Stannard, a state intelligence operative during the colonial years, and the former Rhodesian army commander General Sandy Maclean, Robinson and Flower were persistently accompanied by allegations within the security sector that they were double agents. Stannard and Maclean recounted that Flower in particular was suspected of being loyal to Britain’s secret intelligence service (MI6), although this suspicion was never supported by concrete evidence at the time.
Stannard recalled: “If we had a meeting and there was an important decision to be made about our intelligence, Flower prevaricated. Soon after he would travel to London and upon his return he would take a decision.
Prevarication, a trip abroad, swift decision when home. This tended to be his pattern on major issues.We were suspicious of him and that divided the organisation.
“In my case, what confirmed my suspicions about him was his conduct in the 1980 (Independence) election. CIO had worked on a plan to rig the election for (Abel) Muzorewa. We had boxes and boxes of stuffed ballots. We worked out how to enter undetected where the cast ballots were stored and we were going to replace them with CIO ballot boxes. I was deployed to Bindura for this operation. Flower stalled on giving the order to start rigging, then he just called it off. I was surprised because the plan was agreed. To me this meant he was not his own man.”
Former British Foreign Secretary (1977-79) Lord David Owen validated Stannard’s claims about Flower by stating that “Flower was on our (Britain’s) side. So I was well aware of what Ken Flower was claiming was being done (by the Rhodesian Security Forces), and I used to read the (CIO) reports”.
Evidently, CIO’s institutional history during the colonial years is partly defined by politicisation and internal suspicion and division over its leadership’s allegiances. Apprehension and disunion over the CIO directorship’s integrity continued in the independence period, but a new variety of politicisation emerged. Continuity of distrust and disunity from the colonial years has, to a degree, its source in the Independence (1980) government’s retention of Flower as the director-general of CIO, along with other willing former Rhodesian intelligence operatives, such as Stannard, who continued to view Flower negatively.
According to Flower, Emmerson Mnangagwa (intelligence minister, 1980-88) “asked me to stay in office for at least the two-year period it would take to reconstruct CIO, I agreed but maintained there was little need for change, particularly if they wished the organisation to retain its professional standards”. Flower adds that Mnangagwa acquiesced to his standpoint against post-Independence reconstruction and “left the professional control of CIO to me, while he provided the political link to government”. According to Mnangagwa, “we (Zanu PF) really wanted our institutions to work, but we were careful about the whites (who remained in CIO). We could never fully trust some of them”.
Still, CIO did undergo Africanisation from 1980. It became a mixture of past Rhodesian intelligence operatives, former Zanla (Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army) members and a minority of ex-Zipra (Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army) elements.
There is a dearth of meticulous accounts on the configuration of the National Security Organisation, Zipra’s intelligence arm during the liberation war, as well as on its relationship with military intelligence. There are, however, some pertinent analyses on Zanla intelligence, which was subsumed in its security department.
Fay Chung writes that the security department played “the dual role of providing ‘protection’ while at the same time spying on the person who was being protected”. Chung concludes that this dual practice endured in the Independence period because of the integration of the Zanla security department into CIO from 1980.
Certainly, my Zanu PF interviewees viewed CIO’s double utility as partly a legacy of the Zanla security department’s dual role during the liberation war.
Zanla and Zipra were acrimonious rivals throughout the war. This old Zanla-Zipra rivalry created a new split and climate of mistrust in CIO. As early as 1981 Zanu PF began accusing Zapu of using former Zipra soldiers to foment dissident activity in the south of Zimbabwe.
Consequently, from 1981, Stannard maintained, the minority former Zipra elements were “weeded out from CIO in a very systematic way because they were passing intelligence to Dumiso Dabengwa (ex-Zipra intelligence chief) and Swazini Ndlovu who was Dabengwa’s number two”. By 1987, when the Zanu PF and Zapu hostilities were resolved through the signing of the Unity Accord that subordinated the latter to the former, CIO was dominated by ex-Zanla personnel — an outcome that underscored a new form of politicisation in CIO. The number of ex-Rhodesian operatives had also dwindled by 1987, with the retirement of the divisive Flower being the most significant single departure.
Stannard observed that CIO became a “more or less settled” organisation in terms of ex-Zanla supremacy from 1987 onwards.
However, he identified a meaningful development in the mid-1990s, which was that: “CIO little by little stopped doing hard intelligence work because we now had corrupt, feuding directors. The director-general at the time was called Shadreck Chipanga and the deputy director-general was Lovemore Mukandi. Shadreck and Lovemore were fighting each other for control of CIO. It divided CIO right down the middle. I remember seeing the whole fibre of CIO change. Standards fell.
“The quality of intelligence reports to me was going down, but Shadreck and Lovemore did not seem to care. CIO became more and more about making money for the chefes. Lovemore more than Shadreck was a fiddler who was formerly director of administration in CIO. Also part of the problems was that they were not renewing the organisation enough. There were too many Zanla types who had been in CIO since 1980 who started to see being in CIO as a right when what they were there for was hard intelligence work.”
An ex-intelligence minister responded to Stannard’s observation by saying: “These (white) Rhodesians always say that things worked better during colonialism, but this time they are correct. CIO got worse under us (Zanu PF).”
The former intelligence minister Didymus Mutasa also observed that CIO produced “not very good reports really. I had to read them. They made me tired”.
In response to the escalating 1990s institutional malaise, Mugabe summarily dismissed Chipanga and Mukandi in 1998, a move that resulted in the latter fleeing to Canada to avoid prosecution for fraud in CIO. Mugabe militarised the CIO leadership by replacing Mukandi and Chipanga with two brigadiers, Elisha Muzonzini and Happyton Bonyongwe.
A former intelligence minister alleged that General Solomon Mujuru and Mugabe still had a functional political relationship at the time and, hence the general successfully recommended Muzonzini and Bonyongwe to Mugabe.
Muzonzini was appointed director-general and Bonyongwe became the new deputy director-general.
Stannard maintained that “Mugabe needed to get order back in CIO so that is why he turned to the military”. In addition, Muzonzini and Bonyongwe were outsiders to the Chipanga-Mukandi power struggle, making it plausible that Mugabe saw the imposition of an external leadership as a way of subduing Mukandi and Chipanga’s respective factions in CIO.
Whatever the merits of Mugabe’s decision to militarise the CIO leadership, his determination spawned new fault lines and mistrust in the organisation.
Mugabe removed Muzonzini from the director-general post in 2003 because he presented critical intelligence reports to him before the 2000 parliamentary and 2002 presidential elections that pointed to Mugabe’s declining electoral appeal. Bonyongwe succeeded Muzonzini, but he too did not have Mugabe’s complete trust because: “Mugabe suspected that (General) Mujuru had instructed Muzonzini to produce reports to convince him to step down (from power) and because Bonyongwe had come (to CIO) with Muzonzini on (General) Mujuru’s advice, Mugabe was suspicious of Bonyongwe.
“… Mugabe said to me: ‘Bonyongwe is (General) Mujuru’s man. I want to know what (General) Mujuru is doing (in Zanu PF) so create a parallel intelligence structure for spying on (General) Mujuru and bring that information directly to me’. Every time I met Mugabe alone, he always asked what (General) Mujuru was doing. He was very worried that (General) Mujuru would remove him from power.”
Bonyongwe has held the director-general post since 2003, meaning that military officers have led CIO for approximately two decades now. Yet CIO is a civilian institution manned by career intelligence officers. The imposition of military officers without a civilian intelligence background irked ambitious long-serving civilian intelligence operatives in CIO, who had been waiting their turn to succeed Chipanga and Mukandi.
An additional schism engendered by Mugabe’s militarisation of the CIO directorship centred on the divergence between the institutional cultures of civilian intelligence and the military. Intelligence data may help inform the military’s tactical manoeuvres in warfare, but intelligence work and soldiering remain disparate practices.
Contrasting practices dictate dissimilar institutional cultures and leadership styles.
The core business of the military is warfare. The quintessence of military leadership is command and control, hence the military’s institutional culture is ineluctably top-down or hierarchical, emphasising discipline, procedure and unquestioning allegiance to the command. On the other hand, the intelligence realm is about the acquisition, scrutiny, debate and control of information. Accordingly the culture of intelligence institutions values the contestation of information and critical analyses over complete subservience to the command and its orders.
Given these important differences, the military leaders in CIO did not always find it easy to abandon their top-down approach, as seen in the following criticism of Bonyongwe’s conduct during meetings: “He has a habit of interrupting others during briefing sessions. Bonyongwe likes to overrule other people’s views by simply saying that is wrong. He rarely bothers to offer an alternative viewpoint.”
In addition, Mutasa recalled an occasion in 2014 in which he attempted to mediate a dispute between Bonyongwe and a high-ranking civilian intelligence operative, by stating: “Bonyongwe flatly refused to talk. He said this person is a subordinate. I cannot sit down to discuss with a subordinate.”
To be continued next week…
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