1 Recce. Alexander Strachan

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СКАЧАТЬ At about 10 m from the surface, which was still far too high, he was already falling out of his harness. He hit the water with such force that the straps with which the oxygear was attached to his body snapped on impact, and the expensive apparatus disappeared under the water.

      A fuming Breytenbach could not believe his ears when he heard this. ‘Next thing, the dispatchers will probably tell me the Dakota is missing!’ was his indignant reaction.

      This bad news immediately put a damper on the group’s enthusiasm. They had only seven oxygear sets, and now they were told on top of it that one such set cost the same as a Volkswagen. In the wink of an eye the whole adventure had turned into a nightmare. They had to drop everything else and search for the missing oxygear.

      ‘Get that thing!’ Breytenbach ordered. ‘No one’s leaving here until you’ve found it!’

      There were only five days left before their leave was due to start. Breytenbach’s instruction meant that they would now have to search for the apparatus in their holiday time. For one of the men, John More, it was even worse – he was supposed to leave for Europe on his honeymoon the following morning. His successful appeal to Breytenbach resulted in him being the only member to be excused from the search. More rushed to Oudtshoorn to collect his luggage and flew via Port Elizabeth to catch his flight in Johannesburg. As his plane flew over the Swartvlei Lake, lo and behold, he saw through the window the men still searching incessantly for the oxygear.

      Day after day they toiled, but in vain. They found nothing. The two naval divers showed them how to use rope lines and conduct the search systematically. They slept in a caravan park at night and lived on canned food: bully beef, vegetables, and endless tins of peas. Their pocket money was fast running out since there were no fish or sinkers they could sell. Fires became quieter by the day. He was suddenly the most unpopular member of the group, and the others did not feel like talking to him anyway.

      The whole week was devoted to the search, and before the final dive on the Friday afternoon the oxygear still had not been found. Breytenbach then played another card: ‘I suppose you’re all going on holiday now and I have to stay behind on my own to sort out your mess!’ Whereupon he asked for volunteers to dive with him during the holiday. Koos Moorcroft, Kenaas Conradie, Dewald de Beer, Jimmy Oberholzer, Fires and Dave Tippett agreed to join him in continuing the search. They had no money for a holiday in any case. The Special Forces soldiers did not earn much in those days and did not receive the present-day allowances either.

      Late that Friday afternoon they did their last dive of the day. During this desperate attempt, Koos spotted a piece of rubber in the water next to the swimming line. On closer inspection, he saw that it was indeed the mouthpiece of the oxygear. He immediately dived down, felt all around him with his hands, and, to his own disbelief, touched the oxygear apparatus! As he surfaced with it and the men saw what he was holding, their relief was indescribable.

      Sometimes things went awry during operations too, and in one case this was to the Recces’ great relief. BOSS had received intelligence that a Norwegian vessel was transporting a shipment of mines and explosive systems to Tanzania. The consignment would be unloaded there and then brought to Mozambique and Rhodesia by convoy. This was one of the routes used to supply ammunition to the Mozambican liberation movement Frelimo.

      The South Africans knew when the ship was due to dock in Durban harbour, and Breytenbach, Trevor, Koos and Kenaas were instructed to plant mines on the ship. An expert from BOSS prepared the mines for them. These were still the old kind of magnetic mines that functioned with obsolete delay mechanisms. With a ‘balsak’ (a canvas bag in which troops stored their kit) filled with mines, the team approached the ship from Salisbury Island in Durban harbour and attached the devices to the hull.

      The ship was scheduled to leave the same evening, and the mines had been set to detonate once the vessel reached the open sea. Unbeknown to the operators, the ship’s captain had received permission from the harbour master to stay over for one more day. By the time the sabotage team heard this news, it was too late to do anything about the matter – the mines could not be removed as they had already been activated. It became a very long night for them, knowing that Durban harbour with its many fuel tanks was literally a powder keg waiting to explode.

      To their relief, nothing happened and the ship put to sea the following day. It was assumed that the delay mechanisms might have malfunctioned or that the mines had slipped off and landed at the bottom of the harbour. Another possibility was that the ship could have departed with all the mines attached and that they had been washed off somewhere in the ocean. The fate of the mines has remained a mystery to this day.

      This foray by Cmdt. Jan Breytenbach and his team of Recces was nevertheless the first South African operational diving exercise, albeit that it was executed on home soil.

      Their first sabotage mission outside South Africa’s borders took place in 1972. A decision was taken at government level that the regime of President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania should be destabilised because he had made training facilities available to Frelimo. In the view of the decision makers, these facilities were contributing to the escalation of the guerrilla war in Mozambique. The plan was to foment unrest in Tanzania with a series of sabotage attacks.8 It was assumed that the Tanzanians would attribute any act of sabotage to Nyerere’s opponent Oscar Kambona, a former non-Marxist cabinet minister.

      The Recces were tasked with conducting the operation, and the Tanzanian capital Dar es Salaam was chosen as the first target. Somewhere en route to their destination, the team would board a Navy submarine that had already sailed from Simon’s Town. The plan was for the submarine to deliver them to a position close to Dar es Salaam, from where they would paddle to the beach in kayaks under cover of darkness and infiltrate the city on foot. Specific infrastructure targets were identified on which they had to plant limpet mines with delay mechanisms. After withdrawing to the beach, they were to paddle in the kayaks to a predetermined RV where the submarine would pick them up.

      Breytenbach chose five men to carry out the assignment with him: Trevor, Kenaas, Koos and the two naval members who had dived with them at Swartvlei Lake in December the year before, Ken Brewin and Willie Dewey. Since they were total novices when it came to seaborne operations, the Recce operators first spent four months on sea training.

      They used Cockleshell Heroes by CE Lucas Phillips and HG Hasler as a guideline. The book is a detailed account of a similar submarine-launched raid by British commandos during the Second World War. But Breytenbach and company were faced with a practical problem: the group had no kayaks. Koos’s father then came to their rescue by ordering three Klepper kayaks (a kind of collapsible canoe) from Germany for the planned operation. James Moorcroft had very good contacts among the Germans, and the Kleppers were brought into the country clandestinely.

      Strict security was maintained throughout the group’s training, and no one except Breytenbach knew where the operation would take place. The Special Forces always used cover stories – which had been planned and coordinated at the highest level – to conceal the real nature and location of an operation.

      The team would fly from Pretoria in a Skymaster to the Mozambican coast where they were to be picked up by a Portuguese frigate (a small, fast military ship). Breytenbach briefed the team on the target and the task at hand. Kenaas (their explosives expert) prepared the charges, and each member of the group knew exactly what he had to do and how the task had to be carried out.

      On their arrival at Nacala on the Mozambican coast, they discovered that the Portuguese frigate had failed to arrive – it was waiting in Beira. So they flew to Beira, where they boarded the frigate. In the open sea, the frigate made contact with the submarine SAS Emily Hobhouse (S-98), which was captained by Cdr. LJ ‘Woody’ Woodburne, and the operators went aboard.

      The initial plan was that the team would СКАЧАТЬ