Serving Secretly Rhodesia’s CIO On Record Ken Flower

 Serving Secretly Rhodesias CIO On Record 

Author: Ken Flower  

Publisher: Galago  

Edition: Paperback 1987

ISBN: 978-0-94702-027-6  

Language: English 

Condition: Good. Clean copy with and tight binding  

Binding: Hardcover     

Pages: 330. Print with images and maps

Additional Information

Kenneth Flower GLM was a Rhodesian police officer and intelligence chief

Flower was born in Cornwall, England. After war service in British Somaliland and Ethiopia he returned to Rhodesia in 1948, rapidly rising in the hierarchy of the BSAP. He studied the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya and applied his knowledge in the disturbances in British Nyasaland during the late 1950s.

Flower was appointed Deputy Commissioner of the BSAP in March 1961 and subsequently served as the first head of Rhodesia's and later Zimbabwe's Central Intelligence Organisation. The organisation had been set up by him under Prime Minister Winston Field in 1963 though the original initiative for such an agency had come from Field's predecessor Sir Edgar Whitehead. Flower saw himself as non-political, though with a bias against the 'cowboy element' in the Rhodesian Front, as he dubbed it. Ken Flower has been tied to the creation of RENAMO, a tribally-based guerrilla organization in Mozambique. 

In 1980, when Robert Mugabe became the first Prime Minister of the state of Zimbabwe, he kept Flower as CIO boss as well as other top officials in his predominantly black, first administration. 

Flower wrote Serving Secretly: An Intelligence Chief on Record, Rhodesia into Zimbabwe 1964-1981, published in 1987. 

ZANU militant Fay Chung[ claims in March 1975 Flower ordered the assassination of Herbert Chitepo, then leader of the Zimbabwe African National Union. 

There are allegations that after Ian Smith unilaterally declared Rhodesia independent, Flower maintained his allegiance to the British government and spied on the Smith administration for MI6. In 2011 the BBC Radio 4 programme Documents featured testimony from Lord Owen that Flower had been an MI6 mole for Britain during his tenure as head of Rhodesian CIO and that his disclosure of Rhodesian plans had enabled Mugabe to survive assassination and become the first prime minister of Zimbabwe, following independence. 

Please note that we refer the right to close our auctions at any time.

Payment to be processed within 2 days of auction closing 

Item will be posted on the first Saturday following receipt of payment.

Please refer to all images for condition, as this forms an integral part of the description

We are not responsible for damages to, or loss of items once posted.

The item is second hand and sold as such with no warranty or guarantee implied, expressed or given.

International bidders to kindly request details of shipping costs

Rhodesia | Rhodesian | Bush War | Peter Stiff | Reid Daly | SAS | RLI | Ian Smith | Operation Dingo | Selous | Contact | Recce | Special Forces