Central Intelligence Organisation

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The Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) is the national intelligence agency or "secret police" of Zimbabwe. The CIO was formed in Rhodesia on the instructions of Prime Minister Winston Field in 1963 at the dissolution of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and took over from the Federal Intelligence and Security Bureau, which was a co-ordinating bureau analysing intelligence gathered by the British South Africa Police and the police forces of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

The first head of the CIO was Deputy Commissioner Ken Flower; during his tenure the BSAP Special Branch Headquarters were incorporated within the CIO, while the Special Branch retained its internal security function within the BSAP.

Astonishingly, Prime Minister Robert Mugabe was content to keep Ken Flower in the role of Head of the CIO after majority rule in 1980, when the country's name changed to Zimbabwe. This was seen by some commentators as proof that Flower had worked covertly and intermittently with the British intelligence services to undermine Ian Smith's government, and was in sharp contrast to the treatment of Lieutenant-General Peter Walls, chief of the Rhodesian Armed Forces, who was exiled and deprived of Zimbabwean citizenship in 1980.

In recent years international human rights organisations such as Amnesty International have criticised the CIO's role in alleged internal repression, which is said on occasions to have involved torture.

[edit] See also

• Operation Murambatsvina
• Odile Harington

[edit] References

• Flower, Ken (1987). Serving Secretly - An Intelligence Chief on Record Rhodesia into Zimbabwe 1964 to 1981, London, John Murray.