Ken Flower

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Ken Flower was of Cornish extraction and worked for H.M. Customs & Excise before joining the British South African Police in Southern Rhodesia in 1937. After war service in British Somaliland and Ethiopia he returned to Rhodesia in 1948 rapidly rising in the hierachy of the BSAP. He studied the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya and applied his knowledge in the distrubances in Nyasaland in 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. ^[1] Ken Flower has been tied to the creation of RENAMO, a militant anti-Communist organization in Mozambique.^[2]

When Robert Mugabe became the first Prime Minister of the state of Zimbabwe he kept Flower and Ken Norman, ex-President of the Commercial Farmers Union, in his predominantly black, first administration.^[3]

He wrote Serving Secretly: An Intelligence Chief on Record, Rhodesia into Zimbabwe 1964-1981, published in 1987.^[4]

[edit] Controversy

In March 1975 Flower ordered the assassination of Herbert Chitepo, then-leader of the Zimbabwe African National Union.^[4]

There are allegations that after Ian Smith unilaterally declared Rhodesia independent Flower maintained his allegiance to the British government, or at least the Queen, spying on the Smith administration for MI6.^[5] The fact that Sir Humphrey Gibbs, the Governor of Rhodesia at the time of UDI, and treated shabbily by the illegal Smith Government, wrote the forward to Serving Secretly and referred to him there as 'my friend Ken Flower' lends credence to this view.

[edit] References