The reign of terror under Idi Amin left thousands of Ugandans killed in a methodical and capricious manner led by his notorious intelligence outfits—the State Research Bureau (SRB) and the Public Safety Unit (PSU).
A trove of documents, which were later retrieved from torture chambers and government offices paint a portrait of the Idi Amin regime as ‘a snake pit of fear and paranoia, dominated by a secret police that spent millions of dollars on sophisticated devices such as deadly exploding cigarette lighters but whose agents were barely literate’, according to an archived article by the New York Times.
Going up in smoke
Occupants of the French Ambassador’s house, next door to the bureau in Nakasero, a leafy suburb in Kampala, said that for two days before the bureau was abandoned after Amin’s government fell on April 29, 1979, smoke rose from the incinerator, leading to speculation that the most incriminating records had been burned.
The two‐foot piles of papers that were strewn through corridors and offices indicate that Amin’s secret police tried to infiltrate every area of Ugandan life. Nothing was considered too insignificant to file away, from reports of conversation at bars to complaints about smuggling or “magendo,” the pervasive black market run by top officials, according to the New York Times.
Some show how President Amin’s suspicions and surveillance of outsiders were fed by his subordinates. One letter from Robert Astles, Amin’s British‐born aide, reads:
“Your excellency. We have evidence through documentation and interrogation that foreign companies are working against the Ugandan economy. We also have evidence that the C.I.A. is working against you. We would like to give our intelligence verbally. Your obedient servant, Bob Astles.”
Astles nicknamed the ‘white rat’ was later implicated in the assassination of Bruce McKenzie, a former Agriculture minister in the Jomo Kenyatta government.
Amin intelligence agencies relied on physical and covert surveillance. For instance, locals frequenting the Gun Hill Bar in Kampala were suspected of engaging in “loose talks against the Government.” It was suggested that “our boys join the club to observe what those people are doing.”
The files also contained many copies of letters intercepted by the post office, many of them written by foreign businessmen who complained of having their phones tapped and their mail read. Notations suggested that the businessmen were regarded as subversives “trying to sabotage Uganda’s economy.”
The reports also indicated that many of the Ugandans serving in foreign missions were State Research Bureau agents.
Found in the third‐floor office of the bureau’s head of technical operations was a contract dated 3 August, 1977, between the Government and a person identified as F. Terpil of Intercontinental Technology. It was for $3.2 million in surveillance equipment and “secret special weapons.”
These included liquid explosives, remote radio detonators, telephone monitoring units and weapons in the form of pens, cigarette lighters and attaché cases.
The contract also covered “training of selected students in the art and craft of intelligence, sabotage, espionage and psychological warfare practices.”
A target on his back
Amin’s orgy of bloodletting facilitated by riff-raff intelligence corps and a panopticon intelligence apparatus jolted the western World. In 1977, the Central Intelligence Command (CIA), the US civilian foreign intelligence outfit, singled out President Amin for assassination. Barely two years before his overthrow, the Western capitals depicted Amin as a ruthless leader whose impulse sealed the fate of thousands of his victims trapped behind steel doors in underground torture dungeons.
During his confirmation hearing in 1977, Stansfield Turner, who was president Jimmy Carter’s nominee to head the CIA was asked if he could think of a situation where he might approve the assassination of a foreign head of state. Admiral Turner replied tersely: “Not in peacetime. But, I wonder. I wonder if the world wouldn’t really be a better place if the CIA were to assassinate or assist in the assassination of Uganda’s president Idi Amin.”
This revelation was part of 13 million pages of declassified documents from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released in January 2017, online. The release of the files was prompted by a lawsuit against the CIA filed by information advocates.
Stansfield revealed further, “I believe with my deepest conviction, that the greatest strength we have as a world power is our moral dedication to the rights of the individual. Well, I agree whole-heartedly and this is my point. What better way to demonstrate to the world the depth of our moral dedication to the rights of individuals than to have the CIA arrange one of those fatal ‘auto accidents’ for Idi Amin. In fact, after this is accomplished, the agency might even want to hold a press conference and claim credit for the operation.”
Cloak and dagger world
His choice of words for the operation—‘auto accidents’ opens a murky window into the cloak and dagger world of espionage and the conduct of the CIA’s covert operations anchored on its ‘moral obligation’ to restore a modicum of sanity by assassinating despotic leaders.
Stanisfield became director at the time the CIA faced flak in the wake of congressional hearings into unsavory clandestine operations. During testimonies, investigators said the CIA had tested experimental drugs on human subjects, plotted to assassinate foreign dignitaries and illegally spied on American citizens. It is not clear yet why the plan was shelved.
Amin is portrayed in the CIA scripts as a leader that ingratiated himself with assassins with contracts to kill the most guarded leaders, bomb-making experts and international gunrunners.
Amongst this intricate web of an international criminal underworld was an officer with a storied career as a CIA courier who was later convicted for his role in terror-related activities and arms-sales.
It was 23 September, 1976 when four men met secretly in a private home in the Ugandan capital of Kampala. The CIA files referred to the meeting as ‘a gathering of merchants of death.’
Outside, the reign of terror launched by Amin was in full motion, reads the CIA records. “Inside the house, the talk was of Amin’s dreaded secret police and of international terrorist activities. The four men were among the world’s most cold-blooded, dangerous architects of political murder and mayhem. A single grenade tossed into the conference room could have spared the world much pain and misery in the years to come. But there was no one there to turn the table on the four professional assassins.”
All the president’s men
Astles, in whose home the ‘dialogue of death was conducted’, was Amin’s British-born security adviser and general factotum. In his role as Amin’s right-hand man, Astles was allegedly the brains behind the security police that butchered and tortured thousands of Ugandans during Amin’s despotic rule.
After Amin and Astles fled Uganda in 1979, the Briton was brought in chains to face charges of murder. But in September 1976, he was still riding high, the CIA scripts read.
Another participant was Wadi Hadad, known to some of his enemies as the ‘doctor of death’ for masterminding the 1972 Munich massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes.
Less than three months earlier, the Israelis had thwarted Hadad’s hijacking of a jetliner by their daring raid on Entebbe. After many hairbreadth escapes— including an Israeli bazooka blast into his hotel suite, Hadad died of natural causes in 1978.
The third man was the infamous Venezuela-born assassin, Carlos the Jackal, a leftist militant. He was accused of planning the Munich massacre and was responsible for the kidnapping of the OPEC oil ministers in December 1975, as well as many other acts of international brigandage.
In 2017, he was found guilty by a French court over a grenade attack in 1974 on a shop on Paris’s Champs Elysees, the Drugstore Publicis that killed two people and injured 36.
Carlos, who was born in Venezuela and whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, is serving two other life terms and has lost appeals against them.
The fourth man in the gathering of professional cutthroats was an American, Frank Terpil, an officer who previously worked with the CIA and later turned into a snitch and helped ship arms for tin-pot dictators across the world.
A newcomer to the inner circle of international terrorism, Terpil had arrived in Uganda with the personal recommendation of Libyan dictator Muammar Qadaffi, a close ally of Amin.
As a CIA courier some years before, Terpil had ingratiated himself with Qadaffi when the future dictator was a junior officer in the Libyan army.
The merchant of death
Of the four, Terpil probably best fit the description ‘merchant of death’, the CIA files read. Not one to risk his own neck, he supplied explosives and other items that enabled hit-men to carry out their acts of terrorism around the world. He later fled the United States to avoid prosecution for illegal shipment of arms to Libya. He went into hiding in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon.
Intelligence sources claim that the 23 Septembermeeting was Terpil’s introduction to Amin’s inner circle. With his macabre references from Qadaffi, Terpil signed his first contract with Amin in 1977. It was worth $ 3.2 million worth of weapons and communications gear.
Terpil began providing Astles security police with torture equipment taser electronic shock guns and other deadly hardware. One of Terpil’s associates was to boast later about a torture he devised that required sophisticated equipment. It consisted of a rat placed on a victim’s stomach under an invented pot, requiring the rat to gnaw its way through a victim’s stomach.
Terpil’s first lucrative contract with Amin was followed by several more before the tyrant was finally driven from power.
The American’s shipments of weapons and torture devices to Amin were so ill-concealed that a Ugandan diplomat to the United Nations after Amin’s fall told federal investigators he was appalled that a US citizen could conduct the activities that Terpil had conducted.
The diplomat and other indicated their belief that his former employer, the CIA, could easily have stopped Terpil’s nefarious trade at any time
Earlier on, the CIA it is stated in the records, hauled arms and flew military missions against rebels fighting Idi Amin at the time the African nation was under a US military embargo for human rights violations
The activity, which was carried out in 1976, may have been illegal but the CIA gave in to Amin’s request for fear of losing ‘a spying operation it had established in Amin’s air service.’
The spies in Amin’s four-plane air service supplied western intelligence services with extraordinarily detailed information about Amin’s activities, former US president and Head of the CIA between 1976-1977, George W. Bush when some of the flights occurred said ‘no comment at this time’ through his press office.
The said flights were made in planes sold to Amin by Page Airways of Rochester and by a Swiss dealer who actually was an Israeli intelligence agent.
In one of the depositions, a southern air pilot described how southern air and page employees transported weapons, smuggled in stolen US military equipment and engaged in military operations against Ugandan rebels for Amin. Two southern aircrew members said they were told to transport weapons and assist military operations to remain in Amin’s good graces.
The aircrews were supplied by southern Air transport of Miami once secretly owned and operated by the CIA, which flew weapons destined for Iran to the Middle East and also shipped arms to Nicaragua contras, in what came to be known as the Iran-Contra scandal.
Terpil in the crosshairs
The United States government had secretly arranged arms sales to Iran through Israel and used the profits to fund Nicaraguan contra rebels. In this deal, two separate American foreign policy schemes were joined in the expectation of mutual benefit.
The United States backed the contra rebels who were fighting against the left-wing Sandinista government as part of its policy of preventing the spread of leftist movements around the globe. In Iran, the American government hoped to appease purported ‘moderates’ in the Iranian government with arms sales in order to secure their help in effecting the release of American hostages held by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon.
During an interview broadcast in the 1982 documentary, Confessions of a Dangerous Man, the former CIA agent admitted having a permanent office in the “State Researches Institution” in Kampala. Amin’s victims are known to have been tortured in the basement.
Terpil claimed he was not fully aware of what was going on. “It was a domestic issue,” he later said in Havana.
The night Amin’s rule finally ended, on 13 April 1979, Terpil was on the presidential plane to Libya. He recalls loading steel trunk-loads of gold onto the aircraft, just before they flew out from Entebbe.
In 1980, Terpil was indicted by a US court on charges that included the illegal delivery of 20 tonnes of plastic explosives to Gaddafi and the attempted sale of 10,000 machine-guns.
Terpil skipped bail and left the country on a commercial flight out of Washington DC. In 1981 he was sentenced in absentia to 53 years in jail. The judge said he deserved to serve every day of the jail term, describing his line of work as “trade in death and destruction”.
Terpil also gave a description of Amin as a deranged man who ‘at one time served the head of an assassinated minister for dinner.’
Terpil, who had earlier on in 1973 sold eavesdropping equipment to Amin’s regime, is also accused of participating in the liquidation of Kenya’s only white cabinet Agriculture minister in the Jomo Kenyatta government, Bruce McKenzie formerly a British intelligence spy and wheeler-dealer.
McKenzie’s twin-engine Piper Aztec 23 plane exploded over Ngong Hills, a few minutes after 6pm on May 25, 1978 as he flew back from a meeting with President Idi Amin of Uganda.
According to the CIA scripts, ‘a liquid bomb [supplied by Terpil] hidden in the Lion’s head trophy in the cargo compartment had been detonated by a sophisticated electronic device.’
Mckenzie, a former British Intelligence officer is believed to have provided crucial information to help the Israelis raid at Entebbe airport to rescue hijacked citizens.
Amin’s fixer Astles had close ties with McKenzie for a number of years and had struck a car deal with the Kenyan-based Cooper Motors Corporation to supply Land-Rovers to be used by the dreaded State Research Bureau; as a result, McKenzie was also a supplier to Amin.
After his retirement from the Cabinet, McKenzie had secured the Volkswagen dealership in East Africa with Kenya’s then powerful Attorney General, Charles Njonjo, and was the middleman on purchase of Vickers tank by Kenya in 1976. Astles had turned to McKenzie to deliver radio equipment to Amin’s intelligence outfits from UK’s Pye Telecommunication through its Kenyan distributor Wilken Telecommunications Limited.
This company was owned by McKenzie and Keith Savage and supplied Amin with VHF-FM radiotelephone systems and Land Rovers ostensibly designed to “detect television licence dodgers”. In 1976, another British company, Contact Radio and Telephone, had built a bullet-proof broadcasting station for Amin which could be used in times of war and emergency.
It was also revealed that both McKenzie and Savage made several trips to Uganda and held lengthy talks with Amin. One of the passengers aboard the ill-fated flight was Gavin Whitelaw, a representative of Vickers – a British company that built battle tanks for export. This led to speculation that McKenzie’s trip was possibly to secure an arms sales deal.
Amin had earlier been sucked into the intelligence orbit before he ascended to the presidency.
Love-hate relationship with Israel
As Army Commander during the Obote I government in the 1960s, Amin, briefly enrolled in a paratrooper course and became friends with Colonel Baruch Bar-Lev, Israel’s military attaché in Uganda. A Kakwa, a tribe that straddles the Uganda-South Sudan border, Amin approved of Israel’s support to the Anyanya rebellion in South Sudan, which was fighting the Arab-led Khartoum regime to break the yoke of oppression and gain autonomy.
The New Yorker reported in 2016 that during a trip to Cairo, according to the Israeli military historian Yehuda Ofer, Amin called Bar-Lev because he was worried that, when he returned, he would be arrested for the murder of an Obote ally. Bar-Lev was eager to help Amin, who was serving Israel’s interests in Sudan, and he advised the Ugandan commander to form a battalion within the army to protect himself. The Israelis would train it. This unit, consisting of paratroopers, tanks, and armed jeeps, proved instrumental a few months later when, in January, 1971, Amin overthrew the regime while Obote was in Singapore for a meeting of the British Commonwealth.
According to CIA files, it is not clear whether it was the British MI6 or Israeli’s intelligence outfit Mossad that took the lead in plotting to overthrow Amin but the two seemed to have worked together to aid Amin’s putschists.
When he first came to power, Amin was avowedly pro-British— grateful for the UK’s early recognition of his regime and pro-Israel —loud in his praise for their assistance to Uganda’s military establishment and made his first diplomatic visit to Israel.
But later on, the West accused Amin of being volatile and paranoid and often claimed that the British, Israelis, and other western nations were plotting to assassinate him. Israelis plots and machinations thereafter became the favourite scapegoat for Amin’s ills, read the CIA scripts.
Amin ordered his militias at the border to “shoot on sight any Israeli attempting to cross the border into Uganda and his subsequent accusations of British plots and sabotage accompanied by observations as to what good targets white faces would make for his troops alarmed the foreign community.”