Zimbabwe’s national intelligence agency on Monday began deploying its secret agents within the army and police to purge officers suspected of backing opposition plans to revolt against the government, ZimOnline has learnt. In a confidential memorandum dated 19 February 2007, Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) Director General Happyton Bonyongwe expressed concern over the leakage of sensitive information to the opposition. The memo titled, “Reversal of Mass Action,” was addressed to State Security Minister Didymus Mutasa. It blamed the leakage on senior army and police commanders who are suspected of working with the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party. “There is indeed a lot of privileged information on security that is found with the opposition and that is alarming. However, I would like to inform you that we will start deploying our members within the police and army on March 5 2007 and expect to complete the deployments on March 21. “We will begin by targeting provincial and district commanders, who pose the biggest threat as they are always in possession of vital documents and are privy to information that is classified. We expect the teams to have finished their task and reported back to us by April 30 2007,” said Bonyongwe in the memo.
Last month, the CIO claimed that the MDC was seeking to incite worker grievances to incite a public revolt against Mugabe, warning that the revolt had “all chances of succeeding” unless the government moved to preempt it.