This episode marks a turning point for Hangar 51 Files.
For the first time, we move beyond narration and archival reconstruction into direct testimony — filmed inside Hangar 51 Studios — with two men whose lives were shaped by a war that never truly ended when the ceasefires were signed.
One is David Scales, a former Rhodesian SAS operator and Selous Scout who later served in South Africa’s 5 Reconnaissance Regiment. His career unfolded in deniable spaces — cross-border operations, counter-insurgency, and the long afterlife of Southern Africa’s dirty wars, where loyalties were provisional and maps meant very little.
The other is Patrick Gericke, a former Rhodesian explosive ordnance disposal specialist who made the improbable transition into the Zimbabwe National Army after independence. Officially, he was one of the few former Rhodesians absorbed into Mugabe’s new military structure. Unofficially, he was operating as a covert agent for South African military intelligence.
In 1981, Gericke was arrested by Zimbabwean authorities and accused of sabotaging Inkomo Barracks — a critical military installation outside Harare storing millions of dollars’ worth of weapons and matériel. The explosion sent shockwaves through a fragile new state already gripped by paranoia, internal purges, and unresolved external threats.
What followed was imprisonment, interrogation, and a silence that lasted decades.
Until now.
In this episode, both men speak — on record, in full — about what happened next: a deniable extraction operation deep inside hostile territory, conducted by a covert South African special forces unit, in a mission that does not officially exist and was never meant to surface.
This is not a story of heroes or villains. It is a study in unfinished wars, intelligence tradecraft, fractured loyalties, and the grey zones that emerge when political settlements outpace the realities on the ground.
No mythology. No hindsight moralising. Just lived experience — finally placed into the historical record.
