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Kenneth Flower , ID (30 June 1914In his memoir Serving Secretly: An Intelligence Chief on Record, Rhodesia into Zimbabwe 1964-1981 (p.114) Flower mentions that he shares the same birthday date ( aniversario) with his friend, Portuguese general Costa Gomes – 2 September 1987) was a Rhodesian police officer and Espionage chief.
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.Megahey, Alan 'Humphrey Gibbs - Beleaguered Governor' London 1998 Page 99 Ken Flower masterminded the creation of RENAMO, a tribally-based guerrilla organization in Mozambique.Alao, Abiodun. Brothers at War: dissidence and rebellion in Southern Africa, 1994. Page 45.
In 1980, when Robert Mugabe became the first Prime Minister of the state of Zimbabwe, he kept Flower as CIO boss as well as other top officials in his predominantly black, first administration.Matthews, Robert O. Civil Wars in Africa: Roots and resolution, 1999. Page 226.
Flower wrote Serving Secretly: An Intelligence Chief on Record, Rhodesia into Zimbabwe 1964-1981, published in 1987.
There are allegations that after Ian Smith unilaterally declared Rhodesia independent, Flower maintained his allegiance to the British government and spied on the Smith administration for MI6.Preston, Matthew. Ending Civil War: Rhodesia and Lebanon in Perspective, 2004. Page 134. In 2011 the BBC Radio 4 programme Documents featured testimony from Lord Owen that Flower had been an MI6 mole for Britain during his tenure as head of Rhodesian CIO and that his disclosure of Rhodesian plans had enabled Mugabe to survive assassination and become the first prime minister of Zimbabwe, following independence.
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