CIO uses women to lure MDC supporters

ago blew the whistle on government’s smear campaign, involving the use of fliers aimed at fomenting divisions in the opposition party, the Central Intelligence Organisation has dug into its bag of tricks once again and is attempting to use female intelligence operatives to extract information from opposition officials on the party’s strategy and course of action.
Intelligence officials said the main targets in the MDC were the young MPs, some of whom have already been approached by a lady known as Irene – believed to be an employee in the Ministry of State Security.
Irene’s mandate, sources said, was to lure the MPs to parties where “hostesses” would be provided on the house. The sources said these late night get-togethers were arranged at a hotel on Samora Machel. Parties had also been held in outlying areas, some as far as Karoi in Mashonaland West.
The sources said five MDC MPs attended one of the parties in Harare recently.
“The idea is to extract information on the party’s policy from the MPs, some of whom have been found to be quite malleable under the influence (of alcohol),” the source said. “The hostesses are trained to extract information from men and they rarely fail as they select their targets carefully.”
The CIO is eager to sow seeds of disunity in the opposition and to silence some of the more vocal MPs by offering them financial rewards in exchange for assisting the establishment.
MDC president Morgan Tsvangirai confirmed during an exclusive interview last week the ploy to infiltrate his party but could not say if some of his MPs had been compromised.
“I have heard about the plot and I have told members to be on their guard,” he said.
Intelligent sources said the efforts to infiltrate the party were aimed at achieving two results. Firstly, Zanu (PF) wanted to “eliminate” some MDC MPs so that the two parties could fight more by-elections, which will naturally be rigged and surrender more political space to the ruling party.
Intelligence sources said the latest efforts by the intelligence arm was modeled along a maneuver dubbed “Operation Mazana” that was employed by the CIO to destabilize Margaret Dongo’s Zimbabwe Union of Democrats in 1999. Operation Mazana resulted in the disintegration of ZUD, with the late Kempton Makamure forming his own party; Transparency Front, while Dongo went her own way.