On a hill outside Nyeri one day last week, 25 Mau Mau terrorists on the way to formal surrender were killed by a company of the King's African Rifles, in time of truce. Thus ended Operation China, the strange British attempt to win by negotiation what 6,000 British troops and a squadron of heavy bombers had failed to win by war: the surrender of Kenya's Mau Mau. Named for General China, the captured Mau Mau chieftain who saved himself from the gallows by promising to work with the British (TIME, March 8), Operation China had long remained as mysterious as the Mau Mau. From Nyeri, TIME Correspondent Alexander Campbell reported:
IN his death cell at Nairobi one day last February, China convinced his captors that the Mau Mau, reduced to dispirited remnants, were ready to surrender if the British would give a sign. On the order of the governor of Kenya, he was smuggled out of jail, disguised as an African policeman and flown to Nyeri, where he set to work to write letters to his Mau Mau colleagues. China's letters offered safe conduct to Mau Mau representatives if they would meet British officers to talk over a truce.
Men in Murderland. Two brave British policemen volunteered to deliver the letters. They were Special Branch Superintendent Ian Henderson, 27, and his strapping blond assistant, 32-year-old Bernard Ruck. Henderson is a slim, nut-brown Scot who grew up with Kikuyu children on his father's coffee farm. He speaks Swahili, Meru, Kamba, Kikuyu, French and Afrikaans. Day after day, following China's directions, Henderson and Ruck drove into the forest, unarmed and alone. The forest had eyes, and one captured Mau Mau reported a snatch of dialogue between two Mau Mau sentinels:
"Which way will the white men come today?"
"By the old rhino trail."
"Then let us kill them."
"No. Let us wait to see what they will say."
Meeting of the Elders. Henderson and Ruck left China's letters in hollow trees or in cleft sticks planted in forest clearings. Once they took China with them, his curly head protruding from the turret of an armored car. Another time, Henderson, scouting on his own, hid behind a thick-fronted banana tree and watched a Mau Mau oath-taking ceremony in which the new members were forced to eat human eyeballs gouged from still-living victims. The rite included other barbaric practices in sadism and sodomy.
Days and weeks passed, and the Mau Mau sent no reply. The news leaked out to Kenya's white settlers, and many of them denounced Operation China as "appeasement" and "a disgrace." But at last the Mau Mau answered, and most of their replies were favorable. A dozen terrorist '"generals" from Mt. Kenya and the Aber-dares agreed with China that the "white elders and the elders of the forest must meet to end the war."