Three years later, Mr Mugabe won 78 per cent of the popular vote; he was re-elected again six years ago.In his 22-year rule, President Mugabe’s chief flaw as a politician – a flaw that could turn out to be a fatal liability – has been his inability to deal with opposition. The ruthless repression in Matabeleland was the first example. More recently, it has come to the fore again in the way he has treated the fledgling Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), whose leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, is challenging him for the presidency this weekend. Mr Mugabe has managed to turn a legitimate grievance of many Zimbabweans – the land inequity between blacks and whites – into a potent political weapon to use against his rival.It should be pointed out that Mr Mugabe, like many black Zimbabweans, justifiably resents the shackling of his government on the land question in the Lancaster House accord. He wants his lasting legacy to his country to be a return of the land to blacks. If land were the only problem facing Zimbabwe in the past two years, however, it might be possible to think of Mr Mugabe more kindly But it is not. As president, Mr Mugabe has forced independent judges to resign, prevented journalists – both foreign and local – from reporting freely on developments in the country, passed laws intended to disadvantage the opposition and used the state-owned media to unleash a vicious propaganda campaign against the MDC and its leader.These actions have lost Mr Mugabe many friends and admirers, such as South Africa’s influential Nobel peace prize winners, Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who have each expressed great disappointment.

“Mugabe,” said Archbishop Tutu four months ago, “seems to have gone bonkers in a big way. It is very dangerous when you subvert the rule of law in your country, when you don’t even respect the judgements of your judges.. then you are on the slippery slope of perdition… He’s almost a caricature of all the things that people think black African leaders do. He seems to be wanting to make a cartoon of himself.”Denouncing “African tyrants” without naming the Zimbabwean leader, Mr Mandela urged the public to bring down leaders who thought they had a right to rule forever. “Rubbing shoulders with the rich, the powerful (and) the wealthy has made some leaders despise the very people who put them in power, and they think it is their privilege to be there for eternity.”Will Mr Mugabe still be president after this weekend’s elections? Will he accept defeat if he loses? Nobody knows, although he surprised many when he graciously conceded the defeat of his referendum on a new constitution in 2000. He praised “the rare sense of order, maturity and tolerance” that had prevailed and said the world now knew Zimbabwe as a country where people with opposing views could vote peacefully side by side.After parliamentary elections four months later, when his party won the narrowest victory since independence, he again called for reconciliation, urged “unity across race, tribe and ethnicity” and said that international observers who had doubted his country’s commitment to democracy should “go away both humbled and educated”.Will he be similarly magnanimous in the event of a defeat in this weekend’s elections? Will he gloat if he manages to pull off a victory of sorts? And will the country be at peace this time next week?. Robert Joseph Lamphere, counterintelligence officer: born Wardner, Idaho 14 February 1918; married (one son); died Tucson, Arizona 7 January 2002.

His speciality at the bureau was not counterterrorism but counterespionage – and it made him one of the greatest spycatchers of his age.In the space of 10 years, between his entry into the Soviet espionage division and his disgruntled departure from the FBI in 1955, Lamphere handled some of the most famous cases of the Cold War. He was instrumental in unmasking the first major post-war Soviet spies in the United States, Gerhart Eisler and Judith Coplon. He was sent to London to interrogate Klaus Fuchs, arguably the most damaging of Moscow’s nuclear spies. Then he led the team which broke the Rosenberg spy ring, paving the way for the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Along the way, he crossed swords with arguably the most famous spy in history, Kim Philby, and was a vital collaborator in the Venona codebreak project – so secret that even President Harry Truman was not told of it.Lamphere was an agent of the old school, a rough-hewn man yet shrewd as a fox, a born interrogator, and possessed of boundless energy Both his parents had died by the time he was a young man. He left his native Idaho and moved east to Washington where he finished his law degree “I wanted to be among the very best,” he said later. The FBI, its prestige at its zenith at the start of the 1940s, was a natural home.As Lamphere was the first to admit, he also found himself in the right place at the right time.

At first he was depressed when he transferred in 1945 from standard criminal work into counterespionage. Soviet espionage, he would recall, “was Siberia time; the enemy just went on and on, when you got rid of one spy another took his place”. But within three years, thanks to a string of unrelated events, everything had changed.In 1945, Igor Gouzenko, a code clerk at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, defected with a treasure trove of documents suggesting the existence of a vast Soviet spy network across Canada, the US and Britain. Next, Elizabeth Bentley, dubbed “The Red Spy Queen”, turned informer for the FBI. Then came the discovery of a partially burned NKVD/KGB code book in Finland. Together with documents stolen from a KGB-front organisation in New York, the code books permitted cryptanalysts at the Army Security Agency (precursor of today’s NSA) to read some of the KGB traffic from the Soviet consulate in New York to Moscow Centre.Thus, in 1948, was born the Venona project, and Lamphere became liaison man between the FBI and the codebreaking team, led by the legendary Meredith Gardner. The hard-charging FBI agent and the shy, donnish Gardner forged an unlikely friendship – and, as more documents were cracked, Gouzenko’s leads were confirmed and Lamphere’s plodding beast of an investigation turned into a “raging monster”.Venona unearthed the German-born Fuchs, who had emigrated to Britain before being transferred to the Manhattan atomic bomb programme at Los Alamos.