Committee listed 582 dead and 400 wounded. The South Africans declared the attack on Cassinga to be a great military success, even though disaster was so closely averted by the intervention of the SAAF, and in the face of a SWAPO propaganda campaign that labelled the event a massacre. Despite inflicting heavy casualties, the SADF did not kill or capture Dimo Amaambo or any other senior SWAPO leaders. The SADF casualties were low for such an attack, an important factor in South Africa where the public was intolerant of high casualty rates: Three soldiers were killed, one was missing in action presumed dead (landed in river, failed to emerge), and eleven were wounded. According to General Constand Viljoen, Cassinga set the strategy for the SADF for the next ten years, i.e. that of launching pre-emptive strikes at SWAPO inside Angola, even though subsequent actions would be armoured rather than air assaults. SWAPO launched Operation Revenge, a retaliatory bombardment of Katima Mulilo in the Caprivi Strip on 23 August 1978, during which 10 soldiers were killed and 10 injured as a result of a direct hit on their barracks by an 82 mm mortar bomb. Sixteen guerrillas were killed in a SADF follow-up operation into Zambia. Political consequences According to General Geldenhuys the raid was a "jewel of military craftmanship", but politically it was a disaster for the apartheid regime. A media campaign had been carefully prepared well in advance of the operation and media releases managed in order to create an impression that SADF intervention was at the request of the SWA administration, and to counter negative reports on South African military actions and claims of killing innocent civilians. This campaign included the fabrication and distortion of SWAPO actions. One of the parachute battalions was specifically tasked to take photographs and instructed to focus on images supporting the South African cause; bodies were only to be photographed with weapons by their side. Negative images, such as suffering victims, were to be avoided. Nevertheless, in spite of these instructions, pictures of bodies without weapons and of dead SADF paratroopers were taken. The Angolans were first to publish details of the attack, followed shortly thereafter by SWAPO press statements that supported and elaborated on the Angolan account. They described the base as a refugee camp and claimed the SADF had slaughtered 600 defenceless refugees. The bodies were buried in two mass graves