Dumiso Dabengwa, a Moscow-trained intelligence supremo and insurgent leader in Zimbabwe’s liberation war, whose fortunes tracked Cold War rivalries and the political and ethnic score-settling that followed independence from Britain, died on Thursday in Kenya. He was 79.

His family reported his death and said it occurred as he was on his way back to Zimbabwe from India, where he had been treated for an unspecified liver ailment.

Such was Mr. Dabengwa’s feared reputation among the white minority of Zimbabwe, the former Rhodesia, that he earned the sobriquet “the Black Russian,” because of his close ties to the Soviet Union, where he underwent training by the K.G.B. in the 1960s.

Yet, when the seven-year bush war ended shortly before independence in 1980, he played a persuasive role in trying to unite the rival guerrilla armies that had fought white minority rule: his own Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army, or Zipra, which was loyal to Joshua Nkomo, and the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, or Zanla, which fought in the name of Robert Mugabe. Mr. Mugabe would go on to rule Zimbabwe, ever more autocratically, for more than three decades, until he was deposed in a military coup in 2017.