The South African Intelligence Services

From Apartheid to Democracy, 1948-2005

Kevin A. O'Brien

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415433976
• eBook ISBN: 9781136892813
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book is the first full history of South African intelligence and provides a detailed examination of the various stages in the evolution of South Africa's intelligence organizations and structures.

Covering the apartheid period of 1948-90, the transition from apartheid to democracy of 1990-94, and the post-apartheid period of new intelligence dispensation from 1994-2005, this book examines not only the apartheid government's intelligence dispensation and operations, but also those of the African National Congress, and its partner, the South African Communist Party (ANC/SACP) – as well as those of other liberation movements and the 'independent homelands' under the apartheid system. Examining the civilian, military and police intelligence structures and operations in all periods, as well as the extraordinarily complicated apartheid government's security bureaucracy (or 'securocracy') and its structures and units, the book discusses how South Africa's Cold War 'position' influenced its relationships with various other world powers, especially where intelligence co-operation came to bear. It outlines South Africa's regional relationships and concerns – the foremost being its activities in South-West Africa (Namibia) and its relationship with Rhodesia through 1980.

Finally, it examines the various legislative and other governance bases for the existence and operations of South Africa's intelligence structures – in all periods – and the influences that such activities as the Rivonia Trial (at one end of the history) or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (at the other end) had on the evolution of these intelligence questions throughout South Africa's modern history.

This book will be of great interest to all students of South African politics, intelligence studies and international politics in general.

1
Introduction

South African intelligence in revolution and counter-revolution 1948–2005

Who will believe that your course is just when your behaviours are so unjust?

Unknown sixteenth-century French peasant

On 12 September 1989, two men checked-into the Palace Hotel in Lucerne, Switzerland. Using the names Michael James and Jacobus Maritz, they were in Switzerland illegally – travelling on false passports, false documentation and under cover-names – but decided that the risk was acceptable, given the enormity of what they were about to embark upon. Waiting nervously in their rooms for their contacts – John and Jack Simelane – they considered the possibility that they, or their contacts, could be killed in the process of the meetings, or – possibly even worse – detected and exposed by the Swiss authorities, or the American, British, French or West German intelligence services. As the evening wore on, the Simelane brothers arrived at the hotel, and asked for James’ and Maritz’s suite. Approaching their door cautiously in case James or Maritz were waiting to shoot them down in their turn, the Simelane brothers turned the corner into the room, and stopped: standing before them were James (in reality, Mike Louw, the deputy director of South Africa’s National Intelligence Service) and Maritz (in reality, Maritz Spaarwater, its chief director of operations), with nervous looks on their faces. Entering the room, John Simelane (in reality, Thabo Mbeki, a leading member of the African National Congress’ National Executive Council) and Jack Simelane (in reality, Jacob Zuma, the deputy head of the ANC’s National Intelligence Department) grinned in relief. “Well …”, sighed Mbeki, “here we are, bloody terrorists and for all you know fucking communists as well.” The group broke-up in laughter, thereby starting the first moves by the intelligence services of both the apartheid state and its principal opponent of negotiating a settlement towards the end of apartheid, and a democratic future for all South Africans.¹

Introduction

Since 1994, South Africa has moved down the path towards a multi-racial, representative democracy based on non-racialism and the concept of “one man, one vote”. In reaching this point, the country has moved from a political system where a single party – composed of representatives of the white Afrikaner minority in South Africa – dominated politics for 45 years, to a political system where a single party – composed of representatives across the “colour bar” in South Africa – completely dominates politics. While promoting a vision of national co-operation with other political parties in the country, the African National Congress (ANC), which achieved electoral victory in April 1994 during the country’s first all-race elections, is of such political strength – in a not-dissimilar manner to the power of the Afrikaner-dominated National Party during apartheid,² but under altogether different circumstances – that it has been able to dictate largely the terms of the ensuing transition.

This transition has been a difficult one – yet, relatively smooth when considering comparative examples in other African countries and the alternative futures confronting its crafters in 1990. However, a number of very serious issues confront the new government and its supporters, issues which are being dealt with as well as possible in light of the staggering effect that some of them have. While the successive ANC-led governments since this transition have succeeded generally in dealing with many of the same type of problems faced by their predecessors in Africa who underwent decolonisation or moved from white-minority to black-majority rule, in attempting to deal with these problems, new ones have been created, some of which appear insurmountable based on current attempts to deal with them.

Many of these challenges surround South Africa’s ever-evolving intelligence dispensation – and, in the post-apartheid era, reflect many of the same issues with that dispensation that confronted (and, by-and-large, were ignored by) the apartheid state’s political and security leadership. As such, it must be borne in mind from the start that South Africa’s approach to intelligence today evolved out of the intelligence dispensation which existed under the apartheid regime; as such, this dispensation has both the unique characteristics for a democratic system, and the failings and foibles of a transitional state following liberation. In many ways, it could be said that not only South Africa’s history, but also its viability as a country and a society has been – to varying degrees over the period from 1910 to 2005 – dictated and influenced by its intelligence dispensation. As Sanders notes,

Since the early 1960s, South Africa has been a land infested with spies. Some intelligence operatives are essentially civil servants, others are freelance traders in information … over the last half-century, the tentacles of intelligence stretched far and wide … espionage, however incoherent and dishonest, is part of the glue that has held apartheid and post-apartheid society together.³

This is true as much for the apartheid era as it has been for the period since South Africa’s democratic transition in 1994 – and while that transitional period can now be said to be over, many problems from that transition remain, and continue to evidence societal and political fall-out for South Africa today.

Overview: South Africa’s evolving national intelligence and security establishment

This study grapples with those issues – with a long-view approach to understanding how and why they have evolved (in terms of South Africa’s intelligence dispensation as a whole), what impact and influence they have had on South Africa’s society and politics across its modern history, and what lessons may be learned from these understandings for the future.⁴ As such, this study’s primary period of interest is that from 1961 – the year in which South Africa’s first formal national intelligence capability was established since the founding of the modern South African state in 1910, therefore effectively the beginnings of its post-colonial intelligence history, and the year after the ANC launched its “armed struggle” against the apartheid state – through 2005 – the year that saw the most recent set of amendments to that dispensation introduced by the government in Pretoria. It is, however, impossible to strike a clean starting-point at 1961 – given the influence that intelligence in the decades prior to that year had on the intelligence dispensation long after that year. Therefore, this study takes significant account of developments in that dispensation from 1939 particularly – and 1948, the year that apartheid was introduced in South Africa – in order to understand this evolution in long-view. Equally and clearly, South Africa’s intelligence history did not freeze in 2005 and many significant events have continued to unfold even to the point of writing (2010), as is discussed in Chapter 9’s Postscript – but with this last round of legislative amendments to the dispensation (which do not reflect on the 2009 Presidential Decrees forming the State Security Agency – see Chapter 9) occurring in 2005, an end-point must also be dictated.

The impact of South Africa’s political history on its security

While space prevents a discussion of South Africa’s history generally, a brief appreciation is required.

This history centres on the struggle between the Dutch-descended people of South Africa (known as Afrikaners) and all other ethnic groups which have inhabited or controlled South Africa at various points throughout its history, including

Map 1.1 South Africa (including homelands) 1990 (source: CIA World Factbook).

confrontations between those of English descent and the Afrikaners. One of the single biggest misunderstandings with regard to South Africa’s past is that Afrikaner antipathy towards the English is as strong, if not perhaps greater than, their belligerence towards the various black tribes of the region, as Allister Sparks has pointed out in his remarkable study The Mind of South Africa.⁵

When the National Party (NP) was elected to power in 1948 and declared the policies of apartheid (“separateness”), it did so with the view that these were necessary in order to ensure the survival of the Afrikaner nation in a country where it was thought that black majority-rule would lead to genocide against the Afrikaner nation, and where the English could never be trusted. Thus, the National Party (hand-in-hand with the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa) represented the political and cultural aspirations of the Afrikaners as “white Africans” in a country filled with black Africans.

The English were not, however, the biggest problem confronting the Afrikaners. From the beginning (1911, with the Union of South Africa, followed one year later by the founding of the ANC on 8 January 1912), it was the black tribes of South Africa that constituted the biggest perceived threat to Afrikanerdom. Over the course of the twentieth century, this view evolved to such a degree that, by the 1970s, the state believed that it was faced with a “total onslaught” by the liberation and revolutionary forces confronting it, both in South Africa and regionally – through the network of Communist guerrilla movements aligned with the Soviet Union and Cuba, fighting South Africa and its allies across Southern Africa. This twin rubric of a “black tide” sweeping the Afrikaners to their extinction in South Africa, while “black communism” would accomplish the same with their cultural and religious beliefs, drove the NP to confront these movements with every means at their disposal – and pushed it to decide that the only possible response that it could give to this “total onslaught” was to prepare a “total strategy” to confront it. Within this context, the National Party government implemented policies which reflected two forms of confronting its adversaries: overt, military confrontation; and clandestine-covert confrontation, which will form the major focus of this study’s consideration of the apartheid era and the transition from it.

From the point-of-view of the ANC and other national liberation movements, South Africa had been placed under the yoke of colonial occupation by Dutch (Boer) settlers more than three centuries previously. These Boers (and, later, the British) implemented racist policies to ensure that the black tribes who provided the labour and thus economic success to the white settlers, would remain subservient to them in perpetuity. Thus, the termination of these racist policies (which were developed during South Africa’s Union period and, by 1948, culminated in the one policy of apartheid) and the removal from political and economic power of those that propagated them was the aim of the liberation movements. They believed that, in pursuing this aim, due to the nature of their opponent, an armed struggle was morally justified.

Within this history, it will be noted – as a starting-point for this study – that South Africa’s security establishment began to evolve almost immediately following the National Party election victory in 1948; it would not, however, begin to coalesce into a truly comprehensive security architecture until the late 1960s. The apartheid regime did not have an independent intelligence service until 1961 – the year that Republican Intelligence (RI) was founded, and the year following the launch of an “armed struggle” by the ANC, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and their jointly organised Umkhonto weSizwe (“Spear of the Nation” or MK, the guerrilla army founded in June 1961 by Nelson Mandela); this was significant because the British, in their dominion capacity up to 1961 (the year that South Africa declared itself a republic and withdrew from the Commonwealth) did not allow it to have one, for reasons which will be outlined. It was, however, the events of the Sharpeville Massacre on 21 March 1960 and the subsequent launch of the ANC/SACP “armed struggle” – alongside similar efforts by the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC, a radical black militant offshoot of the ANC), and the African Resistance Movement (ARM, a group of radical-left whites whose bombing campaign between 1962 and 1964 mobilised the security establishment against such future action) – which prompted the apartheid leadership to realise that they had insufficient security and intelligence capabilities to confront these threats, and so move to remedy this over the decade. Even then, a truly effective security intelligence service (as distinct from the intelligence interests of the South Africa Police and the defence forces) did not exist until the establishment of the Bureau for State Security (known as BOSS) in 1969.

Consequently, during the period from 1960 to 1990 (the year in which the transition to a post-apartheid South Africa began) – and under the successive leadership of Prime Ministers Hendrik Verwoerd and B.J. (John) Vorster, and Presidents P.W. Botha and F.W. de Klerk – South Africa was a security state, one which used intelligence extensively to directly target its opponents both internally and externally. While nominal political authority and power rested with the elected ministers who composed the Cabinet, this was not the reality of the situation. By 1970, the true centre of power resided in the central security structures of the government – led by the State Security Council (SSC); while the Cabinet oversaw and acquiesced to all major decisions affecting the country, the SSC was the “super-Cabinet”. In its sessions, the members of the SSC made all recommendations and decisions which affected the governing of the country; ultimately, bodies such as the SSC ran the policies of “Total National Strategy” and “Total Counter-revolutionary Strategy” that ran South Africa. The authority of the wider Cabinet would not be restored effectively until De Klerk came to power in 1989.⁶

Intelligence in South Africa must, therefore, be seen in light of the role that it played in supporting and driving the counter-revolutionary strategies, structures and operations of the apartheid state, alongside the role it played for the exiled ANC and SACP particularly in their efforts to overthrow that state through revolutionary means. In the post-apartheid era, intelligence has continued to play a significant role in supporting the ANC’s continued efforts at introducing revolutionary change to South Africa, in many senses of the word.

Revolution, counter-revolution, and South Africa’s intelligence dispensation

It is also worth noting that in a number of senses South Africa has, in effect, been a revolutionary state since the election victory of the Afrikaner-dominated National Party in 1948. First, with the establishment of the apartheid state in 1948, the National Party and its allies (in other, more conservative Afrikaner movements and parties) sought to revolutionise the nature of the South African state to protect Afrikaner culture and political dominance – not only against the black, coloured or Indian populations that comprised the overwhelming majority of the state’s population, but also against the legacy of British control of South Africa for the first half of the twentieth century. Equally, as noted, the principal liberation movement – the ANC and its ally, the SACP – had determined in 1960 that an “armed struggle” was the only option it now faced, in attempting to overthrow the apartheid order and government in South Africa. It, therefore, began its own revolutionary efforts, which it pursued over the following three decades; this revolutionary approach led to the development of a counter-revolutionary strategy within the apartheid state’s security apparatus, which – following the 1976 Soweto Uprising and by the middle of the 1980s – saw a symbiosis of revolution and counter-revolution both inside and outside South Africa. While this conflict calmed during the negotiated settlement conc...

Table of contents

• Studies in Intelligence Series
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The birth of South Africa’s intelligence capability and the rise of the “securocracy”, 1948–1972
• 3 “Total Strategy” and the “securocratisation” of the government, 1972–1978
• 4 Hydra
• 5 Carrot and stick
• 6 The assassins’ web
• 7 Crossing the Rubicon
• 8 Negotiating a settlement
• 9 Progress and problems
• 10 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index