However, Mandela’s spirited defence of the Afrikaners and their culture – and his accommodation of the military’s past leadership – was rewarded by a manifest betrayal of trust.
Although the intelligence agencies were supposedly amalgamated under the control of a new national intelligence service, the truth is that military intelligence continued to harbour some who continued to pursue old agendas. Three months after the elections, there was an attempt to pressurise the minister of defence by threatening to publish names of ANC members now in government who had allegedly been informers to the apartheid regime.35
Over the next three years, military intelligence fabricated a report purporting to show a plan to disrupt the 1999 elections and bring down the government – a plan that supposedly involved General Nyanda, who was in line to succeed General Meiring. When the report reached him, Meiring took it to the president. A sceptical Mandela found the report implausible; it named people without a motive to upset the applecart, as they were likely to take senior positions when the old-order generals moved on. At the opening of the budget debate in April 1998, Mandela briefed Parliament:
‘Several recent developments have underlined the strength of our democracy. Media reports suggesting that a coup plot had been uncovered have turned out to be essentially without foundation and based on the fulmination of an active imagination.
‘It may be well to take this opportunity to brief honourable members on the basics concerning the SANDF report, which I received on 5 February, and which had the title “Organised Activities with the Aim to Overthrow the Government”. Initial consultations within Government raised questions about the report’s reliability and lack of verification. These were still in progress when a leak of some of its contents made it necessary to establish, with urgency, the reliability of the processes of its compilation, verification and subsequent handling.
‘The commission of inquiry appointed for this purpose reported to me at the end of March. The intelligence report made the following claims: That an organisation called FAPLA (Force African Peoples Liberation Army) had existed since 1995 and aimed to subvert the 1999 general elections, [and] that it aimed to do so by assassinating the President; murdering Judges; occupying Parliament, broadcasting stations and key financial institutions; as well as orchestrating generalised disorder over a period of some four months before the elections.
‘The culmination would be a campaign of attacks in which the present order would collapse, and power handed over to the coup leaders. Some 130 people are named in the report as the alleged organisation’s members, leaders or supporters. They include very senior military personnel, political figures and others.
‘The commission’s main conclusions are as follows: The report was without substance and inherently fantastic. All the witnesses interviewed were sceptical about the existence of FAPLA. Even those compiling it appeared not to have taken it seriously. No serious attempt was made to keep the alleged plotters under surveillance and no attempts were made to authenticate the report.
‘Those responsible for compiling the report over three years failed to share it with the appropriate authorities, including the South African Police Service and the National Intelligence Coordinating Committee. The commission was critical of steps taken to keep the record safe and prevent leaks. Those responsible for compiling and handling the report did not communicate it to the Ministers responsible for Intelligence, Safety and Security, who only gained access to it from the President after he received it from the Chief of the SANDF.
‘An allegation concerning a particular officer was communicated by the Chief of the SANDF to the Minister of Defence, but not the extent of the allegations, the identity of other senior officers alleged to be involved, nor the details of the conspiracy. The Minister of Defence said he was not prepared to communicate an uncorroborated allegation to the President.
‘The commission concluded that such a report should not have been communicated to the President in the way it was. It also commented on the extraordinary procedure of a direct communication to the President and a deliberate avoidance of furnishing the report to any other officials. The commission recommended that the security agencies should investigate why the omissions and failures in the processing of the report took place and what can be done, if necessary legislatively, to avoid repetition in the future.
‘I acceded to the request for early retirement by the Chief of the SANDF, as it was an act which put the national interest of the SANDF above his own. The leakage of the report and the critical comments of the Commission of Inquiry over its compilation and transmission clearly put the General in a difficult position in his relationship with the senior officers mentioned in the report and with his Commander-in-Chief, and Minister of Defence. Such a bold, though regrettable, step was therefore clearly warranted.’
Mandela promised that at its next meeting, cabinet would consider the urgent question of the appointment of a new SANDF chief. He added that ‘it should be made very clear that our nation has a loyal defence force which has laid the groundwork for its own transformation.’ But, he continued, ‘neither the original [discredited] Military Intelligence report nor the Commission of Inquiry’s report have been made public … it would be the height of irresponsibility for any government to peddle untruths and fabrications about people whose reputation could be harmed, despite the lack of truth.
‘The public has a right to know that such matters as this are addressed thoroughly and scrupulously through processes in which they can have confidence. The Commission of Inquiry fulfils these requirements. The briefing of parliamentary committees elaborates the process.’
Mandela did, however, offer to release the report in a redacted form to the Joint Standing Committee on Intelligence, and in order to ‘allow broader oversight’, the reports were made available to the leaders of the opposition parties.
‘It is instructive to note that it is those who opportunistically refused to look at the report [after its presentation to them earlier] who continue to call for its publication. At the same time, they use the fact that they have not seen it to raise doubts about the government’s untrustworthiness.
‘This is a dangerous game to play with our intelligence services and raises the question of whether the legitimacy of the government is accepted by such people! Or maybe it is simply a reckless pursuit of party advantage, bringing self-appointed champions of democratic conventions close to abdicating their responsibility as political leaders. I myself, in dealing with this matter, have sought to act according to the assumption that all of us in our respective political parties share a common national purpose.’
Mandela continued, throwing down the gauntlet: ‘Indeed, there is a more general challenge here. As we approach the election period, parties will have to ask themselves some very basic questions. It is only too easy to stir up the baser feelings that exist in any society, feelings that are enhanced in a society with a history such as ours. Worse still, it is only too easy to do this in a way that undermines our achievements in building national unity and enhancing the legitimacy of our democratic institutions. We need to ask such questions because it is much easier to destroy than to build.’36
Again, it is worth remembering Mandela’s extraordinary capacity to maintain friendships with people he believed were crucial to the construction of South Africa’s democracy. He won over many right-wingers who posed a threat to his project, and enlisted their cooperation; others, like the AWB leader Eugene Terre’Blanche, whom he thought was beyond the pale, he dismissed with undisguised contempt. For example, speaking to Mike Siluma of The Sowetan, he said, ‘We have marginalised the right wing … [Eugene] Terre’Blanche used to draw 2,000 people to his meetings. Today he struggles. He can’t even get 100 – even when counting his horse.’37
Mandela had embraced and defended Meiring, even in the face of criticism from his own comrades. After Meiring’s resignation, Mandela said, ‘I accepted his decision to step down with regret because he
is an officer I hold in the highest regard because of the invaluable service he had rendered to the South African National Defence Force and to the country and to me personally. Over these four years we formed a very close relationship in which I regarded him as one of my closest friends.’38 That the general should have played such an active role in the military intelligence plot was therefore a very personal betrayal.
After Meiring’s departure Nyanda stepped in as the head of the defence force. The policy framework defining both the function and strategic doctrine for a new military was drawn from the 1996 White Paper on National Defence and the 1998 Defence Review. It established a Defence Secretariat, which reinforced civilian control, a departure from the apartheid regime’s use of military power to impose its interests on the Southern African region. There was recognition of the fact that, as South Africa had been embraced by many international organisations, most notably the United Nations, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC), it was expected to play an active role in these bodies, especially with regard to peace and security in Africa and in the region.* The policy framework of the White Paper and Defence Review sought to reverse the military’s order of priorities and provided for support for police operations against crime and a requirement to contribute towards reconstruction and development.
* * *
The review of the defence force’s role and its need for equipment would take nearly three years, and procurement issues arose as soon as Mandela’s government took power. A purchase of corvettes from Spain was in progress. According to Trevor Manuel, Joe Modise, the minister of defence, arrived with a stern-faced Mandela at the ANC’s first cabinet caucus after the elections. They were obviously still carrying the mood of an earlier exchange. Manuel remembers how ‘Madiba said, “Joe?” Joe Modise broke down, crying, “It’s not a nice day for me to say this, and it is my birthday, but the president has spoken to me about this contract to buy the corvettes from Spain, and he said that we will cancel the contract. I don’t know how I’m going to tell my troops, especially the Navy, that we’re cancelling this contract, but the president assures me that we would look at this thing.”’39
Mandela felt that the government had to look at all the needs of the entire defence force rather than of just one service and that, as a result, the contract should be scrapped.40
There was, he said, ‘a national consensus that our Defence Force requires an appropriate capacity and modern equipment. We welcome the fact that debate on these issues is now finding rational reflection in the discussions around the Defence White Paper and the National Defence Review.’41
Given the scope of the expenditure, the cabinet consolidated the complex process of arms procurement into a single component known as the Strategic Defence Procurement Package. The cabinet and a special committee made up of the ministers of finance, defence, public enterprises and trade and industry, chaired by Thabo Mbeki, decided on the allocation of the main contracts. The committee adopted a rule that it would not interact directly with any of the bidders, and there were four independent evaluation groups to add another layer of checks and balances. It was cabinet, however, that would decide on the primary contractors; the latter, in turn, would be responsible for engaging the secondary contractors needed to fulfil their obligations.42
This would have wide implications for the South African government and would, in time, earn the inelegant sobriquet of ‘Arms Deal’.
* * *
Although its integration and transformation had been buffeted by strong winds coming from a questioning media and a wary public, the defence force had changed utterly by the end of the Mandela presidency. It was a complex undertaking, a foray into uncharted territory, and one which could not possibly have succeeded without Mandela’s personal stamp, without his characteristic and always timely interventions. The new defence force was initially a hodgepodge of armies with long histories of mutual hostility and disrespect. The liberation contingents looked down on the Bantustan forces, seeing them as a watered-down version of the time-tested enemy, the SADF. In addition, the soldiers of the SADF had to be brought kicking and screaming into the modern era, one in which they would have to view their compatriots as live human beings and not as quarry in their gunsights.
The twin processes of integration and rationalisation had produced a SANDF in which about 40 per cent of its members were from liberation movements and Bantustan forces.43 Recruitment of black youth into the voluntary part-time force further increased the numbers of new entrants.
Camaraderie began to develop between soldiers from the different forces. The army’s support for the police in fighting crime was seen as supportive to communities, a far cry from the apartheid army’s unwelcome presence in the townships. A 1999 survey by the Human Sciences Research Council found that trust in the Defence Force among Africans stood at 62 per cent. Interestingly, the study attests that ‘trust in the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) exceeded trust in the police and the courts’.44
* * *
When it came to the transformation of the intelligence services, once both the nerve centre and backbone of the apartheid state, the new democratic government had to dig deep into its intellectual reserves – and explore a sophisticated level of cunning – to negotiate its way through a labyrinth that had taken decades to build. The act of transformation meant examining the entrails of a many-headed monster with an unlimited budget. Its officers had engaged in exchange programmes with their counterparts in the Middle East, especially Israel, and with dictatorships in the Americas, where they learnt the finer arts of torture and the manufactured disappearance of opponents. It was a ubiquitous service that touched every part of life – and death – in South Africa. It was simultaneously quite adept at communicating its nonexistence, bringing to mind Baudelaire’s line that ‘the finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist’.45
It was an expression of the state security services’ attempts to cover their tracks that, on the eve of the new government coming into power, South Africa saw an unprecedented shredding and burning of secret documents.
The Military Intelligence Department, which had incubated the report that led to Meiring’s resignation, was just one of the apartheid intelligence agencies. The new government dealt with restructuring of the agencies early on, but even before that happened, Mandela had requested a comprehensive overview of the security situation. He had a series of meetings with the leadership of the National Intelligence Service, the defence force and the police. He told them what he wanted from the National Intelligence Service, itself slated for restructuring, and that he wanted it at the earliest possible convenience. It was a comprehensive list:
1) Were any documents containing intelligence material destroyed or [possibly ‘edited’] and intelligence information wiped off from computers during the period 1 February 1990 and 31 May 1994?
a) If so, the reason for such destruction what was the material or inform: give full particulars of such material or information
b) The dates of such destruction or wiping off
c) The name or names of the persons who authorised such destruction or wiping off.
2) Does the State Security Council and its structures, like the Joint Management Committee, still exist?
a) If so, who are the members of such State Security Council and Joint Management Committees?
b) If not, the exact details of when they were dismantled
c) A list of members before they were dismantled
d) The purpose of the State Security Council
e) What happened to its funds and equipment
3) A list of the organisations on which NIS spied and a list of the agents of NIS who penetrated the organisations or institutions spied upon.
4) Does the Civilian Cooperation Bureau still exist? A detailed explanation of its structure
and personnel must be furnished.
a) If not, when was it dismantled? What happened to its funds and other equipment?
5) Does the Directorate of Covert Collection still exist?
a) If so, who are its members?
b) If not, when was it dissolved?
c) What happened to its funds and equipment?
6) The original copy of the Report of General Pierre Steyn must be supplied.*
a) Precisely for what criminal acts were several senior officers of the army dismissed or asked to resign as a result of that report?
7) Who is responsible for politically motivated violence which has led to the murder of close to 20,000 people?
8) It is alleged that the parties responsible for politically motivated violence were also responsible for the death of freedom fighters like Neil Aggett, Rick Turner, Imam Haroon, Ahmed Timol, David Webster, [Matthew] Goniwe and others, Griffiths and Victoria Mxenge; Pebco Three; Bheki Mlangeni
9) Did the Vlakplaas Unit continue to exist after 1/2?*
Who were its members and what has happened to them.
What was or is its purpose before, or if it continued, what did its members do after 1990? If dismantled, what happened to its funds and equipment?
Dare Not Linger Page 26