Publication: Sunday Independent Issued: Date: 2007-04-29 Reporter: Chiara Carter

Book Tells of ANC's Paranoid Search for the Comrade Judas in its Ranks

 

Publication 

Sunday Independent

Date

2007-04-29

Reporter

 Chiara Carter

Web Link

www.sundayindependent.co.za

 

The ANC was riven by intrigue and suspicion during the dying days of apartheid and even top leaders of the organisation, and its foremost underground operatives, came under scrutiny.

This is according to a new book, Shades of Difference, about veteran ANC leader Mac Maharaj and the struggle for South Africa.

The book, by academic Padraig O'Malley, with a foreword by former president Nelson Mandela, says that the climate of suspicion stopped the South African Communist Party from recruiting iconic mass democratic movement leader Cyril Ramaphosa as one of its interim leaders at the formerly banned party's first public rally in 1990.

O'Malley says the SACP was deterred from appointing Ramaphosa by a bizarre suspicion that the then leader of the National Union of Mineworkers was linked to the CIA.

According to O'Malley, this claim, believed to have been propagated by leaders of the mass democratic movement, was to have been investigated by Jacob Zuma, then the ANC intelligence chief. But it is unclear whether Zuma looked into the allegations.

Ramaphosa went on to become a key ANC leader and chairperson of the constituent assembly. He was said to be favoured by Nelson Mandela for the presidency but quit full-time politics for business amid speculation over a power struggle in the ruling party.

He was one of three prominent politicians named as being party to a plot, revealed to have been a hoax, to influence the choice of a successor to President Thabo Mbeki.

Today, both Zuma and Ramaphosa are regarded as strong contenders for the presidency.

The author makes it clear that the taint of suspicion was cast on a number of prominent anti-apartheid figures, both exiled and internal, as he outlines the history of Operation Vula, the underground operation initiated in the late 1980s to facilitate the return of the exiled ANC leadership to South Africa.

At the height of the struggle, and in the frenzy of political manoeuvering, no one was beyond suspicion, and all too often real betrayal was hidden in the play of smoke and mirrors.

O'Malley points out that no less a figure than the jailed Mandela was in "the shadow of this endemic distrust", particularly when he began to explore the possibility of talking to the apartheid regime.

The book also deals with the allegations levelled at Bulelani Ngcuka by ANC intelligence operative Mo Shaik, and the subsequent Hefer commission of inquiry into the allegations.

O'Malley said that absent from the Hefer commission reports is the sense that there had been a "mortal battle" between the apartheid government and what he describes as "a dysfunctional liberation movement often gripped by paranoia induced by the knowledge that the comrade who appeared to be most motivated and driven might be working for the enemy".

The Hefer commission was impeded by being denied access to intelligence records.

O'Malley reveals that Ngcuka was investigated in the late 1980s by Shaik's Bible unit, which concluded that he was probably a spy. According to O'Malley, the unit's report was forwarded to Lusaka and accepted by ANC intelligence. Shaik was told to continue his investigation of Ngcuka.

The suspicions about Ngcuka were brought to the attention of ANC leader Oliver Tambo in 1988 and were referred to in a communication in 1989, involving Maharaj, Tambo and Joe Slovo, about the confidentiality of information passed though London.

Tambo and Zuma discussed the investigation in May 1989 and Maharaj discussed Ngcuka, Peter Mokaba and Maxwell Xulu with Mandela in April 1990, in the presence of Alfred Nzo.

O'Malley believes that the Bible unit's finding was wrong and that Ngcuka was not an apartheid spy.

"One can go a step further and say, with as close to certitude as one can get in the labyrinthine world of intelligence and counter-intelligence, that Bulelani Ngcuka never worked for the South African police," O'Malley writes.

Ngcuka himself refused to talk to the author about the accusation, saying the matter was behind him and he had "moved on".

Transcripts of the author's interviews with Ramaphosa and Zuma are among several embargoed until 2030.

But in the plethora of research material included in O'Malley's electronic archive are documents that refer to "admissions" made by Peter Mokaba, a fiery and hugely popular youth leader, and by another youth leader. Concerns are expressed by ANC leaders about how to deal with the admissions.

The nature of the admissions is not spelt out in the archive - possibly because the ANC did not make its records available to the author.

With acknowledgements to Chiara Carter and Sunday Independent.


The South African Police (SAP) was not the only institution charged by the National Party government with covert collection.

The South African Defence Force (SADF) also had clandestine units undertaking covert collection within the boundaries of the Republic.

Other non-statutory institutions such as the Broederbond also undertook intelligence gathering and analysis.