Publication	Sunday Independent
Date	2010-06-13
Reporter	Investigations Staff
Web Link	www.sundayindependent.co.za

 

Links to the CIA, Boss, Pinochet and the Cold War

The solution to one of South Africa's most baffling political murder mysteries - the 1977 assassination of National Party (NP) politician Robert Smit and his wife, Jean-Cora - may have been staring us in the face for more than 30 years.

In a re-examination of the Smit killings posted on Politicsweb this week, researcher James Myburgh invokes a "lost theory" of what happened to the Smits in November 1977, when assassins with all the hallmarks of professional hit men descended on the political up-and-comer's rented Springs home, first shooting Jean-Cora from behind, and then, when her husband returned later that night, stabbing him repeatedly with a stiletto, before spray-painting the mystifying legend "RAU TEM" on the wall and disappearing.

Now Myburgh has uncovered an article written in 1980 by leading investigative journalist Joe Trento linking the murders to a CIA-connected hit squad made up of right-wing Cuban and Chilean operatives, performing the hit under the command of former spook-in-chief General Hendrik van den Bergh's notorious Bureau of State Security (Boss).

Among other compelling details, the Trento account, first published in the Sunday News Journal in Delaware in the US, cites:

• ballistic evidence, recorded in secret;
• an incident report compiled by the CIA's Rome Station, saying that one of the bullets extracted from the corpse of Jean-Cora was fired from the same 9mm Beretta handgun used in a failed October 1975 assassination attempt on exiled Chilean leader Bernardo Leighton and his wife, Anna, in Rome;
• information to the effect that Boss and the South African Ministry of Information had facilitated the escape of one of Leighton's would-be assassins - the same hit man fingered for the Smit killings - on a fraudulent West German passport;
• the connivance of Boss agents in communications linking the botched Leighton assassination to the terrorist organisation Zero to which the hit-squad was linked; and
• a statement deposed in the early 1990s by an FBI witness in a different assassination, recording that he (the witness) bought Krugerrands from members of the alleged hit squad who claimed that Boss operatives had given them the coins.

What emerges from Trento's report is a scenario in which Boss was one node in a network of international clandestine co-operations led by the CIA against perceived Cold War enemies - and in support of Cold War allies like apartheid South Africa and Augusto Pinochet's brutal dictatorship in Chile. I

Recruited by the CIA from the ranks of the anti-Castro Cuban nationalist movement in the US, the Cuban assassins were originally targeted, together with Italian fascist assets, against opponents of the Pinochet regime in Europe and the US.

To this end, and within the ambit of the CIA's notorious Operation Condor, aimed at the elimination of the opponents of the US's client regimes in Latin America, they were placed under the operational command of the Direcci243n de Inteligencia Nacional (Dina), Pinochet's secret police.

At the same time, Trento records, the CIA facilitated introductions between Boss agents and the right-wing Cuban exiles, and the entry of Boss into the network of undercover operations.

The point man here, Independent Newspapers can confirm, was the late Taillefer "Tai" Minnaar, a friend of Van den Bergh's, who was working in undercover association with the CIA in the 1970s and was handled out of the South African embassy in Washington.

Minnaar was fingered in 2009 by researcher R W Johnson as having remorsefully confessed to an involvement in the Smit murders, saying the orders came "from the very top".

According to Trento, the key members of the hit squad included Cuban nationalists Guillermo Novo, Jose Dionisio Suarez and Orlando Bosch, recruited in 1974, along with Chilean American Michael Vernon Townley, and Townley's Cuban protégé, Virgilio Paz.

Paz was identified by Trento's sources as having fired the shots in the attempted assassination of the Leightons, which later connected through ballistic analysis with those extracted from the corpse of Jean-Cora.

Though it is recorded that South African police investigators supplied the Smit ballistic sample to the Americans, it is unclear whether the findings were ever communicated to SAP investigators. And though, at the time, The Star newspaper carried reports related to Trento's revelations, the information as reported was somewhat corrupted, and was apparently never followed up by the police.

Trento lists, along with the Leightons, other known victims of the network of assassins as: "Former Chilean General Carlos Prats and his wife, Cora, killed in an October 1974 bombing in Buenos Aires; Chilean Minister of Defence Oscar Bonilio, blown up with five other people in a helicopter in Chile in March 1975; Ronni Kapen Moffit and Orlando Letelier, who died in the September 1976 Washington car bombing."

At the time of his death, Smit was campaigning for election as NP candidate in Springs, and was widely tipped for high office in the government of BJ Vorster, possibly as finance minister. An Oxford trained economist, he had previously served as South Africa's ambassador to the International Monetary Fund in Geneva, Switzerland.

It was here, according to several accounts that have come to light over the years, that he stumbled upon South African government slush funds controlled by the then Department of Information, and used to pay off networks of agents and assets abroad. Smit told several friends before his death that he planned to make his findings public after the elections.

Trento cites CIA and US State Department officials to the effect that Smit had identified more than 20 American politicians, including US senators, right-wing journalists, and publishers on the South African payroll.

Scant months after the assassination of the Smits, many names of such assets came to the public attention in the so-called Information Scandal, which in due course, led to the unseating of Vorster as prime minister, and his key associates, including Van den Bergh, Information Minister Connie Mulder and Eschel Rhoodie, head of the Information Department.

Myburgh is a former researcher for the DA who subsequently worked with veteran journalist Stanley Uys and ANC dissident Paul Trewhela on the Ever-Faster News blog, before joining Moneyweb.

Trento is one of the US's most celebrated investigative journalists, a veteran of CNN's Special Investigations Unit, and author of The Secret History of the CIA, among other publications.

"There were all kinds of rumours and suspicions regarding Robert Smit and his wife's murders," former foreign affairs minister Pik Botha said on Friday.

"I knew them both very well and I was in Washington when Robert was based at the World Bank there."

According to General Johan van der Merwe, his detectives investigated several of the allegations mentioned in the article, but they could never solve the murders.

With acknowledgements to Sunday Independent.