Project Flute: wheels within wheels.

In what appeared to be the first piece of credible investigative journalism published by the Sunday Times in a long while, its 19 January front-page lead revealed yet another embarrassing government secret:  Project Flute, which involved commissioning a spy satellite from a Russian company for R1.2bn. Cheekily, the Sunday Times headed its report with the question: How much intelligence is there in defence intelligence?

“The whereabouts of [the] spy satellite ...  remains a mystery, eight years after the deal was struck. There are doubts whether the satellite even exists,” said the paper, adding that the issue was secretly causing tension in the cabinet, while, publicly, current and former ministers are still frantically denying any knowledge of it, or claim to be suffering from senile dementia.

The trouble is, it's not a new story. The Mail & Guardian told the same story, in far more detail and with a lot less mystery way back in 2008. The key to why the story was being published now in the Sunday Times, and who had instigated it,  possibly lies in that first sentence: How much intelligence is there in defence intelligence?

Equally significant, perhaps, was the bit about tension in the cabinet.

At Noseweek stories like this immediately raise the question: What exactly had the South African government wanted to use a satellite like that for, other than to generate another kickback for the ANC and some of its members?

But in the Sunday Times, Democratic Alliance MP David Maynier is quoted asking the less cynical,  more practical questions about foreign control and systems to protect the privacy of our own citizens.

By Noseweek’s reckoning, however, the satellite is largely irrelevant from the cabinet’s point of view. The cancellation may still cost us a billion or two in damages claims, but when have such things troubled our President and his cabinet? No, the real cause of secret stress is the man who happened to be the SANDF’s head of military intelligence at the time the Russian satellite was ordered:  Lt Gen Mojo Motau,  a man who still for some reason terrifies the hell out of all the politicians in the cabinet.

(OK, politicians everywhere have the same problem with intelligence chiefs: they know too much.) In this case, so terrified of Motau are our cabinet, that when he retired, they immediately made him head of Armscor, where Project Flute once resided. In the past two years however, two ministers of defence have bravely tried getting him fired from there, but here’s the final clue: he has fearlessly and successfully resisted both those attempts and remains put.

Astute observers would long ago have noted that the media are routinely used as troops in South Africa’s spy wars.

With acknowledgement to Martin Welz and Noseweek.