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Dr (Tony) Turton Light Horse Regiment & National Intelligence Service Missing Voices Project Interviewed by Mike Cadman 26 & 28/04/08

TAPE ONE SIDE A Interviewer Tony, I’ve been through your book so I’ve got a good idea of your background, but can you give me just a brief, brief background of where you grew up, what your family was like, was it English speaking or speaking, how big and so on? Tony I don’t know if I can give you that briefly but I’ll be as brief as I possibly can. Firstly I welcome this project very much, I think it’s a hugely important project and when I first heard about it I got quite thrilled because this book that you’re talking about, I’m actually intending, if I can get all my ducks in a row, to in fact record it a sort of tape made for the blind kind of thing, sort of CD, so I’m actually looking for that. I had a very unusual upbringing in many ways, and even now at the age of 52, 53 I still ponder back on my life and think about this upbringing. Part of the unusualness of my upbringing, is the fact that I had a profound father who was a very, very interesting man. He learned Zulu as a first language, he never went to formal school as a small child and his father was, I now subsequently know, the product of the diamond rush, in fact the product of the Anglo Boer War. He was born in Kimberley during the siege of Kimberley. And my father grew up in rural Zululand where there were no schools, and he had a governess and he grew up in a place called Hlabisa and he could speak fluent colloquial Zulu. And that is quite amazing because as a young boy, I learned from him so many things, but he was also very distant to me in many ways. But he was a profound man and I think what I’m grappling to sort of say now is that in my adult life as I look back, I see my father very much as a Hemingway kind of fellow. You know the Old Man and the Sea and this kind of…my father was very much a Hemingway sort of man. And at the moment I’m dealing with issues where I have to second guess what I call the base line of what a man is. Base line of masculinity. Because I took that base line off my father, and looking back on life now, I’ve realised that my father was a profoundly unusual man. And part of that unusualness was the fact that firstly he was a larger than life figure, but secondly, and this is the main point, he grew up in the bush and he took me to the bush on many occasions – I’ve spent times in the bush hunting elephant, hunting buffalo…I’m not a hunter, and that was a source of great consternation for my father, because I was in many ways a journalist, in many ways the photographer, a scientist. He was the hunter and he wanted me to be the hunter and yes, I’ve shot things and I never took any pleasure taking any life, and that’s an important part of my story. But having said that what I learned from my father was this schizophrenia that has come to imbue our generation. We are a schizophrenic generation. And part of that schizophrenia was the illogicality, if 2 such a word exist, of our upbringing. What we thought was a normal life, in fact was profoundly abnormal. And it’s that schizophrenia that I learned from my father, I think has given me a profound respect for African culture, for African traditional leadership, for being an African…I regard myself as an African in every conceivable way you can think of, and in fact I know , and I will take Thabo Mbeki on…I’m busy writing a book at the moment called “Bones”. How many bones do we need to bury before we can call ourselves an African. And the opening paragraph of that is Thabo Mbeki’s ‘I Am an African’. Because every word that he says there I can buy into, and I can reflect back. So I’m not afraid of taking on these leaders, and I’m not afraid of telling the story, because ultimately I’ve got in me the spirit of my father, uMqangabhodwe was his name. “iBhubezi The Lion, uMqangabhodwe, the one that stands above. And in learning inside me I’ve got that spirit. If anything I’m the young uMqangabhodwe, and I’m not ashamed of being that, although that’s not my traditional name. my traditional name is Qabalaza, always in a hurry, always in a rush. So looking back at it now, I remember as a small boy being in school, and say, grade one, grade two, and talking to my buddies at school laughs and they were all confused about what I was, because I would tell them what I did last weekend or during the last school holidays. We went and we shot an elephant, they just wouldn’t believe me, they thought I was lying. And of course the bottom line is this, I’ve learned through that experience that we’ve got a very, very multi- faceted identity as a nation, and I think the important thing is I learned from that, the schizophrenia of on the one hand, society was training us, bringing us up to eventually serve society’s purposes, and unfortunately the tragedy of that was to become soldiers, to fight for a cause that we didn’t understand, to die and bleed for a cause we didn’t understand. But on the other hand there was this other side of life, there’s almost this impervious barrier that we could not cross, this invisible something out there that was different. And where I first encountered that was my first deployment in the townships. So the township story is a very important part of the story, because that was the invisible other half, more than the other half in fact. That was what we were. So in a nutshell that’s pretty much what my upbringing was. It was an unusual upbringing, my father was not an educated man, he only had a standard 8 education, but he was very wise in traditional knowledge, and just recently I spoke to an old friend of his, Professor Rod Connacher, I gave him a copy of my book, and Rod Connacher, there are photographs of Rod in the book here with my father, measuring the one elephant that he’d shot, etc. And Rod is a retired professor and he speaks very highly of my father to this day. Stating that the wisdom that he had was way, way beyond what a man with Standard 8 education should have. And I’ve now come to learn that my father was a highly traumatised individual because he was a front line soldier in the battle of El Alamein at the age of 18 years. And I’ve now come to understand what it means to be exposed to the trauma of war 3 and I just realise now that I was simply a product on the one hand of society, but also of a family that had been deeply, deeply damaged by the cyclicity of violence. And I’m now doing our family history, going back to the 1500s, and I can now show with high levels of confidence what that cyclicity of violence means. And we can go into that later on. Interviewer Did your dad ever talk about his war experiences? Tony My father never spoke about his war experiences...the only time he spoke about it was just before the end of his life when I was now becoming a young man, and we were in the Kalahari together, and I remember one night in the Kalahari it was bitterly cold and we were shivering and then my father told a story about this flying jacket – I’ve got it in my memoirs, this is the flying jacket story – and then I realised that there was this really big piece of historia, and then slowly during those years I was becoming a young man, I was going into the bush and he had very bad arthritis at that stage, he couldn’t work with his hands anymore – I became his hands, I became his engineer, I was fixing up his and getting him into places that he couldn’t otherwise go to. And he just generally never spoke about that, but later on when I went on to do my National Service, it was a very disappointing time for him because I wasn’t a particularly spectacular National Serviceman, I was just what I would call a sleg troep. And that disappointed him very, very much because he hoped that I would become more, he hoped that I would become an officer, that I would become somebody, and eventually and of course in my National Service years I didn’t do that at all. And bottom line is, I think I disappointed him in that sense, but having said that, the question that you asked was, did he talk about it? No, he didn’t talk about it. The little bit that he spoke about was in those last, the Golden Years, because he knew he was dying. I didn’t know that he knew he was dying. I didn’t know he was dying. He died in my arms as it turned out on a very traumatic day of my life. I’ve written about it in my book. And I’ve now put together lots of these bits and pieces, like you’re doing now, I’ve put together the stories about the Sidi Barrani the Gazala Gallop Sidi Rezegh and read up little bits and pieces, etc. Bottom line is here you are an 18 year old kid from Hlabisa, from Zululand, just in love with the Zulu people and here he was suddenly a gunner of a South African fuel artillery up fighting a war he didn’t understand, and he came back and he made it. he was a survivor that made it. but that certainly had a profound impact on his life and consequently it had an impact on my life, my mother’s life, my siblings’ lives and ultimately the cyclicity of violence carries on. Interviewer When, like all young white kids you’re at school and you get your document from the state saying that you have to register for military service and then a bit later your first call up papers arrive, did you sit down and discuss it with the family and say, do I do this or was it a given that you were going off to the army? 4

Tony It was a given that I was going off to the army, in fact it wasn’t the army at all because at that point in time I was at St Martin’s School, and St Martin’s School is a very interesting place because as luck would have it, historically in the last year or so I’ve been back there twice, having never been back there ever after I left there. And the significance of St Martin’s School is that the headmaster that time was a man called Michael de Lisle. Now what I’ve now found out from Michael de Lisle is that Michael de Lisle was a highly decorated war veteran. Highly decorated. He was captured at Tobruk, so the same generation as my father. He escaped while being transported up to a POW camp in Germany, and he fought for about two years behind enemy lines with the partisans in Italy. A highly decorated man. And he eventually went on to become a…I’m not sure if it was a Rhodes scholar but certainly a very highly acclaimed academic, either at Oxford or Cambridge and he got at least a Master’s degree – he didn’t have a doctorate – but he had at least a Master’s degree in the Classics. He could recite Latin poetry. Now this was a man of great stature. But the significance was that he was a navy man…if you look at the history of St Martin’s School, and they’ve just written a book on the history of St Martin’s School, you’ll find that there was a great divide during his years, and part of the divide was that this was a liberal Christian Methodist school that he suddenly divided, because he introduced National Service, he introduced the notion of military service to it. And of course he introduced the notion of cadets and particularly the navy. He was a naval officer then, he was commissioned as a naval officer. And we went through a lot of naval cadet training at SAS Wemmer Pan. And in the back of my mind there was always the belief that I would be drafted off to the navy, that would have been my choice, I would have wanted to become a diver – I’ve been a scuba diver the large part of my life. I’m a certified professional instructor to this day, I still carry my instructor’s rating. So I would have been, I think, a good diver and that’s what I would have wanted to do. So your question was about this thing, when we were… Interviewer You were asked to register and then you got your call up papers. Tony Yes, I registered like everyone else and sort of forgot about it, and when I got my call up papers I was drafted to One Special Service Battalion. And that was a bit of a shock because at that time all my buddies were talking about where they were going, etc, etc, and the big hope was, at least you don’t want to go to the infantry because that’s just a horrible place, because you end up carrying LMGs around and doing silly things. SSB was not a bad place, I’d had an uncle who’d served in World War Two in SSB and so I knew a little bit about SSB, and I wasn’t unhappy about going to SSB. But yes, there was just a lot of speculation within my peer group, my group of school kids sent all over the show and…we expected it, we anticipated it, and the relief was that it wasn’t infantry, the sadness was that it wasn’t the navy. 5

Interviewer Then like all young soldiers you go through your basic training and then you go into a second phase of training… Tony Can I just talk about my basic training, because a very interesting thing about basic training, I remember very distinctly…ok now, we’re going to SSB and SSB is in Tempe. And the first thing I learned about Tempe were the Tempe Tigers. The Tempe Tigers was a school for wayward individuals, a reform school. and these were women that were delinquent. And they’d been sent off to this place, almost like a prison camp, in Tempe. And their camp was not very far from where we were, about, 2,4 our standard PT metric for fitness. And I first learned about the Tempe Tigers, that they’re there, watch the Tempe Tigers because they’re tough. and then the second thing that I learned about was that’s where the parabats were. And at that stage, I thought, aah well, parabats, this is where I want to go. I don’t know why I thought that, I can’t tell you why I thought that. All I can tell you was that, I think I’d been…reflecting back on it now, I think I’d been brought up by my headmaster Sam de Lisle, by my father, by my society at large, with the notion that you serve your country. In time of war you serve your country unquestionably. It was naïve, it was stupid, I never thought about it, you just do. And so when I first went to SSB my initial thought was, well maybe I would like to try out for parabats. And then my very, very first night I was in E Squadron SSB. Now E Squadron is a squadron. And my very, very first night there, we were still walking around in underwear, we didn’t even have uniform yet, and I remember going through the medical process and the thing that struck me about that, a couple of interesting little stories. The one story was that all these young men quite fit and healthy walking around in their underpants with great big wet blotches in front of them because they were asked to pee into something, for some urine specimen, and of course there was always this last little drip at the end, so I felt so profoundly sorry for this degrading sight in front of me, that these people were actually being degraded in a way. but the second thing that I remember was, there was a guy that did his medical with me, that was at school with me at St Martin’s…Peter Barret I think his name was. And the significance of Barret was that he was born with a defect. He only had one ear. He didn’t have a second ear, he just didn’t have a hole in his head. There was no ear at all. And through some surgery they put some sort of semblance of an external pin on his head, but it didn’t look anything vaguely like what an ear should look like. And part of the testing was, that he was in front of me, and there was some corporal in full uniform and we were standing there in our stained underwear looking profoundly sorry for ourselves and they asked us, speel jy rugby? And he said, ja or nee, whatever. Watse posisie speel jy? Mentioned it. And then they passed him. he goes on now down the line, down the production, and I come up next. Asks me the same story. Bottom line is we go through this production process, from one troopie to the next, from one corporal to the next, one medic to the next, taking all different 6 measurements, and he eventually ends up at a doctor, and the doctor turns him around and says, but there’s something wrong with you, you’ve only got one ear! And it turns out that this, speel jy rugby was the so-called fluistertoets, it was like a standard test that they did. And of course he only had one ear in his head, so I mean, he can’t hear very well laughs He failed his fluistertoets, he was sent back. in fact the corporal, the first uitkak I ever saw was this corporal getting kakked out by the medic who was a loot. Interviewer Because he hadn’t registered that the guy had only one ear. Tony Because he hadn’t noticed that he only had one ear in his head. Laughs So they told me that some of the medical stuff was pretty rough and ready. But then the very, very first night we stayed in E Squadron, that was a very interesting night because that night the Bats came over the fence, and they got stuck into us. And here we were just dumb troopies just not knowing anything from anything. And the Bats got stuck into us and they beat the living crap out of us. The next day there were young…I mean, these were young National Servicemen not yet even started their training in hospital! Broken teeth, broken bones, and that’s when I realised that the Bats are actually quite tough buggers, but not only tough, they’re actually just brutal individuals. And that caused me to stop and rethink, because really it wasn’t necessary. And then the very next thing that happened, the very next day, were all treured aan at the parade ground, and the squadron commander came out, a major, he came out, and he said, right manne, this is how it’s going to be from now on, welcome to the army, you’re now part of E Squadron. E Squadron’s a distinct squadron, you wear an overall and you wear a black belt. The black belt is with the grease because the are full of grease and you always wipe your grease on your belt so you’re always going to have a black belt. We’re black belt people, and he said, you see this tree here? The first parabat I can see tied to that tree will get you, the person that captured that parabat, seven day pass. But if you can bring me a beret, that’s good enough for a weekend pass. And that is open war. So day one National Service, SSB was at war with parabats. And that had been going on for generations. And I’ve subsequently learned, eventually resulted in death, and ultimately resulted in a formal signing of a peace kind of agreement between Bats and SSB. And that’s when I realised that we are part of a nation divided. Interviewer What year was that? Tony I can’t remember exactly. My number was 70280276, so I probably was ’72, ’73. I think probably ’73 but I… Interviewer Did that shock you at the time that, here you are, you’re all in the same army, you might be in different units but you’re all there ostensibly for the same cause, and yet, there’s open warfare between two units? 7

Tony It did shock me because none of us also knew what the cause was. So we were in a causeless thing, we were part of a production, part of a sausage machine, and we were all mindless automatons. We were just doing and not thinking. Soldiers don’t think. A thinking soldier is a dangerous animal. A thinking soldier in the front line is actually very close to mutiny and this is an important point, because in my book I talk about a thin grey line. Because I’m a thinking soldier. And you can only use a thinking soldier for very specific tasks, and one of those is intelligence. You cannot use a thinking soldier ultimately to…beneficially for just hard core combat operations. There you want a person that doesn’t think, they just do. And that’s what makes Parabats so special. Because Parabats, I now know many of them, I’ve done many operations with them, I’ve got a profound respect for parabats, and company, I’ve had the privilege of being deployed with his son, etc. They’re actually amazing soldiers, but of course they’re dog fighters, they’re street fighters, and the essence of being a Parabat is that you always get thrown in to the fog of war and whereas an ordinary guy will get confused by the fog of war, a Parabat thrives on the fog of war. And under the fog of war, those conditions are good parabat, a good Special Forces Soldier, uses that to advantage. So there’s a great big divide. All men are not born equal. Some are Special Forces, some are not. And I learned that fairly early on. Interviewer During your training, this is in the early seventies, so it’s before Operation Savannah which was the first major incursion into Angola. But there, the Portuguese colonies, Angola and Mozambique had seen extensive war. Rhodesia is in the early phases of its guerrilla war. Was it ever explained why you had to be in the army? Who were you training to oppose or to defend yourselves, your country against? Tony Ok, before I answer that question, let me just tell you another little story. While we were doing our basics, all of a sudden one day we were treured aan and we were taken into a big hall, and there before us, strutting in their proud step outs were a bunch of RLI, Rhodesian light infantry officers and a sergeant major. But looking very slick and very smart in their…they used to wear stable belts. In those days we didn’t wear stable belts. Later on I went to a regiment that wore stable belts. But these guys were on a recruiting drive for Rhodesia, for RLI. And they came and they recruited some of our people, I don’t quite know how many went but it as the first time that I thought about this Rhodesian thing, because I also had family up in Rhodesia. I had a cousin, Mike Powell, who was an intelligence officer, with Selous Scouts. And I’ve grown up…not was close to Mike, we’ve sort of had a close and a distant relationship at the same time, but I was aware of what’s going on in Rhodesia. At that point in time I was just dumb, I was stupid. I just didn’t think about any of these things. I sense like most people of that age. Now I understand it more profoundly, because what I now understand is that the early Rhodesian battles, particularly when the Luthuli Detachment was 8 deployed…the Luthuli Detachment, the significance is that, Chris Hani was one of the survivors of Luthuli and later on my life became intertwined with life and Chris Hani. And I have a profound respect for Chris Hani, I’d like to place that on record. I regard Chris Hani with very high regard. He was a soldier of note. If we’ve got a leadership crisis today, part of that is because Chris Hani is not here to fill that vacuum. But, having said that, the significance of that period of time was that, when the Luthuli Detachment was deployed through what became known as the Battle of Wankie/Hwange. It was Operation Nickle or Cauldron, (It was Operation Nickle, Operation Cauldron began later in the year and lasted into 1968. M. Cadman)I think it was called on the Rhodesian side. What that did is that it brought South African troops into the theatre of war. And of course it essentially broke MK for a period of time. But more specifically I’ve subsequently come to work with a guy called Jac Buchner Jac was deployed at that point in time as a policeman, and Jac eventually came back as quite a senior officer, a colonel or maybe even a brigadier, and he was in charge of Security Police. And the lesson that he learned…he told me himself over beers like we’re drinking now…he told me that the lesson that he learned there was good intelligence. Because with good intelligence you get into the heads of the so-called enemy and you know what they’re doing, and you anticipate it, and that always…that planted a seed in my mind. This intelligence side. I was always sort of in a way intrigued by this intelligence thing but I wasn’t yet exposed to it that time. I haven’t answered your question. Interviewer What I asked was, did you have no idea of who you were fighting, what were you training for. You’d been trained as a soldier for what purpose? Tony Ok, I can answer that a bit than I have answered. If you go back to my very early life, my very early political conscience, the very first thing that I can remember politically, was when a place called Katanga, the Katangese uprising, a man called Patrice Lumumba, the very first newspaper article I ever read was a Sunday Times, the very, very first one ever, and I was horrified, I was traumatised by this. This was about Katanga and about a group of rebels that had attacked a village or town…I don’t know what the name of the village was, and in this village was a convent. And they attacked the nuns and they raped them and they then went on to cannibalising, to eat them, to literally slice their flesh off their living bodies and eat it. And this came out at a time when a man called Harold McMillan made a famous speech called the Winds of Change, and you’ll see in my book I often refer to the Winds of Change, because my life has been like a tumbleweed in front of the Winds of Change. That’s been the life of my generation – that tumbleweed. No direction, no sense of control, we’ve always been out of control. So when I went into the army I just knew this was the winds of change that I was fighting. This was the ugly stuff, this was the Sharpeville that had come in to my life, and simply I just realised that there was some bad 9 bogeyman out there. I didn’t know who the bogeyman was, it was called the Winds of Change, someone called it Communism, I never really believed it, and in fact if you go into my early National Service time you’ll find out that I was selected almost very, very quickly, I was selected for JLs, junior leadership. And on my JL training one of the things you go through is a selection process. And in that selection process one of the questions they ask you is what is your view on Communism. And of course I go back to my father and my early upbringing, my father had a profound respect for a man called Albert Luthuli. Now he was the great Satan at the time. Interviewer Not something you want to put on the piece of paper that’s going to your Lieutenant. Tony And I wasn’t convinced at the time about this thing called Communism but I didn’t really understand enough about it. So I didn’t have a clear idea of who the enemy was, I had a sense that there was this bogeyman out there, the bogeyman was called the Winds of Change, the Winds of Change were blowing from the north to the south, Katanga had happened, there were just bad things, women were being raped and nuns were being eaten alive, and I just knew that this evil thing was coming down south. And it was happening now in the Portuguese colonies, the Lusophone states in Africa, and was happening in Rhodesia. And I then in those days considered the Just War. I believed in this thing called the Just War and I was also, in a naïve sort of way, believing in this thing, this is your calling, this is your duty. When you get called up you do unquestionably. So that’s what I thought the enemy was. I had no real idea other than this bad bogeyman thing that was coming here and was going to eat my mother alive. Rape kids, anything. I just had this sense of evil and it was embodied in the word called ‘terrorism’, so the ‘terrorist’. And later on we turned that into a name called ‘gooks’, and we depersonalised this thing. And I’ve got a poem that I wrote about ‘gooks’ later on. Interviewer And isn’t that exactly the issue of the whole terrorism thing, it became part of the lexicon of a whole generation of South Africans. The terrorist was all encompassing, it could have been anybody and anything. Tony Yes. Interviewer And as you say, ‘gook’, the abbreviation of terrorist… Tony PB. Interviewer Exactly. Or even ‘terr’ it was just this amorphous enemy, you couldn’t identify any specific element of it. Tony Yes. Interviewer Now, during this period you would have been serving one year at that stage, is that right? 10

Tony Nine months. Nine months. And then of course I had a dismal experience because I was actually kicked off JL course because we were called out one day – we were paid in those days 53 cents a day – and I was on JL course like everyone else was, up at School of Armour at this stage, Tempe. And I remember the first thing at Tempe, I remember losing a young JL, died. Killed. Died in training. And suddenly I realised that this is serious stuff. This guy was smoking a cigarette and inside the armoured cars. And you know the armoured car has got a hole around you, and the fuel tank is at the bottom of the inside of the hole. And you get little fuel leaks and oil leaks and this slops around at the bottom of the hole. And he was sitting in the turret, actually sitting right down in the hole, and he tried to flick a cigarette out of the hatch, and it just missed the hatch and it bounced inside and the whole thing went off. Caught alight and all the ammo on board went off. And we were called out to go and recover this vehicle. And suddenly gee, I realised this is a young guy my age, and he’s mincemeat, there’s nothing left of him. So the bottom line is, I was actually taken off, I was actually kicked off the original course – not something I’m particularly proud of now, but it was a lesson I learned. And the reason why I was kicked off is, I owned up, and I’m not ashamed of having owned up, because that’s what I am, I’m a man of integrity and at that point in time we all used the long tikkie. So the long tikkie was this little ten cent piece, five cent piece that you put a little cord on, a little thread on, and a little bit of sticky tape and you put it in the telephone and you pull it out again and you retrieve it. And you can talk to whoever you want to. Of course everyone was doing it, because 53 frigging cents a day, how do you survive on 53 cents a day? It was like slave labour in may ways, looking back at it now. But anyhow they should have given us free our phone calls as far as I’m concerned. But nonetheless, this sa’majoor treured us all aan one day and he said, I’ve heard, in this thick Afrikaans accent…in fact he spoke in Afrikaans…ek het gehoor dat van julle manne het nou lang tikkies gebruik, en ons weet wie dit is. We know who this is. We all see and we know. You’re insignificant and nothing. We know! Maar ek gaan julle kans gee. As jy voor hom te staan, sal dit dan verby wees. Afgaan. Ok. And of course Kippy, I’m the first guy to put my hand up. Yes, sa’majoor it was me, I’m one of the. I stand forward. I think about five, six, maybe seven of us, put our hands up. Boof, that’s it boy, RTU, off the course, like in lightening speed. And the lesson that I learned from that is, afterwards, it actually told me that to lie and to be untruthful is the gateway to senior rank. And in a way I had a very jaundiced view of senior officers after that, because I could have lied about my view of Communism, and I could very well have lied about my long tikkie stuff. They didn’t have a cooking clue who was using long tikkies because everyone was. I was stupid, I was gullible, I fell for their bait. So, when I was RTUd from there, I felt profoundly disillusioned and that had an impact on my relationship with my father again. Because my father was so proud of me being a JL, so proud of me, and of course I come 11 and tell him dad, I didn’t make it. And the tragedy was, shortly after that my father died. And I never made peace with my father. I never, never, never. And maybe, looking back at my life now, maybe a lot of what I’ve done subsequent to that, I’m still making peace with my dead father. I’m still sort of making peace with my failure to deliver up to his expectations. Maybe I am, I don’t know. it’s something that I honestly can’t give an answer to. I haven’t done it wilfully and deliberately but I think back now, I think if he had to be here now, I think that he would be proud of what I’ve done. But that’s a pure speculation. Interviewer So you go through this phase of your life where they train you, you’re RTUd, eventually you finish up with that phase of your training… Tony As a bad memory. That’s why…I met Chris Marais, and then I went to Rhodes University, and I met Chris Marais and all these guys and I was actually quite…I was very traumatised when I met these people because I’d just lost my father. And my military experience was very dismal because I was not in any combat unit, I was at 81 Base Workshop at that stage. And I just felt like I’d failed. I just felt like I just had not come up to scratch. And I think I didn’t really want to talk about it, I haven’t been traumatised in a way because I hadn’t seen any combat at that stage. Some of my friends had been up to the border at that stage, the very first soldiers that were going up the border but what they were doing was they were busy preparing bases for the military. He was in fact an ADK guy from Lenz and he would drive convoys up from Grootfontein up to Rundu and Grootfontein up to Ondangwa etc. But they were busy setting up the bases. So at that stage there was no military action really other than Special Force. At that stage already Recces were operating, Jan Breytenbach was illegally operating. And that’s another element of this whole story, when you ask about who our enemy was? Our enemy was never defined because we never declared war against any country. And that’s an important thing. I have come to understand what my enemy was, but no-one ever said who your enemy was. Interviewer That’s right, I mean, Breytenbach was working a long way in southern Angola for a long time with a rag tag army of troops using foreign weapons, foreign uniforms, and at times, ignoring Pretoria’s instructions because he was on his own mission. Tony He was a classic brilliant Special Forces officer. Jan Breytenbach in my view will go down in the history of this country as being one of our best Special Force officers. I don’t necessarily approve of what he did ultimately in . And that’s where the conscience comes in. I told you about a thinking soldier. You see, I’m a thinking soldier. And ultimately I made moral choice. And when I made my moral choice, ultimately it was that I wouldn’t join that kind of activity in Bophuthatswana because it was illegal. So ultimately the notion of a legal war and an illegal war and the human rights side of it, the legality of warfare I think is very 12 important, it’s something that’s totally under-explored at the moment, because a lot of the burden that I think people are feeling today is the fact that they fought an illegal war and therefore they can’t talk about it. And the saddest thing that I see today is people of my generation, some of them are unemployable. I know of people who literally are so broken that they are literally unemployable. But you know, they’ve thrown their medals away. I’ve got a stupid little John Chard and a silly little Pro Patria – Pro Nutro we called it – but you know something, I’m actually proud of them. Because I earned those damn things and I did nothing ever, I can look anyone in the eye, I’ve not done anything unjustifiable to any person. So I’m actually profoundly proud of that. And I think one day when we as a nation are healed, we are actually going to strike a medal for all combatants, irrespective of colour, race or creed, or political persuasion. Then we are going to be a mature country. And I was hoping naively when I became a founding member of the Secret Service – at that stage I had the rank of colonel, and at that stage I was hoping to bring some leadership to bear, and in fact I did engage with MK people and I said, this is what we must do. If we talk about nation building, we don’t talk about nation building anymore, to the age of 2008. We used to talk about nation building. No more nation building talk. And nation building means, when we’re going to have the next May Day parade or whatever parade, that all the old veterans are going to walk down Eloff Street or whatever it’s called nowadays, in some kind of semblance of order, but they’re going to represent all of the combatants. All of the black, white, pink and green. And they’re all going to have one medal recognising their role in the struggle, as dirty as it was, because you know something, if our side was illegal and dirty, so was theirs. The other side was just as illegal and just as dirty. The Magoo’s Bar bomber is not a glorious man by any stretch of imagination. And it’s no surprise to me that he sits today before yet another court case, because the man is simply nothing more than a criminal. So there’s no glory in this business, there’s no glory on either side, and if you want to start making some glorious statement, immediately I’m profoundly sceptical of what you’re doing. Interviewer It’s a little out of chronological order, but while we’re on this subject, what’s your view of the Wall of Remembrance at Freedom Park where the decision’s been taken to include the names of MK, APLA, and even Cuban soldiers who might have died in the conflict, but not those who served on the side of the South African government of the day? Tony I am deeply saddened by that wall. I was at that wall a short while ago, and being what I am, today I’m a senior fellow at the CSRI, one of the senior scientists, and I’ve got some influence in society today and part of that influence is I talk to senior people, and I’ve spoken to the director of the Freedom Park Trust and you know something, I’ve offered to give them my book, they don’t want to accept it. And you’ll see the front of my book there’s a 13 photograph of me jumping off the Oribi Gorge bungee jump, and in there I talk about the fact that we are on a chasm, on the edge of the known to the unknown, and you’ve got to take this leap of faith, and we’ve got to jump into that unknown, that sense of nationhood, that sense of South Africaness. And part of it is the Freedom Wall. Is the Freedom Wall necessary? Of course it’s necessary. There’s no question of doubt about it. I want to be very clear, I fully support the Freedom Wall. But, I was there just a short while ago and it’s very interesting what happened that night. Because here I was, we just hosted a UNESCO project at the CSIR, and all these UNESCO guys, all Italian people were out there, and we took them to the Freedom Park, the Freedom Wall. And here we stood on top of this mountain, and there’s the Voortrekker Monument laughs and there’s some other, Kannonkop or whatever…I forget the name of the other kop… Interviewer Fort Klapperkop. Tony Fort Klapperkop, ok. But that’s the white history and this is the black history. And you know something, I was profoundly saddened because this is a missed opportunity. Here’s the golden chance to say, this was our struggle, this was…sure the black people have to grieve just like white people are grieving, that’s important, I don’t want to take that away from them, but in that spirit of reconciliation that Madiba had, the greatness that was in the man called Madiba, the fact that he could transcend our trivial little divides, we’d lost that thing. And you know what happened that night? A whole group of young scientists went back after our formal thing at the Freedom Park, whatever, and they were checked in to a guest house, and some gun men came in, young black men, gun men, they held them up at gun point, they tied them up, they terrorised them for one entire night, rummaging through everything. They took the entire guest house over. They stole their cars, they stole their cameras, their cell phones, they took their dignity. And as a direct result of that, that message has gone back to UNESCO in Italy, and the Italians today are more traumatised than we were, and as a direct result of that is losing some of its scientists. One of our top young emerging scientists was one of those victims, she’s a woman, she can’t take it, she’s busy packing up for Australia. So that’s the whole tragedy in that one little story that tells, that encapsulates, what we could do. So I’ve appealed to the director of the Freedom Park Trust, I was with him a short while ago when they launched the book on the history of…I love history, I think history is important, and they launched the book on the history of water in South Africa. And there’s a story in that as well, because I’d also written a book just before that on the history of water, but that was rejected because it didn’t reflect the black side of the history of this country. So they brought out a new history book, so there’s two histories. Mine pre-dates the other one. I tried to make mine neutral and not racialise it at all. I tried to make mine just reflect the historic facts as found in Hansard’s etc. And of course that ultimately had a certain bias because Hansard was a 14 reflection of the white parliament, and I apologise for that. But, the fact of the matter is, I had the privilege of writing up the first hydro-political political history of this country, and as a result of that, in reaction to that, they brought out another book – I’ve got it here – and when that book was being launched, the director of the Freedom Park Trust spoke, and I had a meal with him afterwards, and I spoke to him, I told him about my Shaking Hands with Billy, and I offered to give him a copy and I’ve never been graced by a response. I wrote him a letter, up to this date I’ve never had a response. I said, I’ll gladly come and talk to you because I believe one of the saddest things in our life – and this is something that I want to place on record – the record of war dead in South Africa is currently in Canada. There is no official record of SADF war dead in South Africa. And I think that is a tragedy of monumental proportions. That will blight us for the next generation. Until we dignify all war dead, black, white, pink or green, by bringing their bones home – my Bones book, ok – bringing their bones home, but in this case we can’t bring their bones home, what we can do, we can at least put up a memorial to them and we can at least have the register not under Canadian control. Who the hell are the Canadians to control the names of our war dead? We as a nation must honour those war dead, and we must honour all races. So my firm belief…I talk in my book about the fact that I’ve still got some unfinished business before I die. Old soldiers never die, but before they die, in know that the inevitability one day I will day, and before I die, I want to know that when I’m going down into that hole into the ground, I want people to sit back and think, at least this man was a man of integrity, at least this man had some impact. And the impact I would like to make is to actually try and create a nation building entity out of veterans. Because veterans have got credibility if they’ve got the balls to stand up and be counted. If they want to cower in a corner and never talk, that’s their problem. But if they were man enough to be officers and lead people in combat, if they could do that, then why can’t they lead people in peace now? And why can’t we reach…because I know many MK veterans. I’ve got a lot of respect – I’ve just told you about Chris Hani. I’ve got profound respect for many, many, many…I’ve named some of them in the forward of my book here. And I think that if we want to be responsible citizens to this new democracy of ours, there should be a thing called Veterans For Nation Building. Maybe give it a nice, cool title or something like that, but something to the effect that we should get up on radio talk shows, we should get up on television shows, we should do it in public events, with our little badge and our little logo that identifies all veterans, not as MOTHS and therefore white, and as MK association as black, but we should link those things up. And there should be this medal struck and we should recognise the struggle and we should continue with the greatness of Madiba and the greatness of the Archbishop Desmond Tutu. That greatness, that’s what makes uMqangabhodwe, -‘’the one that stands above’’ - we must stand above the petty tensions. All that 15 the Freedom Wall is now doing, is that it’s going to ignite those petty tensions, and it’s such an emotive place. You’re going to get little kids going there that have never ever heard about the struggle, they know nothing about it, all they’re living today is a good life, their parents are driving Mercedes Benzes, they’ve got good jobs, they’ve got good houses in the suburbs. Many of them have got a second house down at the coast and they’re going to take their kids there, and they’re going to be inflamed unnecessarily with hatred. So the fine dividing line here, are we going to use this as a vehicle of inciting that institutionalised violence again, or are we going to say, listen that was a dismal phase of our history, it was appalling for all of us, but let’s get on. As the great thing of this nation, the thing that has made South Africa a great nation, is our capacity to reach across the divides. Last year I was headhunted to Canada. Offered a senior executive directorship in Canada. Five times my current salary. I turned it down. The reason why I turned it down in part because I thought of my bones. I’m an African and my bones getting frozen in that wasteland, and when I die burying my African bones in that frozen waste, I couldn’t do it, five times the salary. This is my country, this is my place, I’m part of the solution, I’m not part of the problem. And that for me is my statement. Interviewer Rewinding back a bit to your youth…you ended up at Rhodes, how did you cope with dealing with Rhodes when it was slowly becoming politicised… Tony Very leftie. Interviewer It was becoming politicised in the mid seventies and you’d just been serving in a uniform in an armoured regiment? Tony Yes. You know the funny thing today, I’m a Fellow at the CSIR. I’ve only been at the CSIR for four years. And I came in bang, and was made a Fellow. To be made a Fellow is not a trivial thing because it’s a peer review process. And one of the Fellows that I bumped into there was a guy that was a student with me at Rhodes. Laughs And I won’t mention his name because that would be improper to mention his name, but this guy he had a very different view to me and he sort of like was a bit of a draft dodger and a bit of a this and a bit of a that, and you know, he nearly lost his position as Fellow because when we did a peer review, we actually found that he didn’t come up to the standard. And he used to be a CSIR Fellow, he’s now been downgraded to a lower thing. But the irony of it is the fact that I did what I thought was right and I’ve actually ultimately been rewarded by society. And he did what he thought was right at the time, and he’s ultimately hasn’t quite made it, he hasn’t gone that extra mile. And there’s a lesson to be learned there because in the recent past I’ve been tracking down…since I’ve written this book…I’ve been tracking down some of my old buddies, and one of the guys I’m trying to track down is a guy called David Claxton…in fact I’m meeting him next Saturday, he’s going to come here for the first 16 time… END OF SIDE A (counter at 527) SIDE B (counter at 14) Tony The significance of trying to track down Dave Gladd-Claxton was, he was…I’ve written about him a lot in my book…his name comes up a lot. He’s a man of great integrity, and he happens today be making it big time in the mining industry. Just been appointed as a CEO of some massive mining operation. So he’s done very well in life. But while I was tracking him down I discovered a thing called Face book. Now I’m not into Face book and that kind of nonsense in my life, but nonetheless I discovered Face book and while I was there I suddenly discovered a guy from boarding school that used to bully the crap out of me when I was a kid. And when I looked at his Face book and there was a guy called Michael Chaskalson who slept in the bed next to me in one of the dormitories in boarding school at St Martins. And I tracked down Michael Chaskalson. And Chaskalson, in his story – he’s got a little website now, Michael Chaskalson.com. He lives in Cambridge. He left the country. When I did my National Service he left the country. And the funny thing is, when we were at boarding school together Michael Chaskalson and myself had a lot of battles, a lot of rumbles. And one day he kicked me in the nuts, in the balls. Right in…kicked, boom, like this, lay down, across the bed. And the reason why he did that was that, he heard that my father was a National Party supporter and he was just profoundly disturbed by this. And he went on to become a Buddhist monk. Today he’s a Buddhist monk, and he’s got some organisation that does, I presume, some very important work in reflection and meditation. And part of my rediscovery of Michael Chaskalson is very what you’re talking about now. Has Michael Chaskalson done the right thing to go and dedicate his life to Buddhism? He’s a little Jewish boy from . Ok. And he had so much potential. Laughs And has he lost his potential by being a Buddhist monk or did he actually make the morally right choice? Did I waste and squander the potential that I had by eventually becoming a soldier, an intelligence officer, a scientist? Who squandered their life? And suddenly I’m at that age now where I’m reflecting back and I don’t want to speak badly of Michael Chaskalson because actually while he kicked me in the nuts, it was fairly painful at the time, I actually learned to respect the bugger. He was a man of his conviction. So the point is this, now you’re talking about Rhodes, suddenly Rhodes is a very leftie organisation. Now some very funny things happened at Rhodes. Firstly I was quite withdrawn. If you speak to anyone from Rhodes at that time that knows me they will tell you probably that I was always on the outer periphery, I was never really part of a big main group, I was not self confident at all. I’d just had this very, very difficult experience having lost my father. And it was…just, my life wasn’t good at that point in time for various reasons. And one of the things that of course we were 17 exposed to at Rhodes was this whole politicisation of society. And young people were being asked to make a (inaudible) So some of the people had come through in military training and they were now doing their university training. And other people hadn’t yet done their military training. But there was this big debate. So Rhodes was quite a politicised place. And at that point in time there was an intelligence operation on the go, called Operation Daisy. Now Operation Daisy must not be confused with the army Operation Daisy which was an incursion into Angola. There was an intelligence operation named Daisy. And what I subsequently leaned many years later, was that I was targeted in Operation Daisy. Interviewer You discovered this when you accessed your own file? Tony Laughs Yes. I was targeted in Operation Daisy. And what Operation Daisy was, was a special operation, it was in fact a joint operation that went on between the Security Police and what was then BOSS. I later went on to work for BOSS’s subsequently the NIS. But, at that point in time I learned that I’d been targeted, and they were recruiting a whole bunch of operators that they wanted to eventually infiltrate into the various ANC organs. And of course in that Operation Daisy, if you look back at the history of Operation Daisy now, Craig Williamson was one of the guys. In fact Craig Williamson came forward as one of the main manne. And there was another guy…I can’t remember his name, but he was operating at Rhodes… Interviewer Carl Edwards? Tony Carl Edwards. And Carl Edwards, suddenly he became the guy. So because they got Edwards they didn’t go for me. Now, I don’t know what would have happened had they gone for me. I don’t know if I would have taken their bait or not. I don’t know, I have no idea. I’ve reflected back on this often. But, what I’ve subsequently come to understand, because I knew later on in life, I served under the man called Koos Daisy, who ran Operation Daisy – Koos Kruger his name was. And old Koos Kruger he told me he was very proud of Operation Daisy, that made him his career. And he told me many, many times when I was in charge of an operation called Operation Hardekool, Operation Spaghetti. And he was also involved in Spaghetti, but he kept on telling me the lessons he learned from Daisy that I must now apply to Operation Spaghetti. And be that as it may, what I learned then was that there was a lot of intelligence activity taking place in Rhodes, a huge amount of intelligence activity, and in fact subsequently I’ve come to learn that the irony of this whole thing, the futility of what we were doing, was the fact that the Security Police and BOSS were so active that NUSAS as an institution was propagated and perpetuated by laughs by the intelligence community. The NUSAS offices were so bugged and I’m told that in Rhodes there were something like 13 bugs in the one office in Rhodes. And I’ve been told on great authority, that at certain meetings at NUSAS, the only people present at the meetings 18 were intelligence agents, either working for the Security Police or working for BOSS! So they were reporting on each other. There was nobody else. I’m not saying that at other times there weren’t other people but there were certain critical times when this was so. So we were spying on ourselves. That’s the schizophrenia of the… Interviewer Was that a specific circumstance related to Rhodes only or was that similar across the board at other universities? Tony I think it was across the board at other universities because I think…ok, your universities were your intelligentsia guys, so this is where you get young people with a conscience and they think. For the first time they’ve got a degree of freedom and they think. And most of them actually think quite well. They think in a sort of constructive way. There is a bit of anarchy at these places, but anarchy is nothing more than the constructive process at work. So, Rhodes actually wasn’t that politicised in those days, it was becoming politicised. And in fact there was quite a lot of apathy. And the schizophrenia that I spoke about, that I learned from my father, came out again. At that stage I was doing Economics as a major, Economics and Law. And part of my Economics thing I joined a thing called the Wages in Economics Commission. Which was I later learned was a bit of a leftie organisation, and that’s why I was then targeted by the Intelligence guys. Because they wanted to get into the Wages and Economics Commission, because they were at that point in time developing a data base in understanding of the people living below the poverty datum line. But I mean, I was stupid, I didn’t realise, I just wanted to get a bit of experience on economics and real genuine economics, other than from text books. And so that was the one sort of foray into…but the other side, the guys were just into drinking. Remember Rhodes was a place, I think the ratio was like about five women to one man or something like that. Some horribly skewed ratio, maybe ten to…I don’t quite know what the ratio was. But there was certainly a highly skewed ratio in favour of men. So most of the guys and myself included were just interested in knowing the women and we were there having a bit of a fun time. But lurking in the back of my mind was this thing, this conscience, things were happening. The incursion into Angola hadn’t yet happened, Ops Savannah hadn’t yet happened… Interviewer That was the end of ’75. Tony Yes, but things were starting to happen. I stayed at Rhodes for two years. Interviewer What was that? ’73, ‘4? Tony ’73, ’74, or ’74 ’75. Interviewer Ok, because Savannah was right at the end of ’75. Tony Yes, ok. And then when I left Rhodes, I left Rhodes with once 19 again a profound sense of failure and loss and confusion. I left it simply because I felt it was unjustified for me as an individual to expect my mother to stay at home, she’d lost her husband, my little brother in that point in time was completely lost. If I was part of my father’s death, my brother was even more part of his death because he was there for longer while my father was dying. My brother called me while my father was dying. And my brother to this day has had a very difficult and traumatic life. He’s never actually managed to get it together. He’s just a guy of great talent, a guy at the age of 16 was a qualified pilot. At the age of 16 he was licensed to fly something like 7 or 8 different aircraft. a natural pilot. Went up late on his National Service, his task was…because he wore glasses so they wouldn’t take him for pilot training and they didn’t want previously trained pilots. So his job was up at Rundu to put up a weather balloon once a day. So he brought up little baby meerkats and baby…he’s into wildlife and animals and stuff like that and he’s got farm now next to the Kruger Park. But he’s just had a very difficult life, so my decision was to leave Rhodes and to actually go back home to the family farm and to make something out of the farm. I’d come to terms with the death of my father, was trying to come to terms with it, I thought now listen, this nonsense of trying to get an education, this has got to stop now, I’ve got to go and do something constructive. So I dropped out of university and I went to start a farming operation. And while that happened, Ops Savannah happened. And I actually volunteered for Ops Savannah. And of course they didn’t need me because Ops Savannah was essentially driven by National Servicemen. And I’ve now gone quite deeply into the history of Ops Savannah and I’ve subsequently learned that…well there are a number of facts which I’ll gladly share with you about Ops Savannah. But one of the things was a guy called Paul Roos, my gunner, was on Ops Savannah and another guy called Lenny Rogers who I write about in my book. Lenny was also in Ops Savannah, he was one of the group of guys that were deployed, flew them up into Angola. And I later got to know them when we all served in Light Horse Regiment, this one over here. Interviewer Ops Savannah in your mind has been written about in sort of various formats, but nearly always in passing. Jan Breytenbach covers it in his books on Three Two Battalion. It’s touched on by a couple of other authors. But essentially it was National Servicemen with some Citizen Force soldiers and then Jan Breytenbach and his FNLA guys who later became Three Two Battalion. Tony My regiment was involved. Light Horse Regiment was involved. Interviewer That is correct. Tony They were involved, and in fact one of the bits of memorabilia in the Light Horse Regiment mess…I don’t know if it’s still there because I haven’t been back to the mess recently, but certainly before ’94 one of the bits of memorabilia was one of those white 20 washed milestones on the side of the road. It said Luanda some 20kms or 40…I don’t know quite know what it was, but very close to Luanda. So there were a lot of people from Light Horse that were directly in Ops Savannah. I was not one of those. And that once again, it brought a sort of a division because later on when we were called up to Citizen Force, there was this great divide between those that had served, actually combat operations, and those that hadn’t. And that, I started feeling that. That’s when I started feeling it. Interviewer Just briefly…we don’t really need to try and examine Ops Savannah too much…my understanding is that it was an attempt to try and create a climate where there was support for anybody who was opposed to a Communist regime taking over Angola. Tony No. I think it’s a, in my view, an incorrect understanding of Ops Savannah. Ops Savannah was chaos, it was chaotic. At that point in time and I’ve got a lot of evidence to support this and I will gladly go into more detail, but essentially at that point in time the government of the day had a policy of the carrot and the stick. And the carrot…a lot of my technical writing today is about that stuff. About the carrot and the stick. And what they did was they offered the carrot of development. Remember at that point in time the South African government had a thing called CONSAS - the Constellation of Southern African States. It came after Ops Savannah. And part of CONSAS was, we want to develop as a region, protected by a peace sort of agreement, a non aggression pact, what today is SADEC essentially. But CONSAS essentially under South Africa’s hegemonic dominance, or leadership, and the countries would be linked together through carrots and the carrots were the carrots of development. And the development at that point, what triggered Ops Savannah technically was the Cunene project. There was Calueque. Calueque Dam was being built on Cunene. And Calueque Dam, suddenly you had all these engineers milling around doing stuff, it was paid for largely by South Africans etc. It was part of a big sort of irrigation project, a big water management project that was designed to ultimately bring development into Namibia as part of countering the growing so-called terrorism threat in Namibia. Exactly what happened in the 1960s after Sharpeville in the Eastern Cape when the Orange Fish Tunnel was built, the HF Verwoerd Dam was built, the purpose of which was to take water down to the area where the home grounds of ANC, MK and PAC and Poqo.. So what happened then was the Portuguese troops after the Salazar coup, the Portuguese troops were confined to barracks, and there was suddenly pandemonium broke out. The American embassy was evacuated, there was just pandemonium in the country, and there was suddenly this power vacuum. And the FNLA, MPLA and UNITA were all initially fighting the Portuguese, all of a sudden they had nothing to do. So there was a battalion of UNITA guys that went in to Caleque and took over Calueque. And what they then did was they prevented some of the South African engineers from moving freely. So a signal was then sent 21 back to South Africa that these engineers have now been held hostage. And that signal was sent through to SADF, I don’t quite know exactly which channels it followed, but it went eventually to an armoured car squadron. Because the armoured car guys have got the capacity to move fast, so they deployed an armoured car unit, the purpose of which was purely to go and stabilise the situation at Caleque, basically see what the UNITA guys were doing, protect the South African engineers and get them out. That was the sole purpose of that operation. But running parallel to that, in the fog of war, was Jan Breytenbach shooting up people and doing his things on the side without formal authorisation. There were these two completely different theatres of operation, Breytenbach Special Forces stuff, and then of course this rather unglamorous little operation, little incursion, into Calueque. Then of course what happened after that now was there was just this gradual decay into chaos. And suddenly Breytenbach’s forces started moving further north, going up to Sa da Bandeira and those sort of areas, etc. And then all of a sudden this armoured unit was there now and they brought in more armoured cars. So Lenny Rogers and these guys, they came in now, and suddenly you now started….on Foxbat and Orange, what’s the other one…? (Zulu) These battle groups started forming. But initially they were very chaotic, there was no formal logistics behind it, it certainly was not part of a big plan. If anyone tells you it was part of a big plan I think they’re lying. It was simply the fact that there was chaos there, we now had two footholds in Angola, what now? Where do you draw the line? There is no line. So where do you go now? As the combat commander you say, that’s the line there, I’m not going to go beyond that river, or you say, well gee we can go a little bit further there and a little bit further…there’s no resistance. There was very little resistance being given from the other side. When there was it was maybe a short, sharp skirmish, generally a fairly unglamorous kind of war actually. Never a declared war, and that’s maybe one of the reasons why we’ve never had a formal history out of it. And ultimately in the chaos of war, the South African troops found themselves, in the case of Light Horse Regiment, literally looking, according to people that were there that I’ve spoken to, literally looking at the delights of the capital. And at that point in time something kicked in because BOSS had been talking…the head of BOSS, General van den Bergh, he’d been talking to the CIA, and the CIA had promised two things, they promised support for…technical support, in fact what was being called for was Puff the Magic Dragon, those C130s with the massive fire power. They were being promised and of course the other thing that was being promised was, political support from the United States. And got to a point where it was entirely possible for the American political system to bring that support, and the CIA reneged. So the CIA have always shown themselves to be unfaithful partners, and from an intelligence perspective I can speak lots about the CIA because I’ve had a lot of personal experience with the CIA. I’ve generally found them to be quite ineffective in that area. In fact 22 they ultimately went on – if you read Jan Breytenbach’s Tales as told to Peter Stiff, Peter Stiff talks about a unit up in the far north with FNLA that was abandoned by the CIA. There was an agreement that the CIA would actually withdraw these guys and they were left abandoned and that forged quite a lot of bitterness between South African intelligence and American intelligence. Because ultimately one of the three submarines had to be sent up there to uplift these guys and subsequently I’ve traced some of the guns that were captured there. I’ve actually got photographs on record of those guns that were captured up in the far north when the CIA didn’t pull out the South African troops and those guns are now on display in Luanda outside the Forças Armadas. Interviewer So essentially that operation was a bit like pulling the thread of a jersey? Tony You pull it and where does it stop? A very good analogy. It’s a great analogy, I hadn’t thought of that, but that describes it very well. But it was never a planned and decided…it was very much an ad hoc thing, ad hoc, ad hoc, ad hoc, and what now? Where do we draw the line now? So we’re being punched up there, so we do this here. And of course it was very important because South Africa was learning tactically what to do. Suddenly it became a cross border operation. Suddenly for the first time big lessons were being learned. Artillery. Artillery was hopelessly useless! So some of the Savannah victories was the capture of a Red Eye, and that Red Eye was brought back, retro, you know, re-engineered, reverse engineered, and that later on became the Valkyrie. And of course on that…the important thing during Savannah was we learned that we need to have mobility, fire and movement, therefore the armoured units, very important. And the other thing of course was artillery. And ultimately the final battle of that whole engagement, the battle of Cuito Cuanavale, it was our artillery that played a big role, because the artillery…the lesson we learned in Savannah was, we can’t rely on the 25- pounders and 80-pounders from the battle of El Alamein anymore, those guns that my father served on, we can’t rely on those anymore, we’ve now got to get something more sophisticated. And that’s when Dr Bull came to the scene and that’s of course where the whole thing about the G5 and G6 came from etc. Formidable fighting weapons, formidable bits of military kit. Interviewer So then you volunteered but they didn’t accept you… Tony They didn’t accept me, I was quite disappointed with that. And then suddenly I got a little letter from the army, and in the early part of my story I didn’t complete what I was telling you. I told you that initially I was called up for 9 months. Then because I was on JLs it was changed to 12 months. Then because I didn’t qualify as a lieutenant, I said no, bugger this, I want to go back to my number thing. And of course they wouldn’t let me go, they wrote letters and I fought the system, and eventually after 11 months 23 they let me go. And I thought I’d won. But of course on their books I still owed one month of time. So they let me go because my story was convincing and they said, let this idiot go, we’ll catch him some other time. And I learned a big lesson there. And when I was now on the farm, after Savannah, and I realised this is getting serious now, then suddenly I said, well part of my volunteering triggered off this thing, well where are you now? You still owe us a month. Laughs And I served that month at a historically very significant time. I served that month when Light Horse Regiment, this regiment here, when Light Horse Regiment was splitting 1 and 2. After the Savannah experience they realised that they’ve got to have two units, not one. So they split ‘’the’’ Light Horse Regiment into 1 and 2 Light Horse Regiments. And in so doing, I was one of the…I was called up to do an admin camp at the Light Horse headquarters and I was given a promise by a man called Major Peter Bailey. And Peter Bailey, I’ve subsequently learned is nothing more than a maggot, because what he promised me was that he would get me transferred into Light Horse Regiment, and of course he didn’t do that. He simply failed. He failed dismally. And I’ve come to learn of some many of those officers, because of the process of recruitment, they said, yes, they believe Communists are evil, and washed their faces in the toilet bowl, and they lied about long tikkies. So many of them actually have feet of clay as far as I’m concerned. I’ve actually got a quite a dismal view of many of those officers. And at the end of the day Peter Bailey sold me down the river, but having said that, I got my foot into Light Horse Regiment, and what I did in Light Horse Regiment was I doctored my file, I cleaned up my file. My first special operation was Light Horse. I doctored my file, cleaned it up…because I’d been mustered as something that I wasn’t very proud of and I wasn’t going to do that, and I re- mustered myself as a combat soldier. I mustered myself as a crew commander. And no-one had…because I was in charge of the files and I took the records out. I said, Turton - crew commander. And I then had a big punch up with them because they wanted to send me off to the Pretoria regiment, tank regiment, and I said no, I want to serve in Light Horse Regiment, it’s a fine regiment, it’s a good regiment, I want to be part of that. And from that moment on I started becoming more engaged. But, when was that camp? That camp was June, 1976. So I was in uniform when the Soweto riots happened. And I remember this utter shock and utter horror, I was in uniform and I went to the Regimental Headquarters that day and the Soweto riots had just happened. And I just…it felt like I’d been given…the only way I can describe it is to use this colourful South African language of ours, I’d been given a snot klap. You know what a snot klap is? Interviewer I do. Tony I’d been given a snottie, bah, on the side of my face and I saw stars. My first thought was, how can the government allow this to happen? And that’s how naïve I was. I thought the government was in control. And then I was utterly horrified and shocked. But 24 the significance at that time was that Light Horse was not involved, there were no troops in the townships then. In ’76 there were only police. But I’ve written, if you go to Wikipedia, I’ve written up the piece in Wikipedia about the June 16th uprisings. And when last I looked it hadn’t been maturely changed, although I also wrote up a thing there about Cuito Cuanavale. And that has all been taken out, everything I wrote about Cuito Cuanavale, has been removed by a Cuban. But what I wrote about the , to the best of my knowledge is still there. And essentially what I said there was the significance of the Soweto uprising was that the struggle that was out there, the exiles that left after the sixties, after Sharpeville, those exiles…suddenly…it wasn’t exiles that came home but the battle came home. It was the youth that said to the older guys, wake up. We want your leadership, we’re not happy with what’s going on. So immediately after that of course I was on my way to America, and I went to college I America then. And that is a very significant period in my life because while I was in America I met an ANC exile, and I met the enemy face to face for the first time. And I got to quite like this guy. So my father’s schizophrenia came back in again. Here was a black man who I was told was my enemy, but actually I liked him, he was my friend. And we were Africans together. And yet, he was sad because he wanted to go home but couldn’t. At that stage, I could go home but didn’t want to. So there was this juxtaposition. And then I decided, hey to hell this. In America, in Chicago, on the frozen banks of Lake Michigan, minus 60 degree temperatures, bitterly cold, I had a beard in those days, my beard was frozen solid, and I made a pledge to myself that I am an African and I’m going back to my country. And I went back to South Africa and I immediately got myself involved in Light Horse. And from that moment onwards I became deeply involved in Light Horse. Deeply, deeply involved. I became a sergeant initially and then ultimately a squadron sergeant major, and in that capacity I was deployed into Angola on combat missions and ultimately I was deployed, I had the dubious history of being a sergeant major therefore an echelon commander in the very first troop deployment into the townships. So Soweto, June 16th, ’76 when I was in headquarters, that taught me about the townships. When I was deployed eventually into Kagiso, Vosloorus, and Katlehong and those areas, the east rand, I was there in a combat role and they were completely different experiences and we’ll talk about that later on. Break Light Horse I think is a fine regiment and I don’t want to just sound like an old fart here now talking about…with nostalgia back to the good old days. Light Horse Regiment…well, what is a regiment? A regiment is something that is part of human history, it’s part of human culture. Go back to any society…I’m taken today, I travel all over the world, I work…literally, I’ve probably worked in 60 countries across this planet, and I’m familiar with all their capital cities. And the one thing that strikes me whenever I walk down a main street, whether it’s Washington or London or Paris or Moscow, all of their monuments are monuments to violence. Statehood was 25 bought through the barrel of a gun. And this is an important concept, because what we’ve had in this country from 1652 until 1994, we had an open frontier. We’ll talk about that, we’ll get back to the frontier…just make a note…the concept of a frontier, and the opening and closing of that frontier. But, what I found in Light Horse was actually a really good regiment. It consisted of people that in many cases had a moral conscience. I met really good young men there. My buddies Dave Gladd-Claxton who went on to become a very, very significant mine…captain of industry. Other people…Paul Roos, he was one of the gunners in Ops Savannah, etc. But the important thing was Light Horse, it was an unusual regiment, unusual in many ways because it was one of the, I think there were four regiments in the country that had the right in those days to wear your stable belt. Now, what is a stable belt in the overall scheme of things, it is important or is it not? It’s a silly thing but…I was taken by…when I first saw the RLI guys coming to recruit, they wear stable belts. And there was a stable belt, something about this issue of identity, this issue of pride. And of course the Light Horse Regiment is one of the oldest regiments in the country. It was started at the same time as Cape Town Highlanders and I think…I forget who the others were… Natal Mounted Rifles might have been one of them, and I think one of the other infantry units… Interviewer Not Transvaal Scottish? Tony Something like that, it could have been. But these were the four original regiments that were started, and in the case…I’m talking about before South Africa was South Africa. Before the Boer War. Light Horse Regiment was started to fight the Boer War. And it started as a volunteer regiment, in fact at Saxonwold in Johannesburg. A wold is a forest, the Saxon forest in Johannesburg. Profoundly British. And it was started as a volunteer unit and in order to join the unit, if you were an officer you bought your commission. But if you were just an enlisted man, you had to bring your own kit along ok. laughs And your stable belt was what kept your saddle on the back of a horse. So it was a cavalry unit. And of course in order to keep the stable belts distinct, they coloured them in the regimental colours. So you would keep your stable belt around your waist, and therefore this became eventually sort of part of your traditional dress. But the significance of the age of the unit, besides the fact that in their first action they were wiped out because they just didn’t have…they were a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs that met a bunch of really tough and had the crap shot out of them. But be that as it may, what I liked about them is that they had this sense of history, and part of the history that I liked about the Light Horse…this is very important in the context of the dirty war we’re talking about. These were gentlemen. And in fact there’s a thing in the Light Horse Regiment where the commanding officer will never talk about the troops, he always talks about the gentlemen of the Regiment. I’ve actually got the book here, ‘100 Years of Regimental History’, and they talk here about the gentlemen of 26 the regiment. And this goes back, very interestingly, to a time, one of their first actions, when the commanding officer took out a hip flask of whisky and he was going to take a swig, he was about to take a swig so he had this flask up to his mouth, and the sergeant major – I eventually became the sergeant major – and the sergeant major said, sir, that’s not a very good idea, I think you should offer it to the men first. So the colonel took a look at the sergeant major, what the hell is he saying? And he didn’t put the hip flask to his lips, dropped it, and then sent it around. They were going on a train for deployment in the Anglo Boer War, I think to Ladysmith or something like that. And of course on the way there, the hip flask did the rounds and it came back to the colonel and not a drop had been drunk. And the colonel then said…he held his hip flask up and he saw that it was full still…and he said, I salute you, you are truly gentlemen of the regiment. And from that moment on they were called gentlemen of the regiment. So you know, the sergeant major that I had the privilege of serving, the RSM, a guy called Rory Morton, he was a World War Two veteran. He was an infantryman in World War Two. But he taught us, I became a young sergeant under him, and Dave Gladd-Claxton and these guys, Keith Prinsloo, we’re all sergeants under this guy. And his word was law, and part of it was integrity. And the integrity was, you as a sergeant would be the last man to eat. And the very last person in the regiment to ever get a meal would be the regimental sergeant major. And let him catch you as a sergeant, or a staff sergeant, or something like that, under his command, jumping in front of a troop to get food, and hell will pay. Now you see that gives a normative element, there’s an ethical code of conduct, that at the end of the day, the troop is the most important, the gentleman of the regiment, he’s the most important guy. The lowest of them all is the most important of them all. And if there’s enough food at the end of it for the RSM and the colonel to still eat, well then it means that everyone has had a good meal. And it might sound silly, and for non military people they probably would think that that is quite superficial, but actually that embodies the spirit of what the regiment is about. So within the Light Horse Regiment there was a spirit of camaraderie, there was a spirit of respect, there was a spirit of, well you know we’re doing a serious business here and of course we were deployed now into various things, and some of the most notable were, I think in my mind anyhow, the…we were made battle ready after the Pretoria car bomb went off. Because when the Pretoria car bomb went off we were actually training at at the time. And suddenly our training kicked up, boy we were serious about this stuff now. And we were taught then to train hard and fight easy. And you might have had the same experience, train hard, fight easy. And then I realised this is serious, serious stuff. I mean I always knew it was serious but then I realised it was really, really getting to be serious stuff, so what I learned from Light Horse, a couple of important lessons. The one thing was they all ? (377) because I’m so tall, I’m almost two metres, 1.98, and they said you can’t fit 27 into an armoured car. And I showed them. I fitted into an armoured car. And I learned there that you’ll actually fit wherever you want to fit. If you’re committed you’ll do it, and in fact I’ve now got a little saying, a colleague of mine at the CSIR, he often quotes this saying and it’s just so apt under these circumstances. The saying is as follows: in the bacon and eggs of life, the chicken is involved but the pig is committed. Are you a chicken or are you a pig? You see, I became a pig. I was committed. But I was committed not to just be a gung-ho soldier kicking down doors and shooting the crap out of there, because anyone can do that. In my book I wrote about that. I write about what it feels…I remember putting a rocket into a hut, and that was a very important moment for me because afterwards I thought to myself, did I need to put that rocket into that hut? And I actually concluded that maybe I didn’t. Maybe the excess…you see when you’re a young guy and you’re full of adrenalin and you smell the cordite and this machine gun chatters in your hand, or in the case of a 90mm…actually there’s a poem that I would like to read to you here that captures that experience…when you do that it’s almost an outer body experience because you see, in essence, what it means to be a soldier, is you are in the fog of war, you have no control over anything, you are as confused as all hell, your commanding officer is probably confused, very few people know a lot about what’s going on. What I do professionally today now is I try and bring knowledge for decision making against a background of imperfect knowledge. Because I’ve learned from the field of battle that there’s always decisions being made against the background of imperfect knowledge. And the person that feels that imperfect knowledge the most is that troopie in the front line, the brain gunner, or the poor little infantryman. And I felt such pity for the infantrymen with their little esbit stove, and their silly little existence that they were trying to eke out over this little esbit stove and your fire bucket, trying to keep themselves body and soul together. And of course it’s a very lonely life out there. And it was there that I learned a lot of important lessons and I think one of them that I learned was that…in my book I talk about the think grey line. The thin grey line is that line of morality. And you see when you’re a young man and you’re confused and you don’t quite know, and are you going to see the sun come up tomorrow or aren’t you? Then what have you got? Well you’ve got your buddy next to you, you trust him. Black, white, pink or green, you trust him. You have a profound relationship with those guys eventually, and no-one will understand that. no-one else understands that. But you’ve got your buddy, you’ve got the badge you operate under, because that means something, there’s a history to that, in the case of the Light Horse, goes back to the Boer War, goes back to the battle of El Alamein, it goes back to the Italian campaign in World War Two, etc. Highly armed unit. Very, very special unit. And you’ve got that. And then of course you’ve got the sense of power that having a weapon in your hands gives you, and that’s where it goes wrong. Because if you haven’t got a lot of intellect that acts as a balance, when you 28 smell that cordite and you feel that machine gun come alive in your hand, boy you feel so powerful. And I’ve always tried to counter balance that with what I now call wisdom. Yes, it’s easy to pull the trigger but should we pull the trigger. And one of the lessons I’ve learned now, I’ve actually met in my travels a lot of interesting people. And one of the guys that I’ve met is a guy called, Awraham Soetendorp. Now Awraham Soetendorp is a rabbi. I’ve worked for Mikhail Gorbachov, as an advisor to Gorbachov on occasion. And one of the advisors to Gorbi is this Awraham Soetendorp. Now he’s a rabbi that lives in Amsterdam. And the significance of it, you’ll see that his name Soetendorp is not a Jewish surname. He was in fact a Holocaust kid. His parents were killed during the Holocaust. And he was put in a suitcase as a tiny baby and left on the front doorstep of the Soetendorp family in Amsterdam, and they adopted him. and they brought him up as a Soetendorp but they taught him to never forget the fact that he’s Jewish. And that’s important. And we’ll talk about the Oppenheimers now, because they’ve lost their Jewishness, they’ve lost their identity, they gave it up for the right to go to the Rand Club because Jews weren’t allowed at the Rand Club, and I’ve lost my respect for the Oppenheimers as a result of that. But what Awraham Soetendorp told me…we had a lot of discussions like we’re having now…and he taught me a very valuable lesson, and the lesson that he taught me was that a man can go for weeks without food, for days without water, but not a moment without hope. Hope is a very important part of our life. And one of the stories that he told me…because we were talking about the whole thing of combat etc, and morality. This thin grey line of mine. At that stage I was writing up that part of my book about the thin grey line and I was grappling with what it meant. And he said to me he’s got something to add, here’s a survivor of the Holocaust, a man of great integrity and a man of great insight. And he told me that the difference between a combat soldier and a civilian is the moral choice that they make. A combat soldier is a split second choice. Whereas the biggest moral choice that a typical person in an average Western society will make is when they go to the shopping centre on a Saturday morning and there’s no parking available, are they going to park their car in the invalid parking bay. Laughs That’s about the magnitude of their moral choice. And he then related a story to me which I think is very important, and I want to relate it now quickly. He told me that one of…he’s a rabbi so he’s into the Jewish community and of course one of the people in his congregation is a Jewish father, an elderly man, whose son was a captain during the Intifada. And his son is now a paraplegic. He was shot by some Palestinian kids and this severed his spinal cord and he’s now a paraplegic. But he said, what he couldn’t understand was that the father was so bitter that his son was now a paraplegic but the son wasn’t. The son had completely come to terms with the fact that he was a paraplegic and this was his lot in life. And after I spoke to him about my thin grey line, he said, oh now he understands it suddenly. And what he understood is that, 29 this captain gave orders to his company, the company under his command, during the Intifada, and he said, we are soldiers, we wear a badge on our head, and we are fighting on the side of justice. We do not shoot kids. So he gave a specific instruction that when someone pops up with an AK in his hand, if it’s a kid you don’t fire. That was his order. And of course a kid popped up with an AK, and saw that this Israeli just wavered for a second, and of course he got the incoming. But he went down not a problem. He said, you know, I don’t care what happened, yes, I’ve lost the use of my legs, but you know something, I still don’t shoot kids. Laughs So there’s that moral choice there. And for me this putting a rocket into this hut was my moral choice. I’d crossed that line. I’ve crossed there into that thin…in fact I’ve written a poem about that. END OF SIDE B (counter at 490) TAPE TWO SIDE A Interviewer Tony What I found is, I’ve always like to wordsmith, and I don’t know if I’ve been particularly good at it but I’ve always been interested in wordsmithing and suddenly when I started writing this book of mine I realised I can write a bit of poetry. And that surprised me because it’s something that I didn’t know I could do. But if found an enormous catharsis as I wrote it, and this I’ve shared now with a couple of my army buddies and they’ve all seemed to have understood. And the one thing…I’m talking about this thin grey line, this poem that I’ve written now is called ‘One Man’s Freedom is Another Man’s Fear’. Because that’s what struck me. when I eventually became a senior intelligence officer, and started engaging with the ANC at a very high level, these guys were just like you and me – same hopes, same fears, same aspirations, same colour blood – actually they were really good guys. actually very little between us, this silly ideological difference. And I started thinking about what it meant, this difference. Why am I afraid of that man’s freedom? And this is what I’ve grappled with because if we as a society…I spoke earlier on about the need for veterans to get up and show leadership now, and to link out in public across the line, and make friends in public. The people must see this that this is happening. And why can we not all buy into this dream called this New South African democracy. And this to me is the profound question and this poem deals with that. It’s called ‘One Man’s Freedom is Another Man’s Fear’. And just the background to this: I was always struck by the awesome power of TNT. Here you’ve got this little bit of silly blinking plastic explosive. Man that is awesome in its power. And you feel it, woofff, in your stomach as it’s going off. Wofff. And I came to realise that actually there’s an evil in the TNT. There’s a demon in there. I often refer in my writing to this demon. And this demon now is actually locked within the TNT, and I was just reflecting when I was writing this book and I was trying to get some of my emotions into some 30 tangible sort of way of understanding it and came up with this thing. In fact I came up with this thing partly while I was drawing money out of an ATM. Suddenly the opening lines hit me. And I wrote on the back of the ATM slip, and then I quickly came home all enthusiastic and I wrote the rest at home. And it goes as follows: ‘Locked within the TNT a demon lies there lurking. Urging to be unleashed by soldier unsuspecting like a glutton to feed on flesh soft blood and bone. Why do we feel this primordial need to invade someone else’s home? What have they done to drive us so into that limbo of no man’s land, beyond what I call that thin grey line? Dehumanised lost souls. Why does the unknown cause us to fear, making us act this way? Or do we think if we call them Gooks we can simply do as we may? Why are we afraid of those aspirations so, as their yearning simply to be free invokes in us that thing called fear? Is there no place in there somewhere for me? What will it take for us to start, to seek between us common ground, or does the beat of Mother Africa’s heart doom us eternal, no peace to be found?’ Now that poem captures very much what my life experience has been, as a soldier, as an intelligence officer. I was confused as all hell. What the hell are we shooting these guys for? What the hell is it about? And there were many experiences that I had. I write in my book about a tank, a T34. And that T34 that was at , the . And here is this tank that had been shot out. This tank had probably seen action at the Battle of Stalingrad. It was the same vintage as the old Soviet tanks from the Battle of Stalingrad. One can’t say for sure it was at Stalingrad but certainly it was a Stalingrad vintage. And the Battle of Stalingrad was a tank battle of note. We hadn’t even begun to feel the depths of despair that a soldier feels. Talk to those that were in The Kessel - The Cauldron - at the Battle of Stalingrad. And what struck me about that battle, what struck me about that tank – and I’ve written about it in my book – was afterwards the stench of burnt rubber, the stench of burning things, is a certain smell that when I smell it today…in fact I’ve got this thing here and I want to share with you…I’m doing some work in the mining industry, environmental stuff in the mining industry, and a colleague of mine who’s a hydro geologist, brought me this report. It’s a colour photograph called Voices of Anger. Khutsong, just down the road here. And I saw that photograph and I could smell the burning rubber. I could smell the flesh and you can hear the cry of the person in the background, and I’ve got a cold shiver even now, I get goose bumps, because this is now 2007. This is not 1970s, 1980s. Interviewer And you’re looking at picture of a woman walking past a pile of tyres burning in Khutsong. Tony Burning in Khutsong and this is in that report called Voices of Anger. A report that was commissioned by the treasury. An excellent report, I do a lot of work on this now, because I do a lot of environmental, but I’m digressing now. The important thing is that stench. Once you’ve smelt that stuff, once you’ve smelt it, the thing that struck me in Angola was this endless destruction, 31 this endless landscape…I’ve written about it. I would like to actually just quickly go through that if I can, because this is something that tells a story in its own right, and here’s the photograph now on page 75 in my book here. I talk about this thing here. I talk about, if I can just read from here: “I recall my first operational deployment across the border into Angola, the whine of the four wheel drive gear boxes powering the Eland AFVs forward into an unknown combat situation lulled us into a sense of well-being and adventure. I distinctly remember the smell of cordite burning my nostrils and the mighty lurch of the Eland as the main gun fired and one was forced to clench ones elbows close to ones side to prevent them from being crushed by the vicious recoil of the bridge block. One followed the graceful arc of the tracer behind the 90mm projectile as it sped towards its designated target, loading again automatically in case the first round had missed and a second was needed. I distinctly remember the intense feeling of satisfaction as the shell hit home and exploded and the thunderous roar of high explosives and shrapnel. A brutal finality concealed in the troop commander’s orders across the battle intercom of, “stop target!” meaning that the designated target had been destroyed and the gunner could engage the next. That feeling of intense satisfaction was tinged by the unease that people were dying, ripped apart by the vicious serrations of white hot steel shrapnel flying randomly through the air at speeds in excess of ten thousand metres a second. Thinking back at this now, the first feeling I have is a conglomeration of both elation and remorse. Two deeply opposing emotions that reach to form an odd cocktail of side effects. On the one hand one felt strangely powerful when in command of a gun that could destroy a tank at twelve hundred metres. One felt even more powerful as a Browning machine gun sprang into life in ones hands. The Browning seemed to take on a life of its own, shuddering and jerking as it sprayed something like a thousand rounds a minute into an area accurately demarcated by oneself. One lusted after the smell of cordite, the whine of four wheel drive gears in the naked power that a chattering machine gun gave as it jerked to life in ones hands. I distinctly recall a number of distorted images as I think back to my first Angolan deployment. We crossed the border at Santa Clara and the first thing I saw was an unexploded mortar bomb embedded in the road. It’s tailfin sticking skyward in an angular aberration that was totally at odds with the wild splash of colour from the bougainvilleas spilling over the houses in an intimate of embrace. The scene was surreal with a crazy juxtaposition of the sheer destructiveness of military grade high explosives. And the gentle forgiveness of the almost un-African colour of flowers in the small gardens of the local homes. Then we struck our first defile, my Eland was riding at point at the time so we were responsible for giving covering fire to the Sappers as they checked for mines. I watched with much interest, almost disjointed in a way, as the Sappers did their thing, keeping a sharp eye open for any possible fire from the surrounding bush 32 ready to order retaliation in the form of HE and co-ax Browning immediately if needed. The sights of destruction in the wasteland denuded by the insanity of war greeted us at every bend in the road. The road itself was unique having been raised above the ground because of the prevailing wetness of the earth and the rainy season. The water tower in the town centre that had been shot by a 90mm shell. The vehicles that had been reduced to angry contortions of twisted steel by the rabid appetite of high explosives. The stench of burning rubber and human flesh that had been flailed into submission by angry steel. The charred remains of a house reduced to a blackened smouldering rubble in a contorted monument to what was once human hope. The chatter of distant small arms fire punctuated by the gut felt punctures of exploding shells. And of course, the welcome rhythmic beat of the helicopter blades heralding as they always did life giving support from the sky, which came in a form of short bursts of 20mm fire accompanied always by the echo of ground blasts as they hit home. Doof doof doof, as the shots were fired from the helicopter. Momentary silence punctuated only by the rhythmic swish of the rotor blades. And then wamp pamp pop, as the shells hit their target on the ground and detonated. Images too numerous to describe, but images that still play before the cinema in my head in the small hours of night when I’m alone with my thoughts.” And that’s how I felt, ok…that’s how I felt at the time. None of this stuff was glorious. And in fact, you’ll see I talk here about this 90mm gun when you order, HE action unloaded! And you put in your, heat action loaded! And you put it out the spout and you give this order, and as you give that order, you just grab this handle in front of you because that Eland is such a small little vehicle and the kick is like a stallion, just kicks you. And the crew commander sits in a very vulnerable position because a crew commander is responsible for coms outside the vehicle and coms with the rest of the vehicles next to him, and also coms inside the vehicle. So the crew commander has got a lot going on in his head. And in front of him he’s got a battle site, and it’s a very crude site and he gives commands through that site, and he tells the gunner and the driver which targets to engage next. And in front of his head he’s got this brow pad and the brow pad has got a thick rubber pad, and if you don’t pull that brow pad onto your head and you’ve got to like cling on to that, you’re going to become part of the Eland. Because when that thing kicks, if you’ve got a slight distance between you and that head piece, it smashes the front of your face here. So all the cavalry guys, all the armoured people, you find their faces are smashed up and their knuckles are all damaged because they’ve got to load these shells in very awkward positions, etc. And the crew commander loads the gun. And as you load the gun you give this command, HE action loaded! You shout it down the battle com. And then the gunner replies, firing switch on? And then you give, range one eight hundred. One eight hundred set. And you describe what the target is, traverse, infantry nest, next to the big tree, traverse right. Steady. Because you’re now 33 watching your sight. He doesn’t know what he’s taking on yet. But he knows, one eight hundred, he’s got his sight set on one eight hundred, he knows it’s an infantry machine gun nest, he knows it’s HE, so HE has got a certain trajectory different to a HEAT round for example, so he knows which scale to select. And he knows nothing, he’s just looking through a little sight, he knows nothing about what’s going on in the world out there. And then as you see this thing coming into your crude sight, you say, traverse right, steady, on, when you’re on sight, then he picks it up and he says, on, on target. Then you give the command, fire. And as you give the command fire, you’ve got to grab that handle in front of you and you pull your face into that brow pad, then you pull your elbows into your side, because if you don’t, as this thing kicks back here now, it takes your elbow with it and the recoil, it crushes your elbow. So there’s many of those guys in their first engagements, get injured, their elbows get crushed. So I remember all of those things. And in fact, a lot of the detail is forgotten, but what one remembers is all of the…almost this cocktail, I talk about this cocktail of emotions, the good and the bad. The flippant versus the intense stuff. And in fact, I remember once, the 32 Battalion captain, after a fairly intense engagement, this 32 Battalion captain had just put a rocket into a small…a little courtyard almost…one of these little houses’ courtyards, and there was a soldier there who had taken this hit from this rocket and his head had collapsed – it was still on his shoulders, but his head had turned into a marshmallow, all soft and pap, and his head was flopping over like this on the side, and he was propped up next to a tree – and here was this Three Two Battalion captain, who I later met on special operations in Chief Directorate K, he was one of the operators in K, so we met again. And I was just absolutely amazed that after this intense action, this Three Two Battalion guy is just very hungry now, and when he’s hungry he gets out his rat pack and he sits down next to this dead man, his head this jelly sort of mass of marshmallow, and he eats his rat pack right next to this dead soldier. And that’s when I realised, I just realised these absolute surreal things, this disjointed life of a soldier, and then I started writing these little short stories about this. And have you read the story about the crimson circles in the white sand? Interviewer Yes, I have. Tony Can I record that one quickly? Because this to me is a very important story. Because this story, what I tried to do in this story, it’s a short little story, it’s only half a page long, and that’s what it’s like you see. You go there on this three month deployment and 90% of the time there’s dead boring and nothing happens and you’re standing in a line and you hurry up and wait. But when it happens you get these sort of intense things and this one is called, Crimson Circles in the White Sand. And it goes back to what I spoke about when I…earlier on I talk about this wind of the gears, the winding sound. And I’ll give you another poem that I wrote about this winding sound, I gave it the other day to old 34 David Gladd-Claxton, my buddy, who I’ve now tracked through Face book, going to see him next weekend. Haven’t seen him since then. And he said when he read that poem it just took him straight back into the Eland. He was there and he could smell and sort of see the things. This is the story called Crimson Circles in the White Sand – the incident was as follows, there’d been a contact and there’d been a kill, we weren’t part of it, we were part of a follow up crew that came through. And I just tried to capture the story, I tried to wordsmith it as best I can. “The incessant whine of the gears blends into the static of the radios as both sets of sound were filtered through the headset inside the helmet. All hatches were closed because of the recent contact, with only the senior round of crew commanders hatches raised at half cock to improve the vision for the commanders. They tentatively moved across the killing field, sweeping their eyes through the narrow slits beneath the hutches, hardly noticing bodies contorted by the violence of their last moments alive. Being dragged to a central point by dust covered soldiers picking their way carefully through the detritus of war. The Eland in front, a 60mm mortar with an oddly shaped round turret and an inadequate excuse of a main weapon protruding at a rude angle from its business end, suddenly his hatches burst open. The gunner popped his head out and hung from the tote as his Eland passed the grotesquely twisted body of a recently killed combatant. To their surprise she was a woman either caught in the crossfire or else a mujiba, to use Rhodesian army jargon, that was providing food and sustenance to the gooks in the field. She lay there legs sprawled, apart in a sea of white sand turned crimson as she leaked her recent life into the earth of Mother Africa. She had taken a direct hit in the left shoulder, probably from an HE round and had been ripped apart in near surgical fashion, her one breast still intact but the other a tangle of raw meat that was indistinguishable from the rest of what her torso used to be. Examining her remains from the turret as the Eland drove past, the gunner triggered a switch on his chest piece and whispered into the combat radio network, better shag her while she’s still warm boys! With a dismissive wave of a hand acknowledging the troops on the ground taking care of the aftermath of contact, they drove past them onto their RV position to replenish ammo, food and fuel and to wait for new orders. Their collective thoughts turned now to warm food and maybe a chance to wash themselves.” Now you notice I wrote this whole thing in the third person. I was there. I observed that, and I know who the gunner is, I know who the guy is that said that. And…it’s such a dirty story, because he actually said, you’d better fuck her while she’s warm boys. So I just sort of sanitized it a bit. You know, thinking back about it now, this was also related to that hut rocket firing incident of mine, where I was actually feeling quite dirty, I was feeling quite confused. And in a way it was this incident that sort of brought me back. I thought, shit, you know, how can we dehumanise ourselves to this point? Are we going to…what is this process of dehumanisation? And it’s very 35 interesting, I subsequently read this book, the story of the massacre at My Lai…the My Lai Massacre, this Lieutenant Calley. And of course Calley was put under intense pressure by an relentless command that wanted a body count. I think the book is called Body Count, if I’m not mistaken. And their command wanted a body count. And when you’re out in the field you don’t see these buggers. They’re there but they’re not there! You don’t see them! And this is part of the frustration of that kind of war. You don’t see the enemy. In Angola you do because there it’s more a conventional but in…this is in Namibia, this is actually in the border area, Sector 10. And you just don’t see the people, so you go into a village, go into a shumba, and on one of the operations we were giving support to…it was a Koevoet operation. I saw those Koevoet guys, geez, what a brutal bunch of buggers. Absolutely brutal individuals. And the rocket thing was during one of those Koevoet encounters. And I thought to myself then we’re dehumanising ourselves, and in my book I also write about another kill that happened, we were based for a while at Ondangwa, and I had this very dubious support trooper, very dodgy character. He wasn’t under my direct command but he was just sort of in the unit, and these dead gooks were brought in, they were thrown down on the parade ground – and you get this very white dust up there, very white sand – and the white dust was all over these faces and what have you. And this guy attacked the body of this kill, the whole half of the back of the head had been blown away. And this guy had very big nostrils. Lots of Africans have big nostrils, and this one had particularly big nostrils, and half his head gone. And he jumped up and down on his head, the head had gone soft, and as he jumped up and down the brains came oozing out, shloop shloop, making a noise like that, and as he jumped off again the brains came and he laughed at this. Then he took his rifle, and on the front of the rifle you’ve got that flash hider, that blitsbreeker, and he rammed this thing up the guy’s nose. And I was profoundly disturbed by that. I was so disturbed, here we are, we’re supposed to be…I’m a Light Horse Regiment soldier, and supposed to be part of this gentlemen’s regiment, and yet here we’re allowing this to happen. And he wasn’t under my command and I mean I reprimanded him but he just like shrugged it off. And then a lot of interesting incidents happened after that, and part of the thing was that someone called me a ‘kaffir boetie’. I was labelled as a ‘kaffir boetie’. And then there was this little ripple that goes through the regiment, aagh he’s a kaffir boetie. And I write here now about this cocktail of testosterone fear and alcohol, there’s that thing, there’s a lot of testosterone, and you know something? The guys are just shit scared, they’re just terrified. And maybe I can articulate some of these fears, and that’s what I’ve tried to do through my wordsmithing, I’ve tried to articulate those. And maybe by articulating it I haven’t had to sink to that level of depravity. I haven’t had to go and defile a corpse. In fact I’m profoundly reverent of anything dead. It goes back to my young days with my father, to shoot an elephant, it was a profoundly sad 36 moment. To shoot any animal was not a thing that I ever rejoiced in. So if I could take reverence at the loss of a life of an animal what about the loss of a life of a human being? so it was during that sort of time that I started realising this thing called the thin grey line, and I realised that the thin grey line is very important. And in fact I would go on to say now, in your work…and I’m a scientist now and I sort of like to understand things…I would say that one of the elements of understanding that we may be missing is that those people who have crossed the thin grey line, you can cross it and you can come back again, but you’ve got to be conscious that you’ve crossed it. If you’re not conscious that you’ve crossed it, you can’t come back. And many, many of the people that I was with, I later had the privilege of serving with a major from the Recces, a guy called Deon Terblanche, that was his name in Directorate Covert Operations. He was called Turbo, you might have come across his name Turbo Terblanche. Now he was a major in the Recces and he was under my command ultimately in covert operations. And Deon,.. Turbo would never…the thin grey line meant nothing to Deon. He was way far beyond that thin grey line. And you know, I like Deon a lot. He was a hell of a good soldier, there was no question of doubt about it, he was an excellent soldier. But you know, as a human being he failed. As a human being he just didn’t make it. The last I heard of Turbo was, he’d made an attempt at a civilian life. He was working for Dawn Wing Couriers. A courier service! I mean, an ex Recce working…paper work! Paper work! Dawn Wing Couriers, every little thing is a bit of paper and a bit of this, tracking numbers, how boring! I mean, geez, what a mundane existence. Maybe it was the wrong job for him, but he just couldn’t make it. And he couldn’t make it with women, he had failed relationship after failed relationship. He couldn’t make it with the bank, because he got a loan for a house and he skipped some payments, didn’t make it, got repossessed. Just a dysfunctional individual. And the last I heard of him he’d been captured, he was…I believe he became a mercenary and he was captured somewhere up in Angola, I don’t quite know where, I don’t know the details, and I heard that he’d been force marched across into the Congo, DRC, with no shoes on his feet. And he’d had every conceivable disease you could think of, hepatitis and what have you. And he was an incredibly tough guy and just an amazing person, but the tragedy of it was, as a man, as a citizen, as a human being, he actually lost it. and I don’t want to pronounce judgement on these guys, please, I want to be very careful here. I don’t want to pontificate. I’m not better than these guys. But if think what we’re talking about here is this notion of right and wrong and that thin grey line. I think that’s the important thing. I was conscious after this kind of incident when this guy…his name was Lammies. Lammies was the gunner. And old Lammis funnily enough, the guy that said this, better shag her while she’s warm boys, he was the guy that claimed to have put that 90mm shell through the tower at Ongiva during Operation Protea. And the significance of old Lammies was he was just a 37 real deur die kak troep. I was quite paraat, I was quite into it. He was like really just laid back, he was asleep all the time. If ever you found Lammies he was just like sleeping. He was a gunner and he was like sleeping, the hatches were closed and he was just sleeping over his firing switches and his levers and stuff like that. But suddenly there’s action, old Lammies is there, dooof, one shot, dooof. Man down, dooof, go back to sleep again. So Lammis was a very disconnected guy. And I would love to know where Lammies is today because I think probably Lammies hasn’t made it. I would think. Because I don’t think he’s aware there’s a thing called a thin grey line. And I think that’s a very important realisation, anyway for me in my own sort of rehabilitation, I think the thin grey line is an important thing. Interviewer But now we’d seen Operation Protea and events around about that time, give or take a few years, that’s a good 25, 27 years ago. You’ve written about it with great passion and emotion so it’s had a huge impact on you. But there you were a Citizen Force camper, when your camp ended you were going straight back into society, wasn’t that a schizophrenic existence? Tony You must talk to my wife about that. Because one of the most schizophrenic things was when we were on another tour of duty…you see what I later came to realise, and this is an important thing, I actually want to record this as well…towards the end of the process I came to realise that I was being called up for every cycle. At one stage I served, in a two year rotation, I served in two 2 year rotations, probably for 180 days, and we were supposed to be going up for either one 120 days in a two year rotation and it’s either two sixty day camps or one 30 and one 90 day. And eventually at one stage I served more than that, and only later on did I realise that the reason that I was being called up was because I was always willing to go. And there were other guys that were called up and never ever went. My brother for example. My brother was called up, he never went! Just didn’t pitch! He just didn’t do it. And I then came to realise, hey, I almost became judgemental about these guys. It was this in or out thing. When I was called a kaffir boetie I was made an outsider. It was in my unit, and that hurt me. But by the same token, here we were becoming fairly tough battle hardened individuals and we would look at other people, we’d look at the ADK guys, the blue beret guys, as sort of in a kind of untermensch - these are kind of sort of sub species. These aren’t the real manne. There’s this sense of bravado, the sense of…look at the Recces, hey these are the boys. Look at the Bats, hey these are guys, these are the meneere. So you get this sense of identity and you get it all over the show now. I do a lot of work in the United States and you see a hell of a lot now as battle hardened troops are coming back from Iraq and they’re dealing, not with the stigma that we dealt with, the stigma that we dealt with is very similar to the stigma that the Vietnam vets had. Because when they came back, this unpopular war and they lost the war. But of course it was a declared war. Ours was never declared. So, there’s many 38 parallels between Vietnam, the Vietnam experience and the South African SADF experience. But yes, during that…it was just this porridge of emotions, absolute porridge but part of it was labelling. You see you label, you label he’s a gook, so you can kill him. Or he’s a good guy, no he’s on our side, he’s one of the manne, he’s ok. He’s sleg, he’s an ADK. The ADK guys what do they do? Geez, they would steal. Can you believe it these bastards would steal our presents that our family would send us. They would send us some stuff from home and these bastards would actually sit down back at Grootfontein, they never saw a flipping shot fired in anger in their life. They would live off the fat of the land, and they would steal our stuff! They were thieves! And socks and jams, we hated those bastards, we really hated them. And in fact I had a lovely experience with old Paul Roos, my gunner, in Angola on the airfield at Ongiva. We captured Ongiva and we held Ongiva for…when I say ‘we’, SADF. Not me individually but the SADF captured Ongiva and we held it from Protea right until sort of almost the end. And we used Ongiva as a forward base. We would jump off from Ongiva. And I remember one day there was this great big pile of rat pack boxes laughs on the apron of Ongiva airport. A mountain of rat packs. And my gunner said, listen, let’s go and score some rat packs now, we’re going to eat some decent rat packs. So I went up with him and there were two guys from 32 Battalion. They saw us going so the four of us went up and we were busy helping ourselves to rat packs, not just boxes but cases of rat pack. In the armoured units you take whatever you want and there’s always space to store stuff. So while we were there some little blue beret Commandant came out, and he was flailing his hands around and getting very excited that we were stealing his rat packs. And I looked at old Paul, I’m a wets gerhoorsame guy, I believe in the law and order so I said, ok we’ve been busted so I put the rat pack down and I sort of stood up and I started walking away. And this one Three Two guy laughs he looks at this Commandant that’s busy flailing his arms around for these stolen rat packs, and he looks at his buddy, he looks at us, looks at the commandant again, looks at his buddy, he says, should I slit his throat or will you? And this little blue beret Commandant stops in his tracks, literally skid marks on the ground, you could almost hear the rubber screeching, and sort of says, ok guys, help yourself. This guy had no spine. He had no balls. This bloody Commandant. He was in command, it’s a flipping sergeant or lieutenant, you crap him out and say, it’s not done. There was that sort of element. There was a sense of elitism, and I think back now, is it right or is it wrong to be elitist. I’ve come to the conclusion that you earn your title. And I think those elite units have actually earned their title. Today I sit with a profound respect of those Special Force units, and we can talk about it at great depth later on because you’ll find that when we lost the plot in South Africa, was when a non Special Forces general was appointed, Eddie Webb, and he became the commanding general of Special Forces, that’s when it went pear shaped. When the Breytenbachs’ were involved, yes, there’s 39 some mavericks in there, these guys jump across enemy lines and they get lost and they kill people but they’re good at it. It’s what society asked them to do, they’re actually not murderers, they’re actually men. And once you’ve got the Eddie Webbs of the world, that didn’t understand Special Forces, that’s when they lose it, that’s when they completely…so this thin grey line, this normative value of what’s right and wrong I think is a very important element of it. and those people, just to sort of close off this little part of the discussion, those people that I think that were aware that they were approaching this thin grey line they’ve come out ok. You mentioned that two of your respondents don’t want to be named, etc, I would venture to suggest that those two respondents have got no cooking clue what the thin grey line is, are way over it, and actually don’t know how to deal with themselves. They haven’t made peace with themselves so they can’t make peace with anything around them. I’ve made total peace with myself, I’m happy about it, I’m willing to talk about it. It’s out of my head, now I get on with life, I’m a successful person today in life. If I was successful then, I’m successful now. Success breeds success. Interviewer When you were being called up for these camps, and you seemed to be doing more than most because you were keen to do it, your wife was seeing another side of you, you saw guys crossing this thin grey line, that chap who jumped on the SWAPO man’s corpse and various other incidents, did you start questioning what this war was all about? Tony I’ve always questioned it and in fact one of the most disturbing moments that I had, remember? Let’s rewind the tape. We’re now in the eighties – late seventies, early eighties – I’ve already been to America. In America I met my ANC guy. And I remember that he’s actually not a bad guy. So I had this sense that…and go back to my father, this…traditional leadership is good, African culture in of itself is not a bad thing, it’s a good thing. You respect black leaders, you respect black people, they’re humans, you respect humans. So there’s that sort of element in me. And where I felt the most uneasy was when I saw some POWs being captured. And when these POWs…I’ve actually got some photographs of POW…I haven’t put them in my book because they’re so disturbing. These POWs, they’d been badly banged up. In fact I write here about this one Koevoet operation that we were supporting. There was a group of gooks that came in and they’re quite a big group and Koevoet was put out to chase them, to track them down. And these guys bomb shelled. Once they know they’re being tracked they bomb shell. So if it’s a group of about 40 people they go in different directions. So we were on the spoor of a small little cluster of this. And there I saw…and I wrote about it in my book…I saw this soldier, geez he went…this man was a frigging hero. He ran, he ran…these Bushmen Battalion, on his track, running like sniffer dogs, like crouching, half running…I write here, half running, half crouching like on this guy. Here’s a…what’s it, a troop, I don’t know what they call 40 Koevoet, I don’t know what the units were, but four going in V-formation with four Elands behind them. that’s eight armoured vehicles and 40 men out front, either sitting on top of the or this big V. And the Koevoet units they were mostly black operators, then there would normally be a white driver and then there was a white commander. And he would be the gunner. And these guys were giving covering fire, but these black guys in the field at the apex of the V with this Bushman tracker, just like relentless, like a bloodhound, just on the track. And there you watch it, you can see from…because I grew up in the bush with my father, I know a bit about tracking, and even as I’m driving, I’m in the Eland now so I’m not on the ground but you can see what’s going on. And you can see, here’s a bit of this and there’s a spoor there, and a lot of sand in that area. There’s no rocks. So to do anti-tracking is very difficult. But what the guys do, they’ll come to a fence and they would pick at the fence now, and this gook would run along the fence. So suddenly the fence bisects your path, and here the guy picks up and he runs, runs, runs, all that way down the fence to break the track. And at the end you start seeing the sort of signs now, the guy’s tiring. And this might be, a day or two later. But just this relentless pressure. There’s a gunship up in the sky, one of these K-cars (Alouette helicopter gunships) flying around with your 20mm cannons. And this guy is under intense pressure boy. They’re committed. The bacon and eggs of life stuff, these are real pigs, ok. And at that point in time you start seeing the toss away this, toss away kit, toss away this, and the last thing that you see…I’ve actually got a photograph here of some of the…of the final kit they toss away, a 60mm mortar here, this and that, but they’re very clearly tossed away. And they take you into a defile and that’s where they plant the bombs head. And they take you in there, and as you go in, boom, there goes the detonation and there’s someone’s legs gone. And seeing this guy, eventually I mean, his shoes were run through. There were bones sticking out of his feet. He’d run his feet with bones sticking out of them, that’s how committed he was. He took morphine, he had morphine in his medical pack. And the last thing he tossed away was his medical pack and he’d pumped himself full of morphine. This guy couldn’t feel pain, he ran the bones through his feet. I don’t see a white South African troop doing that ever, running until his bones are sticking through his feet. And when I saw this, I actually felt a sense of shame in a way. I felt a sense of…shit, all we are a bunch of white guys and we go back to the mess at night and we get drunk and we talk bullshit to each other. These guys are committed. And you know, I actually came to the conclusion then, if I was in their shoes I would actually be doing what they’re doing. I would actually be a terrorist. That was actually the conclusion. And then I was so shocked when I looked at myself, geez, how can you say this? So there’s this little man inside me talking to me, whispering in my ear and this was that thin grey line stuff again. About what’s right and what’s wrong. And I came away from that, in fact, I remember at that point in time I was studying at UNISA, and 41 there was a UNISA lecturer…I was studying African politics at that time, I eventually graduated with distinction in African politics, because I was so committed to understand this ideology and this stuff. And there was a lecturer, I forget her name now, it was a lecturer of political science. And I came back after one of these deployments and I sat down and I spoke to her, and I told her something about this and she just completely trashed what I said. She just like hit me for six, dooof. Because I was so naïve and so stupid in what I said. And it was relating back to this incident. And there I realised that these guys had an ideology and these guys had a commitment about a better future. And you know, they’d suffered so much in their life, suffering was normal. We were actually living off the fat of the land. We were actually quite fat. We would bitch and moan and complain if we didn’t have a decent thing to sleep on etc. And we’d actually lost it. I realised then that we lost it. So after this kaffir boetie incident, after this rocket firing incident, after this treatment that I had from this major that I told you about who just sold me down the river, just no sort of morality…I’ve come to realise that during times of struggle like that, some men are attracted to these units and some of those men are committed and some of those men are charlatans. And some of the charlatans are just attracted to the uniform and they do what they have to do because they’re given authority. Because they do what’s expected without questioning and they’re given authority over other men. But I was learning as I went along. I was learning. I was learning valuable lessons and I learned when I…the first proper special operation I went on, I engineered myself and there was this major that kept me back, he wouldn’t let me get a commission this bastard, he wouldn’t let me go ahead in life. Major Hilton Marks. He’s now Lieutenant Colonel Hilton Marks. He kept me back, and I said, to hell with you my friend. I will sort you out one time and you won’t even know you’ve been sorted out. And I then nominated myself for an explosives course, for combat engineers training. And I did it. I went on that course, no authorisation. I went on that course, my first proper special operation and I got myself in, I got all my documentation ready and I came back top student on that course, thank you very much. And I went back and there at the regiment they made a little fuss because they now heard about it, a report came back that I was now top student. So I wasn’t good enough initially to be selected, but when I say it to myself, I come back top student thank you, and there were guys on that course, there were engineers on that course that I beat…I thought, I’m going to beat these buggers, because I’ve got an intellectual capacity, I can understand things, and I understood how explosives worked, I understood how detonators worked, I understood how they were used in booby traps, IEDs, and I understood how to defuse bombs. Today I can defuse these things. I understand the stuff. And I later on went to work at Chief Directorate K, Covert Operations, one of the guys I worked with was the commanding officer of the police anti hijacking squad. He’s the guy that actually wrote the manual on the IED design. 42 I’ve actually got his original hand written manual on IEDs. I was completely au fait, completely familiar with all of those procedures. So to me that was a little silent victory, and I guess in a way that was me coming of age, that was me realising, hey you know, in the conventional units all good and well, in the Special Force units all good and well, we can go out there and we can shoot the crap out of these guys. What now? What’s the big picture? I always had this hankering for the big picture. And when I realised that was…you must talk to my wife about this because when we were pushed into the townships during Operation Blatjang, Operation Adams Vye, I’ve never seen those names used anywhere. I don’t know if you’ve come across them but we were put under Operation Blatjang and Operation Adams Vye, which I thought was a strange name, Adam’s Fig. What kind of funny name for an operation is this? But anyhow, I was the echelon commander, so I took on my orders under those Blatjang and Adams Vye. Interviewer Was that ’84? Tony That was ’83 or ’82…when did the…? Interviewer ’84 was the big operation in Sebokeng. Tony When did the townships erupt? Interviewer ’84. That was the big one in the Vaal Triangle. And that was known colloquially then as Operation Palmiet. Tony Well we were in a subset of that. And that subset was Adams Vye and Blatjang. And we were put in to Tembisa and Vosloorus, Katlehong, and those areas. Shit they were hot. They became so hot. And of course, the significance of that time, was that suddenly for the first time I was in a commanding situation, I was a squadron sergeant major, I wasn’t yet qualified as a squadron sergeant major but I was an acting squadron sergeant major, I had under my command a whole bunch of people. I had a very good squadron commander, Captain Mason Gordon who was acting major. I was staff sergeant, acting sergeant major. And the two of us were in acting positions, and I think we did an incredible job, I’m actually quite proud of what we did there. But I remember coming home and meeting my wife, and you must talk to her about that, because she had no idea. We were in the townships, we were facing…we were taking incoming fire right there in the townships, and we get home…our homes are 20 kilometres away. You mentioned someone could see the Hillbrow Tower, and being a sergeant major I was responsible for discipline, and part of my responsibility was I’ve got to field a roster of people that are always on duty. So eight hours on, eight hours standby, eight hours off duty. That’s a 24 hour cycle. And that for seven days a week for three months. And I saw my troepie just disappearing in front of me, just going home. So I thought, listen if I say no you can’t go home, I’m going to lose it. I’ve got to be compassionate. So one of the first sort of combat decisions that I made in the townships was, I’m going to let my troops go home 43 against orders. I’m going to look after them, they’re going to go home. But the deal is this, you’re eight hours on duty, you don’t desert. You desert, we fuck you up. eight hours on standby, you’d better be ready. If someone needs you and you’re not there, we’re going to fuck you up as well. But after that, that eight hours off duty, if you want to go home, you go and do it, not a problem. I’ve got peace with that. END OF SIDE A (counter at 510) SIDE B (counter at 22) Tony And wit was during one of those lulls that we came home, and my buddy Dave Gladd-Claxton, he was staff sergeant then, Staff Dave Gladd-Claxton came home with me, and as I say, I’ve just been tracking him down now, and I found him about two weeks ago through Face book and I found him through his daughter. And if you look at the date of birth of his daughter, his daughter was born nine months after one of my little unauthorised forays back home. Because Dave came, in fact he stayed with my wife and myself and then at the last minute he decided no to hell with this he’s going to go and meet his girlfriend. And he went to his girlfriend and that night his daughter was conceived. Laughs So she was conceived under…we were just absolutely high on adrenalin and stress and what have you, and you must speak to my wife about that time, because she’ll tell you how it was coming home and… Interviewer Why do you think that time was so much more difficult for lots of guys to handle? I mean, a lot of these guys had served in northern South West Africa, Namibia, they’d served in Angola, they’d seen some pretty serious action, they’d been shot at, they’d shot at people themselves, and in most instances, yes, desertion did happen but it was unthinkable up there that you would just pack up and disappear. Tony Ja. Interviewer Ok, certainly there’s a geographic distance from home but nevertheless it could have been done. Whereas here in the townships it seemed to have been a pattern that guys were… Tony Many guys did. They just deserted, yes. For the first time I saw desertions. I mean I was horrified because as a sergeant major I’m responsible for basically discipline within the unit, and of course also for…in an armoured unit you get your F-echelon, your fighting echelon, and you get your B-echelon, your logistics echelon. So your F-echelon commander is normally a major. A major or in times of war would be a lieutenant colonel. But then your echelon commander, your B-echelon, would be a warrant officer, sergeant major. So I was an echelon commander and my role was to support the front line guys now and to basically bring the logistics up and then to pull out any casualties, but keep the discipline going, keep the supply runs going. That was really the sergeant major’s job. And suddenly, I mean, I’ve never seen it 44 before, people deserted. And there was one little sleg troepie, I forget this guy’s name, but he was a sleg little bliksem, sleg, sleg, sleg, and he looked and he jeered in my face, and there was almost like a court martial that was set and this acting major, Captain Mason Gordon, he would sit with the other commanders and they would make decisions. And like when guys deserted well they would on the ground make the decision, and they would give those decisions over to me as a sergeant major and I had to implement essentially what is corrective drill. Afkak PT. You don’t want to stay here we will give you pain. If you don’t want to wear the beret with pride then we’ll soften you up a bit. And the first time in my life that I ever gave afkak PT to a guy, he just jeered in my face. Just literally jeered in my face. And I said to Dave, this is a sleg bliksem, we’ve got to sort this oke out. And as much as we could throw at this guy, he could just laugh in our face, because he just knew that we couldn’t break him. And he eventually deserted. And I actually remember seeing one of the troops there on the parade ground at Esselen Park, we were running with rifles above the head, hoog oor hoog voor,, jak, jak, jy,, jak, jak, jy, le aan die grond, staan op! Up down, up down, rolling over, and you do it for two or three hours, normally people break. Guys throw up, they can’t handle it. This guy, this one troop that had deserted, he ran with his rifle above his head, and he stumbled on the ground, because we were really putting him to a point now where he couldn’t take it anymore, and he tripped and he stumbled and as he hit the ground, his rifle hit the ground and his barrel bent like that. And there was this bent barrel and we gave him his three hours of corrective drill as called for by the commanding officer, and the next day he disappeared. We never saw him. To this day I don’t know where he is, I don’t know what happened to that guy. And I’d actually like to track him down because I think he was just a sleg bliksem, I think he was actually a coward, I think he actually deserted under fire, and I just don’t think that he’ll be proud of what he did. And I’m not particularly proud that we had to fuck these guys up the way we did, because that’s not the way that I like to lead. I like to lead by inspiration. I like to lead by example. And I’m a carrot man not a stick man. I go back to my old experience of my headmaster Sam de Lisle. Same de Lisle used to beat the crap out of me, give me six of the best, and here I…I told you about Sam de Lisle, this man who had escaped from Tobruk, fought behind the lines of the partisans, an absolute war hero in many people’s eyes. But what this bugger would do, he could recite Latin, I wasn’t even fit to lick the soles of his shoes, but he would give me six of the best, and as he gave me his six of the best, I knew that I was his equal. I knew that all he could do was give me six. And I knew that no matter how hard those six were, the law said, you can’t give me more than six. And I knew that, at that moment in time, my capacity to absorb pain exceeds your capacity to give it, so therefore you’re no longer this Oxford Don, you’re no longer this war hero, you’re nothing more than a little violent individual that sorts out, vents your frustration through the use of gratuitous 45 violence and I’m just a little boy at school and I’m confused but I can take your crap. As much as you can give me I can take. And that was a very important moment in my life, in standard 8, at school. And that very same thing happened later on as a sergeant major. Because here I could throw, I could dish out punishment and this sleg troep laughed at me, much like I’d laughed at my own headmaster in standard 8. He laughed at me, because he knew that I couldn’t kill him. He knew that. I could give him pain and I could maybe make him throw up and so what. Now tomorrow he’s home. And I think the significance of the townships…you asked me a question now…the significance of the township I think was profound, and we haven’t begun to explore that, and I’ll tell you why. The first thing was the township there was a failure of leadership. Now you mentioned earlier on that Jannie Geldenhuys doesn’t want to talk about the townships, because he’s a soldier. I was also a soldier. I don’t want to talk about the townships. Because the townships was a blight on our memory, it was a dirty business. I work today with a guy…I won’t name him…at the CSIR, a very good friend of mine, a very good colleague of mine, one of the top scientists in this country. He was a young lieutenant. He was on those Valkyrie rocket launchers. He never saw action in Angola, he never saw action on the border. He saw his entire two years of service in the townships. He lost, I think…you must actually go and interview him…I believe he lost something like 14 soldiers killed or wounded in action. A young lieutenant, at that point in time he was not old enough to drive a motor car on the highway. And this young man lost…he doesn’t even want to talk to me about it. I’ve managed to get some things out of him because we’re very close to each other, and he’s lost all of this sort of stuff. So what happened in the townships was profoundly disturbing because it’s one thing to sit up in Angola, to know that the guy you’re shooting at is sitting in a T34 tank, and you’ve got an Eland or a Ratel and it’s pretty much an even fight. And you know the uniform he’s wearing and he knows your uniform and it’s a fairly conventional battle. You see him and he sees you and whoever shoots first wins. And tactics are important and communications are important and command and control. But suddenly in the township you don’t know who’s who. And for many people, for many SADF soldiers, it was the first time that they’d ever met black people on their own turf. I’d never seen where a black person lived before, because I grew up on a farm, I understood the farming life and we had a very good relationship with our black staff on the farm, thank you very much, despite what is being said today by some of the trade union movements. We had a really good relationship with our black staff. And the first time that I actually saw how black people lived in townships was in a field of battle. And that was so disturbing. So what were the failures? The first failure was a failure of leadership. Our leaders, the Jannie Geldenhuys' that were such good battle combat leaders – Jannie Geldenhuys was an outstanding leader. He detonated a landmine that one time. You know the story about 46 him when he detonated the landmine and he went shooting out of this Ratel like a cork out of a champagne bottle, and he hit the ground in a great big thump, and all the dust came up and his beret fell off his head. And he picked up his beret off the ground and he swore, and he took all the dust off his beret and he put his beret back on his head and said, manne kom ons gaan! Let’s go and do it. Geez the guys loved him. he was a battle field commander. A really good battle field commander. But you see, suddenly we were fighting an enemy we didn’t know, and in fact we were fighting South African citizens. It was actually a civil war. And it was just very, very disturbing. So the first failure that we had there was a failure of leadership, absolute dismal failure of leadership! The leaders did not give us any instructions. And of course the second thing was that, they made to my mind, a big mistake to deploy soldiers, because soldiers are not policemen. The policemen are careless hard bastards. They do a very important job but under difficult circumstances, and by putting us into the sort of combat zone, we became the enemy. We didn’t know who our enemy was, but I knew that we were their enemy. And it was then, it goes back to ’76, when the crowd gets inflamed, when the adrenalin’s pumping, when the hatred is flowing, then I’m afraid the indicator of who you are, is your race. Sorry to say it, profoundly sorry to say this, but you’re white or you’re black. And that’s what it becomes. And I mean I’ve never been a racist, I’m not a racist today, it became a racial thing and that was just so tragic. So, I think the big loss there was…or the big weakness was our lack of leadership. Leadership did not prepare us, leadership did not give us clear instructions. I talk in my book about Lieutenant Bruce McMurray. Bruce, he was a really good soldier, old Bruce. He shot up a couple of people, maybe more than he had to but the troops liked him. He was a gung-ho lieutenant. And in the townships there was Dave Gladd- Claxton was Bruce’s troop sergeant. And they were kicking down doors and they were smashing in windows and they were chasing gooks into people’s houses. But that was not what we were there for, we were there in a peacekeeping role. We lost the plot there. We lost the plot. So I think, for me the townships was a polarizing event, because for me I realised that the townships, this was a civil war at home now. We are now at war. There’s no question or doubt about it. We are the war and in this war I am the enemy. I this war, I think I’m the good guy, but actually I’m the bad guy. In the eyes of others, I know that I’m the enemy. I’m in charge of a big farm at this stage, I’m employing 50-100 people, I’ve got a very substantial turnover going. I’m leaving my partner Jeremy Hawson back home, he’s running this farm without me, I’m not pulling my weight in my business – my business it’s a big greenhouse complex. You put one petrol bomb in there and the thing just goes up like a candle. And I then made a decision that this is…for me that was a turning point. The townships for me were a turning point. And at that point in time, I was then approached, going back to the old Operation Daisy times, at Rhodes University when I was targeted by, what was then BOSS, 47 for recruitment, but they didn’t approach me because they got Carl Edwards, and I must place on record that I would have been very different to Carl Edwards. I would not have done what Carl Edwards did, because I’m a person of integrity and I don’t believe that he is. But be that as it may, maybe I wouldn’t have been successful, I don’t know. But it would have been very different none the less. But I was on their lists and they still knew about me. And I was then approached in the height of the township violence, I realised that this country was burning, I realised it was irreversible, I realised having seen these POWs, having seen these guys with bones sticking out of their feet, these guys were committed, we were just drunk. Ok. And I realised that, no, the chips were down. And I was then recruited into NI, National Intelligence. And I was recruited with a guy called Riaan Labuschagne, who has written a book on South Africa’s Secret Service. And you’ll see in my book I’ve taken on Riaan, because he was one of these spineless maggots that goes and gloats over other people’s decisions and etc, and doesn’t make a contribution. But be that as it may, I was recruited then into a special unit, at that point in time I must sketch the scene, because at that stage, South Africa was going through a profound transition. The civil war was at home. Our military command was suddenly out of control. We knew that we could win any conventional war or any unconventional war outside the borders, we could do that. We had the likes of Jan Breytenbach, 44 Parachute Brigade was full fledged at that stage. We had years and years of good experience. All the different 1 to 5 Recces were all up and running, doing exceptionally good work. These guys knew what they were doing, they were world class Special Force soldiers. We had the 32 Battalions doing very well for themselves knowing what they’re doing. The National Service side of things had become fairly streamlined at that stage, fairly combat oriented. All our combat hardware was good now. We were bringing out at that stage brand new armoured vehicles that had never seen the light of day, now they were stopped…vehicles…what are they called? Rooi… Interviewer Rooikat. Tony The Rooikat. I had the privilege of seeing one of the first prototypes of the Rooikat. In fact I wanted to stay in Light Horse until we did our conversion to the Rooikat. And then I was going to call it quits. But having said that, the country was going through this transition, and part of the transition was that South African embassies were being isolated all over the world, and it was very clear to me, having spoken now to Jac Buchner, who was a very senior officer at that stage and Security Police, and Buchner told me some very interesting things and I believed him, and the thing that he told me was that the experience that they learned in their Rhodesian deployment was, the value of intelligence. And I then became interested in the intelligence career, and in fact, what triggered the whole thing was, I was approached by NI counter espionage, what was then called Chief 48 Directorate 06. 06 was counter espionage operations, and at that stage they didn’t have a deep cover unit at all, they had a counter espionage unit 06, and then they started a unit called 06101. And 101 was the first attempt ever at deep cover operators. And they went back to all the original Daisy people targets and they picked me up there and they brought me in, and they offered me something, and I was quite interested in what they had to offer given the fact that the country was burning and given the fact that my farm I just knew wasn’t going to last, we were going to lose everything. And…so what Buchner taught me was that value of intelligence. The right placed intelligence can really make a big impact. And I can speak now at great length about that, because I think we did a lot of really good intelligence. In fact ultimately the peaceful transition was 100% intelligence driven. We had an outstanding world class intelligence service. But at that time we were faced with increased isolation, and much like when Operation Savannah happened, when Special Forces were not yet organised, there was Breytenbach doing his little thing out there, all illegal etc. That’s how NI was at the time. NI, we were learning now that suddenly the embassies were going to be closed down. You mentioned that you’d spoken to another NI guy, he was part of the declared part of the service, the open part of the service. We were a new experimental group called K. And the experimental group of K, the decision was made that we want clean people, deep cover people, people that we can change their identities, change their names, give them new passports everything, put them out in the field, they must become sleepers, we can put them out, infiltrate them wherever over a long period of time and we must do sort of world class covert intelligence, special operations work. And of course this fascinated me because I just thought that this was the way to go. And at that time I’d also been approached by military intelligence and they wanted me…in fact my unit wanted me to go and do a military intelligence course and I think this came to the attention of NI. And they said, no don’t do it, because once you’ve done a military intelligence course you’re going to be known as an intelligence guy and they want clean, squeaky clean people. So I then slowly had to down…the instruction that I got from NI was, don’t make a sudden change in your life. If people know you, don’t suddenly change your behaviour, don’t suddenly drive a big car or suddenly disappear. So I was instructed to slowly taper down. So I started tapering down my activities in Light Horse and (inaudible) and I sort of lost interest in being a sergeant major. I just slowly lost interest and I put out word that I was just generally disillusioned and what have you, and over a period of time I just withdrew myself from the unit. And it’s sad in a way because I had a very close tie to many of those people and the guys, the Daves of the world that I’m re-linking with now, in a way it’s unfinished business because I think they almost sort of got a dim view of me now, almost as becoming a deserter and running away. I couldn’t tell them that I was getting more deeply involved. So yes, that’s what happened. 49

Interviewer So that’s about ’86? Tony I was…’87 I became a permanent member of Chief Directorate Covert Operations. Chief Directorate K. 1st of April, April Fools Day, in fact. Interviewer And at this stage South Africa has had two States of Emergencies, things are bad on the international front, they’re bad internally, so this is a sort of pretty much a pivotal point in the country’s history. Just like when you’re in uniform in ’76 at another stage. Tony Yes. ok, let me just quickly add a bit of value, because I’ve just given you a bit of incorrect information. I was recruited into NI in a two stage recruitment process. The first stage started in about 1984, ’85. And that’s when I was recruited into 06101. So if you go and read Riaan Labuschagne’s book, he was also recruited into 06101 but there’s a big difference between Riaan and myself and we can talk about that if you want to. I don’t want to say I’m better than him but there’s a difference between us. And he’s the only guy that I know of that’s ever acknowledged the existence of 06101. At that stage I knew that Riaan was there because he was given the code name of Roooikat, sorry, no, no, Meerkat. He was Meerkat and I was given the code name of Blommeman, which I thought was not very original because I was a flower farmer, so it’s not like deep secret stuff this, ok, so I was a little bit dubious about that, but nonetheless. So from about ’84…’83 maybe it started, because it started at a time of township deployment. So from about ’83, ’84, I can’t remember exact time, until ’87, I was working with 06101. And my task there was a very interesting task, because today we’ve got the Zimbabwe crisis on our hands. And my task at that time was to operate into Zimbabwe. And because I was a farmer, I could cross the border. And it was a very interesting time because it was the first time that I came into contact with hard core intelligence operations. And it became very clear to me that what would happen was, 06 was divided into two legs. There was the counter espionage…well it was a counter espionage chief directorate. But part of the counter espionage is defensive counter espionage, and the other part is offensive. So the defensive stuff is identifying spies and catching them, turning them. The offensive stuff is infiltrating other intelligence agencies. And I found myself in this offensive side, and I didn’t realise at the time, it’s all very secretive and you never get to know all the story. It’s on the need to know basis strictly. But they wanted me because I could operate into Zim and they had a problem, they had an agent in place in Zim in the ZCIO, and this agent was reading every single telex, every single communication that ever came out. And his task was to photograph these documents or make copies of them. And then he had to bring them to somebody and that’s where their problem was. They couldn’t handle him out of the embassy because he would get detected. The ZCIOs are a very efficient intelligence service. Very, very efficient indeed. In fact 50 one of the best intelligence services…that’s why Mugabe stayed in power for so long. Mugabe is in power today simply because ZCIO is so good. And the ZCIO…we were interested in them because we had a lot of Special Forces operating in Zim doing the various sort of stuff, all kinds of low Recce work etc into Zim. And what we needed to know now was, are these people under surveillance. So my task in 06101 was to have a legitimate reason to cross the border into Zim and then to have a Brush meeting, which is a clandestine meeting with this agent in place. I never saw his face, we never spoke to each other, but my task was to go to…he would load what’s called a DLB, a dead letter box, and my task was to either have a Brush meeting or else unload this DLB and to bring it back. And for that purpose I had a bakkie and the service paid for all that sort of stuff and on the back of the bakkie like any bakkie, like your bakkie, a tow hitch. And that tow hitch had been machined in such a way…all of the consumer devices were very sophisticated consumer devices, and the board of the tow hitch could be screwed off and then in the middle of that tow hitch was a place big enough to keep a film. So my task was to cross the border, under surveillance if need be, the ZCIO must be able to know that I’m there, but I must have a reason to be there, and then I would operate up in the…in fact, what was that area, in the sort of far north, Mazoe Valley. I was operating in the Mazoe Valley area, and in fact I’ve got the dubious history of having created the flower industry in Zimbabwe. Because I went over as a consultant. My cover was, I’m a consultant, I’m trained in America as a horticulturist, I’ve got a successful flower operation in South Africa. I believe Zimbabwe is the place to go. So my task was to work into the farming industry and to create a consultancy for flowers. And in fact you’ll find at that time I was also acting as a freelance journalist. An angling journalist etc. And one of the things that I did as a journalist was I actually wrote an article on the Zimbabwe flower industry as a potential for the future. And that is all to establish my cover, my bona fides. Then what I would then do is I would go and stay at the different farms up there and the at a point in time, I had to stay at more than one farm because we didn’t want farmer A to know the gap between farmer A and farmer B and farmer C. There must be a gap between each of those, so I must be able to establish the fact that I’ve been from Beit Bridge to farmer A to farmer B to farmer C to farmer D and back to Beit Bridge. That must all be clearly covered, but there must be a time between those meetings that I can break away. Just for an hour or so, and I must be able to unload the DLB, get the form and then bring it back. So that’s what I did. And that happened very successfully for a period of time. And of course through that I realised that NI was deeply into all these African services. They actually controlled many of those African…when I say controlled, they were into them, they knew what was going on, they might not have pulled all the strings but they certainly knew who was what and what was going on. So we were bringing back on a daily…not a daily base, I was probably going once a month. So 51 we would know, at the latest, a month’s worth of tactical intelligence. Who was under surveillance? Who was not? And of course there were a lot of MK activities happening there at the time, and the MK stuff was very important for us to cover so we needed…I was providing…I was just in the value chain. I wasn’t at the sharp edge but I was feeding this machine. And what’s interesting, I mentioned earlier on that when I was up at Lohatla that one time, when the Pretoria car bomb went off…the Pretoria car bomb came back to haunt me again. Because after doing this now from sort of ’84 onwards till sort of ’87, in early ’87 my NI contact changed, and I was approached by a man whom I’ll just call Sniffles. I met him the other day again, old Sniffles. A hell of a guy old Sniffles. Sniffles had the rank…the NI ranks were military ranks but they weren’t called that. they were given numbers. And Sniffles was a director, and that would be a brigadier general in military terms. He was a very senior guy, old Sniffles was. But Sniffles had this funny way of always talking up to everybody. And Sniffles came to see me one day and he said that there was a big operation, a new special unit being planned, they couldn’t tell me anything about what the unit was about. I subsequently came to learn that the purpose of the unit was to track down the man that the South African government believed was responsible for the Pretoria car bomb. So the Pretoria car bomb came back to bite me in the ass again. And they couldn’t tell me any of these details, strictly need to know, am I interested, am I not? And that point in time I just saw the township thing going badly…I must state that while I was working for 06101 I was still with Light Horse Regiment. So I was doing two jobs, I was doing two things. And that was very tense, believe me that was very tense. And very demanding on my family and on myself. But he came to me and said, listen, there’s a special unit being planned, my name’s come up, I’ve got a good track record now with 061, am I interested? So they couldn’t tell me anymore, so I spoke to my wife about it and things were not going well on the farm, we hadn’t been burned out yet but I thought we were going to get burnt out. So I said, listen, let’s go for it. And in my book, what’s my letter of appointment, where they appointed me the princely salary of twenty four thousand rand per year, which was huge money those days. I built this house we’re sitting in now on that salary. Interviewer Just going back, why did you think that your greenhouses on the farm would be burnt out at some time or other? Tony It was happening, one of the farms was burnt out. There was a farm, Pieter Toxopeus’ farm caught alight. I’m not sure, I wouldn’t say it was sabotaged, deliberate sabotage, but it burnt and when it took flame it was within seconds the fire burned to such ferocity it just wiped out, it just twisted the steel and melts everything, it’s devastating. And I said at that point in time I remember I was a combat soldier, I had done my combat engineering training, I was into booby traps and mines and unconventional warfare, I understood that and I understood very much how easy it would 52 be to target these areas. So maybe I was becoming paranoid but I realise that the place was a target, and in fact what triggered my belief that we were going to be targeted was the fact that there was…we had a driver, and I always had a very good relationship with our black staff, in fact to the point that until very recently I had him living here on these premises…we’ve got a servant’s room at the back here, we’ve never had servants in our life, and we made that available to one of the guys from Hlabisa farms, who found himself fallen on hard times, he couldn’t get a job and we gave him a place to stay. And I’m not saying that he’s wonderful, I’m not saying that we are better than other people, but I’m just using that as an example of how close we were to our staff. And there was this driver…Wilson was his name…and this driver, we caught him stealing huge amount of our product and selling it to customers and that nearly bankrupted us. And in the process I had a discussion with him, and I spoke about what he was doing to us and I don’t want to go into more details there, but he accused me of assaulting him with a firearm. Now one thing I’ve never done, I’ve never used a firearm. I’ve grown up with firearms, I’ve never pointed a firearm at anybody without the intention of shooting. Never. And I’ve always learned never to point a firearm at anyone unless you intend to shoot. And I can state categorically that I never assaulted this man, Wilson. I gave him a bit of a klap, yes, I did that. But I didn’t assault him with a firearm. And he went and laid a charge against me, and he said that I assaulted him with a firearm and he gave as evidence a cut on his head. And that went to court – there should be a record of that in the magistrate’s court – and fortunately I did my own detective work and I found out that there’d been a fight in our compound, and Wilson had been taken…because we often had had fights in the compound, it was a regular occurrence in our lives, people living in confined quarters and lots of alcohol and broken down relationships and families etc. And in one of these fights Wilson had been stabbed in the head and blood was squirting out of his head, not an uncommon thing on the farms in those days, and he’d been taken away from the farm in an ambulance, and the ambulance kept records of it. And so I could prove that what he claimed was the cut on his head made by my firearm, I could prove was that incident which pre-dated my alleged attack. So I state categorically that I never ever assaulted him with a firearm. And in a court of law it was proved…well he could not prove that I did assault him with a firearm and I did not need to prove that I didn’t assault him with a firearm, so the charge was thrown out of court. There was never any outcome of this thing and I was found not guilty, so there is no charge, I don’t have a criminal record to this day and I’m very proud of the fact that I don’t have a criminal record. I’m horrified to think that I came that close to possible getting a criminal record because I’m not a criminal, and that’s very important. But that told me that there was this level…there was another world out there. And I was being naïve to believe that these guys thought that we were good guys. And here we were taking fire in the townships…we 53 were the enemy. I knew it. And with my training now I knew just how vulnerable we were as an enemy. You saw, when you came in here, my house is protected. My house is protected in all kinds of ways that are unconventional and I feel safe here because of my training. So my training has simply told me that listen, we are vulnerable, this greenhouse had burnt down on Toxopeus’ farm, we were so vulnerable, someone could have come put herbicide in the water, where these great big round reservoirs for irrigation water, just go and put five litres of Round-Up in there my friend and your farm’s wiped out. So sabotage is very easy under those circumstances. It would be naïve to think that it’s not. And when I was approached I thought, well, that’s it boys, this is me, I’m for the war now, the war’s happening and I’m now into it. And the bacon and eggs in life, I’m now the pig, I’m no longer the chicken. Up to now I’ve been the chicken, but from this moment on I’m the pig. Interviewer And so now you get drawn into this…or you’d spoken to him about this project and you decide that you’re up for it and you get drawn into it. Tony Yes. That’s where I meet this old…this captain from 32 Battalion again, his name was Mark, and I meet an odd unit that’s been put together, all very talented guys, all hand picked people, they all had distinguished themselves in the military or police, and they’d all been cherry picked, absolutely cherry picked. They were all in their sort of late twenties, early thirties. And they were predominantly Afrikaans. There were two Englishmen, there was this Three Two captain – he was then a major at that stage I think – and Mark and myself. We were the only two English guys. And that was a very interesting experience because suddenly we were put…this whole cultural thing about…in your work you will have known now that most of your Special Force units were just really heavily Afrikaans. Very few English guys were in there. There were a couple of them but relatively few. And many of the Citizen Force units who were sort of more English in their orientation. So this English Afrikaner divide, I encountered that again. And I encountered a very strange guy…in my book I’ve written, it says BB…BB was an odd guy, very odd guy, and I don’t know how he ever got through the selection process because they were very particular in their selection. And I found out that I was selected for a couple of reasons, and the one reason I was selected was the fact that I had distinguished myself now, or I had a proven track record in the military, and the fact that I could speak English. And the fact that I was an analytical mind, and I’m a free thinker. And ironically…and this is the funny thing I learned later on, because I was now serving under Neil Barnard…and I learned later on that Neil Barnard wanted free thinking people. He did not want people that were clones, that were National Party sort of…and I found that very refreshing. Although at that stage I hadn’t met Neil Barnard yet. I found it very refreshing. And I was thrown with this unit called K43…I think it was called K43…I know it was K4. I know it was K 54 because there was a whole thing called Chief Directorate K. and the commanding officer was a guy that I still see on a regular basis, this guy called Mike Kuhn, I’ll use his name because his name is public realm, Labuschagne spoke very disparagingly about Mike Kuhn, and I got to know Mike Kuhn as an outstanding intelligence officer. Outstanding man. But a hard guy. And he didn’t suffer fools lightly. And I also don’t suffer fools lightly, so it’s serious business this. You don’t want mavericks, you don’t want people that have got these illusions of this covert life and this secret identity. You don’t want that kind of stuff. So I have a very profound respect for Mike. And I had a really deep respect for Sniffles. Sniffles was Chief Directorate K4, and K4 never appeared anywhere on any organogram. And the whole Chief Directorate K was under the command of Mike Kuhn, and K’s task was to establish a complete independent intelligence structure that was capable of functioning internally and externally in the even of total 100% sanctions being applied in South Africa. So this was total war and going back to the ideology of the time, the total onslaught. This was total onslaught par excellence, Cold War. This was Cold War thinking. The Cold War is upon us, we can’t escape it now, it’s godless Communism we’re fighting and it’s KGB and it’s the CIA and it’s all this kind of big intelligence stuff. And the purpose of K was to establish a capability. Learning from Jac Buchner’s experience of the value of tactical intelligence, when you capture a gook in the field, and to tell him…you don’t ask him, you don’t say, who you are? You say, you are. And you crossed the border on this date with this unit, and your buddy next to you on your right hand side was this guy’s name. And your girlfriend at this stage was this person. You flabbergast the guy. You don’t use force, you use intellect. And that’s what K’s mission was. K’s mission was to establish a completely world class intelligence capability capable of functioning internally and externally. They were divided, K1 was the command element, K2 was the internal covert deep cover people with Koos Daisy, Koos Kruger as the director, commanding general, I guess you’d call him – we didn’t call them generals but that’s what he was – and then we had K3, which was under the command of…I forget his name now…a very Afrikaans guy…I’ve got it in my book…and then there was this thing called K4 that didn’t exist anywhere on any organogram, and the commanding officer of K4 was Sniffles and to cover his position he was appointed as staff officer K1. So he was K1 staff officer but he actually was a general and actually his task was to manage K…there was K41 the support unit, then there was K42, don’t know what they did. K43, us. Then there was K44…I think…to this day, you can hold a gun to my head I don’t know about those people, all I know is that in K43 our task was very clear. We had to establish a foreign covert capability. The task was…the mission was to track down, and bring to justice, the perpetrator of the Pretoria car bomb. And at that point in time, the name was Joe Slovo, and he was given the code name of Billy. Billy was our man. And we were trained initially by the Mossad by 55 the Israelis, and we were trained originally…we didn’t all go over for training because we were so deep cover. What happened was there was a guy called Daan Droskie and Daan Droskie was to become our instructor, and we could blow Daan because he’d come from the open service. So we sent Daan over and he was the Mossad trained guy, and he was our link to the Mossad. And Mossad had developed such units very successfully and two of them were prominent. The one was the unit that had tracked down and brought back Adolf Eichmann. So we benefited from all of their training, all of their experiences, so in many ways the ‘Billy’ operation wasn’t given a code name even because to get a code name it’s got to be registered in a book somewhere. So there was no code name, K4 didn’t exist anywhere on any organogram, and part of the Mossad training was based on the experience of the Adolf Eichmann case, and the other part of it was the Mossad experience in the Munich massacre. The unit K43 was styled 100% along the lines of the unit that was brought together for the Munich massacre. And that unit consisted mostly of ex Special Force soldiers, or soldiers that have distinguished themselves in the field of battle in one way or another. They all had good track records, none of them were intelligence people, they were all clean guys, and of course the significance of them was that they could speak different languages. So the language component was very important. I was brought in because I could speak English and I was brought into that unit as the intelligence officer. My task was to do the tactical intelligence appraisals as we were tracking down Joe Slovo we code named Billy. And Joe Slovo lived at that stage at 13 Lime Street in London, and our task was initially to find out all about him. So where he lived and who he rubbed shoulders with and everything we could. And we launched at that time an operation called Operation Spaghetti. And Spaghetti was a technical operation, an intercept operation, where we put a telephone interception devices in London, into all of the SACP network that we knew of. And this goes back to another very, very important operation within the intelligence community, Operation Olyfberg. And Operation Olyfberg was an operation that was designed to identify all of the SACP guys in exile after ’61, after the Rivonia Trials. In ’61 there was the naïve belief that they’d smashed…Vorster had smashed this SACP of course. Olyfberg was the first attempt by BOSS to say what’s happened to these guys? And they sort of shipped these guys out there and they actually dug in. And they interestingly enough are very active in London so the British connection is very interesting because the IRA side of it, the Brits were on the one hand fighting the IRA but the other hand they were giving sustenance to these guys. And there were a couple of key addresses that came out. There was 32 Oakshot Crescent, the home of the Buntings. There was 13 Lime Street, the home of Joe Slovo. There was another one called…I think it was 47 Anson Avenue, which was very interesting, it was a safe house, it was an apartment complex of six units, and that was under the control of the Communist Party of Great Britain, CPGB. And Aziz 56 Pahad lived there, and the Ronnie Kasrils would often go there, and Albie Sachs lived there, and lots of shenanigans went on because we had technical surveillance going there. So we picked up all the electronic, who was screwing who, on the sideline. END OF SIDE B (counter at 521) TAPE THREE SIDE A Interviewer This was all happening at the height of international pressure on South Africa and so on, so it must have been exceptionally difficult to run technical surveillance on people in the middle of London? Tony Yes. And you must remember there was no internet in those days, remember there were no cell phones in those days. So a lot of it was just hardcore intelligence work, and in fact, we were over there on one of our operations, this Three Two captain guy, he was in one of the units. We were broken up into small little tactical units, two men per unit, and we were familiarising ourselves with Europe. And remember in those days the visa requirements weren’t what they are today, etc. And we could get into Europe quite easily. And one of the things we were doing is we were trying to figure out…we knew where Joe Slovo was living in 13 Lime Street…but we had to bring him back. We didn’t want to shoot him because we had many times, many chances, when we could shoot him…for example Joe Slovo was living in London but he was very often in Russia, he was very often in Mozambique, very often in Zambia. And we had lots of Recce…I’ve spoken to Recces now who’d tell me of times when they had Joe Slovo in their gun sights. So Joe could have been shot on many occasions but our instructions were, bring Joe Slovo back, we want an Adolf Eichmann, we want the moral victory of putting this man on trial. We want to demonstrate that we have the capacity. And so he was operating in London but now we had to snatch him. So effectively we are committing a crime because we are now aiding and abetting a felony. We are planning the criminal abduction. This is a criminal activity, ok! Let’s not bluff ourselves, and that’s why I’ve been very reluctant to talk about it up to now. Let’s be very serious about this because those that were involved in that have committed whether they captured Joe or not, they were there and they were planning these things, so I can’t go into too much of the detail of where and what and why and how, but what I can say is that, we were deployed in Europe in two man units, a number of them. The command element was under Sniffles and with Mark as his liaison officer. Mark did not have a South African passport so he could…that was very useful for us. We were all working under different passports, under alternative passports. All legal but different identities. And I don’t want to mention those identities because there’s records kept of those. And all of a sudden out of the blue we get an instruction down the line. We’ve got to have a clandestine Brush meeting, got to meet Sniffles and Mark, and we’re given the instruction that…who is that guy that was holed 57 up in the embassy in Pretoria? Interviewer Klaas de Jonge. Tony Klaas de Jonge. We were told that Klaas de Jonge had just been released, we must pick him up, find him. Must go back to Europe. And I was in command of my little two man unit, and the guy with me was an absolutely bizarre guy called BB. And BB, that stage the Hungerford Massacre just happened. The Hungerford Massacre some guy went beserk in Scotland and… Interviewer That’s right and shot some kids…. Tony Yes. And at that point because of the Hungerford Massacre there was word out in Europe that if anyone comes in from the street and asks for guns in a gun shop, take his name. And of course BB loved guns. He loved guns and knives. And we were given strict instructions that when you go over there don’t go into any gun shops and ask for guns. So what does BB go and do, first thing he goes and does, he goes to the first frigging gun shop and asks for guns. And I shat him out, look you can’t do this, this is a different kind of operation, this is a different kind of war we’re fighting now, this is a different place. Look there are bobbies on the beat here, they’re going to pick you up my friend. Anyways, BB and myself couldn’t see eye to eye, we had a huge punch up, just a huge, huge punch up. I found him to be a total maverick, I found him to be profoundly disturbing, he was like a rabid animal when he got aggressive, and when he was hungry he got aggressive so I would feed him like a lion, feed him to make him docile. And then he’d do like 600 push ups, then 600 sit up, because he was a very strong guy. He was a very, very strange guy, BB and he’s today, no surprise, divorced and got a broken family and the first gift he gave his little baby son was a gun and knife. So poor kid, what chance has he got in life, but anyhow, I digress now. When we were busy with operations, tracking down Joe, and we knew where Joe was, we were busy planting all of these technical surveillance devices, and that’s another story we can talk about that detail. And all of a sudden instructions come that we must have a Brush meeting at some strange bizarre place in Europe. And I had to meet Sniffles in a very strange place because when you do these special operations, you try and plan for all contingencies, and one of the things is you’ve got to plan for the unknown. And to plan for the unknown you have a meeting, and it’s a covert meeting and you’ve got to do this meeting in a way that you can’t be placed under surveillance. But you’ve got to have a reason to be there so I can’t just be in a deep secret place when no-one goes there. So it’s very complicated and very technically specific, and my training was quite intense from the Mossad on us. We selected a place, a very well known landmark in Europe, where millions of people are, go there any time of the day and millions of people are there, so there’s every reason to be there. And part of this landmark is a little tunnel, a pedestrian tunnel. So the idea was, if you go to this meeting place where all the world is, but for about ten seconds 58 you’re out of view because you go into the tunnel. So if you go into the tunnel, one guy comes in this way, and one guy comes in that way, you can brush into each other on the way past, have a quick Brush meeting, pass, exchange your information that you have to – in those days we used to use little things, micro dots, can you believe it? So we were trained to make micro squares and stuff like that. A little tiny thing, that size there, and that’s got all your instruction on it, so you’ve got to get these instructions and disappear. On this day, as luck would have it, it was just pissing with rain and there was not a tourist in sight, so we were the only guys standing at this great big monument. So it was an absolute cock up, but anyhow, be that as it may, we had our Brush meeting and given instructions that we must make our way to find Klaas de Jonge. And had no idea where he was going, no idea what his address was, absolutely nothing to work on, absolutely nothing. And then all these two man units now converged on Amsterdam, because that’s obviously where he was going to. And it was so bizarre because Amsterdam’s a very small place actually. Laughs So now we started falling over each other. And you must remember now we’re doing very sensitive operations, we’re busy trying to track down Joe Slovo, all of a sudden we’ve been pulled out and redeployed into something that we haven’t trained for, we haven’t sort of spoken through all the little sub units, can’t use radios, can’t use communications, can’t co-ordinate. You co-ordinate through one sort of invisible thing back there. Very complicated stuff and very, very, very stressful, I mean, highly, highly, way more stressful than any combat can ever be. And we’re sort of falling over each other’s feet. And then eventually we made a decision, this is silly, we’re falling over each other’s feet, let’s just combine and just work as a unit again. So we combined and we’re working as a unit, and one of the guys in the unit was a very, very colourful character, a one eyed guy, he’d lost an eye to an AK round. His name was Harry. And old one eyed Harry who was sitting there at Damrak, just outside the central station, next to Walletjies…the famous red light district of Amsterdam, sitting in front of the Cosmopole Hotel in the Damrak Square, and I’ll never forget there was someone that was playing these little orthonopters, those little flying bird things, flying around our heads, etc. And we were commiserating the fact that we had this horrible mission and no-one knew how the hell we’re going to find this bloody guy Klaas de Jonge, and we were having a couple of drinks and we were just talking about what we’re going to do, and as luck would have it, old Harry looks up, and there walking across the square, laughs in front of us, is Klaas de Jonge. Can you believe it! Geez, so we’re onto him like a rash, and we’re all over Klaas de Jonge. We pick him up and from there…once you’ve got him, then you’ve got him. They can’t use radios because they’re intercepted. It’s all hand signals, it’s all training, very, very difficult. But nonetheless we tracked down Klaas de Jonge, we got technical surveillance on him, we planted the technical devices, we got video footage on de Jonge, we did everything 59 that we were asked to do on de Jonge and we sent it all back, and that was met with ecstatic adulation back at head office, because suddenly now our commanding officer could go and brag to high authorities that they’d spent millions on establishing this unit, and the unit was now producing stuff, you see. Producing tactical intelligence, whatever the value was, I don’t know…I don’t think it was of that great value but the important thing it was a training exercise. We could demonstrate that we could operate. And then of course we then launched this operation, Hardekool, originally called Operation Spaghetti. And one of the reasons why I criticise Labuschagne, is that Labuschagne was never part of Spaghetti. And Labuschagne wrote in his book as if he was knowledgeable about Spaghetti. Had no knowledge whatsoever about Spaghetti. And it subsequently came to my attention that Labuschagne had…this thin grey line stuff, here was a dominee, trained dominee, man of morality, doing these dubious things and he just couldn’t handle it. And his marriage broke down and he wanted to blame someone and he was very close to the guy that originally recruited me to 061, a guy that I called SD…in my book I refer to SD…SD recruited us both, and SD was eventually a broken and failed man. Today he’s a broken alcoholic, probably a hobo living on the street somewhere…I don’t know what he’s doing now. Probably beating up everyone because he’s just a violent individual. Just certainly a failed man. And it was actually…SD knew about Spaghetti, he knew something because Spaghetti was running parallel to him so he knew about some of the details but not all of it. I was the case officer on Spaghetti, and he was telling Labuschagne about Spaghetti, for vindictive reasons. And I just don’t buy into that stuff, so in my book I’ve taken on Labuschagne with the greatest voracity that I can muster. So now, we did this electronic surveillance and we tracked down Joe, and if I can claim one little victory for my silent voice, I can state that I played a role in not doing stupid things, because one of the plans was we were going to abduct Joe Slovo in London. And I put in a report that I think was a convincing report that under all circumstances we should not consider abducting this man in London, committing a crime in London…Britain was at that time our last ally, the last thing we want to go and do is like piss on their batteries and that’s why I can’t understand the stupidity of Craig Williamson, this is now the so-called hero of the frigging struggle. Here’s a man who goes and befriends people and then lives in their house…you know who I’m talking about…and then sends them a letter bomb to kill the wife and the daughter. A man of dubious, questionable morality. I don’t think he can spell ‘thin grey line’, let alone understand what it means. And here this stupid man, Craig Williamson, goes and attacks one of the ANC offices and burns the frigging place down. When we had surveillance going on in that office. We were picking up voices, we were picking up video footage of what was going on in that office. And this ‘moegoe’ now goes and takes us ten years back. And not only does he do that, he draws attention to the 60 Special Branch that we are operating there. He causes the ANC to realise that there are people, there are spooks in their backyard. What inestimable damage was done by this stupid guy called Craig Williamson. And I’ve been on record because 702 did a program after Osama Bin Laden, 911, and they brought me in, for three hours we spoke about intelligence and there I told them what I just told you now, so it’s on record somewhere within 702s archives, my feelings of Craig Williamson. Funnily enough he’s never responded, he’s never given me his sort of side of the story, but be that as it may, I’m proud to say that part of my intelligence put wisdom into the system that said we cannot…we know Joe’s here, we know exactly where he is, we know what he’s doing, we’re very close to Ronnie Kasrils…I knew whatever Ronnie was doing we knew about. We were right on Ronnie’s tail. And I found it very funny when he brought out his book, Armed and Dangerous, about all this…the Scarlet Pimpernel stuff he was doing, because we were…in fact one of the few death threats I’ve ever had in my life…I had a death threat from a Lebanese man laughs and I won’t mention his name because I don’t want him to come after me again, but this Lebanese man, we approached him because in our tactical intelligence we found out that Ronnie had done some harm to his sister, to this Lebanese man’s sister, and we wanted to know if this Lebanese man’s sister could take us back to close to Ronnie. And he then said, If you come close to my sister I shall kill you. Let there be no bones about it. And if I was Ronnie I would be a little bit worried now still because this man’s still out there and still not very happy. But be that as it may, we had really good intelligence going, a very good flow of tactical, not strategic, just tactical intelligence. And my little claim to fame is the fact that I told them that we can’t under any circumstances do a stupid thing like this. So the next question was, where are we going to abduct him? And we then recruited into the unit a highly decorated SAAF helicopter pilot. This was an amazing guy, just an amazing, amazing guy. And his, going back to Labuschagne…Labuschagne talks about Prince Charles going into the desert with an NI guy. Well the NI guy was this helicopter pilot and I mean I know…we worked in the same unit, I know exactly what the planning was. I refer to him here as KD in the book. And what KD’s job was…I mean, he was a highly decorated helicopter pilot, his job was to snatch, when we pick up ‘Billy’, Joe Slovo, probably in one of the African countries, we’ve got to bring him back across the border and that’s what we’re going to do. And he’s got to keep his hours up and he’s got to keep current, so he farmed himself out as sort of freelance pilot. And he picked up the contract to fly around Sir Laurens van der Post and Prince Charles. And it was just once again, like finding de Jonge. We were there at the right place, the right time, we picked him up. In this case there was Prince Charles, right place, right time, and our man just flew him around. Once again we got to learn how to do it. There was absolutely no intelligence significant to the fact that there was an NI operator within 61 handshaking distance of the Prince. Absolutely none whatsoever. So once again, Labuschagne’s extrapolation of data is completely erroneous but be that as it may, it was an interesting and exciting time. Very stressful time, very…I would get back from most operations, geez I tell you, I was very strung out, and you must speak to my wife about that. Because they’re lonely, it’s a lonely life, very lonely sort of existence, extremely demanding of the individual. And of course you must remember that operating in African countries, we would operate wherever they operated. So whether it’s into Russia, wherever, you name it, we were there. And in those African countries my friend, there was the death penalty, there was life imprisonment – if you get caught as being a spy, that’s serious stuff. So, I would come out of those operations feeling fairly stressed out and I was profoundly disturbed that this BB guy was such a gung-ho man. And I later found out that BB was in big trouble with the police because when he was with the police he just fired on people, and in fact there was a big court case about him when he took a shot at a person that was throwing a petrol bomb and he dropped him and he killed him, and this man was like some 100 and something metres away from him. And the evidence was led, why did you shoot him? Because he said he was protecting state property from being burnt. And of course the whole thing about minimum force etc, applied. Anyway he was in fact reprimanded for that and he was given some or other negative incident in his file. But that tells you he was a hot headed guy who wanted to shoot and kill. And that’s not what we were on about. So I parted company very rapidly with Ben…sorry with BB, and ultimately that operation laid the foundation for my understanding of intelligence work. And of course events rapidly started outstripping our operational needs. And because we were now in place over there, because we had this intelligence capability, we were suddenly in a position to start putting hard intelligence on the table about the Cuban troop withdrawal, about that stuff. Interviewer Can we just rewind, there’s just a couple of questions I want to ask you…had Pretoria decided that it was ok to snatch Slovo in the UK, practically could you have done it? Tony Yes, we could have done it but I would have disobeyed orders. There’s no question of doubt about it. You see, I spoke earlier on about a thinking soldier, I’m a thinking soldier, and you cannot have a covert operator that is not a thinker. Because there’s not a set of orders on this planet that will be detailed enough to cover every single conceivable thing. So, a characteristic of a successful operator is his or her…and we had many women, very good women…their capacity to think on their feet and ultimately to make a valued judgement. I’m told to do this, however, this and this and this and this, I cannot execute my instructions now. If I execute my instructions then there’s going to be a catastrophic failure. And in the case of that, if we had snatched Joe from London, there would have been no question of doubt in my head that we would have had comprehensive sanctions. We 62 could have got him out, remember the way they got Eichmann out, and that’s the difference between the Israelis and the South Africans. The Israelis controlled a thing called El Al Airlines. And there Mossad is king. We had SAA…but when they snatched the man, they had to get him onto the airplane, and the way they did that was they had a diplomatic mission going in there. So they were not afraid to merge their diplomatic cover with their operational tactical requirements. They had Eichmann under surveillance for months beforehand. But, I mean, they would shake his hand almost on a daily basis, that’s how close they were to him. But months later did they make a plan to now get him out, and that plan was a diplomatic mission. So there was a diplomatic airplane that went in. So they effectively broke international law, because international law that dictates diplomatic cover, was now being used for an operational purpose, which is illegal. But of course the moral high ground that Israel had, capturing a Nazi war criminal, that was another story. So in our case, if we would have gone in and we would have used SAA, now imagine the disrepute that SAA would have come under. And of course we didn’t have the option of a diplomatic mission there, so if we would have snatched him we would have had to hold him somewhere, and we would have then had to smuggle him onto an airplane within a crate or something? I mean, how do you do this? Those things aren’t…it’s not pressurised, it’s very cold there. You could kill a man. So very, very dangerous and maverick stuff. So I put in a detailed report, I wish I had that report now, that said, under no circumstances can we consider that. The windfall from Operation Spaghetti, that became Operation Hardekool…and the windfall then was we’re into negotiations now we had all our stuff in place. And these guys felt safe out there and they were just chirping on a daily basis so we could know exactly what was going on. Once again, the Jac Buchner stuff. Get into their heads, understand what’s going on. And that’s it, so yes, technically we could have done it, it would have been extremely unwise to do. If I was in any operational situation I would have refused to take that order. And in fact in my book I even write about the fact that I had a little bit of a dodgy understanding, having rubbed shoulders with some of our leaders and I’m thinking now of who’s this man that I wrote about, who just washed Frank Chikane’s feet? Interviewer Adrian Vlok. Tony Adrian Vlok. He would sell us down the river just at the drop of a hat. So if you’re out there on these operations, you’ve got to understand my friend, when the shit hits the fan, you’re on your own. And you’ve got to use your judgement, boy, you don’t just go there and say, I’m following orders. You don’t do that, because that’s not a defence out there laughs that’s not a defence. Interviewer So, you recommended that it shouldn’t happen, and it didn’t happen in the UK… 63

Tony It was going to happen in Mozambique or in Zambia. Interviewer Ok. And because of the way politics then developed, the thing didn’t happen. Tony Yes. Interviewer Speaking about Craig Williamson, it strikes me that there was a case of National Intelligence doing one thing… Tony Absolutely. Interviewer …but the Security Police and Military Intelligence might all have been doing different things. You mention in your book, Dulcie September and Godfrey Motsepe, who was in Brussels. So one hand… Tony ..never knew what the other hand were doing. Interviewer ..and you were under deep cover so nobody knows what you’re doing. Tony ..are in the middle of all the shit, yes. Interviewer But back at headquarters nobody’s actually talking to each other to find out who’s covering what. Tony Well you see it was ultimately…one of the things you need to know, and this is what I’ve now learned, and this is applicable to contemporary Zimbabwe, one of the things that you need to know is that in a totalitarian regime it’s not necessarily the strongest man that’s in the second in command position. The strongest man is number one but he surrounds himself with a bunch of normally Adrian Vlok type of people that he can manipulate and people that are of questionable moral fibre. And ultimately it becomes a power struggle because you’re now battling for the favours of the king. And will the king favour you or (inaudible)and careers are made on this. So we get back to Eddie Web now, when Eddie Web was appointed as commanding general of Special Forces. He was just totally out of his depth. He just didn’t know what he was doing. But obviously he had some political clout somewhere, so a political decision was made to appoint a non Special Force man in a Special Force commanding position. And that’s where the thing went down. Interviewer When you say went down, was that with the CCB and…? Tony The CCB and yes, because suddenly Eddie Webb didn’t know what Special Forces is about, so what does he do, he now appoints a man called Colonel Joe Verster who’s the Special Force man, he knows what’s going on, but the difference is Joe Verster is a Colonel, and a Colonel is tactical, a General is strategic. So how can you cascade down from a strategic level of command to a tactical level of command things that have got strategic ramifications? And from that moment on CCB and Region 7 and blah blah, all that kind of horrible stuff happened. You can trace it literally to the appointment of Eddie Web. Before 64 that Special Forces was Special Forces doing incredible things. And then suddenly after that Special Forces became murderers, they became thugs, they became gangsters, they became something that we can in no circumstances condone, and that as a soldier we cannot in any way be proud of. I distance myself 100% from those activities. I cannot support them. Interviewer Well my understanding from talking to some of the guys was that the criteria for the Special Forces guys started changing. Tony Yes. Interviewer And is that where the breakdown came in? I’m not taking sides in the war, but prior to that [the CCB] Special Forces soldiers were used… but thereafter it started changing. Tony They became murderers, nothing more than murderers. The Williamson factor kicked in. Sorry, just to briefly answer your question because I haven’t fully answered your question, yes, the left hand never knew what the right hand was doing. And you find that in any totalitarian regime because it becomes so secret and secrets within secrets. And clandestine units and need to know basis and it’s so top secret and we can’t tell you and all the generals are vying for their own little command positions and their future careers because they’re going to retire one day, and they want to retire at the best possible level so that they can get pension, etc. That’s what it’s about at the end of the day. Interviewer And I think…obviously you’ll correct me if I’m wrong…but it was also exacerbated by other divisions within government, foreign affairs weren’t particularly liked by some of the military. Tony Yes. Interviewer And so on and so forth. And we still also have the…at that stage, PW Botha, certainly in ’87, ’88 was still in charge, but his tenure was coming to an end, and the de Klerk faction was coming through. So there were a whole bunch of politics going on while you guys were operating in the field. Tony Yes. We were operating in the field…and we were quite oblivious of that actually but I’ll tell you something, I remember the day that FW came to power, because that same day…we used to have a safe house in what was…what is now called Glen Austin in Midrand area. We had a safe house there. And we were called in to the safe house…I forget the code name of the safe house, but anyhow it was in Glen Austin…and we were all called in, K43 were called in, and we were told. In fact, Sniffles was angry, he was as mad as a snake, and he said no, shit, this bad stuff’s happened now, this bloody FW has just come into power now and they’ve pulled all operations, all hostile operations. I was the most relieved man that day. I came home that night, I smiled. I had a smile on my face. Because I don’t believe that we should ever have been doing that stuff. In fact, there’s a guy at the moment, I forget his name now, but he was a Brigadier I think in 65 the Security Police, and he’s busy writing a PhD now, and he’s using my work as an element of his PhD. And part of his argument is that the police should never have done that stuff, Special Forces never have, NI should have. And my counter argument is that none of us should have ever done that stuff. that’s not what we should have been doing. So wait for his PhD to come out, because it’s a Tukkies…I can’t remember his name now but I can look it up in my records. My Alzheimer’s doesn’t allow me to remember all these tiny details. But yes, so…I don’t think we should have ever been doing that and I was so relieved, in fact in my book I write about the fact that now we could apply ourselves, because now we’d established a very efficient, very effective intelligence capability. After ten years of investment, in good manpower, womanpower, humanpower. Ideologically not aligned…I mean that’s amazing! Imagine today having an ideologically non-aligned thing. We wouldn’t have the Zuma problems and we wouldn’t have all of this kind of stuff, you know. So yes…we were in position now to really start doing something and I was then transferred from K43…I was transferred across to K32. I told you about, K2 was internal covert…there was K21, K22, and one of the operations that they ran was this car Safari. That was a K2 operation, and then K3, I was in K3, K32, and my responsibility was operating…K32 was divided into Africa and the rest of the world. Sorry, K3 was divided into Africa, so K31 was Africa, and K32 was the rest of the world. And I was in K32, the rest of the world. And I don’t want to go into those details there but other than the fact that I then had a big run in with the CIA, and I’m the CIA records. In fact, I’ve sent a copy of this to the CIA so that they can put on my file to complete my file because it’s not complete. Laughs Interviewer Have they acknowledged receipt? Tony They haven’t acknowledged receipt but I’ve also put a copy of this in the Library of Congress because I’m told that if it doesn’t exist in the Library of Congress it doesn’t exist. So I’ve sent to the Library of Congress and I’ve never had an acknowledgement but nonetheless I know it’s there so…what I can say is I have spoken in my meetings now, I’ve met a very senior guy from British intelligence and I’ve given him a copy as well. I know the Brits are…I’ve made peace at intelligence level and I’ve apologised in my book for operating in their backyard because we were quite rude to do that. And we were a little bit sort of up-startish. But because…the problem was when an element of Hardekool became public knowledge…Harold Wolpe’s telephone, when he found his bug eventually, that became public domain. And what we did not know at the time…and this is funny in intelligence…there’s lots that you don’t know, ok…what we did not know is that Harold Wolpe was living on a street that there was a member of parliament living on the same street. And because of the IRA threat, the MPs were being given special surveillance and special VIP protection stuff, so we planted Wolpe’s bugs under the nose of these people. Laughs 66

Interviewer And they never picked it up. Tony They never picked us up. And I’m horrified to think of it, had we known it we wouldn’t have planted a bug there. So it’s not that we were audacious, we were actually stupid. Interviewer But it strikes me that you had the ANC hierarchy, certainly in London, pretty much under tabs? Tony I spoke in my book about this Operation Cruiser. Now I don’t want to talk anymore about Operation Cruiser, but Operation Cruiser in my view if you’re serious about history and if you’re serious about intelligence, you want to go and talk to people about Cruiser. Because Operation Cruiser was, in my view, one of the most brilliant operations ever. And what Operation Cruiser did was it put us on the inside. The reason why the ANC…the reason why there was never ever an armed struggle victory was simply because of Cruiser. And Cruiser enabled us to get into every single communication. There was not a communication that happened that we were not aware of. In fact, one of the funny things was as an operational officer every day you go into your office…at one stage I had an office here in Northcliff Corner…and I’d go into Northcliff Corner, and there was on my desk, a pile of intercepts from the previous 24 hours. I mean, it was a mission just to read these intercepts. And later on when I became a founding member of the Secret Service, one of my tasks was to take the ANC guys, the Mbokodo guys, the DIS, the intelligence people, take them into our interception facility in Pretoria…we had a formidable interception facility because going back to…remember Sapper van der Mescht? Interviewer Yes. Tony When van der Mescht was captured we managed to get him released, and part of the release was…I don’t quite know all the details of it but part of it was, there were some BND, some German intelligence officers that had been arrested by the KGB. And we managed to work into the deal…and it’s an interesting bit of history to go and find out about this. When van der Mescht was released we also managed to put into the mix some of the BND officers that were released at the same time as van der Mescht. And because of the role that we played…when I say we, not me individually, but we as a service – we played a role in liaison in this thing – we were rewarded from a foreign intelligence service with satellite interception equipment. So the satellite interception equipment that exists at Rietvlei comes from that period of time. And with that, I remember that the ANC officers were operating essentially out of Lusaka. Interviewer That’s right. Tony And we then had the interception capacity to, by means of satellite, and remember we also controlled Telkom, etc, all those landlines, we could control all of those links. So when Klaas de Jonge was put under surveillance, the entire city block in which 67 the Nedbank building is, that entire block was shut down, it was deliberately faulted. So everyone phoned in and said they’ve got a fault on their lines, and the cover was, we’re going to put a new cable in because the whole cable’s gone. And that under de Jonge’s nose the operator went in and de Jonge was watching him while he planted the bugs. We were very good at that stuff. And because of our sanctions, because we didn’t have international support, we developed the engineering capability at Rietvlei that made this stuff. So in the early years after we became Secret Service, SAS, was born, we had the capacity to engineer things and to produce surveillance just like would be used in our helicopters and artillery, we produced this intelligence equipment. And we had a massive market for that stuff. Of course all that’s been lost now. It’s all been lost because we’ve lost the engineers, we’ve lost the technologists that did it. But at that point I literally…the guy that planted the bug in the embassy under de Jonge’s nose, he even got a letter from de Jonge written to Telkom thanking Telkom for the wonderful support they gave. And that eventually came up on this guy’s file and he eventually was given a commendation for the good intelligence work he did. So be that as it may, during amalgamation in 1994 when we joined all the forces together, I was the NIS representative on that team, and my task was to drive the first week of amalgamation, but we’re jumping ahead of ourselves now. But in that week…I’ll just tell you the story quickly about this thing. I took a number of senior officers – they’ve all gone on to now become very senior guys in SAS…in fact most of them have left now. But I took them into the intercept room and I told them that we were intercepting all their stuff in Zambia and they didn’t believe us. And I said, well, there’s the headphones, put them on. Laughs And there was one guy, he was the MK man in Windhoek, and he put these things on…his MK name was Flint, and I called him Comrade Flint. And I asked him if I can call him Comrade Flint? And he said, he’ll call me Comrade Tiny if I call him Comrade Flint. But anyhow…old Comrade Flint puts his headphones on and there we log him into the satellite and then we pick up a telephone conversation between Lusaka and London. His eyes were like this,(gestures with hands) he just didn’t believe it. I said, well, guys we were listening to you the whole time. There wasn’t a thing that you did…see, they made the fatal mistake the believed that they were invincible and their personal security was very relaxed. And that’s why it is so dangerous of the Williamson’s of the world to go and do their tomfoolery, to go and do their silly bugger stuff, to go and play boy scout’s kind of spy-spy stuff, because they caused enormous damage to us. But yes, we had incredible intelligence coverage, and in fact it was largely that intelligence coverage that created the climate of certainty, when FW came to power, that suddenly FW for the first time – you’ll see if you look carefully at the history of PW Botha, PW Botha tended to favour the military. He despised Neil Barnard and he despised NIS. But Neil Barnard used that time…I write in my book this thing the hawks versus the 68 doves, I won’t go into detail of that, it’s all on record here. But that’s a very important historical period of time because that decade, or that couple of seven or years, enabled Neil Barnard to establish NI capability without the pressure of having to produce. Because military was producing all the stuff…bad stuff eventually, but they were being relied upon. So when FW came to power, that instant NI was in position, we had our networks, we had our surveillance devices, we had our agents in place, and suddenly we could now start popping and weaving. END OF FIRST PART OF INTERVIEW (counter at 387) SECOND PART OF INTERVIEW (counter at 388) 28/4/08 Interviewer Tony when we chatted on Saturday we ended up talking about…we jumped a little ahead of ourselves but you spoke about that by the time FW de Klerk came to power, and from your point of view, you guys were well placed and had all your monitoring equipment in place and you had a very good idea what was happening throughout the region and also internationally with, whether it was the ANC, PAC, but whoever you were tasked to monitor. And you said that after ’94, or in the early nineties, when you met some of their operatives they were astounded at your capacity to listen to their phone calls, be it out of Lusaka or elsewhere. Perhaps we could go back to the late eighties, early nineties. Tony Ok, let’s go back… I just want to make it quite clear from what you’ve just said now, I want to clarify possible misconception. What is intelligence? Intelligence is information that has been verified. It’s processed information. And that information comes essentially from human beings. So we were in the business in Chief Directorate K, we were in the business of human intelligence, Hume-int. Technology played a role in our capacity to intercept, and of course in our capacity to verify. But essentially the role of K was human intelligence. And of the entire intelligence spectrum open to any intelligence agency in the world, human intelligence specifically covert human intelligence, probably accounts for two percent, maybe three percent of your total intelligence mix. It’s the riskiest intelligence to get, you need the more sophisticated kind of operator to get it. Technical intelligence, what they call a chatter…if you listen to CNN from time to time they talk about chatter. Chatter is all of the intercepts that take place on the telephone systems, all the public domain stuff. When you think you’re talking in private, when you think you’re sending an email to somebody confidentially, all of that is intercepted. And it’s intercepted using hit words, intercepted using specific phrases. If you talk about for example, a bomb, or talk about assassination or some…these certain hit terms are programmed into computers and these have been around for probably 20 years now, this kind of computer. It’s really old technology. So people are naïve to believe that they’re not intercepted. Doesn’t mean to say that everybody is intercepted. If you talk about assassinations and planting bombs and hijacking 69 airplanes then you are going to be intercepted. If you talk about your next door neighbour’s sexy wife, then who cares? Who cares other than your next door neighbour maybe. Laughs So in other words the capacity to gather intelligence…it’s a sophisticated approach…and part of the process…and this is a very interesting thing because from 9/11 we learned a number of very important lessons about intelligence. Part of the intelligence process is what is known as the given picture. What is your given picture? What do you know it’s like at the moment? And any intelligence is evaluated first against that given picture. So, the reason why 9/11 happened, was because, although the FBI knew about some of these things, the given picture was such that it was unlikely. So when you come up with some new startling intelligence, for example, that the Cubans are prepared to talk peace, that is startling, it’s new, it does not fit the given picture, so the burden of responsibility is then on the operator, on the agent handler concerned to prove that what his agent in place is saying, is in fact correct. And that is why very often intelligence agencies make a mistake, they drop the ball at that time because they think that this agent is maverick or they think that this agent is maybe a liar or something of that nature. So, the intelligence process is a very sophisticated process. It’s not just a bunch of palookas going around there picking locks and busting teeth out of heads. In fact, none of that at all. It’s a highly targeted, highly sophisticated approach, and where K got it right, K got it right because Neil Barnard was a very wise man and he used, what I call in my book, I refer to three watershed events…I’m not going to go into the details of those events because anyone can read those in the book. But there were these three watershed events that happened, and he used those very, very cleverly to buy time. And ultimately he bought time, when the heat was off NI – after the collapse of BOSS – the heat was off NI. In fact NI was not even a relevant player at that point in time but they were legitimate and recognised. And he used that period of time to build up a very professional service. And what I found very interesting was just towards the end before I left the service, I at that stage was a highly experienced operational guy and I used my operational skills to get access to my own file. Laughs My own vetting recruitment file. And to my very, very great surprise, I found in my own personal vetting file, someone had written in the file that I had been to St Martins’ School, which was a white liberal school, in fact a school with a very strong anti- profile, and the person that did my vetting originally said, this fellow called Turton was at this school where he was taught to think independently. And someone then commented underneath that, this is a good thing. So the original vetting officer put that forward as a possible negative thing to be held against me, and Barnard had inculcated by that point in time a corporate culture that valued difference, that valued the non clone. And I found that absolutely fascinating because it completely flies in the face of conventional wisdom about this guy with a thick Afrikaans accent and black shoes on and being rather clumsy going around 70 society pretending to be something but clearly being a Security Police spy. This was world’s apart. This was a very sophisticated group of people with a very different world view, and in fact in many cases, decades or two ahead of their time. So there was a period of time that was bought. And this where I think Neil Barnard was probably one of the unsung heroes of our peaceful transition. Because he had this enormous wisdom on the one hand, but on the other hand he had the political clout to actually…let’s call it the political acumen to bop and weave, to understand when to move and when not to move. So he was really an operator of considerable skill. And it comes as no surprise that he was the man that spoke to Mandela. It was ultimately Barnard and Mandela that actually hammered out the desire to talk further…I wouldn’t say they hammered out the final agreement because that would be wrong, but certainly the talks about talks. Absolutely driven by Barnard and Madiba. And I’ll talk about that later on because we launched a major operation and that operation only had probably about ten operators involved, a very small group of people called the Special Work Group, and I was one of those operators. So the rank and file within Chief Directorate K had no inkling about the true activities of Special Work Group. And I’ll gladly talk about that later on because I think it was probably one of our more significant operations. Interviewer And at that time do you think that Military Intelligence or the Security Police had any idea of what was going on with the Special Work Group? Tony No, the Military Intelligence were deeply suspicious of us. In fact in the latter years, as we approached 1994 when things really got hot, and clearly at that point in time there was severe infighting within the Security Force community, I found it very, very strange at that point in time I was head of covert training… END OF SIDE A (counter at 520) SIDE B (counter at 18) Tony …we had adopted a policy that we we’d learned from the CIA in fact, where the CIA is actually quite a good intelligence organisation, not one of the best in the world but certainly a very robust intelligence organisation. And the things that CIA have got right is very training. And what we learned from the CIA was that they would take, of all their operators that came back out of the field, say guys spent a couple of years, say five, ten years in Afghanistan or whatever, and the guy’s maybe a bit strung out now and a bit tense, he’s been out in the cold for too long, they would bring him back, and they would then recycle him through training. So they would maybe take two or three percent of their top operators and then turn them into instructors. The idea being that they would now capture all of the latest savoir faire, of how things were done, and teach the people. So in my capacity…I was pulled out, after Bush talk and after the Special Work Group 71 and after the Cuban Angolan negotiations, I was pulled out of the field and put into position heading covert training. And while in covert training we were using a safe house facility for our training and it became very evident to me that we were under surveillance. Remember I was a surveillance specialist myself and counter surveillance was just second nature to me. And it became very clear to me that we were under surveillance and in fact we were under surveillance from by the CCB laughs believe it or not. And the CCB actually made death threats…my family received death threats and this was quite a disturbing time and there was a tense moment when they penetrated our facilities – I’ve got it written up in my book on a specific date, I can’t remember the exact date now, I’ve got it in the book – when they penetrated the facilities and it’s very clear to me that there had been a penetration, where they’d come and rather unprofessionally planted some surveillance equipment. And we decided then to put the ears on them, to turn it around. And what actually happened, because it’s quite bizarre, because the guy concerned was a man called Joe Verster, and we know Joe Verster, and the tragedy of the thing was that these people thought that we’d gone soft on Communists. That we became the enemy, that we were now traitors because of this. Word was sort of out within the intelligence community now that there was high level access, and in effect, not access as an agent to target but access as equals. Access as sitting down like we’re talking here. We are talking to senior ANC people, talking about a new future dispensation, a peaceful transition to a democracy. And of course they thought that we’d sold out. So they wanted to take us out. And that was a very, very tense moment in time, but that also told me that we were doing the right thing. But this opens up a whole discussion that we can go as deeply as you want to ultimately. The role of strategic intelligence in leading, because when you lead not everyone follows. And the direction you lead into is very often uncomfortable for many because what you’re essentially doing is breaking the status quo. But that was a very interesting period of time, I think at that stage we’d learned a lot, we were I think very self confident in our operations because we’d pulled some stunning operations off…Operation Hardekool for example. Operation Cruiser, Operation Bush Talk. I mean, these are absolutely world class operations. And you know, we were fairly confident at that time given the fact that the CCB was under such intense scrutiny, they were walking around murdering people. They were just really ham-fisted in their operations, completely unprofessional, totally illegal what they were doing. So we felt that we had certainly the moral high ground and as professionals…you must remember we were professionals…we viewed them very often as enthusiastic amateurs. Ham-fisted, dangerous, enthusiastic amateurs. So there was a very, very deep division between us, but I’ve written a chapter called the Hawks versus the Doves and there I also talk about these three great watershed events. And those watershed events I think are very important because ultimately driven by Barnard’s wisdom we 72 developed the capacity to put on the table high class intelligence that is undisputed. And that is what built the bridge between the political elites. And we can talk at length about the role of intelligence: is intelligence bad or good? Is it bad to be spied on? Well no-one wants to be spied on, but you must appreciate that if you’re a political leader in times of revolution, in times of great turmoil…let’s just take for example Israel and Palestine today, any Palestinian leader has to accept that they are a target of intelligence. If they don’t think that then they’re naïve and stupid. And vice versa. So at what point in time does that leader engage with the other side through the intelligence channels? Because that’s what we did. We used the intelligence channels as the means of engagement and was that a hostile… well there were elements of hostile engagement, of course there were because they were the enemy, they were busy shooting up people in St James’ church and Magoos’ Bar and stuff like that. And it wasn’t only them, we also had the things like the Barend Strydom…Strydom Square massacre. So it was across the board. There was a move to radicalisation in the country. But the important thing was the intelligence services on the one hand had established a record of unbiased reporting, telling it like it is, and on the other hand they’d established and developed a very, very well trained cadre of professionals. And those professionals were field tested but the quality of the information coming in, into the intelligence machine, that was then processed by your really very well trained analysts…remember Barnard was an academic originally. So one of the things that he did was he actually established a very robust analytical capability. No more palookas, no more old ex policemen just processing material and writing a report, like that famous report that came out, the Meiring Report, that accused Winnie Mandela and Michael Jackson of trying to overthrow the government. That is ham-fisted in the absolute extreme. That’s ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous. So NI was completely out of that league. They were in a league of their own. So yes, that’s how it was. Interviewer And while you felt you would be in a league of your own, to what degree were the ANC, the PAC, or any other grouping monitoring…to what degree had they managed to infiltrate your organisation? Tony Infiltration into an organisation, it is something that we’re jumping right ahead of ourselves here now. We’re talking completely out of the time line sequence now, but when I first became aware of penetration…I mean, any intelligence is about penetration. And intelligence organisation A works against intelligence organisation B and they penetrate each other. And that’s what they do. Is that good or bad? Well, in the overall scheme of things it’s probably good because all sides know what the other side is thinking, and that’s what it’s about. So there’s a game being played in many ways. And that game might be shocking and horrific for non intelligence people but there’s a silent war going on there between agencies and it’s a gentlemen’s game in many 73 ways. You play chess against each other. Where I became aware of penetration into the South African intelligence community was only after amalgamation. At amalgamation there was a certain date given at amalgamation and I was responsible at that point in time, ironically because I was a fluent English speaker, I was put forward into some of the negotiating teams. Because it’s very, very strange that some of the senior management, although they were highly competent people, felt very, very ill at ease when they were forced to speak English. So as a result of that I was put into some of the negotiating teams and it became very clear that at a certain date we were going to amalgamate and we had to put on the table a list of names. So we had a division called the statutory forces, that was NIS. The Security Police, the TBVC states, , Bophuthatswana, and . All of their services, they were statutory, what we call statutory services. And then you had the non stat services, the ANC, PAC essentially. And the whole thing was, well how are we going to level the playing field because the non stats haven’t, for example, had things like pensions and salaries, blah blah blah blah. So, anyhow, be that as it may, at a point in time we had to put our names on the table and we said, right, that will be D-day, and those names, once you’ve got the list of those names, we will now know who is who in the zoo, and that will then become the foundation of the new dispensation. And the new dispensation was an intelligence dispensation that would be divided into an internal leg and an external leg. We didn’t know what they would be called yet at that stage. Later on they became NIA and SAS. But at that point we just knew it would be changed, we didn’t know what it would become. And at that point in time it was very interesting when all of a sudden on the table came some very senior Security Policemen on the non statutory lists. So these guys had been recruited. What was very interesting was that none of them from NI. There was not one NI person that had defected. The people that had defected tended to defect in the latter years of the struggle, they tended to come mostly from the Security Police and I think it was driven to a certain extent by fear that there would be change and there would be prosecution for illegal activities so these guys – look I’m interpreting now what I think they thought. My interpretation is that they believed that if they could basically sell out to the other side they could then negotiate a reasonable position for themselves here. And I’m talking about people like Dirk Coetzee. I mean, Dirk Coetzee ultimately became…he was on the list of the non statutory list. There were a couple of others, I can’t remember all their names. There was a general…I’ll think of his name now…he was an English speaking guy…I can’t remember his name right now, but anyway, there were a handful of them, and it was very significant on the day of amalgamation when the different forces walked in and suddenly these Security Police guys walked in as ANC members. It almost sort of sent like a shock wave through us as a community, because the last thing we would ever do is defect. That’s just so anathema to what we were. But I think what’s very 74 interesting is that these very people, they were traitors at one time, and I think they would be very naïve to believe that their new host organisation is not going to regard them as traitors as well. Traitor once, traitor always. And I’ve always found…I’ve adopted a policy, listen I did what I did, I was what I was, but you know something, I’ve been consistent in that. I will talk today to the ANC, I will talk to the PAC with respect, I’ve never changed my views, I’ve certainly never changed my allegiance, because my allegiance was never to a political party. My allegiance was always to that thing called a South African identity that has ultimately been embodied in what is now the Constitution. And that is where my allegiance lies and it’s very interesting today, a lot of the discourse that you see in the media today, about the Scorpions…I heard just this last week one of the senior ANC spokespeople talked about the fact that they’re disbanding the Scorpions because their allegiance is to the Constitution, they feel that they’re above the Party. Now, you know something, I am 100%, my allegiance is to the Constitution, and if we all had, in the Security Forces, our allegiance to the Constitution and not to individuals and not to parties, then of course we would have a professional service, we would have a balanced country, we would be able to grow our economy, and we would now have checks and balances in place. That’s a long answer for a question. Break Interviewer We’re talking now about the late eighties again, are we? Tony Look we’ve decided to go sequentially rather than thematically and we’re rewinding back now to the late eighties. Because once again you must appreciate that the intelligence world, the perception is that, gee, you’re an intelligence officer, you must know what’s going on out there? Well the truth of the matter is that you work in a very compartmented world, and you work on this need to know basis, and when you’re under deep cover, you didn’t even know who the other people were! You must appreciate that, there was a huge investment made in the K operators. K operators were elite people, there’s no question of doubt about it and I hate to sound as if I’m bragging about it, I’m not at all, I’m just saying that these people were remarkable people in many ways because they lived this very lonely life at the absolute cold face, cutting edge of what was happening in society and very often they didn’t realise what they were doing or the strategic relevance of that. And that’s why the voices are being captured now because I think we should honour these people. But you must remember at that point in time, I spoke earlier on about this given picture. Now the given picture was driven by one thing and that is the Cold War. If we were to ask a question, apartheid clearly was an abomination, there’s no question of doubt, any thinking person will tell you that apartheid was unsustainable, it was a crime against humanity, if you want to take it into its extreme form. So how did it last for so long? How was it so durable at the end? Why didn’t it collapse so much earlier? And of course the answer to that is not a simple one but 75 there are two elements that answer it. And I think the first element is the Cold War. And the second element is the fact that South Africa was a gold producing nation and in that point in time gold prices were soaring. So there was a deal cut between the government and the gold mining industry. That to this day has got serious environmental implications that I’m working on professionally, because they haven’t yet been through their Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But they were given complete free hand, carte blanche, do what you want as long as you give us the…keep the cash flowing into the coffers of government because we need to sustain the war. So we won’t talk about the gold thing now but that was one element of what sustained apartheid for so long. But the second thing that sustained apartheid was the Cold War, there’s no doubt about it. Was this a Cold War thing? I’ve got absolutely no doubt this was all Cold War, because when you were in the Cold War era, remember that the Cold War era coincided with in Africa with many wars of liberation. Now the wars of liberation were actually a colonial thing. So as the colonial struggle came to a point where the different liberation movements felt that they wanted to be liberated from their colonial masters, these were probably what you would call a Just War, certainly they were driven by specific ideologies, but on the moral level there’s very little…you don’t have to make a very strong case to realise that these guys had the moral high ground. There’s no question of doubt about it. now, the moral high ground is one thing, the capacity to wage war is another. And of course your government forces tend to have the upper hand because they’ve got the security establishment, they’ve got the intelligence, they’ve got the conventional weapons, etc. So if you were in the 1960s when the Cold War was really starting to rage, and you were a little liberation movement somewhere, all you’ve got to do to get weapons is you’ve got to go to one of the super powers and say, guys, help us. And the instant you do that, if they turn you away, you go to the other guys. Say, listen, we went to the Americans, now you Russians, are you going to help us? So every one of the wars of liberation were aided and abetted by some of the super powers, to the extent that Henry Kissinger wrote a book. And Henry Kissinger was an amazing guy because he was the Secretary for State during Operation Savannah and during those very, very crucial period years in South Africa when the Portuguese were pulling out of Africa and changing the regional balance of power. And Kissinger wrote a book where he spoke about the Cold War and he said that the problem with the Cold War is that you’ve got these countries, the super powers that have got thermo nuclear weapons and they can never face each other because they’re going to annihilate the entire planet. So he developed a thing called the theory of limited warfare. And the theory of limited warfare said that, the Cold War will go into areas other than the super power backyard and the surrogate forces of the Cold War powers, the surrogate forces of the super powers, will engage with each other. And this is a way of relieving tension 76 globally. And then there’s the rules to the game. And the one rule is that as soon as any one of the super powers become directly involved, then the other guys can also become directly involved. Then you start escalating and that’s dangerous. So that’s why you never ever found for example, just take Vietnam. In Vietnam it was well known that the Chinese and/or the Russians were supporting the Viet Cong. It was well known! But you very seldom, if ever, got them captured in the field. It was known for example that Russians were flying some of the MiGs. But they were never shot down. So in many cases they were there training, they were providing hardware material, logistical support, intelligence, etc. And that is in our case as well. So that’s why in Operation Protea when they captured that Russian in Xangongo, very important. Because this is clear evidence now of super power involvement, and that triggers another level of engagement. So, bottom line is this that, apartheid was maintained, no question or doubt about it, by the fact that we were a reasonably powerful military force that was Western oriented, but of course we were a pariah state so the west couldn’t welcome us in with open arms but we could sort of play this game with them. So had the Cold War ended much earlier, then we could have disengaged much earlier. And that starts adding a new dimension to the analysis of the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, and let’s move on to that now. Because in my professional capacity, I was originally engaged in this counter espionage work I told you about, into Zimbabwe. Then from that I established a track record for myself. Then from there I was then recruited into K43, specifically to snatch Joe Slovo and bring him back to justice…to trial. Whether he was the man responsible or not that’s beside the point, the fact of the matter is K43’s mission was to bring him back to put him on trial. Then when that sort of was no longer necessary for various reasons, one of the triggers that changed that was the whole changed strategic situation in Angola with the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale. And what we were doing at that point in time, because K32 had established a fairly robust intelligence capability overseas, building on all these other experiences…remember the last time we spoke you mentioned that the division was quite crude, Africa and the rest of the world. Well the rest of the world was wherever it was relevant to us. And all of a sudden Cuba became relevant. So, all of a sudden out of the blue, I’m working in the rest of the world, whatever that means, and essentially I’m the ANC, SACP specialist working in K32 which means that my operations are focused mostly on Spaghetti, then became Hardekool, which is based wherever these guys are. But essentially mainly in London, but also into Germany, there was quite a strong ANC, SACP presence in Germany. There was funnily enough, one in America as well. Quite bizarrely so. There were sort of three clusters, there was one in New York, there was one in Washington, and there was one in San Francisco. Sort of cluster of ANC, SACP types. They were less militant maybe than the ones out of Britain. And then there were the African ones which we didn’t deal with in K32. And 77 then were a couple of others, in Moscow for example, and those other sort of areas. So all of a sudden this thing becomes relevant now…Cuba…we’ve got to understand Cuba. And as it turns out once again, like with the Klaas de Jonge affair, we look out there and, well they say in Afrikaans, the calf is in die pit, when the calf is in the pit you look for a solution. In intelligence services it was called, you’ve got to find a tree. You’ve got to find a tree to climb up it. and we had to find a tree because we suddenly had to get something out of Cuba. And we started asking around and before we knew it we actually had incredibly high level access into the Cuban government. Very high level stuff! And geez, we thought, this is interesting, ok. It was not relevant before but suddenly this was relevant and of course the other thing was, we started developing high level access into the Soviet Union. And we needed that Soviet Union access because this is all about the Cold War. So on the one hand there was this strand of intelligence coming in that was telling us now that we’d fought this Battle of Cuito Cuanavale now and…or it was impending, we were building up to the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale. it had the potential of going nuclear. Why do I say that? Because…many people will deny that. It had the potential to go nuclear for the simple reason that South Africa lost its air superiority in the mid eighties with the deployment of Sam 8 and Sam 9 missile systems, and that becomes a very important sub story in the whole intelligence game, ok, with the CIA etc, etc. And is air superiority important? Of course it’s important. The war in Afghanistan, the Mujahideen, the day that they were given the Stinger missiles, that’s the day, suddenly, that the Russians lost their air superiority in Afghanistan, and from that moment onwards it was a downhill battle. So the moment that South Africa lost air superiority, suddenly things weren’t looking so rosy for South Africa. And one of the alternatives was, well, we have tactical nuclear weapons. So, it was always kept as a background option. It was never, ever considered as a main…this is going to be our main cut and thrust, but, there was always a thought, guys if it gets out of hand we can always deploy nukes into theatre. Now this was obviously very frightening and very worrisome because the nukes that we had were tactical weapons not strategic weapons. And the reason why they were significant was essentially when the Russians were pulling out of Afghanistan, they were remobilising, redeploying into Angola. So a substantial element of the final battle of Cuito Cuanavale, which I consider to be the final battle of the Cold War in Africa, this was the battle. This was the mother of all battles that ended the Cold War in Africa. And it was strategically very important because on the one hand it taught us that the Cubans were not as monolithic as it would appear. They’d been there for a long time. They’d taken lots of casualties. And that’s why there’s such a vigorous debate today about, they’ve got to put forward a story that they won the war. Otherwise all the mothers that have lost all the sons have done so for nothing. So it’s vitally important that the Cubans are seen to be winners in that Battle of Cuito Cuanavale. But in 78 reality we suddenly had high level intelligence, people in place, right next to Fidel Castro, as close as you can get. And these people were telling us that there was a split. There was a split in the Cuban government and there were people that wanted to pull out, but they wanted to pull out in a face saving way. So there was an element there that we could start talking. As soon as there’s a split there’s a bit of a gap that you can move in now, there’s a bit of a diplomatic manoeuvring space. Then we started getting intelligence…we started comparing this now with our African intelligence. And the African guys were really moving as well, they were doing remarkable stuff, K31. And they were putting on the table now high level intelligence from deep inside Angola. Right up at the highest level, that there was a split in the Angolan government as well. And there was this Nationalist faction and there was this Communist faction. And this whole thing about Nationalism versus Communism started becoming relevant. And then we were then tasked to start looking now at the Soviet Union and what is the Soviet Union doing? Because this is now the crucial variable. And then of course when Gorbachov came onto the scene, suddenly the strategic landscape started changing. And it started shifting now to answering the question, well, we can’t talk to the ANC, SACP, because of the SACP angle, but we can talk to the Nationalists. So if that’s happening now in Angola, if that’s happening in Cuba, then why can’t it happen in South Africa? So the first time the question at a strategic level is asked. So we now start gathering intelligence on this. And we’re still putting in some fairly good hard core stuff. And coming out of this it becomes very, very clear that the Soviet Union is going to disintegrate. Very, very clear that the Cold War is coming to an end. Very, very clear that the reason for the Cold War ending was simply because the arms race was costing so much money, and it caused, ironically enough, such massive environmental degradation, specifically in the Soviet Union that human health was now at stake. Chernobyl had happened, one of the biggest disasters. The Aral Sea which is another environmental disaster of note, not necessarily directly related to the Cold War but in a way driven by this command economy approach. All of this was clearly unsustainable. And all of a sudden it became very clear to us that now if Communism is now collapsing can we find our own legitimate group of people within the African National Congress that will be willing to talk to us. So my transition from a tactical intelligence operator to a strategic intelligence operator happened during the Cuban, Angolan, South African negotiations. And all of a sudden I found myself pulled into the office one day and deployed on this mission into Europe. I had to go and debrief an agent that had just come out of…in fact we then started pulling in stuff from Angola even though we were K32 we had access into Angola from Europe. And I was sent to go and debrief this agent, and I had another agent that we were running doing other stuff, but we found out that he had this high level access to Cuba, and all of a sudden this was coming together. And it was quite bizarre 79 because the only time I’ve ever flown first class on an intelligence operation was that time. Because the only flight I could get back…I was sent into Europe on Friday afternoon, I had to be back by Monday morning. So it was a weekend flight. I literally arrived there, got on the train, did a bit of counter surveillance, met my agent, debriefed him, did a bit of counter surveillance, couldn’t get a flight so the only flight available was first class. So I said, thank you I’ll take it, and it was just so nice sitting in the very front seat of this airplane, tired as all hell, but writing up my report on the airplane. And I came back Monday morning, handed it over, and that report was considered to be a breakthrough report. Because all of a sudden there were negotiations on the go already, Jannie Geldenhuys and his guys, they were talking, there was all these various talks in different parts of the world, I was not directly part of those talks, I was the sort of faceless intelligence guy out there feeding intelligence in. I was just one of a few people feeding intelligence in. And I was so tired when I got home, my eyes were seeing double and I was absolutely knackered. And I went to bed and there was a little punch up in the office because there was this silly little secretary who didn’t want to type up the report, and I said, listen I don’t really care, I was deployed at very high level, here’s my report there, I’m going to write in my diary that I’ve handed over to you at ten minutes past eight, and I’m now going home to sleep. And when I get back, I don’t care what you’ve done with that report but I know that I’ve handed over to you and I know that Neil Barnard wants that report right now laughs so it’s your choice. Type it or don’t. So be that as it may, a telephone rings about two or so days later, deep in the night, and this is one of my immediate superiors and he’s been called by his immediate superior just come down the line from Neil Barnard. And Neil Barnard’s message was, listen this is just breakthrough stuff, absolutely mind-boggling stuff, and Neil Barnard didn’t know who the operator was, just wanted that person to be thanked. And the significance was that just before that I was so enthusiastic about the possibility of having peace in the region. I remember walking down the streets of Washington one day, and I was just so disturbed because Ronald Reagan had made a pronouncement that South Africa was a pariah state and we were like terrorists. And I just felt so dirty, being called a terrorist. Really, I just felt dirty. And I just felt, who the hell is this bugger to say this to us! And then the chance of talking peace came, maybe I grabbed it with a little bit too much enthusiasm because in my debriefing of my agents…remember these are agents of other governments, these are agents that are potentially run by those other intelligence services, and you’ve got to talk to them in a very measured way. And in my enthusiasm for the occasion I suggested, maybe a bit more than I should have, that South Africa would probably be willing to talk peace. And I was reprimanded severely for that, in fact I was bust back a rank. Laughs And I was negatively incidented. We had a thing called the geel book system, and I was negatively incidented…that was a very, very bad thing to 80 have, like a serious black mark against your name, but then the significance of the midnight telephone call, was that all of that was reversed now. And I was promoted again, and all of a sudden I’d done the right thing. So I’d learned from my bad experience of being a bit enthusiastic and clearly one must not be too enthusiastic, and on the other hand it showed me that we were a learning organisation and that they did tolerate enthusiasm and that they did tolerate professionalism, and I just felt so good and so justified that suddenly coming out of the war in Angola, having been a veteran of that war, having seen…I spoke to you earlier on about the feelings in Angola and just this death and destruction, just this horrible, horrible stench of burning rubber and flesh, and all of a sudden now there’s a real chance of not feeling like a bad guy when walking down Pennsylvania Avenue, feeling like a proud individual. Interviewer So you felt that while it was clear that the liberation movements had the moral high ground because apartheid was indefendable, you felt that you were contributing towards a change by doing the work you were doing? Tony I had no question or doubt about that, remember I was rubbing shoulders with a lot of liberation people, and I’d met a lot of the white liberals that were sort of supportive of them and a lot of these, ironically enough, were around Breyten Breytenbach. Now this is a funny thing because Jan Breytenbach and I’ve got a very high regard for Jan, and there’s Breyten, who I’ve also got a high regard for. But Breyten had this very active group of people around him that would do all kinds of incredible things for the struggle, but at the end of the day they had feet of clay. They actually had feet of clay. And I learned from them, and one of the lessons I learned from them…and that’s why my book is called Shaking Hands with Billy, because shaking hands you get to know, you move towards from what you were to what you are, and in that process of moving you change. Not because you’re weak, in fact because you’re strong. Because you are open, you’ve got an intellect, so you learn as you go along. So you don’t stick doggedly to an old thing that doesn’t work, you learn and you feel out and you say, hey this is a mistake, and this is a good idea. And I was confronted then by this moral choice that people made, and the moral choice was, when you get called up…I mention Chaskalson now, he went away and became a Buddhist monk. Well was that good or bad? Well that was his choice and I can only salute him for making that choice. There was this other fellow…who’s this guy, this ANC guy who eventually became the ambassador now to the Netherlands? Carl Niehaus. What a serious bugger, I wish he’d just one day smile and laugh and be happy. Now his choice…I like Carl Niehaus and I’ve got respect for Carl Niehaus. He made a moral choice, but in so doing, he kind of betrayed his people, whoever his people were. Because were we white or…I don’t know but he made a choice. And that choice we have to salute because he was a man of conviction. History will judge him whether that 81 move was good or not, because I know a lot of people that made that choice, a lot of white liberation struggle people…I’m talking here about Mike Muller for example. He was DG of Water Affairs. I’m talking here about Barbie Schreiner, Deputy DG of Water Affairs. These people made a choice and they were all formidable people. I’m talking here about the Jordaan fellow who became head of Mintek, who was a white geologist who defected to the ANC, and used his geological skills to overfly the Caprivi strip and provide intelligence to MK. So he made his choice and he started fighting against his brethren, whatever those brethren were, and that was the dirty part of our war. It divided people, it became a civil war. And all of these people have been fired. Every one of them today are no longer in senior positions, they’ve given up their entire life for the struggle and at the end of the day the white community by and large regards them as traitors. I don’t want to speak on behalf of the white community but as I understand the white community they regard them as traitors, that’s why Carl Niehaus doesn’t smile so often. And I think also the black community regards them as traitors. I don’t think that the black community, by and large has embraced them as they should have. Maybe the masses have but not the political elites. So when push comes to shove these guys are not good enough to make it. Now that’s a pronouncement I’ve made, I might be wrong. I’ve got a very high regard for the Barbie Schreiners of the world. Mike Muller, he’s got a copy of my book. I’ve got very high respect…I speak highly respectfully of these people in my book, and these were people of formidable capabilities. So yes, so that’s where we were. For me the transition was from tactical to strategic and of course that opened up doors for me all of a sudden. South Africa was on the new road. The new road was now clearly a road of negotiation. It was a different road, we were now suddenly going into a different dispensation, and no-one knows what that different dispensation is, so we were here, we wanted to go there, we don’t know where there is. We just know that there is not here. And we know that there is vaguely in that direction, but how do we get there? Do we jump in one leap or do we go in little bits and pieces and that’s the whole next sort of chapter of the story. Interviewer Just one question about, you had people quite senior within the Cuban government right next to Castro you said, and you’d sensed that there was a split within the Cuban government about their attitude towards Angola. Was there a split between Cuban thinking on it and the Russian thinking? Tony That’s a funny thing that, very complicated stuff. Remember the Cuban Missile Crisis? The Cuban Missile Crisis caused a lot of flak that still is being felt in the Cuban community today. The Cubans have got a very strong intelligence service, make no bones about it. Cuba, a little Mickey mouse island in the Caribbean, it stood up to the United States for so long laughs I mean, they’re remarkable people, let’s be honest the Cubans are remarkable people. And that’s why the veteran side of things 82 we’ve got together and we’ve got to salute each other because these guys are resilient and dogged, they really are good people. And at the end of the day elements of the Cuban intelligentsia, as demonstrated by the intelligence community, were bitterly angry at the fact that while the Cuban Missile Crisis took place on their soil, they were angry at the Bay of Pigs and they were very angry…I think it was Khrushchev at the time…whoever the Russian leader was, who suddenly made a decision unilaterally without informing the Cubans that he was going to pull the missiles. So the Cubans never trusted the Russians and the Cubans never trusted the Americans. So the Cubans are profoundly schizophrenic people, they trust nobody. Now there’s a theory that’s been put forward and I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it’s a theory I’ll put on the table, because this theory has been captured by some work that’s now been done by the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington DC. They’ve got a huge project going on the Cuban project. And in my book I make reference to some of these because I’ve had access to some of their archives. And what they’re finding now is that Cuba made a decision that they were going to embroil the United States and the Soviet Union in a bunch of little mini-Vietnams. They were going to spread them out all over the globe so that they couldn’t invade Cuba again. Laughs Now whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. But all I can say is that, it was a very complicated question, it wasn’t just a monolithic, ‘the Cubans say this, the Americans say that’. There were always these factions within. And certainly it was very clear to us that there was space to manoeuvre. Cuito Cuanavale I think tested Cuban resilience to the limit. If you speak to people on the ground, and I think it’s very important that video footage that I’ve located for you now, that’s vitally important because the G5s knocked the crap out of these guys, and I tell you if you speak to veterans of that from that side, they talk with great respect of when that big dog started barking, when these G5s started coming in, these guys were decimated. So the Cubans were hurting badly and they needed a face saving device, so I think one of the reasons why the different governments have never come forward with any strong desire to write the final story about the battle of Cuito Cuanavale is, this is the bone that was tossed out. The price of a negotiated settlement was the fact that, we’re going to leave this great big untold story there, and each side can claim whatever degree of victory they want to or need to claim, and let’s wait for a decade or two when the veterans are too old and their Alzheimers is maybe meant that they’ve forgotten all the details and then we’ll tell the story. So I think it’s an honourable reason and I don’t think we should dabble too deeply in that stuff at this point in time. It will come out. Feelings are simply too sensitive at this point in time. It’s going to probably achieve no great objective right now to tell the true story about that. But certainly the story that I know is that South Africa by no means lost. By no means whatsoever. The tactical nukes were considered, were never ever put into theatre. Because they didn’t need to. And the lessons we learned 83 there was that you can have air superiority as the Russians did, but we managed to capture their Sam 9 missile systems and that was a very significant event. And then when the CIA sold us out earlier on, up in the north, in the earlier years of the Angolan conflict, suddenly the CIA were all over us and they wanted the Sam 9s and we said, thank you very much, we’re not going to give them to you. Because when the CIA gave Blowpipes to UNITA they wouldn’t give to South Africa. And we said, well to hell with you then, what kind of ally are you? Remembering that the Blowpipes were the ones that changed the balance of power in Afghanistan, so why can’t the Blowpipes help us regain our air superiority? So the Americans showed their colours then, and I think that’s a lesson that has been deeply learned by the intelligence community. And when that Sam system was captured – that’s been documented now elsewhere, it’s on the record because the fellow concerned got the Honoris Crux for it, so that is all part of history today. And you know we just decided then not to give the system to the Americans. So be it as it may, we learned a couple of lessons from that and we certainly engaged from there in an absolutely unhurried way, there was no rush, there was no panic whatsoever. Yes, the Cubans had their final little bombing spree. Funnily enough at Calueque again. So the war started in Calueque and it ended in Calueque. And in fact I know the guy who did the last body count, the very final body count, and the final person that was killed in Calueque…I can’t tell you his name…but I know that all that remained of the guy was a piece of his pelvis and his three lower vertebrae. And the person that did the count is in fact today my accountant. He does all my tax returns every year. laughs And his job in the army being an accountant was…he was in ADK, and he was the sort of body count guy, he kept all the accounts of who was living and who was dead. Laughs Interviewer What a job. Tony What a job. And it turned out that the guy whose bits of pelvis he found was someone who he knew the family of and he had to go and break the news to the mother. But anyhow, that’s a little sideline story. END OF SIDE B TAPE 3 (counter at 509) TAPE FOUR SIDE A Interviewer So during this whole period, your job, you’re working quietly behind the scenes and you’re providing information for the people who are negotiating…there was Foreign Affairs, there was Jannie Geldenhuys, who was the Chief of the Defence Force at the time and so on. Tony Yes. Interviewer Did you ever meet these guys? Tony I never met them except one night I met old Jannie in a pub. We 84 were doing some surveillance training and we had one of the operational skills we taught people was a thing called ‘barfly’. We would put them in a bar and we would give them targets. The instructors would go in with a group of young trainees and we would sit down and we would say…in any pub somewhere…and we say, right, you see that person there, third from the left, by the end of tonight I want to know…I want you to have that person’s business card and I want you to find out the following about them. And you’ve got to have set up a future meeting with that person. So that was a typical barfly kind of exercise. And of course, just teaching people how to engage and how to schmooze their way into someone’s business card. And there lo and behold is Jannie Geldenhuys with his lead foot on the bar rail. And I actually went next to him and I rubbed shoulders with old Jannie Geldenhuys and I had a beer. I never actually engaged with him much. I think I did talk to him. I can’t remember the detail of that, but I had a funny feeling, it was this sort of intense feeling of satisfaction and that’s this anonymity of this covert operator. You’re deeply involved in these things but you can’t tell anyone about it, and you know that it’s significant but…that’s what it was, it was nothing more profound than that, it was just like a little…maybe a couple minutes of my life. Interviewer Although as you say, what you were doing was significant and the top man in the Defence Force was unaware that the person providing some of the information was drinking a beer right next to him. Tony Yes. But…yes. One of the things about a successful intelligence person is they tend to be anonymous people, they tend to not be James Bonds. James Bond is far too flamboyant and far too slick and everyone knows who James Bond is. The typical intelligence person just doesn’t attract attention, they’re just grey and sort of they just melt into the background. And during that year, I described the roller coaster ride, here I was reprimanded, bumped back a rank for talking peace laughs with the head of the whole Foreign Affairs, maybe giving a bit more than Foreign Affairs was willing to concede at that time. Then suddenly being promoted because we had this strategic breakthrough. And I was deeply gratified during that year when I was awarded the Chief Director award. And in fact, that’s this puppy over here. That’s the ward here. And the significance of that award is it’s a peer reviewed award. And it’s an award given to the top operator for the entire year’s activities. And this was given in 1989. So that was given during that period of time. That was for my activities that period of time. That’s not a medal that you can wear around your neck laughs or pin to your shoulder. And the imagery is something that I’ve now come to sort of understand more. At the time it wasn’t exactly what I would resonate with culturally, although now that I understand my history a lot more I actually resonate quite a bit more with it. It’s a sombre man sitting over…it’s a broer in sy roer…a man nursing his Martini Henry, but you can just sort of feel the weight of responsibility on his 85 shoulders. Almost the sort of bitterness, almost the enormity of the…almost the futility of the struggle. This asymmetry of power, and you get back to the Angolan Cuban thing, where this asymmetry of power, we lost the air superiority, but through very clever operations we can wipe out their MiGs before they take off by using Special Forces. We can send in Mirages, very gallant young men, very sort of dapper guys, to go and act as decoys so that we can get their MiGs to be scrambled so we can shoot them with our G5s. So it’s not just a question of on paper having air superiority, it’s the person behind the machine, it’s that spirit. And it’s that spirit that to me is embodied in this. So I’m actually very proud of this little thing. Only seven of them were ever…K existed for around seven years, so I think there was seven given, because there was one given per year. I know of, I can name maybe five of the people that got it now. So it would be an interesting exercise. And I might be interested in donating it some time to, some… something that cares about it. But to me it’s an important thing because it showed me that even though I’m a Soutie, even though I’m a South African, even though I’m a whitey, and I’m regarded as being a Brit...although I’m not British at all, I actually go back to the Vryburghers, but all these stereotypes suddenly were broken in that award. Interviewer And this award, the physical award, it’s a small bronze statue with a guy who looks like he was an old style Boer with a big beard… Tony A bittereinder Interviewer He’s seen here with his rifle looking, as you say, very contemplative. Tony, I noticed that on the award there’s a little bronze plaque on the front that says in Afrikaans, it’s an award to yourself, it says, Hoof Direktorate Toekenning, 1989, to RM Cronin. But on the back you’ve actually put something different. Tony Yes, you see, the funny thing is the faceless nameless nature of the intelligence operator…in the intelligence world I was known as Roger Mark Cronin. RM Cronin and my force number was 930 6/18, I think it was…I might be wrong but if I remember correctly. And we were faceless and nameless for very good reasons. So here you’re given an award laughs but it’s a faceless and nameless thing. And it’s not as though I can take it now to my office at the CSIR and put it up there because everyone will say, who the hell is this Cronin? Did you steal this award from someone? So I decided to actually correct it, and I got another plaque made up in English…I thought they could have at least given to me in English, I mean, gee whiz, I mean, after all, we were bilingual, but none the less, in their wisdom they gave it to me in Afrikaans and I appreciate that. And I just had it written up at the back, Chief Directorate of covert operations awarded in 1989 with my real name, AR Turton. And the fact that it’s symbolically, I put it on the back of the award, so when you see the award you won’t see that at all. You have to actually pick it up and turn it around. And it also doesn’t have nails in it, you see. 86 It’s just stuck on, it doesn’t have the little nails. Also symbolically because it’s just sort of stuck on there, it’s not a permanent fixture to it you see. So I’m a person that believes in symbolism and that’s my little symbolism. It used to be kept in the safe here and it had lots of dust on it, and I decided that I’m going to take the dust off and put it out. It was very significant that when you came here the other day, my wife had put it away. I keep putting it here and my wife had put it away, because this is part of the covert nature of our life, and it’s just so deeply engrained that there must be no connection. And I said to her, no, I’m going to pull it out. Because, hey, I’m proud of it. There were only seven of these given, gee, why shouldn’t I be proud of it? We’ve got nothing else left at the end of the day, we’re sort of senile old farts now. and all we can do is we can sit with a quivering lip and think back to the good old days when our capabilities were better than they are now. And hey, that’s…I gave a huge piece of my life for that silly little pieced of bronze and I’m actually deeply proud of it. While we’re talking about that, can I also then just show you this other thing, this bittereinde medal. Because once again, the same kind of imagery, if you look there, going back to the corporate culture within K, what we’d learned from the Israelis particularly, was this whole notion of identity. You must have a sense of identity. Because you’re asking your operators to go and do extraordinary things against all the odds, and very often they are only motivated by that thing burning inside their hearts. So what is that thing? How can you ignite that thing inside there? So this was very much Mike Kuhn’s kind of approach and in my book I talk about the fact that when the Israeli paratroopers go their wings, to this day they go to Mossada, and the significance is that Mossada fell in the Roman times, and the Israeli paratroopers, when they get their wings pinned to their chest, take an oath at Mossada that Mossada will not fall again. So the question was, what imagery can we use in South Africa to invoke that sense of belonging and that sense of identity. And the have got a very strong sense of identity in a way, it’s also very fractured but quite strong in a way, and if you yourself did your National Service and you yourself went to Lohatla, and at Lohatla you probably participated in a Klipstapling. I don’t know if you ever did a Klipstapling? Interviewer No, I didn’t…but I’m aware of what the… Tony Now the Klipstapling goes back to…just down the road here there’s a Paardekraal monument. And the Paardekraal monument was when all the different Boer leaders came together and they put stones into a cairn and they made an oath at that point in time. So it’s deeply imbued in culture…in the Afrikaaner cultural psyche. So the question of am I an Afrikaaner or am I not? And I’ve now come to realise that I’m way more Afrikaaner than I am English. And in fact I’m an African more than anything else…but, the reason why this medal was given was, it’s the bittereinde medal, and it’s the same image that guy there, he’s one of the bittereindes, these are the guys at the end of the Boer 87 war, you got the hensoppers, the guys that gave up. The Jannie Smuts and they sort of defected to the other side. The notion of defection and…once again. And then the bitter einderers that fought to the bitter end. And we were asked to take this oath, this bitter einde oath, and when you took your oath, at the end of your training, you had now been tested into your unit and you were now part of this group, you were then given this award. So this is the one little medal that all the covert…all the K guys get, nobody else in the service got. So your internal service people would never have had that. Only the K people got these medals. And I would guess there are probably 120, maybe 140, maybe 150 out there. And it was given to you at the end of your training period. So you took an oath at the time. And that became a very interesting oath because later on when we now start talking peace to the enemy, are you betraying your oath? Interviewer Well that was very interesting because I know the history of the Boer War relatively well and the whole concept of a bittereinde was almost a contradiction of what you believed you were doing way back…well many years later in the late eighties. You wanted to talk peace, you even got into trouble for talking peace in such a of forthright way. So it’s almost a contradiction. Tony Yes. It is a contradiction and I think that’s the question of our society. Isn’t our society filled with contradictions? That is what makes South African society so rich. You see I am an African, I am not a Boer, I’m not a Brit, I’m not a white, I am an African! That’s what I am. And I will negotiate with any one of them, I don’t give two hoots. That’s what I am. And in fact I learned this from the PAC political commissar, one of the political commissars, a guy called Peace Vilikazi. It was a very ironic name for this guy. And when I mentioned I was in one of the negotiating teams, and in the negotiating teams of course you meet your enemy face to face now for the first time as equals. And you look at these guys and think, these guys are maybe going to be my masters soon, so what do we do now? And at that point in time there was this fellow…whats name now, Saki Macozoma he was out in the media right now, toy-toying and calling, “one settler, one bullet!’ And then came out the thing, “one settler, two bullets!” Interviewer Wasn’t that Peter Mokaba? Tony Peter Mokaba also, yes. But Saki, Saki also. Yes, Peter Mokaba he was also doing that. But Saki Macozoma was also talking the same sort of language. And this disturbed me and I spoke to old Peace Vilikazi one day, I said, hey my brother, my Comrade Peace…this thing about Africans, what’s an African? Am I an African or not? He said, no you’ll know if you’re an African. I said, do you view me as an African? He said, your heart will tell you what you are. And then I said to him, what’s this thing about ‘one settler, two bullets? What do you believe? He said, no, it’s a waste of one good bullet, he said. laughs So I got to know these guys quite well and in fact I actually developed a very profound 88 respect for the PAC guys because I think that they had quite a strong sense of identity even though they’ve lost it completely now. They’re no longer really a relevant force. But it was just a very turbulent and interesting time. And the question of…you asked me about the bitter einde stuff, well the bitter einde stuff you see, here you take an oath, is an oath a good thing or a bad thing? Is it clever or stupid? It’s actually stupid at the end of the day. It serves its purpose. It serves its purpose at a moment in historic time when you have to mobilise people to do something that they otherwise wouldn’t have done. So the oath that was taken at the Battle of Blood River ironically wasn’t even taken then, it was sort of glorified later on when Afrikaners started uniting and forming this thing called , which excluded me. I didn’t feel part of that at all. But an oath plays a role. And ultimately you see we ask this big question now, was I just following orders? And that’s such a bankrupt excuse. In my book I take full responsibility for everything that I’ve ever done, because I’m a rational thinking human being. And yes, I’m disciplined, and yes, any soldier or anyone working under orders has to follow orders. But I do not believe for a minute that there is no role, there’s no space, in that for your own interpretation. So I’ve always followed my conscience. That thin grey line I spoke about, I followed my conscience. And at a point in time I made an assessment in my head, I said, you know something, we’ve got tactical nuclear weapons, we’ve got Ratels, we’ve got Rooivalke, we’ve got Rooikatte coming out, we’ve got pretty good soldiers, we can fight ourselves until we’re like punch drunk heavy weight boxers that are just beating the crap out of each other. We can inflict brain damage on each other and who’s going to win in the end? Is it necessary? What is this notion of winning and losing? Why are we so competitive in South Africa? Why do we put such pressure on our kids at school to win the race, to be the first in class? Because we’re a nation under threat. We’re a nation at risk. And because we’re at risk we push our people to destruction, and I came to the conclusion we’re all losers. I came to the conclusion that we are all victims. Every single one of us, black, white, pink or green, we’re all victims. And that’s why Shaking Hands with Billy, it’s about learning, it’s about realising that Joe Slovo isn’t the great big evil. When I looked at his head, he didn’t have scars where the two horns had fallen off, and he didn’t have a tail. Actually Joe Slovo was in fact one of the better ministers that we had. laughs Actually Joe Slovo did quite a lot of good stuff. So it’s that learning, that process of learning. And when you learn, you outgrow your ideology, you outgrow that simplistic thing, this bitter einde oath. So was it wrong for us to go and sit down and think the unthinkable? No. I think that is what was expected of us. If we didn’t think the unthinkable we would have let ourselves down as people, we would have let our country down. We would have failed in our mission as intelligence operators. We would have failed more dismally. And that’s the tragic because today we don’t have that capacity for free thought anymore. We’re not questioning like that anymore. 89 So, ultimately when I decided to move on from the bitter einde oath, I thought that the only thing that can guide me is my integrity. And my integrity says, that we can kill each other a hundred different ways, but you know it takes a truly great person to transcend that hatred. If everyone wants an eye for an eye, it was Kofi Annan that said, you end up with a nation of blind people. Laughs So we need people with vision and we’ve got to transcend that. So we’ve got to learn ultimately how…our challenge is…how do we convert the bitterness of the struggle into a place where the moral high ground proclaimed by the ANC was a non racial democracy where everyone is equal before the law. Where everyone has the right to develop to their full potential. Now we’re all winners. The fact that we negotiated ourselves, the fact that we were the first and only nation on this planet to ever voluntarily relinquish all nuclear weapons, makes South Africa a country of great people. Every one of us. That’s everyone walking in Soweto, everyone down in Gugulethu, everyone in KwaZulu-Natal, every whitey, no matter how angry they might be in their heart, we’re a nation of winners. And to me that was the dream. And you couldn’t meet that dream, you couldn’t meet that aspiration if you tied yourself into this oath, this bitter einde oath, like the Mau-Mau oath. It served a purpose and we outgrew it. Interviewer If you’d heard yourselves…I mean this as a hypothetical question…but would you have held similar views to what you’ve just expounded back in 1989 when Mandela hadn’t been released yet but it was quite clear to you guys in the know that something big, something momentous, was about to happen? Tony Ok, let’s rewind to that time, because I think we must go back sequentially to that time now. We’ve dealt with…I’ll deal with that question now, just remind me at the end if I haven’t dealt with it properly, but…ok we’re going back now in time to the peace process now in Angola has happened, it’s a reality. We’ve realised now that the Cold War is coming to an end but we’re not quite certain. The Cold War is still an unknown entity ok. We think it’s coming to an end, we haven’t got hard core verification of it, and we’re back now…I’m pulled back out of all this heavy stuff, this is like a tumbleweed going in front of the wind, just like really fast and really hard and a little bit battered and bruised, a little bit confused in a way, elated mixture of emotions. And then all of a sudden I get pulled in one day, I’m now back working on the ANC, SACP desk, back in K32, and we’ve got our Hardekool going…Spaghetti, now called Hardekool at this stage, and this production’s coming through thick and fast. So thick that we cannot process it. I mean, the production was unbelievable. We didn’t have the people to process the intelligence. Here we were getting…in those days there was a lot of talk within the London ANC…they would have their monthly meetings…I forget what they called them, sort of RPC meetings, something like that, I forget what they were called. But they would have these meetings and before the meetings the guys would talk to each 90 other and they would talk on the telephones and we’d had all the phones covered. And it was very interesting at the Communist Party, SACP…was trying to isolate certain of the Nationalist leaders in the ANC. And there was a lot of negotiation before and about what to do at the next meeting and what position to take and we got a profound understanding then of this whole two stage revolution and who was who in the zoo, what the internal factions were. And of course part of this now, in those days the first electronic banking started coming out, and we didn’t have it in South Africa yet but they had it in places like Britain and Europe and Germany, etc. And all of a sudden now these people started transferring money over the telephone. laughs So we got access to bank accounts. And then we got access to, at personal level, who’s having a love affair with who, and gee man, that’s a den of iniquity that place. It seems to me that the life of an exile is full of intrigue, and one of them is this whole personal, romance, sexual, adventure side of things. So who’s busy screwing who, and who’s making babies with who, it’s just amazing when you get into that level. Interviewer And that wasn’t just in London, that was in… Tony All over. All over the show. But I think that happens with exiled communities. They just live in this little world of theirs and I think part of the ANC mentality was remember that they were always under threat of being infiltrated so especially if white people came in they would always test them. And part of the testing was always the sexual test. Are you prepared to sleep with so and so? So if you don’t pass that test you don’t make it. When you’re handling agents it’s a thing you’ve got to deal with as well, because we actually had a very tragic situation where one of our very robust agents had to pass that test. And he went and he slept with a woman and he reported it back to us and he contracted HIV. And later on we had this very big moral dilemma, what do we do with this guy, because he actually did this in the line of duty and how do we treat that? So that is a moral dilemma. It’s a very difficult, very complex thing and I don’t know how to deal with it. But it’s an important issue. So, anyhow we’re now running Hardekool flat out. And we’re starting to develop spread sheets of things of who’s doing what and who’s linked into which faction, etc. And one day I get called in to the office…my book I refer to the guy called JR. The doings of the Ewings and JR. JR calls me into the office and he says there’s a thing that’s been established it’s called the Special Work Group and I’m now the liaison officer from K32 in the Special Work Group. And we must have our kick off meeting. So we go to a safe house on the far side of Pretoria. It was a safe house that was an old K2 safe house that had been given to us near the…Wonderboom airport, out in that kind of area, far, far, part of Pretoria. And of course I was thrilled, because the funny thing as an operator you get given a motor car and I was on a certain system where you pay for the motor car by using it, and then the car becomes yours at the end. So the more official kilos that you can ride, laughs the 91 quicker the car gets paid off. So you get this sort of kilo chase. It’s quite funny, it’s got a little sub story, very mundane and silly sub story, but I was riding my car, got lots of kilos and I was like really thrilled laughs There was this thing called AWK, amptelike woening kantoor, and whenever you were posted to a new unit, the first journey you had to make, it had to be audited. There was no riding around the block ever. It had to be audited. And that was your Amptelike Woning Kantoor. Interviewer Ok, so they had it on record that you were 17.4 kilometres [from the office], that’s what it was. Tony Yes, and they would only give you a maximum of 50 Amptelike Woning Kantoor, and anything more than that was for your own pocket. So, your AWK, you could not claim that as official. But there was a certain element that was official and that had to be auditable. But the fact that we were far away meant that anything that you had to do operationally, of course you had to just maybe drive a hundred kilos more than you would have, means that your car’s paid off that much faster. You know, it’s a mundane little story but it’s by the way. And in this Special Work Group it was an odd bunch of people that were put together. We were there under the operational command of old Koos Daisy, him of Operation Daisy fame. And Koos Daisy was an asthmatic and he was terrorised by Mike Kuhn, he was just terrified of Mike Kuhn. And I attended many meetings where Mike Kuhn would start, for some or other reason, just to assert his authority, he would just create a little bit of uncertainty amongst these senior officers. And old Koos Daisy would always be one of his victims, and Mike would just go for him knowing how he’s going to react, and old Koos Daisy would reach into his pocket and pull out his little asthma pump. Then you would know that Koos is now under pressure. But Koos was an honourable man, I really had a very good regard for Koos, he was an honourable good, good, good man. I liked Koos a lot. Lots of experience, an ex Security Policeman, lots and lots of experience in the field. And he would listen and he would give guidance to the younger guys. And he was the sort of overall commander, and then under him we had a guy called JEC…I refer to him in my book as JEC. Now JEC was most probably the most decorated operator we had. Controversial fellow in many ways, you can’t be a good operator without being controversial. And what JEC had was just this incredible chutzpah. He had balls this guy. He would go…the fact that he was under surveillance overseas no problem, he would go and do it. Just go back. I mean, I don’t know if he was either stupid or if he was just enormously brave but I mean, JEC was just a hell of a guy. I can only say that I salute JEC, although I disagreed with him fundamentally and in many, many ways. But he was the sort of tactical commander. And then underneath him we had a guy…I think I refer to him as CC, or KC…Callie his name was. And Callie was just under him, and Callie was an interesting guy because he’d spent many years out in the…but in deep Africa. deep, deep Africa doing intelligence stuff. But he 92 was not a covert guy. He was in that sort of quasi diplomatic African experience where we didn’t have diplomatic relations with many countries but we had intelligence…declared intelligence people in their country, and they became the de facto of foreign affairs link between the presidents. So he was known to the presidents, it was know that he was a South African intelligence guy. So he was a declared member but he had this enormous experience, old Callie did. And then underneath him now we had all the different liaison officers of which I was one. And we were given a task, and the task was to start doing a high level analysis of the ANC, SACP in exile. And of course because I was running Spaghetti, now called Hardekool, in fact it was at this time I think that it changed to Hardekool, because suddenly this became an asset of great, great, great value. And we started processing all of these things now. And we started…I’ll never forget my office, I had a piece of paper, because I’m an analytical person, I put out a matrix and we said, right, who are the top guys that we know? Thabo Mbeki was one of them. Nelson Mandela was one of them. Joe Nhlanhla, Joe Slovo, all of these guys. So where do they fit in because you’ve got the ANC, and you’ve got the SACP. So we developed this matrix. And the matrix showed all the different positions that each person held. And that grew from a piece of paper…and I’m very, very sorry at the end, we had a thing called re-evaluation and we shredded everything. I’m so sorry that I shredded that piece of paper because that piece of paper eventually took up my whole wall in my office, and because of the security nature of what we were doing, we would never leave anything in the office overnight. So you have to take it down and put it in the safe and come back the next day and put it up again. You never left anything in your office, ever, because of possible penetration at night. So anyway, be that as it may, we started doing this analysis. And what was very significant about the Special Work Group was, that we were given very high level clearance. It had never happened before. Never, never, never, never had it happened before that we were in the field, in a superior position to the Security Police. Never happened! So I’ll never forget, I was now given a task, and because we had this matrix now and we were now tracking down people. We said, right, let’s just take Joe Nhlanhla, as a key guy. Who knows Joe Nhlanhla? How are we going to pick up leads to Joe Nhlanhla? We now want to figure out, where, what how. So now we go draw the files on Joe Nhlanhla and we find out that Joe Nhlanhla knew Joe Bloggs twenty years ago. And Joe Bloggs is still here. So let’s go and pick up Joe Bloggs. So now we get tasked every day. Go and find out so and so and so. I was given a task and I had to go and track down a guy…I won’t mention his name…it wasn’t for Joe Nhlanhla, it was some other access that he had…and in my book I’ve given him the name of Cavalier. That wasn’t his real name, we would always work on code names. So anyhow, I was given old Cavalier to go and pick up. So I started, now you’re in the field, now you go out, and my first port of call was…this guy was active on a certain part of the Witwatersrand. So you’d go 93 and…I would always start with the belief that you’ve got to breathe in the air that these people breathe in. So you’ve got to go to where they were. So the last known address. This guy was in exile now but he had spent a lot of time in the Witwatersrand but we could get access to him and the idea was, can we get access to that person to spring us into the next level now? So, I was now breathing the air of this guy’s last known residence, started out in Hillbrow, and then from Hillbrow, you breathe the air, ok, the flat looks like this, and he must have been like that, you start building up a picture in your head of what the person’s like. Then you knock on the door and you ask people questions. You can’t blow it so you can’t…you’ve got to invent reasons why you’re asking the question, because you don’t want to say, listen we’re busy with a high level intelligence investigation, you know. We’re about to release Mandela, blah, blah, blah, we can’t say that. So very exciting operational stuff in a way. And then I’ll never forget I got to a point now where suddenly it took me out to one of the extreme sort of east west rand type of place, and all of a sudden we reached a dead end and a decision was made now I must go now and draw this guy’s file at Security Police. So laughs now Security Police had always taken a very dim view of us, and here all of a sudden I go in and I go to Security Police headquarters and say, listen who I am, I’ve come to draw Joe Bloggs’ file. Geez, the guy went ballistic. He just, it can’t be done. I said, listen, I’m here on instructions, orders, please here’s the telephone number, verify this, but I want the file. I’m entitled to that file. And anyhow a great big altercation happens within the Security Police fraternity and this poor little sergeant goes and calls somebody else and eventually it goes up to the major or whoever it was, I don’t know who it was. And it goes up to some senior officer and he gets all red in the face and pulls me in his office and explains why I can’t do it. And I said, please just make this phone call. So he makes the phone call, and of course this was all sanctioned from the top. This was sanctioned on the very highest level. And this is a big unknown now, I mean, I still haven’t figured this out to this day, what was the highest level of sanctioning because suddenly when this Security Police had made that phone call, he just gave me the file. He gave me a young warrant officer and this warrant officer was tasked to be my liaison and I could go into the archives and I could draw any file I wanted. And just amazing, absolutely just like the seas had parted. And from there we started picking up these names and now we started tracking them overseas. Now that they’ve gone overseas now we started hunting these guys. And we followed up on Cavalier and we went and we recruited him. And we did a whole bunch of recruits. We were aggressive in those days, very aggressive recruiting. And we went out there and we just recruited left, right and centre. And that’s where the whole JEC came because he was a very good recruiter. So I would do the ground work here, pick up the guy’s profile and then he would go and recruit. And then the guys would come back to me to handle. And from this we started developing this new network. And of 94 course it then very soon became clear to me that what we were actually doing was we were doing a strategic assessment on the ANC, SACP with a view to negotiations. And what I didn’t know at the time, which I’ve subsequently come to know now, was that was the time that Neil Barnard was talking to Madiba. So part of the action then was, this whole thing about pulling Madiba off Robben Island, put him to Pollsmoor, the sole purpose of which was that Barnard could have direct access to him without drawing attention because to go to Robben Island you had to go on the ferry, and you would have to sign on and off and everyone knew your comings and goings, but Pollsmoor was different. So that was one of the big drivers of the Pollsmoor. But during that time we were doing all these very aggressive investigations, and one of the guys I had the privilege of operating with there was a guy called IAO. In my book I call him IA. And IA was killed in action. He was one of the few guys that I can remember. And I would like IA to be honoured because…sorry… emotional Interviewer Do you want to take a break for a while? Tony IA was a hell of a guy. He was…I’ll just take a break… IA was a coloured guy, and he worked with another black operator, also very good. Two very good operators. And what I learned about IA was, although he was a coloured guy, he was the blackest person I’ve ever met in my life. But he was so self confident about who he was and what he was. And we would go out often on operations, and you know, you go to the pub afterwards and what have you, and he would always have this thing, he would start an altercation in public between this very, very black guy and a white guy. He would put you on the spot. And he would sort of start this…he would just rub this racial thing up, but he would not do it in a malicious or vindictive way. But he would always make other people around him feel very uncomfortable about this whole racial thing. But IA was such a lovely man. That guy had balls, I tell you, he had serious balls. Because of his blackness, because of his technical skill, he was very good at penetrations, he could penetrate any building anywhere. And he would plant bugs anywhere. And IA was deployed into some of the front line states in Africa on very, very dangerous missions. Him and this black guy, they were put in as two man teams very often. And they would spend weeks on end at the sharpest of edges, absolute sharpest of edges in the community somewhere out there, you name it. But in this community and getting technical access. And he was compromised during one of these operations and he was shot, he was murdered...he was killed I action, not murdered. He was killed in action. And the sad thing is, I don’t think the service has ever acknowledged him. And I think maybe one of the sensitive things that have come out of this is the fact that I don’t know how his widow was looked after, I have no idea. I think his widow has a right to be looked after. And I think that Ivan’s story should be told. I don’t know much more about Ivan’s story than what I’ve told. All I can say is that…he was a tremendous role model, he was just a hell of an operator, 95 he was a guy that would go into the deepest, darkest of places, and you would know that he would be there. You would know that he was rock solid. This guy was like the Rock of Gibraltar. So buddy, I just want to say to you that we miss you. And I’ve not done justice to your story (emotional). But I think the nation owes you something. Ironically some of the nation would see him as a traitor. I don’t think he was a traitor at all. And that was in many ways this is what intelligence was about because you see what intelligence did was it established the link between factions that were at war and where you could carry on killing each other for ever, but the intelligence guys that had the bravery, that had the guts to go in, actually established that bridge, and they got the enemies to talk to each other and ultimately it was those enemies that negotiated a settlement. So Ivan, buddy, we owe it to you. I often think about you and I think that this project, if nothing else, has given you a little place in our history, so…that’s all I can say about Ivan. (Emotional) Break Thanks for that break. You know, I think, if we want to become mature as a nation, we’ve got to acknowledge these dark and deep things, and some of them are bad and some of them are good. But we’ve got to acknowledge our dead. Irrespective of their colour, irrespective of their political ideology, and irrespective of what they did, they were all human beings. I think where the CIA has got it right is they’ve got this wall of remembrance of all the operators killed in action, and some of them are just a star there or something like that, you know. But I don’t know if we can ever put the name of these guys out there. We never lost many people. Most of our victims were psychological, severe psychological damage. In fact of all the people we ever deployed into field, into theatre, I think Ivan was the only one that I’m aware of that was killed in action. I’m not aware of…others were captured. We had this very sad and sorry case of Aubrey Welkin who was captured, and brutally, brutally, brutally treated. And the sad thing about his story was that he was sold out by his own people. But that’s another story, we’ll talk about that…that’s actually not NI, that was actually SAS, that’s the post ’94 period. A sensitive story but…Aubrey Welkin also deserves to have his voice heard, because…I doubt if he’ll talk because he’s just so severely psychologically damaged, but…I think this is the damage. The damage has been done, the fact that these people are silent and faceless and nameless, and the fact that they are stigmatised by the Dirk Coetzees and this kind of thing…the Joe Versters and…these are the people that have stigmatised us, and none of us were ever like Dirk Coetzee or Craig Williamson. I can only say that I have great pity for those people. I can only say that there but for the grace of god go I, because I would never allow myself…I’ve always applied my mind, I’ve always applied my integrity and I think that was what the NI people did, they applied their integrity. I think NI people, at the end of the day, if you had to summarise it in one word, was integrity. These people had integrity. And when all else is taken away from you, well one thing you still have is your integrity. You either give it away, but it can’t be taken away. So I think to me, 96 that’s what it’s all about, it’s about integrity. Interviewer And integrity means not crossing that thin grey line that you refer to all the time. Tony All of the above, and part of integrity is not obeying orders when the order is a stupid order. Part of integrity is just saying, this is right and this is wrong. And you know, the sad thing is that many of these guys have paid such a price and we’ve not heard their voice. But anyhow, I think we’re digressing now, we were talking now about the Special Work Group. Ok, what the Special Work Group then started doing was, suddenly there was a new energy in the service, and the Special Work Group was then abandoned, the plug was pulled. And the people that were involved…I would guess…how many were involved in the Special Work Group? Less than ten. Less than ten people were in the know in the Special Work Group. And what the Special Work Group that was… actually it’s set in motion, an irreversible part of our history, and that was of course, the desire to talk. Talks about talks. And…part of the big…the one question that we asked always was Thabo Mbeki. Who is this guy Thabo Mbeki? Son of Govan Mbeki. An intellectual, graduate of Economics from, I think, University of Sussex if I remember. An intellectual erudite man. His father was a member of the Communist Party, we know that, Govan Mbeki. We know that Thabo Mbeki was originally a member of the Communist Party and then we know that he was censured, he was actually kicked out of the Communist Party. And we know that…well in the paranoia of the time, the question was, is this very clever manoeuvring that they’re trying to conceal his Communist Party roots or is it because he’s intellectually outgrown the Communist Party? I think the latter. Now, at the time we didn’t know. But Thabo Mbeki was certainly targeted as one of the key people. And another guy that was targeted of course was Joe Slovo, absolute key player, no question of doubt about it. Nelson Mandela, no question of doubt about it, this was clearly a key guy. And Chris Hani. And Chris Hani, if I can just dwell for a short moment, I think Chris Hani was just a remarkable leader. I think we lost such a good person in the assassination of Chris Hani, and I think as a nation we cannot replace that calibre of leadership because right now, the crisis we have in South Africa is a crisis of leadership. And that crisis of leadership…we just don’t have good leaders. The people that we have, have been corrupted by money, corrupted by power, and they’ve just lost their desire to lead. And people want leaders, we’re going into this uncertain future, we want someone to say it’s going to be good for us, and it’s going to be better, and we’re going north and not south. And Chris Hani, I think, would have played that role. So these were the guys, there were a handful, and of course Ronnie Kasrils, he played a very prominent role in our targeting and we did a lot of aggressive operations around Ronnie. Ronnie himself was an operator par excellence. Ronnie was probably one of the better of their operators. Joe was an excellent operator, no question of doubt about that. There was 97 always talk that Joe was a colonel in the KGB…this is open to discussion, I don’t know if we can verify that 100% certain. But certainly there was a strong Soviet connection there. Certainly all these senior guys were trained in Moscow and the Soviet Union etc. Another guy that played quite a big role was of course Tokyo Sexwale, his name came up. And the bottom line is we had this great big list of paper, and this list was about people, and it was about factions, which factions where and we were looking for that split that we saw in the Cuban and in the Angolan government. Was there a split? Could we get into that split and could we talk? And this brings us to this notion of power. Power of…quite a lot of the work that I do now in the field of water source management, deals with this issue of power. And power as ‘pouvoir’, power as ‘puissance’. Power as ‘puissance’ is might, military power. And what NI did, they were masters at power, at ‘pouvoir’. ‘Pouvoir’ is engagement. The power of engagement. The power of sitting down and talking it out and sitting it down…you can even steer the final outcome in your favour through ‘pouvoir’. But you can’t through ‘puissance’. ‘puissance’ you break and you kill and you dominate. ‘pouvoir’ you engage, you negotiate, you share power, you share authorities, you share ideas, it’s a very liberal, very enlightened form of power. And I bought totally into the ‘pouvoir’ school. of thought. And of course K was deeply into it…and my criticism that I have with Riaan Labuschagne, is Riaan was just so stupid. He had a seven year degree, and he could speak Greek or Latin or whatever, but he couldn’t understand ‘pouvoir’ and ‘puissance’. He just couldn’t understand that. He thought you must go and kick asses and break heads. It’s just not what it’s about. So not what it’s about. So at the end of the day, a couple of interesting things happened, and the one interesting thing now was that, it became clear to me that these negotiations were ongoing now with Mandela. Interviewer Now this is about ‘89ish? Tony Yes, yes, at that time I was deeply, deeply, deeply…I was so excited by that, I woke up every morning and I’ve never worked in my entire life for a salary. I do not work for a salary, I never have worked for a salary, I work because I’m committed. And I’ve ever been more committed than that time. Because there was this dream, here we could come out of this death and destruction. We’d been locked for 350 years in this cycle of violence. We could now end this cycle of violence and we could suddenly have a brighter future. So, with this Madiba talk going on now, a very interesting special operation was launched. And that is what I call this Dakar Safari. And the Dakar Safari came out in part from that Special Work Group. It was very interesting working in the Special Work Group because when we went back to our respective units, in my case to K32, people had heard about the Special Work Group but they didn’t know what it was about, and we never spoke about it. This compartmentation was total. It was quite funny, because once again, a few of us were in a position where we knew a little bit more than others but we couldn’t talk 98 about it. And of course a lot of guys would come and try and sort of pick your brains, but there was a cultural element in the intelligence community where you just don’t ask questions. And if you do ask questions people start mistrusting you. So trust is a very, very important element. END OF SIDE A (counter at 554) SIDE B Tony So all of a sudden the political talks were secret, there was trust being built between Madiba and Barnard. Mike Louw was brought in at that stage. Mike Louw had some of the talks with Barnard, and Mike Louw is an interesting character. He’s in many ways a grey, sort of kind of accountant kind of guy. He’s not a charismatic man, but funnily enough neither is Neil Barnard. They’re both intelligent people. Of the two I would guess that Barnard is probably more intelligent than Louw, but none of them are charismatic. Both of them shy away from any public profile, and they’re both profound people. And you needed that kind of grey entity, that non presence kind of person. Anyhow, I’ve been to medal parades where Barnard would give me commendation. And he wouldn’t look at you in the eye. Barnard would never look at you. He would talk up here, he would talk up in the corner and he would have this far away look in his eyes, and he was looking at something far in the future and he would like talking in that very humdrum uninspiring speech of his, but inside there was an incredibly nimble mind. And it became clear…well looking back with hindsight now, at the time it wasn’t that clear…but now to me with hindsight it was very clear that the negotiations had reached a point between Louw and Barnard and Mandela, that a very important threshold had to now be crossed. And that threshold involved a number of elements. The first element was, how do we get bigger buy-in? Who do we buy in with? Now on the statutory force side PW was in power and PW was not interested in this stuff. PW saw this as cowardice, as weakness, PW was not interested. The ‘good news’ in inverted commas is that PW’s health was going. So it was very clear that PW was not going to be around for much longer. So, I think looking back with hindsight now, there was this game being played, waiting for this window of opportunity to open up. On the ANC side of course, how do you cascade it out now from Madiba into the broader ANC, SACP leadership? I mean, were the exiles actually in charge? Or were the Robben Islanders in charge? Interviewer That’s a good question, because when you mentioned all these names, Mandela was still in prison, Sexwale was a Robben Islander, the others were all exiles. Did you draw anybody from the internals into your…? Tony I was never party in a face to face way in those negotiations. In all of these things I’ve been a faceless, nameless guy in the background. I’ve never been direct party…the only negotiations I was involved in was later on the more technical negotiations 99 about the establishment of a new intelligence dispensation under democracy, the establishment of the new covert operations capability, that SAS still has in vestiges of today. And the negotiations around what the intelligence law should be, how we should conduct ourselves under democracy, the establishment of the standard operational procedures around the oversight of intelligence. So, I’m an expert on that, I can talk a great length on that but no, I was never really a front end, I was always the back end of these things. I was always in the engine room, I was never the captain of the ship. Interviewer Sure I understand that, but at that time you were involved in the broader gathering of understanding of these individuals. At the same time you mentioned a question; was the power with the exiles or was the power with the Robben Islanders? Was there a question of how much power rests with the internals? Tony Yes. A big question, because of course you must remember that time…in my book I’ve got this time line at the back, and if you see the things that are happening in that time line, there was this little thing called Rolling Mass Action. Laughs And Rolling Mass Action was taking place around the country. And there was this little funny thing called…the UDF. And UDF suddenly had the power. Did the ANC actually have it or was it the UDF? So suddenly, aah, times of great uncertainty. Who do we talk to? Who do we talk to? And coming out of that now was the need to cross this threshold. So from the government’s side we had to cross it into more areas of elite decision making, which meant going into the military, it meant going into other people, but that was difficult at the time. So it was a closed NIS thing still. The president still hadn’t bought into this idea. It was being conducted…I don’t know to what extent…it was being conducted with the ignorance of PW. But certainly I was never direct party to those talks, but I suspect that PW didn’t really know all this stuff. And you know the funny thing is, look at Mugabe today. Mugabe only hears the intelligence he wants to hear. He has terrified his intelligence officers to the point that they will only tell him what he wants to hear. So what he hears and the way he acts is what he thinks to be real. And of course PW was the same. And that’s once again, gets back to the greatness of Barnard. Barnard understood that. And Barnard would not feed lies to him, but just wouldn’t necessarily tell him everything that he would simply filter out anyhow. So Barnard would tell him what he needed to know, but at the end of the day he was building this bigger vision, and that bigger vision was when the window opens, how do we move through it? When we open the door, how do we now suddenly go forward into a new set of dynamic interactions to find a new level of equilibrium? Once we cross the threshold it’s a new equilibrium. And he immediately understood that in the fluidity of the moment we need to find the dynamics, the drivers, to understand those things so that we can get to a new level of stable equilibrium. He was always into the sort of…this instability bringing stability. so the threshold with the ANC was an important 100 one. Are these guys willing to talk? And of course that hatched this operation now. And this operation I think, a serious scholar…I challenge any serious scholar to analyse this stuff because I think it was actually world class operational planning. And that was what I call this Dakar Safari. And the Dakar Safari was a really, really brazen intelligence operation. It was an out and out an intelligence operation. And you look at that time, who was involved in this thing? I mean, there was Van Zyl Slabbert, he was one. There was a rugby player, there was a wine farmer, there was a whole bunch of people. Were they in the know? No, none of them. There were a handful of them in the know. And one of the guys that was in the know was Wimpie de Klerk. And Wimpie de Klerk I’ve mentioned in my book by name because he has come out publicly. I was one day sitting putting petrol in my car, Talk Radio 702 was on, and there was Wimpie de Klerk being interviewed. And I actually phoned in and I spoke to Wimpie on 702, and I admired the fact that Wimpie acknowledged the fact that he played a big role. So Wimpie was in the know. Interviewer Was it Wimpie de Klerk or Willie Esterhuyse? Tony Sorry, sorry, Willie Esterhuyse. Not Wimpie de Klerk, Willie Esterhuyse. Please, correct that, my Alzheimers is kicking in again. Yes, Willie Esterhuyse, professor of Philosophy at Stellenbosch University. And he’s had the courage to come out and say it. So I admire him for that and I haven’t betrayed anything there. So there were sort of one or two of these guys that were in the know. They were on the intelligence pay roll. They were…I don’t know if he ever accepted money or not, that I can’t say, but they were part of the plan. They were witting in the sense that they knew that there were intelligence interests. Now what was the purpose of that operation? The purpose was very simple. We did not want to gather intelligence about the individuals, we couldn’t care two hoots about them because we knew about them anyhow. What we wanted to do was two things. we wanted to know was the ANC in exile willing to talk, yes or no? And number two, more importantly, what did the white constituency back home think about talking to the ANC? That was really the big question. We could continue still with the ANC in private and what have you, we could engage them in any other way, but this was a litmus test, and I think that was a really brilliant operation because it was done in such a way that it was...while it was driven by the intelligence community, it had many checks and balances built into it, and lots of deniabilities built and plausible deniability, which is a classic part of intelligence operations. And at the end of the day, it achieved a huge amount of press coverage. People started talking about this, and suddenly it…undemonized the ANC. Remember the ANC were blowing up things, there were the bombs and there was…bad things happening at home. The ANC were considered to be terrorists! 101

Interviewer The state regularly referred to them as such, PW Botha, Pik Botha and so on and so forth? Tony Yes, yes, yes. So in a way it was a face saving device for the ANC as well. And let’s not lose sight of that you see. Remember that in the Bush War in Rhodesia there were…we’ve forgotten about the fact that two civilian airliners were shot down. We’ve forgotten about that! Nowhere is it mentioned. In my writing now I refer to those things. people don’t want to talk about that! the one aircraft that was shot down, half the people survived, and were then bayoneted on the ground. I mean, this is barbarism of the highest possible…this is terrorism, let’s not mince our words about this thing here! But having said that, Barend Strydom did the same. He was also a terrorist. Dirk Coetzee, frankly he was also a terrorist. So it wasn’t the racial thing at all, it’s just that we were in a dirty war. And the dirty war, all sides had a bad image. So we needed to move to a common middle ground, and that common middle ground was important because that enabled all the parties to reinvent themselves in a way that was acceptable to the other. And that’s really in a nutshell what it was about. So, the Dakar Safari allowed that to happen. It allowed the ANC to be seen in a non demonic way. It allowed the public to start thinking about the unthinkable. It allowed the military to suddenly start realising, because at that point in time the military deteriorating rapidly, since the appointment of General Eddie Webster, Special Forces were disintegrating, the CCB was out of control, there were hit squads left, right and centre, we just clearly couldn’t carry on like this. Interviewer That’s Eddie Webb. Tony Sorry, Eddie Webb. General Eddie Webb…just completely lost it from that moment onwards. If you do a time line analysis, you’ll find from that moment onwards things just got out of hand. So clearly we had to talk to different constituencies, but we couldn’t go there as intelligence guys and say, listen, listen to us. We had to work through the media. And remember, this ‘pouvoir’ thing again. This is ‘pouvoir’, now because the early attempt at this was the Info Scandle, where the government bought a couple of newspapers. That was very crude and clumsy. This was another form of the same thing. We were simply setting up the stage, not manipulating at all, we were providing a platform. That’s the important thing. We were providing a platform that could go public, that’s why I’m talking now about it, that’s why…I’m not betraying all the laws of the intelligence service, I’m talking in dignity about part of our history. I’m not betraying any confidences. And by providing that platform, on the one hand it allowed people to engage, but on the other hand we were providing hard core quality intelligence that people could believe. We’re going into the great unknown now. It’s unstable like you cannot believe. And…I mean, I’ll give an example of this. After we negotiate with the Cuban troop withdrawal, and that was all now signed and done and dusted, and the Cubans were going 102 home, etc, then of course Resolution 435 in Namibia was the big issue. So how do we do that? So, the spin-off from that was we withdraw from Namibia, and of course at the last minute SWAPO go and do the most stupid thing of all things. they decide that they’re going to push their forces in, their PLAN fighters, into Namibia, to essentially intimidate the population because they’re uncertain of an elected outcome. What a stupid move! I mean, what an absolutely stupid move. So at that moment in time, there was great uncertainty and the hawks within government wanted to use that opportunity to say, listen, we re-engage, you see, you doves you were wrong. Us, the hawks, we know better. We know, puissance’ we’re going to shoot the crap out of these guys again. And it was NI again, that said, no, no, no, we’ve got it right, this is a surge, it’s not sustainable, in fact for the first time SADF went in…Koevoet actually went in, under command of United Nations laughs And that was all on NI’s intelligence. So at that point in time some of the decision makers, the key ones back in South Africa, trusted NI’s intelligence enough. Imagine had the military side of it prevailed! And they’d re-engaged. Namibia still would not be independent, we would not have negotiated with the ANC, we would not have had CODESA, we would still be in a state of civil war. So these are pivotal moments in the history of a country where profoundly complicated decisions need to made in conditions of great uncertainty, and at that moment in time it’s our quality of the product, it’s the integrity of the process, and it’s the credibility of the organisation that gives. That’s really what it comes down to. So, I think NI had established itself very well, at that stage we were humming, boy we were humming. Almost everything we touched just turned to gold. And things just worked out. Interviewer With the Dakar Safari you say that the vast majority of people were drawn in without any knowledge that NI might have been involved. You say there was a tiny nub of people that did understand. Did NI facilitate the Dakar Safari? Was it an NI idea? Tony Yes, it was an NI idea out and out. And it was absolutely out and out. And it was interestingly enough…you could almost say it was a joint venue because you see, part of the trick, what we’d learned now, let’s quickly rewind the tape…operational experience that we’d learned. One of the things we’d learned was that, people didn’t want to work for an apartheid government. So we had to go along and say, listen Joe Bloggs, I want to talk to you, I’m a BOSS agent, I work for the apartheid state, we kick teeth out of heads, and you know we want you to do to the following. The only guy that works under those conditions is a criminal or an odd person. So we’d become in many ways lepers. You know, we had to operate as lepers, as a pariah state. So what we learned was, and a very sophisticated way of doing what is called either a false flag recruitment or an unwitting recruitment. Now false flag recruitment is when I am NI, you are an agent that we want, but we want you to think that you are working for the British, not the South Africans. Now that’s a false 103 flag, so you know you’re doing intelligence work, but you think you’re working for MI6, or you think you’re working for the CIA. So that’s a false flag recruitment. So you know you’re doing intelligence stuff, and there’s been some brilliant things around that. I mean, one of our South African handlers did just that. And the way he set it up initially was, he met the agent on the front doorstep of laughs the false flag organisation! He just met him there and then they went from there down the road to go and have a beer and take it further. But the fact that he was sort of seen to be at the front doorstep… Interviewer The association was that he’s… Tony That’s it. it’s risky. All these things are risky. So it’s about managing risk. How do you balance up your risk and how do you make a risk threat assessment and manage your way around risk? It’s not gung-ho at all, it’s very carefully calculated and thought through. So, that is the one way, the false flag. The second way is the unwitting. Now I’ll talk about Cavalier. Cavalier was one of our best unwitting agents ever. If you had to go and hold a gun to Cavalier’s head today, he would not admit that he was an intelligence agent, and with good reason because he never knew he was an intelligence agent. Laughs Now that’s an unwitting person. Now unwitting stuff is extremely sophisticated. Very. You’ve really got to have…the agent handler relationship is very, very crucial. Now remember at that time, you have to understand what was happening at that time, and part of that what was happening at the time was big business suddenly realised that hey, you know, business can’t carry on with Rolling Mass Action and Boipatong Massacres and all this kind of stuff anymore. Business must get engaged. And you remember at that point in time there was a gentleman called Clem Sunter and that gentleman suddenly started saying well let’s do some scenario planning. Interviewer That was this high road, low road stuff. Tony Well all that kind of stuff. Now that was all part of the process. So big business got involved. And our challenge was to understand what’s going on out there and say, hey, you know, the Sunter initiative and there was Fleur de Villiers was involved with the gold industry, and then there were the intellectuals at Stellenbosch University were interested and you know suddenly…our challenge was how do we put all these little bits and these ingredients together to cook up a really good stew. That was our job. So, do we nudge it a bit, do we put the foot on the accelerator, do we turn a little bit left here? You know, a lot of this was just chemistry. Understanding the processes and nudging them along the way. So was it entirely an NI creation? Well, I don’t know. Certainly the idea was that we need to cascade it, we need to escalate it, we need to test opinion. We need to engage. We need to engage for a number of reasons, we need to get it away from the ten officers in NI that know about it to the whole of society that knows about it and buys into it. That’s 104 the challenge. Then we’ve got to work through society to brow beat the political leadership to follow. So you’ve got the political leadership that doesn’t want to go! PW doesn’t want to go in that direction! But if you work through to his constituency and his constituency starts putting pressure on PW…I’ve just published a book now called Governance as a Trialogue. Government, society, science and transition, that’s the trialogue, that’s where it comes from. We don’t work as scientists…we don’t work to the decision maker because they don’t listen to us! So we work to the constituency. Laughs And it’s as simple, it’s no great rocket science here. So that’s all we were doing there. And I think it was highly successful because you see, we created a new playing field. And that new playing field for clever, far-sighted leadership, they could see the opportunity. Let’s ask another question. Would it have been morally wrong if we had have sat down with, let’s just say, one of the top leaders and recruited that person? Well of course we tried to do that and some of them we recruited, some of them we didn’t. Some of them we false flagged, some of them we made unwitting. Every leader was of interest to us. So at the end of the day now suddenly there was that big attempt made a short while ago, which was extremely destructive by Mo Shaik, when he tried to get that list of traitors put on the table, who was a police spy, and Bulelani Ngcuka, and all this kind of stuff. Who cares? We were at war and the sides were engaging with each other. Maybe it wasn’t so good if you sold out. If you sold out your people for seven pieces of silver. Well that’s not cool, ok. But if we came to you and said, listen, I’m an intelligence guy, I’m not going to pay you any money, but I want you to facilitate a meeting. We’ve got to talk to you people. Is that dishonourable? I don’t think so at all. That is simply engagement by another means. So, that’s one of the reasons why the decision was made with revaluation to destroy all the records. Because in the hands of an unenlightened public, they would see the record and they would, oh Joe Bloggs now, gee he was a police agent or whatever and therefore was evil! They wouldn’t understand the nuances of it. So a decision was made for better or for worse, the records are gone. And it’s sad and it’s lost. So now we’ve got people like me that remember some of the stuff and we can maybe talk about it, and others maybe will hopefully talk about it. But you know, these decisions were taken against that background. So here we are at the time of he Dakar Safari, we’re suddenly starting to get this overwhelming sort of feedback that things are moving in a direction. So now the intelligence decision is well what do we do now? Because we’ve established that the AMC are willing to talk. We’ve helped Madiba cross his threshold, because he’s now cascaded it out to his leadership. And they kind of brought in different guys – Mac Maharaj had one view and ….and different people had different views. But nonetheless it was being discussed, there was a new game being played. We’ve cascaded it out now to the National Party constituency. The rugby players were involved, the wine farmers were involved, the newspapers were involved. So suddenly it was now sort of 105 more optimistic. A little bit uncertain but still more optimistic. So what do we do now? Is the ANC still a legitimate target? And of course that’s where Operation Vula comes in. Because when Vula comes in suddenly they re-legitimize themselves as targets. Once CODESA had happened, I will state categorically, that once CODESA had happened, they ceased…the ANC and PAC ceased to be legitimate intelligence targets. And that’s why I’m at odds with Labuschagne. Because he then went and penetrated the offices and did stupid things. They were no longer targets. However, where Vula was involved, where these people, a group of maverick operators were now decide…they were second guessing their own leadership, and if they were using the hiatus in discussions to smuggle in weapons, to re-escalate the thing. So Connie Braam, you know there’s that book by Connie Braam. I’ve got great, great, great distrust for the Connie Braams of the world. These are enthusiastic amateurs, these are dangerous people. The Dutch people, the Dutch nation, has got a lot to be held accountable for. Because they were aiding and abetting an insurrection at a time when all parties were seriously talking peace and the Dutch people must take responsibility for that. They mustn’t fob it off and say that it’s…they were also equal parties in this game here. So, of course the Connie Braams of the world became flat-out targets. And with very good reason. So when I…I’m talking about the CODESA period of time, because we’re now building up to the…we’re not quite yet at CODESA, but we’re moving into that direction. Interviewer Yes, Dakar was first… Tony Dakar…there were talks about talks, then of course the intelligence services start disengaging. But before they disengage, there’s an important set of meetings that take place now. Think of this theoretically. Think of this…the sides are at war with each other, they hate each other. There’s hatred and animosity, there’s energy between the two, it’s polarised. Society is polarised. You can sit on the fence, you’re either this or that. you’re in a camp. You can’t be the neutral body of a nobody in the middle. So that’s our job to try and get that. Part of our task is to get that. But of course part of our task is to get these two polarised sides to talk to each other. So we start channelling information, we start…at some point in time we’re going to feed them both directions. That happens. That happens. But later on. Ok. Then, we now create this platform and we’ve got this vision. PW is still in command so we can’t quite do it yet. FW is kind of in the wings, we’re not quite sure he’s going to be the next guy, it could be anybody. So we don’t quite know, we can’t predict with a high level of accuracy what’s going to happen out of that. And we’re now sort of moving into a new dispensation. And in that new dispensation we’ve got to start exploring new things. And part of this now is we have symbolically gone to them and we’ve shown our throat. Like a wolf. Have you ever seen wolves behave, behaviour…? 106

Interviewer Yes, the interaction, it’s a sign of saying I’m not at war with you. Tony Ok, we’ve gone at them submissively and we now send a mission, Mike Louw, I think, was in command of that mission, I wasn’t on that mission so I don’t know you have to talk to Mike Louw. But from what I heard through the grapevine, Mike Louw goes along, he could have been captured. Could have been. But essentially what he was doing symbolically was, he was going into the wolf den and he was lying down and showing the wolf, the alpha male, showing him his throat and saying, rip my throat out if you want to, but I come here in peace. That is very important. Symbolically. For no other reason. Symbolically that was important. We’d gone into the den and we’ve come out alive again. And the next step was the reciprocal of that. Now suddenly we’re talking to the senior ANC and they’re interested. Now the intelligence guy is engaging, now they’re like in there, they’re just like picking up and just…now we’re really working the field. And a decision is now made that some of the ANC elites must come into South Africa for secret talks. But of course technically speaking they’re still banned, they’re still illegal they can be arrested by the Security Police. So this becomes one of the important tests of our integrity. So a small group of NI people get given the task of facilitating the meeting and these guys are smuggled into South Africa illegally and they’re brought to a meeting. And this meeting is very, very important because once again, they’ve reciprocated. They’ve come into this den of wolves and they’ve show their throat. And of course they go back safely. Now they become ambassadors of good will. So both sides have reciprocated, we can now engage. So with that instruction is given to the intelligence community to pretty much disengage. From that moment onwards I was disengaged and I was then sent off on another task. And this whole process was just thundering on on its own. And that’s one of the reasons why I feel so sorry, maybe we disengaged too soon. I feel so sorry about the assassination of Chris Hani. Because ultimately maybe had we been more engaged, we could have been more defensive in that kind of event. As it turned out I was profoundly, profoundly moved when Chris Hani was murdered. I think Chris Hani is a hero of this country, not of the ANC. He’s a hero of South Africa. And he belongs to all of us, not just to one group of people. And I think we must honour Chris Hani through this kind of activity as well, and people like that. But the important thing was now, a decision was made at this time now that suddenly the unknown variable in this equation was the Soviet Union. And then I was deployed out again, re-deployed. Interviewer Roughly what year is that? Tony That was ’89. ‘89, I suddenly find myself out. That’s where this comes from. You can see there. Break We’re now talking about post Dakar Safari, CODESA is starting to happen, well the early roots of CODESA, the thinking about this negotiated settlement happening. We don’t really have all the nuts and bolts in place. 107 Intelligence services have now been largely disengaged. Interviewer And Mandela is still in prison. Tony Yes. Interviewer But it’s quite clear behind the scenes there’s… Tony Yes, yes, because I’m now redeployed. And I get deployed on this highly sensitive mission. Geez, it was a stressful mission because, here’s a drawing that was taken, you get these street artists, and you see I had a lot more hair on my head in those days. I used to have a moustache in those days. Interviewer I was going to say, you look like to me the average white South African of the era. Tony Laughs Yes. But ok, that photograph, look at the date there. See that date, that drawing was made of me. And I was basically deployed into Europe. And part of my task in Europe now, was to continue running Hardekool. Laughs This thing was still churning out intelligence. Just turning…it’s got to be one of the stories of the intelligence community, I mean, it really has to be because it was just an amazing operation. And part of it now is we’ve got to start monitoring the Soviet Union. But we want to know on the ground, because suddenly with the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the ending of the Cold War, there’s a whole lot of unpredictable stuff happening now. The power equation is as follows, if the Soviet Union does collapse and stops supporting the SACP, then we can negotiate with absolute confidence with the ANC. However if the new thing coming out of the collapsed Soviet Union, if they continue to support the SACP, we cannot negotiate. So that’s the one element of this whole thing. The second thing in this sort of calculus of risk, if you want to call it that – the second element of this calculus was, in the post repressive period, whatever that is, remember South Africa is highly repressive, the Soviet Union was highly repressive, so we’ve gone from one state which is repressive but stable, and we go through a whole new dispensation to a new thing now that is not repressive but potentially unstable. How do we understand the dynamics of that process? That’s really a critical element here. So part of my deployment now, I find myself in a major capital city in Europe, a beautiful city, I had a great time living there, very, very hard, I lost probably 10-15 kilometres of my body weight in that time, one of the hardest operations I’ve ever done in my life, because it was months and months of totally isolated operation. But we applied what is known in intelligence circles as the third country principle. So the country that I was living in I was not operating in that country. I was not in any way interested in any intelligence targets in that country. but we were operating third country, so I was operating from there into other countries. And I went there under deep cover so I didn’t use my Cronin name, I didn’t use my Turton name, I was under another name – I don’t want to mention that name – and I lived in a flat. And of course the first day I moved into this flat, being an expert 108 at penetration and planting surveillance devices I immediately check my flat. And what do I find, there I find a tomato looking at me. And it’s very clear that the local counter intelligence people know about this. And of course this is not surprising, you must remember that you’re working in a foreign country, you’ve got to go and sign contracts to get an apartment, etc, etc, you need a bit of assistance from somebody maybe, and of course these people are linked. So bottom line, be that as it may, day one I’m five minutes into my apartment and I see that I’m under surveillance. So what do I do now? What do I do? Now this is that, getting back to the lonely life of the operator and the judgement calls you have to make. So I decide that I have to report this back to my superior structures and how do you do that? You’re under surveillance now, how do you do it? So I invent an excuse and I decide not to use my telephone at home, and I go back, I find just a randomly selected public telephone booth and I make a very, very brief telephonic report back home stating that I’ve arrived safely, I’ve moved into my apartment, however I am under surveillance – I didn’t use the word surveillance, we used to use code words for that kind of thing – however I am under surveillance, and I’ve got this thing. The guy that was handling me at the time, the project handler, was old SD, the guy that originally recruited me into K43 in the first place, my old handler in 06101, a hard, hard, hard man, I’ve never met such a hard guy, excellent recruiter, but hard, just takes no nonsense, no prisoners, he always gets his man. Just like the Canadian Mountie, always gets his man. But brutal and hard and just doesn’t have a sense of compassion in his body. Today he’s a broken alcoholic as a result of that. The message I get back is, I mustn’t think I’m James Bond, I must get on with my job. So I said, well, this is a challenge, this is clearly a challenge. Now I’m here now, I’m posted here, I’ve got a mission, and I’m under surveillance from day one, so what I do? How do I operate? So I then just kicked into operational mode, and that was a period of great intensity for me because you know that you’re under surveillance the whole time and you’ve still got to operate, and that’s where the third country principle is so important because if you are not doing anything to break the law in your host country then you can maybe survive. But you’re always waiting for the tap on your shoulder, hello, hello, hello, can we have a word there please guv. You’re waiting for that moment. So believe me it’s tense. You don’t sleep deeply and you’ve got this sleep deprivation problem, and I’ve always had a thing that I never drink alcohol on my own – I’ve always been afraid of alcohol, I don’t abuse alcohol in any way, I don’t abuse drugs in any way, I keep fit, I run, I go to gym, that’s how I keep my mind nimble and healthy and I keep focused on my task. I’m told today by people at the CSIR that they’re frightened by me, I’ve got this intensity about me when I focus on a task, I just focus and I forget about everything else and that makes me successful. So now I’ve got this task at hand and part of the task is operating Spaghetti, now Hardekool, and the other part of it is operating into eastern 109 Europe. And what we’re doing, the Spaghetti part is really neither here no there at this stage, you know enough about Spaghetti, it’s still producing but part of this thing now is this eastern European thing. And that became very, very clear to us from a very early stage that once you take the lid off the top of the beer bottle laughs it overflows. Or once you pop the champagne, the champagne cork, you’d better be ready to capture the flow that comes out the top. So we immediately started monitoring the doings of what was going on in East Germany, Erich Honecker. And what we were looking for there was when Honecker came out with his famous sort of speech now in front of the Hauptbahnhof in Leipzig, he basically threw down the gauntlet and it was clear that he wasn’t going to give in. And then of course the Leipzig option was revoked. The rolling mass action, and that’s what fed into South Africa, all of this rolling mass action was the Liepzig option they’d learned from the eastern Europeans that this is what you do. And Honecker was forced out of power through a series of events and I found myself at this historic moment in time, standing on the wall between east and west and watching it being broken down. Just standing there, just watching this, historic mind boggling stuff, this anonymous little non existent South African just watching these events. And of course what we learned out of that process was from intelligence that we were gathering was that the Russians did not put in support. Once Honecker lost it, he’d lost it. He was on his own. And that for us was just a big breakthrough. Once Honecker lost it, and once we now knew that the Russians would not support him, then we said, right that’s it guys, now we can cook with gas. Now we know that when we talk back home, that we’re not going to have this new thing. That’s why this Vula thing was really the last kick of a dying horse. It was symbolic, the Connie Braams, they had to show that their years and years of fighting this anti apartheid thing, suddenly they did something glorious and they were revolutionaries or warriors or something like that. It was nothing more than that. And then we watched with great interest and I remember being absolutely transfixed as this whole thing happened in Timisoara. The Timisoara massacre, we’re now talking about Romania, when the Romanian thing bubbled up I was watching with great, great intensity now, really just transfixed. And I remember the Timisoara massacre, I remember them digging up bodies. And the one body that I saw, which was quite remarkable, it was a woman and a young baby. Whether the baby belonged to the woman I don’t know, but the woman had been tied up with wire and she’d been killed and she’d been buried with the wire still tied around her. And they dug up this baby and there was this iconic image that came out from that time, and that iconic image showed this baby being put down, I think on the mother’s chest. This tiny little infant that had been murdered. And of course this Timisoara massacre just triggered off this revolt in me, I just couldn’t control it anymore. And what we were interested in now, the big intelligence question was, what role does the intelligence service play? The Securitate in 110 that case? What role do they play when things are going out of control. And we were mildly interested in what was happening to Ceauşescu because he was ultimately tracked down and captured and he was put before a kangaroo court and tried and eventually shot. And I remember I wasn’t close to him at the time but I was certainly transfixed by the images that were coming out, and we saw this man defiantly beating his fist on the table, much like PW Botha. And saying that any moment now the Securitate will come through that door and will release me and you the generals are all illegitimate and illegal and I don’t acknowledge anything. And just this defiant, despicable man. Interviewer Defiant and unbelieving. He wouldn’t believe the circumstance he was under. Tony Much like Mugabe today! Much like Mugabe. Watch Mugabe . Mugabe has to go down the same way, it just has to happen. Because he’s surrounded by such surrealism and his intelligence people tell him what he wants to know and he doesn’t…he’s lost touch with reality. So in this case what we were interested in now was when the surge of public opinion changes. And this I guess in the Zimbabwe case, what’s going to happen now when eventually people decide, the middle ranking officers of the army and the intelligence service decide to turn, what happens then? It’s not the senior guys. the senior guys they’ve bought in, they’ve got farms, they’ve been corrupted, they want to protect. So the split comes in the middle rank when someone is asked to point a gun at their own family and they say, no I won’t do it. That happened in Russia. When Yeltsin got on the tank, the same thing. When the Russian tanks suddenly came over onto Yeltsin’s side exactly the same thing. So this is fairly well documented and understood, but our interest then was in the public opinion, because of course the public opinion was overwhelmingly negative against the Securitate and when people got into the Securitate buildings…remember they had the flag flying, they’d cut out the emblem in the middle of the flag and the symbol became the flag with a hole in the middle. And when the public got so inflamed eventually by this, and when the military turned onto the side of the public, when they cut that hole out in the middle of the flag, the Securitate were then targeted and we were interested in that. Because with the role that NI was playing in the negotiations back home, would we be turned upon eventually by an unforgiving public? Would we be regarded as traitors, would we be regarded as oppressors? What would happen? So the whole idea was, how do you control that flow of pressure? That was the big question there. And then the next thing happened, I think if I remember sequentially, I think it was Vaclav Havel in Hungary, the Velvet Revolution, very peaceful, very heartening for us. We realised that you can through charismatic legitimate leadership, we can manage it. So in many ways the Hungarian experience became the model that we eventually chose, whether wittingly or unwittingly, we just learned from that experience and we fed that back in. So, there were times of great, great 111 speculation, great uncertainty, great jubilation. Here I was under surveillance the whole time, monitoring this, feeding my reports back. And then all of a sudden early one morning, I get a phone call, and it’s winter time and it’s cold and it’s horrible and you don’t see any blue sky. And I get this phone call and it’s JEC, he phones me, breaks all standard operational procedures and phones me, and he deploys me by phone…because they know that I’m under surveillance, but at that stage I don’t think they really realised the severity of the surveillance. It’s also, the lesson there is that, when your man in the field tells you something, believe him. Because they thought I was just being a bit paranoid. And in the end the last moment in my flat, I decided, do I take the bug to bring home, or do I photograph it? And I photographed it and I brought it home, and I eventually put it on the table with my final report, and SD was in serious trouble because he failed to recognise the operational significance of the risk that he’d now placed the entire operation under by insisting that I was not James Bond. But I’d also shown that I had the vasbyt, that I could do it, that I had the capability of working against the odds. Believe me it is very difficult when you know you’re under surveillance and when you know that you can be picked up at any moment where you could be put in court, where you could be locked away in jail for years, maybe a lifetime, but you better believe it, that concentrates your mind. So anyhow out of the blue I get this phone call early in the morning now, grey European winter morning. And I’m tasked to fly somewhere. And what I’ve got to do is…Mandela is being released. Laughs And my task now is I’ve got to marry up with another technical intelligence guy and we’ve got to go to another agent and we’ve got to install crypto capability to this agent must now report. We want all the reports from different members of the ANC exile community. We want different reports on how they interpret this event. END OF SIDE B TAPE FOUR (counter at 501) TAPE FIVE SIDE A Tony And it was a very funny flight. It’s a pity I can’t tell you where the flight was to because that would make it even more sort of poignant, but the flight was funny because there was a massive storm that hit Europe. The mother of all storms. People died in that storm, ships were broken away from the anchor, scaffolding was ripped off the sides of buildings, and it was just an amazing storm. But here we’re flying at 30 thousand feet above the storm, blue sky, and sitting next to me are two young executives in Saville Row suits, and they’re preparing for some kick ass presentation that they’re going to give to the board, they want to prove that they can make it in this big corporate world. And here I’m sitting, this quiet little faceless, intelligence guy, the only guy on the plane that knows that Mandela’s about to be released, and I’m a bit nervous, I’m about to land, I’ve got to go through customs, each time you cross the border it’s always a nerve 112 wracking moment. In those days there wasn’t a Schengen visa so you had to move through different borders to get to different countries, unlike now where there’s just one…so anyhow, it was so funny because now these guys, these cocky little fellows, they’re talking about their presentation and they’ve got their pinstripe suit on and they’re strategising about how they’re going to like just show what good young executives they are and how they should be promoted in the near future, and the captain comes on the intercom and says, there’s a bit of bad weather…understatement of the century…and he said, look, we’re going to be flying around in a holding pattern but you know we’re going to get you down at some stage, please sit back, relax, we’ll break out the champagne. Laughs So the hostesses come out with the champagne and here these young executives next to me start drinking deeply of the bottle of champagne, and are really getting cocky now because they’re going to be a little bit late for their meeting but nonetheless they can still make it. all of a sudden the captain says, right, fasten your seat belts, it’s likely to be a bumpy ride but we’re going to get you down. Geez, was that an understatement. As we’re going down now through the turbulence of this storm, suddenly this airplane is thrown around like a cork in a tumble-dryer. And we’re up and we’re down and we’re this and we’re that…and I’m a fairly strong guy and I don’t get seasick or anything like that, and next thing people just start retching all around me. The air hostesses can’t walk around because of the turbulence, they’re all strapped in, and this airplane just smells of the stench of human vomitus. And these two guys next to me with their Saville Row suits, one guy with the pink shirt on, he’s just like tossing his cookies all over this front of this shirt, all over their presentation. I just felt so sorry for these guys. And I’ll never forget, as we hit the ground, I was just so grateful that the wheels were finally on the ground, and we came screeching to a halt, and we eventually taxied on, and just the smell of vomit in the airplane was overwhelming, people were moaning and crying. It almost took me back to military operations in Angola, where after a contact you get this moaning of people that have been shot up and the sound of the wounded. And it was very much like a war zone. And the last thing I remember was, as we taxied to that tube that comes on the side of the airplane, boy I was the first guy out of that airplane because I hadn’t tossed my cookies yet but just the smell of this…I was coming very close to it, and the last thing I remember looking over my shoulder seeing this guy in his Seville Row suit, his tie on the one side here, just the whole front of his pink shirt covered in his breakfast. And I often wondered what happened to those guys, if they ever went and made their big kick ass presentation to the board, and if they got promoted as a result of it or not. Laughs But be that as it may, we hit the ground and I married up with this other guy, and of course all the trains were out of action because of the storm, and we had to make our way to a place where we had to meet this agent, and the remarkable thing was, all the communications were down, but the two NI guys came 113 through. We came through. And if you had to speak to that agent today, that agent would tell you that one of the remarkable things that he had, was he had written us off. He believed the storm was too great, we weren’t going to make it on time. We were a little bit late, but we made it. And that one event cemented our relationship once again. This guy later on told me that he realised at that moment that when he was swimming in dark and deep waters he always knew that he was swimming with us, he was not swimming alone. And that gave him enormous confidence because that guy went on to play a very, very big role in all kinds of things later and was one of our better producing agents, and a remarkable fellow. So that is that. And then of course I retired to this mountains…I was then sent up into the mountains…in my book I refer to the Alps, and the Alps cover more than one country laughs so we’ll just leave it at the Alps. And there I remember once sitting in the Alps in this retreat, and the first picture I’ve ever had of Madiba was that iconic image that came out, when he walked out of prison and he was met by Winnie and he had this little hobble, a bit of arthritis in his hips, but what a dignified man, and the whole world is waiting to see him because no-one has seen his photograph since that young photograph when he was first taken to court with the Treason Trials. And when I saw Madiba there I then just knew that, listen this was the man, this was my future president, I had no doubt in my mind that I would serve him, I had no doubt in my mind that this was where we were going, and I had this…I was overwhelmed by this sense of wellbeing, this sense of what we were doing is the right thing, there’s just no question of doubt about it. Interviewer And after he’d come out did they continue deploying you in the Alps and elsewhere? Tony I continued my operation deployment there, when we’d got the intelligence we needed I was pulled home. And I came home on a very interesting flight because the flight that I came home on was filled with many exiles returning home for the first time. And it was very, very bizarre because when I left the country, the Communist Party was banned, the ANC was banned, Mandela was in prison, I knew about these intelligence activities but the cork was still in the bottle. When I came home, here on the airplane these whole bunch of exiles with their Communist Party t-shirts on, and I remember as I walked out of the airplane a group of enthusiastic individuals were welcoming these exiles, and there was this great big red Communist Party flag at Jan Smuts airport. Just what an image! I just watched the Berlin Wall come down, I thought that was bizarre, and I my book I refer to the fact that some famous landmark there was a tunnel going through this, the very same place that I had to have Brush meetings beforehand in Shaking Hands with Billy stuff, very same tunnel funnily enough. I knew that tunnel very well and I walked through that tunnel on the night of the 31st of December 1989, the birth of the 1st of January of the last decade of the 20th century and this was all happening, and I was amazed that the 114 champagne bottles and the glasses that had been broken in that tunnel were so deep that it took the municipal workers a full week to clear. So there was just such enormous optimism in Europe. Europe was just awash with optimism. The Cold War had come to an end, Germany was…so here was Europe that had just been through this horrific experience, this optimism that was unbridled, the wall had come down, if you travelled at that point in time through Paris you would see that the Eiffel Tower had a special decoration on it, because it was a hundred years old. So it was the centenary of the Eiffel Tower. And if you travelled anywhere in Europe at that point in time there was this enormous optimism, the Cold War had ended, the Berlin Wall had come down, Germany reunification was happening. And suddenly things were happening in South Africa. It was just this enormous optimism, I cannot tell you how people were just excited, and as an intelligence officer, wow, I was just so taken by the moment. So I came back and I’d lost an enormous amount of weight because of the surveillance thing, I’d lost about 15 kilograms maybe. I was a relatively skinny guy and I was particularly skinny when I came back from that. Very strung out because of the isolation. I’d kept my head together, I’d kept my money but I was so glad when that airplane door closed. Because one of the incidents that happened during that time was…I’ll just tell you the brief story because it tells you what the mindset was. Any intelligence operation is vulnerable when you communicate. Communication is the Achilles Heel of any intelligence. Counter intelligence always gets into your coms. And we were using a communication system at the time, a crypto system, and of course if you get found with crypto material, it’s an act of espionage. And espionage now…you now go to jail. It’s now an offence. Of course normally you don’t go to jail, normally what happens is they arrest you and then a tit for tat sort of thing happens, and then they eventually keep you for a couple of months or maybe a couple of years and they maybe work you over a little bit, and they eventually exchange you for something else, you become a pawn on the chess board. So in Europe, they’re not going to kill you. They’re not going to torture you in Europe it’s just going to be uncomfortable and unpleasant. In Africa they might kill you. In Africa they certainly will torture you. In Africa it might be a lifetime. In Africa they might even conceivably put you in front of a firing squad. So this is the sobering truth of an intelligence officer out in the field doing hostile operations. And in this particular case, when you’re at your most vulnerable is when you’ve got crypto material on you, and of course that is the hard evidence, the forensic evidence that goes to court, where they prove that you were now engaged in espionage. You can talk to anybody, that’s not necessarily espionage. But crypto material, that’s empirical evidence of espionage. And your crypto material is very sensitive because this is the protection for your entire government communication systems. The Brits have got the GCHQ that do all their crypto stuff, the Americans have got the National Security, NSF…what are they called, National 115 Security…whatever. A lot of resources are put into your crypto, so I developed a system where I always keep my crypto coms on me at all times. I had it with me, rather than stashing it away. If you stash it away you never know if someone’s found it and then put surveillance on that. Because I was under surveillance the whole time, my deal was I would keep my crypto keys with me in a small little concealment device and these crypto keys could be corrupted by magnetism, so in my one pocket I would keep a strong magnet and in my other pocket I would keep my crypto com. So if I was ever in a situation where I saw anything that was untoward I would just put my hand in my pocket, pull out the magnet, transfer it, put it in the other pocket and with that I’ve wiped out my coms. I wiped out my crypto. Worse case scenario, I haven’t got coms, now I’ve got to get another set of coms in place. Best case scenario, well they haven’t got that empirical evidence. But that is always the hard moment. Interviewer Sorry, can I just ask for some clarity. You talk about your crypto keys, in simple terms, how does this system work? Tony If you go back to the enigma machine, you know the famous enigma machine. The enigma machine you would type in A and it would come out as something else. There’s a mathematical algorithm that changes it. Now you can make an A=Z, but that’s easy to crack. Because each time you write A, then each time a Z comes out, it’s simple to crack. So it all comes down to a mathematical algorithm and eventually the sophisticated cryptos for example, if you look now at your banking system…Mark Shuttleworth has made a lot of money on crypto. His money is all about crypto. Because what he does is he takes the A-Z, and then he takes the Z and he makes it something else and then he makes that something else something else and something else. So the more times you scramble it…think of it as an egg. You’ve got an egg and you break an egg and you call it scrambled eggs. So you’ve got scrambled eggs, now can you make from scrambled eggs another egg. If you put a pig into the mincer and you get pork sausages out the other side, can you put the pork sausages in and get a pig out. That’s what crypto is about. So it’s more often than not computerised nowadays. There are ways, when we talk about Bush talk I’ll talk about other crypto systems that we used to use that were very robust but were not computerised. But essentially it’s computer things so it’s computer disc that you’ve got. A tiny, small, little computer disc and as you know, computer discs are corruptible by magnetism…I don’t want to talk anymore about crypto because it’s a sensitive thing and I’m not an intelligence officer anymore but… Interviewer But that’s enough, I now have a good understanding how it works. Tony Ok, so when you’re at the most vulnerable is when you are now encrypting your message, so what you do is you type your message up, you use aski text to type your message up and 116 you’re now going to scramble the egg. You’re going to get your crypto message and then you’re going to transmit that through whatever means, there are many different ways of transmitting the message. But in the process of scrambling it you’re working on a computer. So, say you’ve got all your stuff out and all of a sudden on the door, knock knock, there’s this knock on the door. Now we deliberately chose the flat that I’m living in for reasons. And one of the reasons is that no-one can get to the front door. Laughs It’s one of those typically European apartment complexes built in sort of 1920s, something like that. plumbing is a bit old but works. But, it’s got a front gate right down at the bottom and a sort of great big keyboard with all these different buttons that you have to push, and if anyone wants to come visit you, they push your button and they announce who they are, you can even see them on a video camera, and you then let them in or not. So to have someone coming to your door unannounced is very unusual. And here I’m in the middle of crypto communication so I’m extremely vulnerable. So what do I do now? I get up and I…one of the things in intelligence work, you must never panic. Panic is your enemy. You’re always living on the edge, you’re always living in…you’re out of your depth but never panic. You’ve got to keep a really cool mind. Very, very cool calm mind. So first thing you do take a breath and you always assume that is not as bad as it appears. Because if you now run like a rabbit now you’re going to be caught. So you’ve got to keep very cool and calm. So what I do is just took a deep breath to compose myself a little bit and I look through the peephole in my door and there was a man I uniform. Oh shit, a man in uniform and here I’ve got all this crypto stuff. So, I can choose to ignore him. knock knock Really insistent again. This is like, this guy is on a mission, you know. laughs So I thought, whoa, what do I do now? So I look around me and I’m just compromised, I’m just caught. I’m absolutely compromised now. So I put all my crypto stuff under the bed just so that it’s not visible and I take my disc and I do my disc stuff, but I’m right in the middle, there’s messages there, I just know I can’t get rid of it all. What do I do now? And as I open the door with this pleasant smile on my face, and I speak foreign language to the guy, and I ask him can I help in, what is he interested in? And it turns out that he’s a fireman. And he’s busy collecting money for the widows and orphans fund of the local fire brigade. Laughs And I mean I was just so relieved because…you’ve no idea of this weight of this pressure that comes off you, and you go, oh shit, I’m not going to go to jail tonight, I will sleep in my bed. It’s an enormous feeling that you have, and that day I just gave liberally of my money. Normally I’m not a big spender, I always try and keep a tight budget but that day I gave liberally because I just felt so enthused and so happy that I’d lived to fight another day. But the bottom line is when I left that country, it had been a very successful operation. The last decision that I made was, do I take this tamatie out and take it back to prove? Because that would now have been considered to be a very hostile act, and that could trigger a response. So I 117 made a very cool, calm and collected judgement decision again. I said no, I’m not going to take the tamatie out, I’m going to simply photograph it so that we can identify it, keep it in our own records and I dismantled it as quickly as I could, I photographed it in different angles, we’re all trained in this kind of photography. In fact a lot of our photography was about making micro squares…we actually used to work with micro squares, can you believe it? So part of our skills was actually making micro squares anywhere, wherever you are. A micro square is a thing that’s about maybe a centimetre by centimetre square piece of film, with emulsion on the film that you condense a photograph down into that and you eventually re-expand it. So I was very skilled at that sort of stuff and I took a photograph of this thing and I put it all back together again and I kissed it goodbye, packed my bags, waiting now, because if I’m going to be intercepted now’s the time I’m going to be intercepted. They’ve got all the evidence they want of you and now before you leave the country that’s when they grab you, so I was just waiting, going through customs just like really, really lonely, going through customs, get in the airplane, doors close, start taxiing to the runways, sense of absolute relief as the airplane takes off and I’m now next stop Maccouvlei…you know, next stop home! And I get home and there’s this SACP flag laughs that I was just so happy to see this thing, I was just really…I wanted to embrace the people. But there were lots of ululating people, and happiness in the crowd, and I just sort of once again slipped into this anonymity, slipped into the crowd and just disappeared. And that pretty much takes us now to the next period because the next phase operationally was now a decision that was made at a very high level, I think the State Security Council but I’m not sure because they were starting to buy into this sort of thing at that stage. And a decision was made by some very wise people that we now had a good chance of peace in Angola, we were withdrawn from Angola, there was still civil war in Angola but we were not part of it anymore, the Namibian peace was holding, the talks, CODESA, was thundering away, we were doing all kinds of funky things in the field of negotiations and a decision was then made that all of this is worth nothing unless we make peace in Mozambique. And that’s where the next phase of operations went to. And a decision was made to deploy two operators into Mozambique, into Renamo, and that was just a remarkable time in my life. If ever I’ve lived life, my time in Renamo was when I lived life with abundance. I lived every second of every day. I just lived it. Very dangerous mission. Very, very dangerous for the simple reason that Special Forces was still active with Renamo. Illegally. The Security Forces were no longer united. There was no longer a unified command. You mentioned that you’ve spoken to the General. The General didn’t like to talk about things like township stuff and what have you… Interviewer He wanted to talk about the war in Angola and South West Africa. Tony The simple truth of the matter was that at that point in time the 118 Security Forces were no longer united. There was actually talk in the intelligence community of a possible coup. So South Africa could have had a coup. So now you don’t know who to trust anymore. The hawks and the doves are punching each other up, now the hawks are winning. The doves are winning in negotiations but the hawks are saying that…when Vula happens for example, the hawks say, yes, we told you so, we told you, you can’t trust these buggers, we all know that Communists wash their face in the toilet bowl, you can never trust these buggers. And then we say, no, you can trust them, you can trust them, don’t worry, it’s all cool, it’s all safe, we can do it. So, we deployed now into Renamo, and the purpose of the operation in Renamo was to do an assessment of Renamo, not from a military perspective, but from a strategic intelligence perspective, to try and determine if there was any opportunity for negotiating peace. We wanted peace between Renamo and Frelimo. We wanted to end the civil war in Mozambique because until we could do that, with an insecure border, we were just going to have weapons and refugees and AK47s and landmines coming across our border and we didn’t want that anymore. And it’s interesting now you see Isuzu and all these guys involved in…all these cross border operations…that’s all that comes out of that operation…Operation Bush Talk. Interviewer Now this was… Tony There’s the date there. When it reached its pinnacle, ’93. So Bush Talk took a lot of getting off the ground because the first thing that we had to do with Bush Talk was we had to determine if the operation was viable. Now at this stage we were seasoned, we were hardened, we knew what was going on in the field of operations, there was little that we could be taught…I hate to sound arrogant but we were pretty sussed out with what was going on. And we approached the guy, a very despicable man, a guy that in my book I refer to by the name of Wyatt Earp. And Wyatt Earp will read this stuff and hear these tapes so…because Wyatt Earp is still around. Wyatt Earp was a despicable man because of all the human beings I’ve ever met in my life, and I’ve met some amazing human beings, I would consider Wyatt Earp to be one of the three most intelligent people I’ve ever met in my life. Just an amazingly intelligent guy! Nimble minded! But an evil man. An evil man because he was selling his soul for seven pieces of silver. And he was working into every liberation movement in Africa. So every liberation movement will know Wyatt Earp by a different name. and I found it very interesting because I’ve been googling his name to watch what he’s been doing, it’s no surprise that he was involved in Sierra Leone, wherever there’s people have been killed and wherever money’s been made out of diamonds and gold, Wyatt Earp has been there. He’s a polyglot of nature, he can speak many languages, fluently, highly intelligent, and of course he knew, Afonso Dhlakama personally. Dhlakama would not make a decision without talking to Wyatt Earp. And we also happened to know 119 that Wyatt Earp was working for…he was a prostitute. He was a whore. What we call an intelligence whore. He would work for any service. So part of the trick was now, how do we work knowing that Wyatt Earp is going to sell us down the river? Knowing he’s going to sell us! How do we work with him? This is a different game. This is not Recce stuff, this is different stuff, hey. Interviewer And it’s also very different to Europe. Tony Africa, brutal. They cut your throat, they just…so the first thing we decided we’re going to use Wyatt Earp now, so the risk calculus around using Wyatt, how are we going to limit our risk knowing that he’s a traitor, knowing that he’s like he is? So that’s the first question. And the second question now is, how are we going to get into Renamo under deep cover? We do not want Renamo to know that we are intelligence officers. We don’t want that. So how are we going to do that? So we approach a guy…once again, recruitment comes in now, we do an in-depth analysis and we approach a guy…I can’t remember what I called him in my book now, so I’m not going to give him a name…but we approach this guy, and he’s a businessman. And the businessman wants to do business. So we set up now with Wyatt Earp that Wyatt Earp will engineer a meeting with Dhlakama and his key people and this businessman. And this businessman talks to Dhlakama and Wyatt Earp tells Dhlakama that he can be trusted and blah blah blah. To what extent they trusted I don’t know, but nonetheless be that as it may, they talk to the businessman. And the businessman reveals the fact that there’s lots of business opportunities in the bush in Renamo, particularly I’m afraid to say this businessman wanted to plunder all of the hardwood trees in the area. And ’m very sorry to say that I guess I aided and abetted that because we needed that to get into the area. So he’s deal was, he wants to plunder the forest and he wants to cut down the trees and he’s going to buy trees, he’s going to put a sawmill in and do all this kind of stuff. But he needs someone to look after his business interest there, so we need a person, person A, to look after this businessman’s business interests. Then the second thing that he discovers is that their communications in Renamo is very bad. They need a communication’s engineer. So there are two people that they need: A and B. So now that’s an important little breakthrough. So we come back and we do a head scratching session – I was not part of that process at all, I was doing my stuff back at K32, doing sort of post CODESA stuff. Basically at that stage I was involved in Vula, the whole Vula shenanigans that I’ve written about in my book – I get called into the office one day, told there’s another operation coming down, I’ve been nominated for this operation and they don’t ask you how you feel, they just say, you’ve been nominated for the operation, go for a briefing. So I go for a briefing and I hear about this operation and I’m immediately excited, immediately it’s just right up my alley, I love the bush, I love living out in nature, once again this peace process…the 120 challenge of working behind the lines with Renamo is just an absolute intellectual challenge. In a way it’s a kind of adventure challenge, it’s a kind of childhood dream in a way. So I say, right that’s it. And the reason why I’m selected is because I’m a qualified radio ham. And that’s an important thing because that story, I want you to pick me up later on, on this radio ham thing, the reason why I eventually left the service. Just pick up the radio story later on please. So here we’ve got a group of people in K and these guys can do all kinds of things, and one of the little things I can do is I can make a radio do anything you want it to do. So I’m plausible enough to be considered by a person with sort of reasonable education to be a radio engineer. I’ve got some of the papers necessary for it. So that’s the reason why they select me. They also selected me because of my experience now, I’ve been in Eastern Europe and my experience now in these various operations…this is a strategic level operation now, this is not a tactical operation. We’re now talking strategic stuff. at this stage I become established within NI as the strategic operator. There were a handful. If you think around the people that you know that are capable at engaging strategic level, very few, very rare skill. And this is what I sell myself today, this is what I do profession today, I work at strategic level. So I get put in at number B, the B man. And the A man, they go back to a guy...in my book I refer to him as Pedro. Now Pedro is an interesting bugger. Pedro used to be a sergeant major with Three Two Battalion. And Pedro, very committed soldier, very, very highly trained soldier. He was a combat engineer. And he was the explosives expert in 32. And he was a hamster, a real, but incredibly intelligent guy! Geez, what an intelligent bugger. And he had a reputation in 32 as being the hamster. He would always go and pick up every little bit of wire and a little hairpin and a little detonator and a little 100gram block of TNT and you know he would have all these things in his pockets, his cheeks were stuffed like a hamster. And he came to an end in 32 Battalion because he detonated a landmine and he was left for dead. So he was severely wounded. Literally left for dead. In fact, he had no palpable pulse, no visible signs of being…they thought he was dead. And now his side of the story, it’s very interesting to hear about it because he talks about the fact that here he is, after this landmine detonation he’s left for dead there, but he’s severely burnt, his uniform is burnt into his body, so he’s known here by all his scar tissue on his body from this incident. And he’s alive but no-one thinks he’s alive and they’re busy cutting off his boots and stuff like that and they’re busy rummaging through his pockets to take the little bits and pieces that he had – this hamster mentality that he was – and he actually hears the zipper of the body bag open, zzzzz, and they’re about to put him in the body bag and he’s trying to shout, guys I’m alive, I’m alive, don’t put me in the body bag! And of course nothing happens. And then suddenly he managed to get a flicker somewhere, he just flickered, I don’t know, an enormously strong guy this guy, just enormous vasbyt, and he got a flicker going and the dominee was praying before 121 they put his body in the body bag. And the dominee says, hey there’s a movement there. Laughs And they start resuscitating him, and they really go for it now. And they put adrenalin into him, boof, and they kick-start his heart and geez, they get him going. Tough bugger. They casevac him out of there now, he’s alive, he’s alive, but only just. Anyway eventually he gets rehabilitated and it’s clear he can’t go back to soldiering, he’s done his soldiering days, but he’s proven himself, so he, typical kind of profile he gets spotted now for K and he gets pulled into K. But he’s a bit of a maverick this bugger. With the 32 he learned to speak Portuguese, fluent Portuguese. And he’s a clever guy. So I’m talking but at that stage what I haven’t told you about is that I’m busy thinking about my future and I want to really tread myself so I’m doing post graduate studies. He’s doing graduate studies. I’m convincing him that he must not stop his studying, and guess what his studies are on? His studies are on, of all mundane things, public administration. And our businessman determines in his discussions with Renamo that, one of the things they need is a possibility of a future when Renamo might become part of the government they want to put their people in to public admin jobs and they haven’t got a cooking clue what public admin means…their entire life has been during war. Their people are totally uneducated. To read and write in Renamo was a rare thing. Most people were illiterate. Most Renamo people, functionally illiterate. But their average life expectancy in Mozambique was 38, 40 or something like that. That spanned the entire lifetime of those people. They’d lived only in war, that’s all they know is war. They’d never been to school many of them, and they couldn’t read and write. That’s an interesting story, the reading and writing, I want to get back to as well, because that opened doors later on for us intelligence wise. So the fact that he’s now doing his masters degree in public admin makes him doubly interesting. So the businessman now goes back to Dhlakama and says, right, this is what we’re going to do. I’m going to field to people on my payroll, they’re working for me. But part of my commitment to Renamo, I will pay these guys salaries, I will put them in the field with you, use them, they’re at your disposal. The one guy, Pedro he’s an ex soldier – they must tell him that because otherwise they think that he’s…and they tell a little story about Pedro, but he speaks Portuguese and guess what, he’s in public admin. So part of what we’ll do is we’ll set up a school here and we’re going to train your people in public admin. And Pedro’s the instructor. But then the other part of your problem is your communications. We’ve got an engineer for you…and I had to go I under my real name, not under a false name. So I went in under my real name. Renamo knows me by my real name. One of the few operations where they know my real name. And the reason why I had to do that was because all my licensing for my radios was in my real name, so I could prove my radio skills…I had all government operators certificates, etc, from the radio world, and that was my real name. And this businessman gives the commitment now that he will put these 122 two guys in the field. The deal is this, these people at your disposal in Renamo, use the radio engineer as you want to, use this other guy as you want to, we’ll build a little school, we’ll get it going, but I want this Pedro, he looks after my business interests here as well. So Pedro is my man, the other radio guy you use him as you want to. So we now get deployed into Renamo. And the first time I get to meet these guys we get flown in, and it was very funny because we’re flying over the eastern highlands… Interviewer The highlands of Zimbabwe. Tony Yes, Zimbabwe. We don’t know where we’re going to land. Renamo’s very skittish, they don’t…remember Renamo has been shot at by the MiGs. They’re at war, the MiGs are flying in the skies. Frelimo controls the air, Renamo controls the ground. And that’s it. So we’re flying in Frelimo space, we’re unannounced and we’re flying over the eastern highlands, we go over Zim, Zim doesn’t know anything about this, they can shoot us down. And we don’t want to fly at a tree top height because that is also aggressive so we’re flying high, we get picked up by radar, we just suss this out. And we’re flying in over Mozambique ostensibly en route to Malawi. The flight plan says we’re going to fly to Malawi and we’re just going to be dropped off on the way there. And as we’re flying over this, I remember seeing the eastern highlands just disappear behind me there and just seeing…our airplane could fall now, no-one knows we’re here. There’s no record of us, we haven’t gone through a border post, nothing. And suddenly the radio coms come through, Renamo gets onto us and they give us co-ordinates. And we go the co-ordinates and we can see nothing, just nothing. I thought, shit, how can we land an airplane there, there’s just nothing. And of course Renamo were just very, very good at concealing their presence. And we land and I get to meet Dhlakama for the first time, and I’ve now got to prove my skills as a radio engineer. So I’ve got a radio with me and just an ordinary commercial I-com radio and a dipole antenna and I throw this antenna up, it’s in a forest. This is one of their operational bases deep in the forest, you can’t see anything from there. Anyhow I’ve just explained, and I just throw my antenna up over the trees in the forest and I made a tactical decision to call on the ham bands on the 20 metre band 40 megahertz and I call as a radio ham. CQDX, CQDX, this is Zulu 06 Charlie 0 tango mobile in Mozambique. I get a Mozambique call, so calling CQDX and standing by. Go off the air. Nothing. Static. Same thing, CQDX, CQDX, this is Zulu 06 Charlie 0 Tango mobile in Mozambique calling CQDX and standing by. Boof, suddenly the radio goes alive. A guy from Indonesia picks me up. Chat to him, note Dhlakama eyes I can see immediately…there’s Dhlakama and with him one of the generals and with him is one of the senior, what he calls his Minister of Foreign Affairs. They stand back immediately. I just knew I had them. talking, talking, talking, chatting, chatting, and suddenly the radio is alive, people trying to talk to us. Why? Because Mozambique is off the ham radio circuit. If you can talk to 123 anybody in Mozambique, boy you want to talk to them and get their card. So ok, I talk to a couple of guys, four or five people, go off the air, say sorry I’m going silent key now. off. Turn off. I look up and Dhlakama’s got a big smile on his face. He says, who were you talking to? I said, that’s Indonesia and this is a guy from there and I give the geographical location. He said, well we need that. We’ve got no coms, all our coms are broken down, you are radio engineer from now on, that is it. So from moment onwards the decision made now that we’re going to be deployed so we had our meeting with these guys, came back to the states, and in South Africa we now do the planning, the intense operational planning. Now the normal military circumstances, when you deploy someone into this function behind the lines, you’re now working behind enemy lines, and you’re working under deep cover, you can’t communicate. So what you’d normally have is we’d have what’s called the hot extraction. And part of your planning would be, you’ve got to extract your people in the field. You always look after your people in the field. Their morale is affected negatively if you don’t extract them. The Americans are so good at this, they’ve got a full extraction procedure, they will always pull their downed pilots out and that’s why their pilots are so good because they know they always come out. And we had this hot extraction procedure, but that would involve of necessity the use of South African airforce. And we therefore had to make a decision, not to involve them, because we didn’t know to what extent they were involved in illegal activities with Renamo. So a decision now was made that there will be no hot extraction capabilities. Interviewer That’s quite frightening because if something does go wrong..… Tony So if you get caught with your pants down now, you’re on your own pal. You’re on your own. This is a very sobering moment and I mention this not to sound dramatic or anything of that nature. I think we’re talking about silent voices here, and maybe this is a voice that people haven’t heard about. What the sacrifice was that these people made. Bottom of the line is, we were deployed wittingly, we were willing. I could have said, I don’t want to go, and they would have said, fine, I’ll get someone else. We went in voluntarily and we knew what the odds were. And the odds were if we get compromised we’re on our own. So our hot extraction plan involved the copious use of US dollars and morphine. So if we need to extract ourselves we’re going to do escape and evasion, so high level of skills in escape and evasion, high level skills. Escape and evasion, disappear…if something happens you disappear into the bushes and you make your way to Malawi. But you live off the land, at night, take a lot of dollars in your pocket, pay your way, where you’ve got to go, live off the bush, eat worms if you have to, eat crickets, eat caterpillars, whatever you have to eat, eat them, stay alive, so morphine is part of it. When you’re in pain pump yourself full of morphine and just run. Getting back to the experience I told you about, that SWAPO guy, you might be an addict afterwards but you got out, you’ve 124 escaped. So that is escape and evasion. And this was very sobering because that focused us. And the decision that we made, this Pedro guy was a hell of an operator, but he wasn’t a strategic man, he was a tactical man. And this is an interesting thing to analyse and dissect, because in rank I was his senior. But on the ground he was in command. He was the tactical commander. I was the strategic guy. And we made a decision between ourselves that we would never ever make a decision arbitrarily, we would always talk it through. And we would apply operational tradecraft strictly to the nth degree. So when we went in, we went in with a lot of dollars in our back pocket as part of our escape and evasion plan, we had our medical kit, and we had to hide this away, we had to stash this away. And there’s a story in that. Because in the first deployment we were kept in isolation, we were kept in a massive base, a base that I later got to know was about 30 kilometres wide. Massive base! But we were kept in one…when I say 30 kilometres across, it’s just little settlements here and a couple of huts there, and then nothing, and then a little group here and then a little place there where they sew uniforms, and a place here where they fix up motorbikes – because all of Renamo stuff was done by motorcycle, they didn’t have vehicles, they didn’t have roads. So this whole place is just scattered over 30 kms radius. Interviewer And this is central Mozambique? Tony Yes. Up in Manica area. And we’re now kept in isolation. And of course, people in isolation they…Renamo’s been in isolation, so suddenly we’re a bunch of white faces that come from nowhere and who the hell are we? And people are interested in us. So we were given a tiny little place to live in, we were actually given a refugee tent to live in, and we were given a toilet facility that was just a long drop in the ground. And the funny thing about that was that we were given no privacy. No privacy whatsoever. Around the toilet there was a little grass sort of fence, maybe knee height. So when you go to the long drop laughs everyone knows you’re going to the long drop, no privacy at all. Interviewer Now was that peculiar to your circumstance or was everyone living like that? Tony Everyone in Renamo knows everybody, and the way Renamo recruited their people was a funny way. We just didn’t understand Renamo when we first went there, there are all these myths and legends about these murdering bastards and that Rhodesian intelligence created…all nonsense, all utter nonsense. Renamo was a group of motivated people that were highly traumatised and the war in Mozambique was fought by the air superiority of Frelimo against the ground hearts and minds stuff of Renamo. And Renamo controlled 80% of the land and Frelimo controlled 100% of the sky. So Frelimo controlled a couple of the capital cities, the big cities and that’s it. Beyond that Renamo was boss. So what did Frelimo do, out of frustration they would go and strafe the villages. Shoot the crap out of the villages. These are 125 ordinary peasants, they don’t care two hoots, they’re battling to survive, they’ve not been educated, they’ve got no medical, they’ve got no water, no food, no nothing, they just want to grow a little bit of something that they can live for the next week or month. And of course when Frelimo came in to shoot them up on the belief that they’re now in Renamo territory, therefore they must be Renamo supporters, that simply traumatised the people. So people die in the napalm, they get burnt, and you get these little kids running into the bush. They’ve just watched their mother being murdered! They watched their father become a Roman candle! And these little kids get traumatised, they run into the bush after this attack has happened, and they walk around for a couple of day, hyenas might them up, if they’re lucky they survive, if they’re lucky they don’t die of dysentery. Then eventually they bump into some Renamo soldiers and Renamo welcomes them in as family. So Renamo’s a family. It’s a family of people, they trust each other, they’re all surrogate fathers and mothers, they’ve all lost somebody by violent means and they’re united in their misery and their grief, and they’re united in their overwhelming hatred of Frelimo. And the significant thing about Renamo is that one of the things that Renamo does when they liberate an area is they go to the traditional leaders and they go to what we could call the sangoma and they liberate that sangoma. Remember Frelimo was a Communist organisation and they did not believe in any religion. Religion is the opium to the masses. So Frelimo’s big mistake was they suppressed the traditional sangomas. Renamo did nothing. All they did was they liberated the sangomas. So the sangomas now, in a way, were the extension of power of Renamo. So we had a lot of dealings with the sangomas, and the sangomas gave back the people their animistic belief. And that is very powerful and people haven’t picked it up today in the literature, I don’t know why. They’re all very sophisticated analysis and they forget this one very fundamentally important fact. Africa believes in spirits. Africa believes in ancestors. Africa is not in and of itself Christian or Moslem. So that’s what Renamo did and we slowly got to know these guys, so in the camp we were kept in isolation, we weren’t trusted. And it’s very interesting, as we were trusted, as slowly over time, as we learned the tricks of the game called trust, one day we suddenly come to our long drop and there the fence is a little bit higher. Bit more privacy. And then next month it’s like one and a half metres high, then it’s two metres high. Eventually we got total privacy. Eventually they built…I’ve got a photograph here of a house they built for us, a complete house. Complete privacy. At that point in time we were part of the community. And one of the big mistakes we made was, because we thought of this escape and evasion stuff and because we thought of our need to always have a stash somewhere, we went in with our own food, big mistake. And we went in with locks. Big mistake! Renamo doesn’t trust a lock. So we went in with a trommel of food, we went in with our own emergency medical kit and we went in with our own…I had more than one pair of socks, and I 126 had more than one pair of…I was walking around with short pants like this and a t-shirt etc, but I had more than one pair. And in our little tent initially we locked things away, and we had a liaison officer…here it is over here, I’ll show you this guy, I’ll show you the picture of this liaison officer. There he is there. Gaspar his name was. Commander Gaspar. And Gaspar’s job was to spy on us. His job was to make sure we don’t do funny stuff. And old Gaspar would come into our tent…he would love his different uniforms. And he would come into our tent and he would look at this lock and say, what’s this? Don’t you trust us? What’s in this Il here? Food? Don’t you trust us? Are you part of us or not? So we learned…we went in on a cyclical basis, three weeks in, three weeks out, and the first cycle we learned a lot, because there we learned just how to suss the people out and we learned an important lesson about the locks and about the clothes. The second time we went back no locks. So old Gaspar would now come in, and he would come into our tent, and he would come up to me for example, and you see I’ve got hairy legs, and he would come and stroke my legs like this, very uncomfortable if you’re a man not used to this sort of stuff. What you doing? Oh he’s feeling because they’re very slight people in Mozambique. They haven’t eaten well their whole lives, they’re very small people, they’ve got no body fat and they’ve got no hairs on them. Interviewer This picture I see that he comes up to your shoulder if that. Tony Yes. So they’re all small, diminutive people but wiry and strong and hard. But he would feel the hairs on my leg and it felt alien to him. So you’ve got to get used to people coming into your space. And then he would go into your Bergen… END OF SIDE A (counter at 546) SIDE B (counter at 5) Tony …unpack this, and you’d find that you have three pairs of underpants and he had none. Laughs Interviewer So in his mind this was a bit extreme, you should share. Tony You share! So eventually there you see me I’m in a dirty t-shirt, one pair of pants and you’re flat. I only had that, because I had a backman eventually, and my backman, I created employment because my backman washed my clothes every day. So I had that and I had one other alternative. But just a short pants like this, and a t-shirt that’s it. I had two pairs of socks, two pairs of underpants, that’s all I had. And you start learning things for example, trust. Trust is earned. This guy here…I’ll show you this fellow here…I’ve got a picture of this man here. This man here, he got cholera and he was about to die, and we were faced with a perplexing moral question, here we’ve got anti cholera medication…remember we’ve got escape and evasion tactics to get out in the case of the pawpaw hitting the fan, and we’ve got antibiotics in the case of getting sick, because we’ve got to stay there for at least the three weeks cycle. Our next uplift is maybe 127 three weeks from now, eventually it became six weeks cycles. So we’ve got to be self sufficient fully for a minimum of three weeks, and part of that is we’ve got our own antibiotics, our own medical kit. I was a battlefield medic in the army and you know, it was just one of the things, I wasn’t a medic as such I was just trained in battlefield medicine and I could at least stem flow of blood and I could at least stabilise a patient and at least sort of treat for shock etc, etc., and put a drip in and suture a wound, etc. I can do all that stuff. but in this case here’s a guy who’s got cholera, he’s about to die, so what do you do? If you give up your own antibiotics you put yourself at risk. And once again it’s another decision that you made. And I made a decision and I gave him my antibiotics, and I brought him back from the brink of death. And after that we were cemented. We were brothers. We’d proven it. You know you see it there for example, I mean, these guys were fighting a primitive war. Once we got into Renamo and we started realising what they were doing…when I was the radio engineer I was getting their networks going now, repairing the radio stations, getting their networks going. Suddenly I was meeting…this guy’s a signals commander, this guy’s a signals commander, so I was working out with the signals people and getting their trust and there I’m teaching them how to use Morse code and how to use a very simple crypto system. We wanted them to use that so that we could intercept it. so that we can break their crypto. So we give them the crypto keys, we give them the crypto systems, but we want to train them in Morse code so that we can intercept it. So I’m a Morse code instructor so I teach them that, etc, etc. So these are the different elements. But trust is earned, and in my book I write various sort of little sub stories about this. Always afraid that you’re going to get taken out. Always close. In fact in my book I talk about the one time when we’re now getting deeply under the skin of Renamo, we’re getting in there and we’re sussing them out and we’re now really getting on top of it. And all of a sudden one day, they call a meeting, and there under a great big tree they pull out one of these clerks…I told you that very few people read and write there, so the literate people are our targets…and they pull out one of these clerks and they tie him to a tree in front of us and put a bullet in his head. I wrote in my book about that. And Pedro looks at me and I look at Pedro and say, shit what now! And Pedro could always speak better Portuguese than I can, and Pedro says, what’s going on? And then the answer comes back, no there’s been a leakage of information from the president’s office…they would refer to Dhlakama as the president. Shit, is that us? Because at that stage we’re leaking information from the office, we’re getting our hands on hard intelligence. And then what do we ask now? Once again we’re getting back to the situation like when I was on the other side of the door and the fireman was there, if you panic you blow it, or do you keep cool, calm? So, now we calm down and Pedro asks the next question, did he do it? Is he guilty? And they answered, no, he’s not guilty, it wasn’t him. So why do you shoot him? laughs Just to send a 128 message to those that are thinking of these things, that’s it. so whether they knew we were on to them, whether they sent…to this day I’m bewildered, I don’t know, I just don’t know. Whether that was their normal…that’s how they just keep people to toe the line, I don’t know. I just don’t know to this day. But that’s the life we lived. We lived at any moment in time, we’re waiting for that knock knock that hand on the shoulder, and in my book I talk about the one night when, I’d established a reputation for myself I could fix up most of these things that were broken, and we got the radio networks going…in fact here this is a very interesting picture over here. This is one of the radio shacks, this is now at one of the bases. We’ve now been taken to one of the remote bases. And this is a radio station that’s been given by a Recce. So that’s a 24 volt hand generator. So here you get this guy, his job is for 8 hours a day he cranks that hand generator. He’s the radio operator. In this case (Interviewee shows photographs) there’s Pedro there and this is the general, and they’re showing us the base and we’re checking it out now. And what these guys would do when they charged the radios, they would generate electricity for that radio com, but then afterwards when the coms were over they would charge batteries for their own walkmans. So you’d get like a trench dug in the ground and all these batteries stuck together, in a hole in the ground, and then this guy for 8 hours he goes and churns out the electricity, then he goes and listens for 8 hours to his headsets. And that gave us an in. Because we then started buying these cheap little tape cassette players and batteries. Batteries, you can buy your way in Mozambique, with batteries! With razors. My batman would shave and there are no razor blades So he had sharpened his razor blade to a point that it was a thin sliver. So all I did was I came back and I got a whole bunch of razor blades and gave them these razor blades. And scented soap, oh! The people stank because there was no proper water and no sort of deodorant. So just scented soap you know. They loved it. So we started working our way in and we started building up trust. And when we started realising that we were being trusted a couple of things happened. The one thing happened was this guy here, he’s the chief of staff, and he came to me one day, and there was always a big question, should we take photographs or shouldn’t we? When I took that photograph there, it was clear that the general was uncomfortable. Because why were we photographing this base? But on the other hand we needed photographs so it was always a tactical thing, when and what and how, and when do you do it, how do you do it? So, it became clear that the senior officers actually were quite happy once we brought back the photographs we’d taken. So we made a rule…we made an operational rule that every photograph we took we would take a copy back to them. So when that general…he might have been uncomfortable when he saw me take that photograph, but later on he got a copy of the photograph then he was less uncomfortable. And we had a breakthrough when this guy here, he looks quite dapper in his uniform, he’s the chief of 129 staff. He’s quite dapper. And I knew I’d made a breakthrough when he came to see me one day, this is my little radio hut there, that is my life, that is my tent, that’s what I lived in, all my daily activities centred around this place here and one day I look outside and there he’s standing and he’s in a uniform and he asks me, can I please take a photograph of him in his uniform? And the next day he comes back in a different uniform…see they’ve got different uniforms. Next day he’s in a different uniform and I photograph him. and eventually, he wants to be photographed in every single conceivable uniform he can be seen in. And I take them back and I give them back to him. And then he comes to me one day and he’s looking all embarrassed, all sheepish, he stands around and he doesn’t want to look at me in the eye. And he talks to me and talks to me…I say, what’s going on? What’s wrong my friend? Com esta? And eventually he says to me, he wants to tell me something but he’s shy, he’s embarrassed. Talk to me I’m your brother. And he can’t read and write English, he’s the Chief of Staff, he’s embarrassed, will I please help him? I became his teacher. From that moment onwards I became his teacher. You become his teacher, you treat him with respect and trust starts growing. So this is what happened. And we’ll end on that now. break Interviewer Before you took that break we’d been talking through the pictures that you have mounted in this collage, and it’s nicely framed and it’s around a flag which is the Renamo flag I presume. Tony Yes, that’s for the first ever democratic elections in Mozambique, we printed…chief director of K…printed these things. So that flag and this thing, this election manifesto, was all part of Bush Talk. And I just got one or two of them and kept them as mementoes because I think they’re historically relevant. I just want to say one thing before we carry on. When we talk about K, I want also to have it on record that there’s a thing called Ops K. Ops K is Koevoet. So if you look at some of the literature and they talk about Ops K, Ops K was the core sign for Koevoet. So when I talk about K, in all of my K references I’m talking about Chief Directorate Covert Operations National Intelligence Service. Just to have it on the record. We were talking about life with Renamo and some of the little stories that were happening around the day to day bases. The first little story I want to relate to you while living this paranoid life, I mentioned that we had this whole thing about a stash of money hidden away. And morphine ready to pump ourselves full if we had to run for ten days non stop. And one day I was sitting with old Pedro and we’d now become quite comfortable, we’d dug ourselves in, people respected us and trusted us, and we were moved now to a more sort of dignified place. We were away from that long drop without the privacy etc, and we were moved into an area close to what they call diplomatic quarter in the big camp that we were staying in Maringue. And next to this was a liaison camp area. So this is where foreign dignitaries would come and meet Renamo and they would get shunted off into some of these grass huts and 130 what have you. And of course part of this was a toilet facility befitting a VIP. And it had a roof over the head, and our toilet didn’t have, we were just under a bush. And I said to old Pedro, Pedro my brother let’s just quickly go through it, let’s just check ourselves, we’re becoming paranoid now, we’re living on our own for a long time, we’ve been under surveillance for the whole time, we’ve got to make sure that our decisions are right. That stash of money that you hid away, A: have you checked that it’s still there, and B: I want you to go through that stash of money and make sure that there’s no receipt in that money that says National Intelligence Service. laughs Have you done this? He says, no, no, no, he hasn’t. I said, Pedro, go and check it out. I pulled rank, I said, go and check it out. So Pedro goes off and he finds his stash, comes back, ashen faced, whoa, slow glad that I told him to do that because he’s gone through this big pile of dollars and stuck in between the dollars is a receipt, and this receipt says, National Intelligence Service. If we get caught with that now, this is the smoking gun, this is unforgivable, this is an operational mistake of great magnitude. So I said, well, we’ve got to get rid of it. And we’ve got to get rid of it decisively. Now, one of the things we’re trained in when I was deployed into Europe was, how do you get rid of papers where there’s smoke detectors? Because if you burn a paper in a hotel room and there’s a smoke detector you trigger the smoke detector Laughs and that’s the last thing you want. So there’s a special way of getting rid of paper without triggering off smoke detectors. Anyway, we decided now, we sort of did an operational appreciation – that’s what it’s called in the technical world – we did an ops appreciation, right here are the facts. The fact of the matter, we’ve got a receipt in our hands that is incriminating. The other fact is that Renamo is highly skittish about smoke, because if smoke happens then the MiGs come in and shoot us. So if you want to cause major consternation in Renamo, make a fire where there’s smoke, and before you know it there’s big trouble, ok. So the decision was made that, we’re going to go and we’re going to tear this receipt up into the tiniest little piece that we can find, million of little pieces and we’re going to drop it down the long drop. But not in one long drop, we’re going to put it in different long drops, so that you really have to dig down there to find all the bits and pieces. That is the plan, that is the decision made now. So Pedro says, you go and do it. not a problem, I’ve got the plan. Pedro was a bit of a maverick in that way, he was a hell of an operator, a really great guy, but I mentioned earlier on that he was a tactical guy. He never thought through the big picture stuff. And I always had to sort of just remind him, hey, what about this? What about that? In many ways he was still a Three Two soldier. And I’m not saying this in a bad way, just that you know, he was like so caught up in the moment that he sometimes lost sight of the detail. And anyhow, to cut a long story short, Pedro goes to the long drop, this VIP long drop and he comes back big smile on his face, no the deed is done, all the receipt is got rid of, it’s gone, doesn’t exist anymore. Next thing he’s sitting and chatting and talking about 131 general things and the next thing I look over and there in this VIP toilet area is a big plume of smoke. Said Pedro, what have you done? The decision was, we’re going to tear it into pieces and we’re going to put it through the different long drops, and we’re not going to burn it. Did you burn it? He said, yes, he decided in the end it was too much schlep to break it into lots of pieces and sprinkle it around, he burnt it. But don’t worry he dropped it down the long drop. But of course down the long drop there’s combustible material down there, so now this long drop is on fire. What do you do now? Geez, we do what all people do, we go and try and pee it dead. So now, we go and urinate on this thing, just to try and get rid of the fire, but it’s a big raging fire down there in this long drop and burning smoke is belching out of this hole in the long drop. So eventually we get the water we can find, we get rid of this thing and hell we really tear our hair out, and to cut a long story short we manage to eventually get enough water, kill the fire, and we didn’t raise any alarm. But it just shows you once again how a small little mundane thing like this can…things that you take for granted in a normal life, suddenly be taken a whole new significance when you’re living under those conditions. So it sounds amusing now but believe me I was livid. I crapped him out like from a dizzy height at that point in time, because he was simply unprofessional. He simply…he cocked up. And a cock-up like that is unforgivable. I was a perfectionist under those circumstances. I preferred operating solo, because when you operate solo then you don’t have to rely on moegoes around you that can drop the ball. So all of the work that I did where I was significant was always mostly a solo operation. But anyhow that’s the one story. Then the other story that I mentioned, I mentioned the uncertainty. The country was full of landmines, absolutely rotten with landmines, so the roads were always suspect. The roads were at best rudimentary, and we went in, you’ll see on these photographs here that Renamo fought the war on Honda 175 motorcycles. They just had an army of these motorcycles. And these were robust motorcycles and there was a mechanic there who could make spare parts for this Honda with a hacksaw and a piece of…pliers and not even a vice and he would make a spare part for the Honda. So in our wisdom we decide that we as operators we’re going to go in with a 4- wheeler. Why? Because a 4-wheeler has got lower pressure in the tyres so it will not detonate an anti-tank mine. It will detonate an anti personnel mine but we’re not really worried about an AT mine because they’re mostly directional and it will detonate about sort of a half a metre away from you and you’re probably going to survive. But the anti tank mines these are the bad ones. So with a pressure distribution on the 4-wheeler we’re safe, and of course the 4-wheeler became known within the Renamo circles as a quatro rodas, the four wheeler. I used to think it was red, but I see in the photograph here now it’s blue. But anyhow, nonetheless, quatro rodas, people would talk about the quatro rodas. And in our wisdom we thought well we’re going to give Dhlakama this motorcycle here, and that’s a 400cc motorcycle 132 and now they’re only used to 175s. And they’re skinny guys. Now they’ve got to kick-start this 400cc motorcycle and they can’t. There’s not a guy in Renamo that’s got enough meat on his bones to kick-start the 400. So as it turns out this very inquisitive mechanic now gets given for the first time this brand new motorcycle, it’s not a Honda 175, so what does he do with it? He dismantles it, pulls it to pieces to see how it works. Can’t put it all back together again, now the thing is not working. So we eventually scratch our head and fiddle and get it going again. But now the deal is that we bought this for Dhlakama because we feel it’s befitting that the commanding officer should ride something different from the rest. Laughs But he can’t kick-start it so now each time he rides it they call on me, the biggest guy around, my job is now the kick-starter of this 400cc motorcycle. So it’s around the motorcycles that a funny story happens. One day we were looking at getting close to this General Mateus Ngohama. Now the Chief of Staff was one thing, I was teaching him how to speak English, and he was an interesting fellow, ex Frelimo man, they were all ex Frelimo people. But Ngohama was another because he could only speak Portuguese and was very skittish because he’d been dropped by a Recce. He was working very closely with Reconnaissance Commando people at the signing of Inkomati accords and he was absolutely horrified that him and all of his Renamo counterparts were loaded up from Phalaborwa, put in a Samil, taken to the border and unceremoniously dumped at the border. So Ngohama was livid. He saw this as betrayal of the highest order. They were left to fend for themselves at the border, they could have been arrested. Remember there’s still war going on and Frelimo is still in charge. So Ngohama hated anything that was a white South African, hated anything that was a possible SADF thing and I can tell you now that SADF after Inkomati had no peace with Renamo wherever Ngohama had a say. So anyway he was always a bit aloof from me and I could never quite suss him out, and one day suddenly Ngohama comes in and he’s got a big sort of…not quite a big smile on his face…but his face looks a little bit different. And he’s on one of the 175s and he just beckons to me to come, I must follow him. So I fired up the quatro rodas and now…remember we’d been isolated…in certain areas we were forbidden…not allowed to go into certain areas, on pain of death if we went into certain areas, we were told they would shoot us. So all of a sudden now we’re going through this great big…that’s the day that I realised just how big this camp is. And anyhow I’m chasing the general now, he’s on this 175 and he’s ducking and darting and in and out and I’m chasing on the quatro rodas, you can’t always get through the forest on the quatro rodas, because it’s wider than an ordinary 2 wheel motorcycle. So you’ve got to sometimes take a different path. You don’t want to puncture the tyres because to fix them up is a big schlep. And now we’re going up and down and over a valley and through a river and somewhere else and I’ve never been out there, don’t know where we’re going, and then the thought came to me, what are they 133 doing? This was after the incident where they shot this guy. Are they taking me to tie me to a tree to put a bullet in my head or what’s going on here now. never happened before, I’ve never been this close to Ngohama. I know that he doesn’t actually particularly like South African white males, what now? So once again a bit of trepidation and I started getting really nervous because we’re now sort of like riding for 30 minutes or something like that, no idea where we’re going to, absolutely no idea what’s going to happen around the next corner, full of landmines, are we going to hit one? I don’t know. So, suddenly we come around a corner into a clearing and there in front of me is the most incredible sight I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s a clearing in a forest and it’s got just bare sand and hundreds of little children. Hundreds and hundreds of little kids. And sitting on the one side is an old man, very wizened looking fellow, sense of incredible tranquillity about him, and this sea of children – I was taken immediately by the fact that they were badly clothed, they mostly had just little short pants on, very few had tops on, they only had one piece of clothing and that was what they had on their body. In almost all cases I was taken by the fact that the little boys that wore these khaki trousers had worn the bums through, so you could see their two buttocks sticking through the back of their trousers. But they were happy and excited and, you know, like kids are. And we came into the middle of this clearing, here was Ngohama in his uniform…in fact that was the time then…and I was there in my t-shirt, and they’d never seen a quatro rodas before. And of course there was a surge forward of these young kids and they wanted to come and see the quatro rodas. And all it was, was that this was Ngohama learning to trust me and he wanted to show me these kids…these were war orphans…and the war orphans were very sensitive because Renamo had been accused of child soldiers by some aid agencies and they were very, very shy about showing people these children because they believed that these people would think that these are child soldiers. So it was a sign of trust, that they were trusting us, that they would show us these kids. And I remember this enormous sense of tranquillity when I spoke to this old man sitting under the tree, because he was a teacher and here I was…just look at our mindset…here we are, a member of a sophisticated intelligence service doing this very specialised operation, we’re supposed to know what’s going on, we come from a western civilized society, We’ve got technology on our side, and all of a sudden you’re here in a place where you ask this man, how do you feed the children? Well, he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know where food will come from, but he just knows that tomorrow there’ll be food. This sense of tranquillity was just overwhelming when I saw this, and I saw this wisdom and I just felt so humbled that day. And I remember very vividly that all these kids were clambering on the quatro rodas now and I was taking like ten or twenty, however many could fit on the bike, I would take them a little spin around this big open field. And after about the fourth or fifth attempt, the kids were really excited now and I look in the background and 134 there was a little girl with a scoliosis, a little girl with a hunchback. And I looked at her and I beckoned her, I said, you want to come forward? Because she was too weak to fight a way through the crowd. And I looked at her and I said, do you want to come for a ride? And she shrugged her shoulders, a little hunchback, you could see she was in great pain, and she shrugged her shoulders. And she sort of looked at me and in that moment that her eyes made contact, she looked at me and I just saw, sad, tired eyes. A little girl, five, six years of age, sad, sad, tired eyes. And I said to her, come forward, come it’s your chance now. And I beckoned…the kids…made them open a path for her and she came forward, but the way she shrugged her shoulders, this air of acceptance, well, whatever is going to happen, shit happens and this is my life. And I remember picking her up, and as I picked her up to put her on the quatro rodas, I was absolutely amazed at her absence of weight. She had no weight whatsoever. It was like picking up a feather. You anticipate the weight and you sort of bend accordingly and she had no weight at all. So anyhow, I put her on the motorcycle and gave her a solo spin. She was the only kid that had a solo spin. And I came very close to asking if I could bring her home and I wanted to adopt the child, because I don’t think she’d have been given any chance out there. But anyhow I had to remind myself that we’re on an operation and I had to remind myself that we can’t let personal feelings get in the way of the work that we do, and as much as I felt that we could maybe give this poor little kid a better life, at least better medical care, at least better education if nothing else – I thought my wife would be maybe surprised if I had to bring a war orphan home, in my baggage, in my Bergen – but nonetheless I sort of said goodbye to her and I often wonder if she’s made it. I would actually love if one day – there was an iconic moment in Afghanistan when that journalist took that photograph of that Afghan woman, and they went back many years later. I would love to know if we actually go back and find that little girl with the scoliosis because personally I doubt if she’s made it. I just don’t think she’s got the strength. But it’s a nice little story. Then the one other story about that time that I would also like to add was…I’ve mentioned now about the knocking on the door, in our case the tent flap, and the question in the dark, have you been betrayed, this man called Wyatt Earp has he sold us out or hasn’t he? He’s such a snake he’s likely to do it, so has he or hasn’t he? And we had to protect ourselves by enormous means that are still in place funnily enough. The protection that we set out then is still in place, so the day that Wyatt Earp tries to sell us down the river then that mechanism will get triggered and he will get burnt. So we’ve had to think as deviously as that. But be that as it may, one night, at this stage, Pedro and myself had been separated. Pedro’s gone off and he’s now working out in other parts of Mozambique and I’m working on my own now, so we’re sort of living a solo existence again. And all of a sudden I hear this scurry outside the tent flap, and someone trying to open the tent flap. Now, this is strange because it’s never happened before. So what do you do 135 now? You can’t lock anything away. So I get up out of my sleeping bag, open the tent flap and there in front of me are a couple of guys wielding AK47s. And I thought, shit what now? What happens now, have they bust us? What now? And this guy speaks in Portuguese, tells me to get dressed and come along. Said, where we going? He says, no, he can’t tell me. So I say, shit what now? So now we’re walking through the bush, thick dense bush, a little small footpath under this moon, silver light of the moon, and this silhouette of the trees. Quite amazing, walking through this moonlit pathway. Now, I’ve just been woken up out of my deepest of sleeps, as fitful as those sleeps were because you don’t sleep deeply for long. And suddenly I’ve got two guys in front of me with AKs and two guys behind me with AKs and we’re going through the bush to some unknown destination, armed escort, the guy doesn’t appear to be very friendly, no smile at all. The other three soldiers not communicating at all. What now? This looks very, very ominous to me. So we go charging through the bush and now I start thinking, you know your head starts ticking over, what is it now? And I remember clearly thinking to myself, I hope I don’t cry. When they interrogate me. My thought was I hope I don’t break down and cry. And at any moment in time you are waiting for that rifle butt to come crashing in between your shoulder blades. And very, very disconcerting, very perplexing. Stumbling through the night, these guys know where they’re going, you don’t, you haven’t got a cooking clue. And slowly you start hearing this noise in the background, it’s this prrr sort of rhythmic sound. It’s a generator working out there. And then you get a bit closer you hear the generator a bit louder, a little Honda generator. And suddenly you break forth into this clearing and there’s a sort of a hut, there’s a satellite dish and it’s a communication centre that I had no idea existed. I was doing all their coms but I didn’t know about this satellite coms centre. And this was a coms centre given by the Italian government, I later found out. And this coms centre now that we knew about it we could do something about it, but as it turned out there was one of these clerks, one of these literate guys that was manning this office, and his Xerox machine had broken down. And he heard that I was an engineer and he motioned this thing to me and said, can you fix this thing? laughs Interviewer The purpose of the night march. Tony Just this sense of absolutely… I’d been spared for yet another day. You know you age in those marches, you age, you really do. And I mean I remember opening up this photocopy machine and inside it…I don’t know if you know how a photocopying machine works, but there’s a big drum and there’s a high voltage wire that ionizes the air, and if you touch that you get zapped by a couple of thousand volts. But inside this thing is this great big monstrous hairy spider, never seen such a spider in my…well I had seen but…I’d just killed a spider in my tent that was so big that when I put a soup plate over his legs his feet still stuck out under the soup plate. I’m not scared of spiders, I’m not scared of snakes. 136 I’ve handled them and I quite enjoy…at one stage I was hoping to become a herpetologist when I was a small boy and I’m very comfortable with snakes and spiders, but living so close to this great big, hairy guy I was a little bit uncomfortable and I killed him, but I could only half kill him. I only wounded him, and I always thought he was going to come back and take out his revenge on me in the middle of the night. But anyhow, on this particular night, now I’m in the middle of this clearing next to the satellite dish and here I see this great big, hairy spider. It was the happiest moment in my life that I shooed the spider out of there and he was shorting out this high voltage wires etc., got the thing sorted out, just amazed these guys that I could fix these things up. A lot of it was just fiddling around and anyway I got the photocopy stuff going and after that they sort of escorted me back to bed again. Clearly these guys haven’t got a sense of humour. So their sense of humour failure is such that you’ve got to just keep your head about you all time. So that was really the life in Mozambique. It was a remarkable time. I remember sitting under these great big trees because life in the bush is dictated by the time of day and the season. So I’d listen under my tree…there was no alcohol allowed in the camps. Dhlakama would not allow any alcohol. So at night when the sun goes down the mosquitoes come out and attack you and you go to bed. And early morning when the sun rises you waken before the sun rises to the sound, doof, doof, the women stamping their meal, their corn and women singing and you hear the soldiers marching around and doing their sort of soldierly things, and at night you’d sit there and watch the satellites come over and count, ten, twenty satellites a night. Watch the incredible sky, blue, blue sky, became black at night but not a whiff of industrial pollution whatsoever, so beautiful sky. And I would sit under this great big tree and listen to the nag apies coming and going and you would know that you’d been there for a full year because the nag apies would come and go to the same tree a second time, they would come and go to the different fruits that they would eat at night and the fruit bats and stuff like that. And I remember watching these little lizards that were living in the tree, and I started making note now about how many lizards there were and how they demarcated their territory and what the pecking order was amongst the lizards. So here you’re dictated to by a time…process of time that is different completely to what you’re used to in a civilized world. And it was actually a lovely life, I really lived that time. It was just a wonderful moment, a wonderful period of my life. But of course there was great suffering in Mozambique. Great, great suffering. Let us not forget that. I met some wonderful human beings, I’ve got a profound respect for the Mozambican people, they’re lovely people. If they’re given half the chance I think they’re going to make valuable citizens in the SADC region and I must say that I’ve got a profound respect for the Mozambican people. Interviewer You mentioned earlier on that Renamo had earned, or had been granted, a bad reputation by one means or another. Through aid 137 agencies and through the story of how it was developed…Rhodesian intelligence claimed to have had a lot to do with it, and then latterly South African military intelligence and the Recces went and stuff like that. Is your perception that they were bad guys fighting the wrong war, or an evil war, or is that something of a misunderstanding? Tony I’ve come, now in my old age, I’ve come to realise that the labels we give of good and bad are very superficial and very boxed in. These people were living in a time of war. Remember they’d been occupied…well they were being colonized by Portugal, one of the poorest of the European countries. And the Portuguese were simply extractors. They just took from Mozambique what they wanted and they put nothing back. Mozambique, in fact Angola, all of the Lusophone countries have got no infrastructure, no education, no health care. The Portuguese record in Africa was appalling, it was abysmal. So all these people knew was violence. All they knew was struggle. I just told you early on how the kids were recruited. I mean, imagine seeing your parents being napalmed and then surviving a night in the bush where the hyenas are trying to eat you, your little three year old sister. Just imagine that! I mean, that’s how these people lived. So, I actually came to love those people as really wonderful people, but they were brutal. You know, this guy here, Gaspar…one day I said to Gaspar…Gaspar had a big scar down his face here, and I said to Gaspar, my brother, how many people have you killed in your life? Just a ball park figure. Is it ten or is it twenty or is it four hundred or a thousand, I don’t know, tell me? And he looks and he thinks and thinks and he’s not being funny now, he’s just thinking, thinking, and he gets back and he says, do I mean, during the war or just outside the war as well? So there was a completely two different categories for him, I mean I was astounded by that. So these people have just lived a life much like it must have been in Africa before the colonial time…at least before the colonial times there was a hierarchy, there was a structure, there was tribal identities, there was ethnic groupings, there was normative systems in place. I reckon Africa worked pretty well in those days actually. I reckon the colonial era damaged Africa really very, very much. So I must say I had a lot of empathy but you know, these people were brutal. I must say that they were very disciplined as well. And I mean, I saw on one occasion a guy had lost his foot in a landmine, and you know if you look at a typical western soldier, take an American or something like that – I saw it just the other night a guy had been shot in Iraq and there was a thing on BBC, just this last week. This guy was screaming and shouting for the medic because he had a silly bullet in his leg. I mean, he wasn’t dead. He wasn’t going to die. He had a hole in his leg so you fix it up. With this guy his foot was blown off. He didn’t moan, he didn’t complain, he didn’t cry, he didn’t beg, he didn’t shout the odds, it was fatalistic, this is what happens. He’s lucky to have got so far, his foot had been blown off and now he had to be operated on. So the guys start operating on him, no anaesthetic, no nothing! But they put a 138 stick in his mouth and they take what we call a hacksaw, and they cut the guy’s leg off! Geez, I look at this lot! And we come from a warm, secure environment and we pass these value judgements over people living under these conditions. I don’t think we’ve got the moral right to make those judgements. So as it turned out this guy survived. I don’t know how he survived, because if you don’t survive the loss of blood in the first place, then the pain of having your leg cut off in front of you! Just imagine your leg, your bone being hacked, rrrrr, not in one go, it’s piece by piece ok. And then the infection that sets in afterwards, if you still survive that, geez you’re tough hey. So these guys are very tough people. They are enormously tough. General Ngohama one day, he was redeployed to another command laughs and he walked there. 40 days of walking. 40 days! Now you deploy one of our…Jannie Geldenhuys. General Geldenhuys you’re now deployed to a new command. How does he get there? Interviewer Normally in an aeroplane. Tony Yes, he gets flown by helicopter or something, it’s a great big ratatata, and a rolling drum beat. This guy walks. And he doesn’t walk with a backpack on his back because the local people feed him and support him. This is a guerrilla unit that lives close to the land. Ideological of course they’re going to take help from whoever they can take help from. Were they created by the Rhodesians? Absolutely not! Absolutely not! That’s arrogance of the highest order. Did they take help from the Rhodesians? Of course they did. The Rhodesians recognised the value of a guerrilla movement that was anti Frelimo, this guy [Andre] Matsangaissa their leader, they saw in him a charismatic man, and they gave him some assistance. He went and sprung some people from jail, which was a sort of daring Fidel Castro kind of Che Guevara kind of move, made him very popular to the people, and that became the early Renamo. Renamo was not a creation of the Rhodesian intelligence service. It was a not a surrogate, it was given assistance by them and it fought alongside them and I think fought a very, from the military perspective, a very effective war. Then South Africa came on the scene, they did the same. They simply took it to another level of relatively crude sophistication. I was astounded when I got right into Renamo, just how little they had. Western analysts talk about all the weapons…I mean, they had a couple of AK47s and a couple of Honda 175s. and they had a big heart and they had a vision, they had fairly good leadership and there were people willing to support them. Here, that is a patrol going through one of the villages, look there, that’s what they’ve got. Couple of AKs and what have you, Tokarevs here and there, very little stuff and that’s it. That’s how they fought the war. The war was fought more…if you want an analysis of why no side won, it’s simply because Frelimo lacked the capacity the wage a ground war. And Renamo lacked the capacity to engage in aerial warfare. If Stingers had have been given to Renamo, they would have won 139 it. Absolutely they would have won it. So one of the funny things about Mozambique is because there are no natural resources of note, there’s no oil, there’s no diamonds, there’s no gold, so the Cold War protagonists didn’t really care too much about it and maybe that’s their saving grace in the end. Maybe it’s not going to be like Angola where there’s oil, or Sierra Leone where there’s diamonds, or the Congo where all of these happen, ok. So at the end of the day they were a fairly simple organisation, they were close to the people, they lived very simply, they liberated the traditional sangomas, they ruled through the sangomas. Can you govern Mozambique today without them? Absolutely not. Absolutely not! Ignore these guys at your peril. Are they going to run a sophisticated public administration? Absolutely not. In their entire lifetimes none of those people have ever had garbage removed from their backyard once. They don’t know what it means to have running water and sewers. So why do you expect that to happen overnight? So, we are now going to reap the seeds of destruction that were sown centuries ago. But I believe that Renamo is a grossly misunderstood organisation. Capacity for good and a capacity for bad. Yes, they used child soldiers, yes, they were murdering bastards, yes, they were callous and unfeeling, but they were just victims of their circumstances. Interviewer On your deployment to Mozambique, you were posing as a radio engineer but you were helping them run their coms and at the same time you were gathering information and getting it back for your bosses. You were in and out quite often…when it came towards the end of your deployment did you simply say goodbye or did you simply go back as you had done many times and just leave it at that? Tony I’m sorry that I never had time to say goodbye finally to these people. We’d reached our mission objective. We’d found that Renamo could be brought to the negotiating table. We couldn’t push them there and in fact history will show that in the first elections at the very last minute they pulled out. I can’t remember the dates but I know for a fact because we were on the ground and at the very last minute for some stupid reason some clever dick came and told them to pull out. It was, I think if I remember correctly, a week long election process, and I think we brought them in day three. We mobilized all kinds of diplomatic activities, we knew which button to push there…and I think records…I mean, if you really go and research this you’ll either refute me or agree with what I’m saying. I think on about day three they came in. And that means that they lost a lot of stuff. They lost a lot of opportunities, but…sorry your question was again? Interviewer I was saying that you’d been coming and going regularly, when it came time… Tony It was mission accomplished. I’m very sad that I didn’t have a chance...in fact today I’m always very nervous when I go to Mozambique because Mateus Ngohama he’s the second in command of the unified Mozambican army. I’m sure that he 140 would remember me, I hope he would respect me. He might be pissed off that we were there spying on him, but I think at the end of the day I hope that he would have the wisdom to realise that it was in everyone’s best interest. There’s always the unknown. You’re not quite sure, and because I travelled there under my real name, one never knows. So I’m a little bit skittish when I…I don’t travel to Zimbabwe and I travel with great circumspection to Mozambique. It doesn’t mean to say that I can’t travel there, I have been there. I’ve done some SADEC work there and once again the fact that people know about it, the fact that it’s out of the closet, so they pick me up, they interrogate me now, I’ll tell them what happened in the 1980s, so what else? Read my book. Give them a copy of my book, sign it and say that… END OF SIDE B TAPE 5 (counter at 526) TAPE 6 SIDE A Tony …the damage caused by Wyatt Earp. Wyatt Earp could have gone and burnt us badly. And we just don’t know. In fact there was one occasion, I’ll just quickly give you the final Renamo story. We were going in and out, and in and out quite regularly now, and we were never ever crossing borders, we were never ever getting stamps in our passport. And all of a sudden because Wyatt Earp is playing such a big role in this thing, Wyatt Earp had some connection, he was a very charismatic man and a very intelligent man, and he had a connection to one of the senior intelligence guys, one of the managers that was in charge of us, he wasn’t in the field, he was a sort of an office boytjie. And he convinced this guy to suddenly change the operational plan! Now you never do that! You don’t change your frigging operational plan halfway through. So in this case I mentioned that we started out by going in sort of three week in, three week out, six week in, six week out. Eventually we then split. Pedro went one way, I went another way. and now on this one occasion, on this particular occasion, Pedro was…how was it? Pedro had gone in before me, I was relieving Pedro, but because this idiot Wyatt Earp had changed the plan now, he suddenly got afraid of overflying Mozambique, that’s what it was I think. He was afraid of overflying Mozambique and he was afraid of getting shot down. I think that was the reason. That’s the only explanation I can think of. So he goes and makes the plan on the spur of the moment and he decides that we’re going to, from now on, go through the border post. So that means you’ve got to fly to Maputo and you’ve got to clear customs at Maputo. But what he forgets was…no, I’ll tell you how it was. I was in…I was in and Pedro was out. Pedro was relieving me. So this plan has changed now but now, but I’m in! I don’t have a passport! I haven’t been through customs, but now once you go in through customs you’ve got to come out through customs, so they haven’t thought this damn thing through. So I’m sitting in the bush now, they’re coming to relieve me, Pedro comes in through customs but he’s been in the previous time to go…I’m sitting there but I 141 don’t have a passport! So I’ve got to come out on Pedro’s passport! Now, I’m 2 metres tall, Pedro’s one and a half metres tall. I’m blond, blue eyes, Pedro is Portuguese looking. There’s nothing that looks…we don’t even vaguely look like each other, now I’ve got to pose like Pedro to go through some customs official. Now this was a stupid development. It just wasn’t well thought through, and this is once again, we getting to the knife edge, we balance all these little things out. We’ve got to do these things properly and professionally because it’s about risk management. So anyhow what can I do! My back’s to the wall, the gun’s to my head, what can I do, I’ve got to pose as Pedro. So I come out and I’ve got to charm this officer. And how did we do it? Well we did it with our highly scented soap. When the chips are down you’ve got to make a plan. And we figured out that we’d learned that people like batteries and razors and stuff like that, we had a whole bunch of soap that was very highly scented and we sort of were brandishing this around. This took the attention of the customs official away, stamped Pedro’s passport with me in front of him, and we got out. But I mean…we were generally professional but sometimes there were these silly little things that came in. And these silly things came in normally where the operators were overruled. And there was sort of outsiders that would suddenly come with a bright idea. So in general I think our operations were very slick, very professional, and we certainly managed to establish the fact that Renamo was prepared to negotiate under certain circumstances, could be induced to the negotiations, was a force to be reckoned with. We got a fairly good idea of their force numbers by the radio intercepts, we got a fairly good understanding of their geographic deployment, where their bases were. So we could verify when they eventually did come in that in fact it was the majority of the soldiers that came in, that they hadn’t kept a force out there to later intimidate. So I think ultimately I’m very happy to say that I was part of that operation, I’m very proud of that fact, I think K did very, very well in that operation, and I think ultimately we brought peace into Mozambique and I think…this is a story that is probably completely contrary to what public perception would be that Special operations type of people were bloodthirsty and right wing in their orientation and would try and perpetuate the conflict. So hopefully this goes to show…I don’t know to what extent people can verify these stories, because this is…I could just be smoking something and talking here, but I presume that we’re talking here to serious scholars and I’m presuming that the serious scholars would verify what I’m saying. And I’m sure that there must be tons of evidence out there to verify what I’m saying, otherwise I’m just smoking stuff. Interviewer I don’t think that’s the case, but…one last question…you’re there coming and going off and you and Pedro are coming in and out, did you tell the Renamo that you were doing that because you were actually a radio technician and you had other work to do? Did they understand that it was just part of your business? 142

Tony You know you wing it as you go along. You wing it. A lot of it is just living by the seat of your pants. Technically we had this thing called ‘cover for action’ and ‘cover for status’. And these are different covers that you use and I don’t want to get into all the technicalities of it now, but basically we’d established enough of a reason why we could come and go. We were giving services to Renamo that was rendered…that they considered to be valuable. One service was, the CIA had given them an AM transmitting station and of course they hadn’t trained these guys in running a fairly powerful, a couple of kilowatt, radio station. And these guys were fiddling with it and…you never, ever fiddle with an AM station putting out kilowatts of power by changing the frequency, because the antennae is designed to resonate at a specific frequency and the energy you put into the antennae just melts everything, burns it. So, these guys had fiddled with it and they’d burned it. So I fixed it up, one of the first aircraft coming out I took that radio with me, that’s a picture of it over there. I bought that down to a guy who’s now dead, a guy called Jimmy. Jimmy was an electronic engineer that I knew, a Portuguese guy. Jimmy fixed it up for me and went back the next aircraft and we managed the set up that radio station, it worked for a short period of time, and the value of that was that I could demonstrate my capacity to do the stuff, and the other thing that we did was, I think fairly cleverly was, we use the testing of that radio station to get all of the…here we’re doing it here now, we’re doing it there, and we’re doing it here. We’re doing the testing of that radio station and what we’re now doing is we’re calling all the other…these are the commanders from the different units now…they’re calling in all of their units to do a coms check, to hear how they heard the signals. And once we knew that, we knew how many there were and we could through another unit work on the side here, we could do DF work on them, so we could find out where they were. I think that’s quite a clever little intelligence ploy, and we didn’t get all the stuff we needed but we got pretty good indication. So at the end of the day it was a successful operation, we met our objectives. Clearly at this point in time we’ve got to get back now to South Africa because now CODESA is in full steam now, and it’s an irreversible process, FW is now president of the country, PW has been relegated to a position of relative insignificance and we can now move forward. Interviewer And back in South Africa…you mentioned in your book…there’s serious violence happening in many townships, and not just townships, in many parts of the country. Hani was assassinated in ’92, I think it was…and in the early nineties there’s been train violence, township violence, and CODESA is up and running but there’s breakdown from time to time, and I know that you talk about your role in that to some degree. Can you tell me more about that. Tony I was not directly involved in that because remember I was in K3 and K3 was foreign… 143

Interviewer External. Tony Yes, external. This is an internal matter and we were not really directly involved in that. Where we were involved was sort of in a peripheral way…let’s talk about the train violence. What was the train violence? Let’s try and unpack that a little bit because I think this is historically significant as well. Now I don’t know if I’ve got all the answers, but the way I understand it, you cannot understand the history of this country and particularly the history of the armed struggle if you do not understand the history of the Afrikaner people. And you can’t understand the history of the Afrikaner people unless you understand the history of Xhosa and the Zulu people. The British, when they came to this country, subjugated the three most dominant political forces in the country. First when they came they clashed with the Xhosa. The Xhosa people were engaged in a hundred years of brutal war. A century of warfare which ended in one of the greatest catastrophes that this country has ever known, the Great Cattle Killing. The Great Cattle Killing broke the Xhosa nation and part of the Cattle Killing was driven by the fact that the Crimean War was going on at the time – I don’t know if you know that, but there’s another lesson there, we can’t understand what’s happening here without understanding what’s happening somewhere else. And because the British are punching up the Russians in the Crimea, there was a belief in the Xhosa area that the Russians could come and get rid of the British. And that’s maybe one of the reasons why later on the Communist Party played…I don’t know, I’ve never answered that question. But I think it’s a question of scholarly interest that someone can go and scratch their heads about in the future. But the important thing was when the War of the Axe was finished, the Xhosa were fairly broken, the British demanded I think forty thousand cattle as reparation – the British would always go to break the enemy. They never saw the value of leaving behind and enemy that was restructured but viable. They would break it. I think that’s a mistake. History I think will maybe judge them…I don’t know, it’s not for me to judge. So the Xhosa people were broken after the Cattle Killing. And even Mandela – Fatima Meer’s book, refers to the Cattle Killing – there’s a book out called the Dead Will Arise, that’s about that period of time. I think it was a period of time we need to explore, it’s part of our history that, like for example, whiteys wouldn’t know about, but it’s of great significance to the history of our country. So the Xhosa were subjugated after the Cattle Killing by the British and they were broken, and because of that the Brits could now expand. Then the Brits bump heads with the Zulus. So the Brits are totally decimated at the Battle of Isandlwana. And then they invent a little victory at Rorke’s Drift and the next day, it’s a tiny little victory and the most number of Victoria Crosses ever come out of that tiny little battle. I don’t want to deny the fact that the Welsh fighters were enormously brave, but you know, I’ve just told you my story. You know when your back’s to the wall and you got no option, you do what you’ve 144 got to do. So Lieutenant…what’s his name? Interviewer John Chard. Tony John Chard, he was a great guy, and I happen to have a John Chard medal and I’m very proud of that, but nonetheless, John Chard did what he had to do, that’s all it’s about. But the British broke the Zulu people eventually at the Battle of Ulundi. The British decimated the Zulus, because the Zulus own military doctrine was such that it was so predictable and this notion of, you aren’t a man until you’ve killed your own enemy and drunk his gall bladder, eye to eye kind of stuff. Now with a Gatling gun suddenly eye to eye isn’t so relevant anymore. And it’s no longer Martini Henrys, it’s now Gatling. Not Gatlings, what’s the other one that they used to use? Before the Gatling, some other machine gun that they used [Maxim]… anyhow, it was the advent of the machine gun versus the spear, and clearly the Brits outgunned the spears. And the sad thing was they subjugated the Zulu, but in the process, the pieces on the chess board were put in place for the ultimate showdown with the Boers, with the Afrikaners. And this was done for greed, for purposes of greed, to steal our gold, to take the wealth from our country and to take it back to Britain. I think it’s a crime as far as I’m concerned. I just think it’s monumental. But, in this whole process, there are three dominant groups, the Xhosa, the Zulu and the Boers. And these are the dominant political forces even to this day. We can’t deny that. Now each of those forces were subjugated, and each of the forces has risen again. Today the ANC dominance is Xhosa. The Zuma thing is a Zulu thing. So will the Zulu dominance be housed within ANC ideology or are we talking IFP stuff? Big stuff there. Haven’t even begun to talk about that yet. But the significance now, we’re talking about the train massacres…it goes back to the murder of Piet Retief. Can you believe it? When Piet Retief was murdered, the Afrikaner people made a decision as a nation that they’d better understand the Zulus and better work with the Zulus. So a lot of your Special Force activities cannot be understood until you go back and really analyse the relevance of the Boer-Zulu connection. And of course the deal was the Afrikaners want to be involved in the selection of the next Zulu king, and they recognise Zulu hegemony but they respect it, profoundly respect it. There’s respect there. It’s not fear…part fear, but there’s respect, that’s the important thing. My father was a great Zulu linguist and a person that loved…he was a Zulu through and through my father, and I guess I regard myself in a way as a detribalized Zulu. The funny thing is today I teach at the SANDF college. I teach on their staff college there, one of the instructors that take people from colonel to brigadier level. And I teach every year, at least one course a year, sometimes two courses a year. And it’s interesting one of the commanders at the moment, he’s Colonel Buthelezi…and Colonel Buthelezi remembers my father uMqangabhodwe he remembers him. When I spoke the first time to Colonel Buthelezi about uMqangabhodw, he immediately…I said, that white kid from Hlabisa, and then he 145 got on the telephone to his mother and his mother spoke to me about my father. And it just shows you that this is a small little story but it shows you the value of identity and the value of respect and the value of cultural acceptance…and isn’t that our challenge in this country? To try and respect across cultures, to try and respect each other’s differences, to have difference being our strength rather than a threat. So anyway, you need to understand that, that when Piet Retief was murdered, the Afrikaners make a decision that they are now going to understand Zulu politics and work closely with the Zulus. And they understand that the Zulus are different to the rest. And they’re profoundly fundamentally different to the rest. So now a whole lot of stuff happens in the meantime. Anglo Boer War happens, etc, etc. the Afrikaners rise in 1948 again, they become an apartheid state, in 1961, become independent, etc, etc. But all along the line there’s this link to the Zulus. There’s a strong link to the Zulus. So now suddenly when the liberation struggle starts happening, and you’re talking about black people now, Xhosa people essentially, PAC and ANC guys mostly from the Eastern Cape, they start rising up in armed confrontation. The political culture says, talk to the Zulus. So the alliance between the Afrikaner and the Zulu goes back to that time. And when the Zulus are threatened the Afrikaners are threatened and they start working together. So in Afrikaner psyche if you can work with the Zulus that you understand better, you can act as a counterforce to the Xhosas that you don’t understand. So that’s where a lot of this Operation Marion and all of this sort of stuff comes from that period of time. The original training by Special Forces of Zulus up in Caprivi Strip, it all goes back to that psyche, the Afrikaners trust the Zulus, there’s this myth of Afrikaner invincibility, there’s this myth that an Afrikaner is a born soldier, a natural soldier, genetically engineered to be a soldier. And there’s this myth that the Zulu warrior is the same, that there’s this understanding between these groups. So you start getting Special Force training. And that ultimately leads now to the unleashing of this lethal cocktail of Special Force training on the one hand, with the other aspect being the threat against Zulus. Are the Zulus part of this or aren’t they? So I write a whole chapter here now, but as we move to the abyss of full scale civil war, we’ve sorted out Mozambique now, CODESA is kind of happening, a lot of people don’t like this thing because the Afrikaner is going to lose power. The only way that this equation can balance out is that if Afrikaners relinquish power. If they don’t relinquish power than we’re going to carry on fighting, so ultimately you’re asking the Afrikaners to give up what they think is their god given right. It’s very difficult. We need to understand that, it’s very sensitive stuff. So, there was a kind of alliance with the Zulus and of course when we talk about the chapter of mine, staring into the abyss of full scale civil war, we need to understand that it was about numbers and at that point in time there was not a foregone conclusion that the ANC would control the national majority! There was a belief that the ANC was largely Xhosa in orientation 146 and would bring in some seats in the Eastern Cape etc, etc, and nothing more. So if you look at Operation Katzen, go into the history of Operation Katzen, the whole thing about Xhosa land. There’s actually the belief by Kat Liebenberg and Joffel van der Westhuizen that they’re going to evoke these old Xhosa divisions, the Ndlambe factions and the…I don’t know what all the other factions were…they were going to evoke these things and they’re going to bring this Xhosa land as a sort of separation between Ciskei and Transkei. I mean what bizarre social engineering! This goes back a century at least, if not longer, and it’s all very primitive in its analysis and it’s unlikely to work as we now know. So, I believe you have to understand the train violence, you have to understand all of that stuff as those three suppressed nations, broken in some way – Afrikaners still in control at that time but now clearly being challenged, the other two rising again. The Zulus and the Xhosas rising again. And it’s not an uitgemagte sake who’s going to make it, so when the final battle…the Battle of Mmabatho , when that takes place…I mean, that’s the closest we came to full scale civil war because in that battle you had General George Meiring, showing his willingness to deploy SADF against his former commanding general. Very important. Afrikaner was going to fight Afrikaner. Up until then it was basically black on black violence, and that was understood in the primitive apartheid mentality of, well this is tribalism. It probably wasn’t. I don’t believe now in tribalism. But in the Afrikaner psyche at the time, in the prevailing threat perception, that was simply a manifestation of tribalism. So for the first time now you’ve got the real prospect of Boer fighting Boer. So the closest we ever came to full scale civil war was that moment. And at that moment in historical time critical things happened. The one thing is Ronnie Kasrils, Red Ronnie, comes the party and Red Ronnie has done his analysis before and he’s got this whole thing about the fact that essentially the armed struggle has failed, but the way to do it is you’ve got to start encouraging your security forces to defect. So the one element of the equation…I’ve gone into great detail in my chapter, I won’t give all the detail now…but essentially Ronnie’s plan of revolutionary combat work kicks in, so when you now get Eugene Terreblanche coming in with his khaki clad, camouflaged individuals badly trained, just pumped full of brandy and coke, and not a sense of ideology, the riff raff of society, frightened people…when they come in what do they do, they start shooting up innocent black people and that immediately triggers Ronnie Kasrils’ plan. So you immediately get a movement within the Bop Defence Force and the Bop police force, they immediately turn against these guys. So ironically history will show, I think, that Eugene Terre’Blanche actually played laughs a pivotal role, although he wanted to bring about a , he ensured that a Volkstaat would never happen. Had he not done what he did then I believe that you would have then seen white on white violence, you would have seen George Meiring deploying his troops into Bop, you would have seen him coming up against many of the 147 former SADF guys that were now loyal to the General...Constand Viljoen, with ironically our good old friend Jan Breytenbach in the wings again, always there when there’s a bit of action. And I think it would have been a ding dong battle and I’ve got no doubt at the end of the day that the SADF would have won, because they’ve got more logistical support. You simply cannot fight a guerrilla war without fundamentals being in place. The one fundamental is you’ve got to have safe rear bases. You can’t have a safe rear base, there’s not a country around us that would support white right wing militants. So you cannot engage in guerrilla warfare, it’s just not going to happen, you’re going to simply die. So during the final battle, the Battle of Mabatu, I think that’s where all the things came together, and up until then COSAG, the Concerned South Africa Group, had every possibility of actually becoming numerically superior to the ANC, UDF at that point in time, because the UDF were doing lots of things that lots of people didn’t like and at that point in time, KwaZulu-Natal was potentially going to secede from South Africa, so you have a secession battle in Natal, so you’ve got to deploy your armed forces to stop that happening. Then you’ve got the white on white violence now taking place in Bophuthatswana so you’ve got a country divided, it’s full scale civil war, and I don’t think that the final conclusion was easy to predict. So we came very close to that. All the details have sort of escaped me now, but they’re all in the book and anyone can read that. Interviewer Ok, so then we get to ’94 and we have an election and Mandela becomes President. How does this affect you? Tony I was very, very happy that that had happened. In my book I talk about the last night that the old flag came down, we had a meeting in a place called Eikerboom. Now Eikerboom is a beautiful old safe house, absolutely beautiful place, in Pretoria area. And a lot of things happen in Uikerboom. It was a place where lots of intelligence high ups met and a lot of liaison took place. So you’d get people from other services coming in there etc. So it was really a nice place, it was a guest house, but a covert guest house. And there was a meeting that night, and the significance of that night was that all the covert operators came out of the woodwork. People that you hadn’t seen for a long time, people you didn’t even know were covert operators, they all got together that night. And there was a mother of all parties that night. And I remember looking around and saying tomorrow is the new South Africa, is there going to blood on the streets? Remember I’d been deployed into Europe, I’d watched what happened to the Securitate, we’d just come through the Battle of Mmabatho, the Boipatong Massacre, no, the Bisho Massacre, I don’t know how many massacres we had… Interviewer Inkatha. Tony All these horrific things. It was a tinder box. Was it going to be a…there was talk of a military coup. What now? Where are we going now? I remember still the Securitate guys being urinated 148 on and I remember seeing some woman actually put her cigarettes out in the eyes of a dead Securitate officer and I thought, geez, that’s not nice, that’s really not cool. So was that going to happen to us? And I remember that night having a sense of great trepidation, great excitement, a lot of this is a cocktail of emotions, it’s a cocktail of absolute extremes. It could be this, it could be that. I remember looking around and saying, yes, how many of these guys will be around? Where am I going to go? What’s going to happen to me now? Where do I go? How do I fit in? And of course the elections took place very peacefully and I was very grateful for that. And then the big question now, what about the intelligence services? So amalgamation now happens. And I’m then immediately nominated to serve on some of the super working groups. There were a whole bunch of working groups going on. This is post CODESA now, so CODESA is a done deal. There’s a new South Africa is a done deal. The government of national unity is happening. And we now clearly have to restructure the intelligence services so I get put in now, in my capacity as head of covert training, I’m put into a couple of working groups. The one working group was on training and the other working group was on covert structures. What do we do with the covert structures? Do we continue with them? How do we restructure them? Are they useful? How are we going to go on? So that’s what I started sort of applying my mind to. Very exciting period of time. I was very wary…tired in a way of these months and months, years and years, at the sharp end of operations. I was actually tired to my bones. I was almost like an elastic band stretched as far as it can go. Very, very tense in many ways. I always managed my tension by keeping fit and training hard. I get all my tension out when I’m in gym. So that’s what I was doing but my head wasn’t lekker and I made a decision then to carry on with my graduate studies, so I was studying part time and I realised that I probably didn’t have a future in the new South Africa, in the new dispensation, and I realised that I’m probably going to leave it. But then to my great surprise I get given this task in the two super working groups and I immediately come into contact now with very senior ANC guys, and I meet amongst other things, Billy Masethla. And I must say I actually had a very profound respect for Billy. I know Billy is in the news now for all the wrong reasons. I can’t make any comments about that. All I can say is that I knew Billy Masethla as being a really, really good leader at that moment in time. Leaders are people that have got a sell-by date. At that moment in time Billy was a great guy. He was passionate, he was eloquent, he was excitable, which maybe was one of the things that wasn’t good about him. He would start getting excited about the Americans – he hated the Americans – and he would start stuttering when he spoke about these Americans. But the bottom line was, I got on very well with Billy Masethla. And I got on very well with another senior ANC guy called Terence Tryon. Terence was an important guy, you don’t hear anything about him now because he’s slipped off the radar screen and Terence has just never ever made the 149 news for the wrong reasons. Terence is a dignified man, a man I’ve got a great respect for. I will go to the ends of the earth for Terence. If we had to fight a war together I will gladly sit in the trenches next to Terence, and in fact next to Billy. This is a different Billy to the Billy of my book. But the deal that was now cut was, Billy Masethla was going to…it was clear that he was deputy director general. Mike Louw became DG. I’ve spoken very highly now so far of Neil Barnard. Neil Barnard gets farmed out immediately. He’s dumped, like overnight. And he goes on to constitutional development because that’s now really the new thing now, what do we do with the Constitution? How do we go from here? Very, very important, so he applies his mind…he wasn’t kicked out, he just migrated across to his area of natural expertise. And then Mike Louw comes in, and Mike Louw is a very bland sort of accounting kind of guy, not charismatic, he’s not going to rock the boat. Technically did the right thing, and he made a very valuable contribution stabilizing it with Billy. Billy Masethla was his number two man. And during that time we had this…I’m actually going to hand this thing over to you, this document…I want you to put this in the library please. This is a document called the National Intelligence Service 25. It came out during that period of time and it was just a brief history of what NIS was during that time, so there you see Mike Louw and little bits and pieces about the people here. and you’ll see in my book I’ve actually scanned a lot of these photographs in. And in the front here I’ve just said that I want to donate this to the Missing Voices Project by myself, my name, in order that some of our lost national history may be captured and preserved for serious scholars and future generations of South Africans. So let me hand this over to you, for archiving and for putting on the rack. And in this you’ll see there’s some really interesting little stories and little…but elements of what was going on at the time. Interviewer Thank you, I think that’s very valuable. Tony So Mike Louw comes in now as director general. K has been an enigmatic thing for Mike. Mike Louw doesn’t really know K. He knows of it but he doesn’t know the K people personally because we were compartmented. He’d seen a couple of us in the different medal parades where we got different commendations etc, and I know I’ve had a commendation that was awarded by Mike Louw and one from Neil Barnard. And anyhow, we start applying our minds now to the new dispensation, and you’ve got to understand that at that point in time the Constitution has been…well, we don’t even have a Constitution, we’ve got an interim Constitution that establishes a Constitutional Assembly that’s going to draft the final Constitution. So until the Constitution has been redrawn all of the other laws are there but they’re not there. They’re not really valid, so we’re in a kind of lawless place. And the big thing now is what are we going to do. So the first thing is we’re going to establish SAS. And there was immediately this desire to establish this new intelligence service – we didn’t know it would be called SAS. And I was put in charge of the first 150 week of amalgamation after all the technical negotiations of how it was going to be structured. There was a thing at the time called the Pikoli Commission of Inquiry. And I’d like to place that on record because the Pikoli today who is in the media a lot from the Scorpions. Now I found Pikoli to be a hell of a level headed guy. The Pikoli Commission of Inquiry took evidence and I was tasked with the responsibility of preparing some of that evidence, although I didn’t give the presentation myself, that was given to a guy called André Joubert. And the Pikoli Commission of Inquiry heard evidence to suggest how the new intelligence dispensation should look with a view to drafting new legislation, etc. So we listened very carefully…maybe the mistake we made was that we were always very professional and we were very quick out of the starting block. Maybe we were too quick. I don’t know. Maybe that’s a lesson we can learn. A lot of other people are chaotic. So the people that eventually became NIA tended to be…that’s Barry Guilder and…who’s this other fellow that’s still today a senior guy in NIA, I forget his name now…I saw him just the other day, he was from Rhodes University based in...he was a journalist I think, based in…Pete Richer. I saw him just the other day in the airport in fact. These guys, they were chaotic. They were disorganised, and they eventually took over control of NIA. And NIA became a kind of disorganised kind of place. The guys that eventually took over SAS were very organised, so here we’ve got Mike Louw as the number one man, the DG, here’s number two, Billy Masethla. Under him now he appoints a whole lot of senior ANC guys by and large, although a couple of NIS guys were also appointed. And the one senior ANC man that’s appointed is Terence Tryon. He becomes Mike Kuhn’s number two. Mike Kuhn is now put in charge of chief directorate C. So what was K before is now becomes C. And K was for Kovert Operasies, Afrikaans, C is now for the Chief Directorate Covert Collection and Counter Intelligence. CCCI. So triple Cs and an I. And I was given the task of developing the new insignia for that. And in my book I write about the insignia for that, and you can go into the details of the insignia, what it all means, etc, but that’s unimportant now. So now we set out establishing this new professional service. And there are a couple of tensions that arise, and the one tension that arises is this whole thing of training and how do we bring the people in, how do we level the playing field? So we made a decision that we will start on day one, D-day, which I think was in April or something like that, I forget the exact day, it’s in my book. But on D-day when we’re going to amalgamate I was in charge of that whole week of amalgamation. So from that very first time we’re going to bring these guys into a great big hall, we’re going to give them a kind of talk about what it is, and then everyone’s going to go to their offices, but we couldn’t get rid of the old offices because it’s not practical, and the non stats were coming in to the stat offices, but we want to make it very clear that these weren’t our offices. These were the old offices but they belong to us all now. So it’s very important that we have that mindset. So we prepare the 151 statutory guys very, very well for this event. And what we did was after this induction course, we pulled all these covert guys into a big building in Brooklyn area, Pretoria. And we made it clear that all of the statutory guys had to relinquish their offices on that day. So effectively everyone moved into a new office even though some of the guys knew the building that they were in. And we were very adamant about that. We tried to give strong leadership in that regard. And we prepared the statutory people very, very well for this particular occasion. A lot of the NI guys decided not to make it and they were given voluntary packages – quite good money in those days, a couple of million in some cases. JEC took it for example, and CK also took it. JR took that kind of package. I didn’t. I decided not to take it, because I actually had faith in Madiba. And I believed…although I knew that I probably wouldn’t have a future in the service, I realised that I had enough faith in the system to be loyal to the constitution and I could certainly serve under Mandela. I had absolutely no problem at all serving under Mandela. So now we get the first week of amalgamation going…it was very hair raising because, I remember the first day I was talking to these guys and there was just this sea of black faces out there, APLA guys and MK guys and…I knew some of the leaders, some of the senior guys, but now you’re talking about the rank and file people now, and it’s a different sort of kettle of fish there. So I drove it with a guy…there was a troika that drove it, there was one APLA guy. In my book I just give his initials, FM, I think I call him. And then there’s a guy JM. He’s the ANC guy, he used to based in Botswana. MK guy, he used to do all of their false passports and stuff like that, he was an expert at that. And then there was myself. We were the troika that ran the first week of amalgamation. And because I can speak…I got up and I spoke to the people and I did a lot of the talking for that time, but anyhow we managed to sort of wing our way through that week without any sort of clear guidance of what should be done, we just sort of made decisions on the ground as and when the need arose. And we got amalgamation going and of course the…at that stage there was a strong desire by those that were going to stay to make the new South Africa work. They wanted to make the new South Africa work. So, we haven’t quite got a new Constitution. Got an interim Constitution. We don’t quite have the new legislation, but we’ve got a great big heart, we’ve come through this thing and we’re still alive, blood hasn’t flowed in the streets, and where do we go from now? Where do we go to? So we immediately put our shoulder to the wheel and we started thinking about a new mission for what was Chief Directorate C. And we set up this fairly sophisticated covert operational capability, part of it was a counter espionage capability, and therein was a problem, because the counter espionage function eventually fell under NIA, and yet the external counter espionage function fell under SAS. So there was a split command. And I think to this day they haven’t resolved. That split command problem. But I don’t want to get into details about SAS…in too much detail. But anyhow, the other thing that was the big sort of 152 issue of the day now was, what are we going to do with management, because clearly we’ve got too many white faces in management positions and not enough black faces. So how are we going to change that? So then Billy Masethla in his capacity as deputy DG, it became clear that he was going to become director general. And when he became DG, I had a meeting with Billy Masethla, and we cut a deal. And the deal was this that I would pioneer within SAS a new career path ladder for the white professionals that had come from K. Not all had come from K, some had come from the Bop service. We had a mixed bag. Some of them came from the different statutory forces, and some we didn’t trust at all. There’s one guy who eventually ended up working for another intelligence service who came in that mixed bag. But anyhow, certainly the NI guys, they felt comfortable with each other, trusted each other, and where they started linking up with the ANC guys we tended to trust each other. The PAC guys we never fully trusted for various reasons. But, we started forging this new operational culture, corporate culture. And Billy Masethla said to me, right, I’ve got to now pioneer a way of setting the white technically competent people’s minds at ease, so that they would stay in the service, we needed their skills. It was clear we were going to have a new mission, clear we were going to have a new modus operandi, it was clear that we were world class at that stage, we needed to keep like that because we were a pariah state still, we were isolated, we were economically marginalised, we were now going to become economically re- integrated into the world. How do we do that? Economic intelligence. This is a completely different kettle of fish. How do we do it? What is our role now in SADC? What is our role…at that stage the African Union hadn’t been invented…but what’s our role in Africa? All of these big sort of questions were being asked. And how do we do intelligence under oversight of democracy? So, coming out of that now, Masethla gives me this task and I take to it with relish and the decision is made…the model that I put forward is this as follows, very straightforward: allow the senior white people that are loyal to the Constitution, allow them to stay, don’t force them out, they’re good people they’ve got good skills, they want to be part of the solution. I’m not saying reward them for what they’ve done, but just at least retain them. Let’s transfer skills, because the assumption that you’ll transfer skills under duress is false. It’s flawed. If I know I’m going to lose my job once I’ve downloaded my head and given it to you, I’m not going to download my head. Simple as that. So the idea now is to create space fro these professional guys to develop. So we decided to split the career path and we split a management career path, which we called M, from a line function or career path which we called L. and then we created at the top part of the L, the line functional career path, we created three new notches. And those new notches were equivalent to your management notches in salary, in perks, in benefits, but they were not management. So these became specialist roles. And I became one of the first specialists. And the idea here was that 153 we’ll retain these skills but how do we prevent freeloading? How do we prevent a guy that’s maybe a mediocre white operator from now not having to take responsibility as a manager but still being rewarded. So then the decision was well, but they’ve got to get academically trained. They’ve got to come up with post graduate qualifications, they’ve got to get at least an M degree, maybe a doctorate. So essentially that’s where my doctorate comes from. Because in order to prove that this is what should be done, I did it. I’ve always led by example. So that was the plan. And then that worked fairly well. Then Masethla approached me another time and he said, right, we’re now sort of stabilized – he’d now become director general, in fact I’ve got a newsletter that came out when he became DG and I’ve only got one copy so I can’t give it to you but I can give a photocopy maybe. It was an interesting little newsletter because it talks a lot about Masethla and it talks a lot about Mike Louw, and the role that Mike Louw played in the process. So anyhow, Masethla gives me this new task now and the new task…and I was very gratified by that, I must say. Very gratified because he decided to promote me to M2. Now M2 is divisional head and on the rank scales that’s a full colonel in the army or a senior superintendent in the police. So when I was doing liaison work with those forces, I would work to a full colonel or to a senior superintendent. And interesting things we haven’t got time to discuss at all, because I got involved in a murder investigation there but…that’s another entirely by the way. So the deal was this, that he wanted me to then become this M2 – I became one of the only white former NIS K operators that was promoted to a senior management position in SAS. I was very proud of that. Because it meant that I had managed to transcend the divide. Now my feet were…I’d served under PW Botha, I’d served under FW, I was now serving under Madiba. And the fact that at that rank you have to be appointed by the president meant that Madiba had effectively endorsed me. And I felt enormously proud of that. That made me change my mind and that made me realise that I do have a place in the new South Africa, and it made me realise that I do have a place within the intelligence dispensation. If I look back in my intelligence career I think I’d been a very successful intelligence operator and I believed that I had a lot to give back to the service. In terms of this new mission we’re not fighting a covert war anymore now. But it’s a new war. It’s now an economic war. And of course it was a war against crime. So part of Masethla’s instruction to me was I must become divisional at C11. C11 is the support unit for what was then Chief Directorate C, I don’t even know if it exists anymore because I’m no longer part of it. But C11’s function is to, on the one hand provide support, operational support, including training, including all this kind of…building skills in the new dispensation. But the other part of C11, and this is the interesting part of it, was to experiment. To experiment with new things. And we immediately launched an operation called Operation Zini. And I was the commanding officer of Zini and I pulled in as my tactical commander a Lieutenant Colonel (Commandant) from Recce. 154 And he brought in turn a whole lot of really good Recce operators, but really good. Now these were guys that were never part of the CCB. These were the old Angolan guys, these are the guys that were good soldiers but they didn’t want to murder civilians. They weren’t in that league. So they were good operators, nice people, professional, thoroughly professional people. And I had the privilege of working with these guys. And under Zini we developed the first ever tactical capability to overcome cash in transit heists. There were lots of cash in transit heists. And to my great surprise the plug was pulled on Zini. After our first stunning success…remember it must be said, we didn’t have a legal mandate. This is police work, this wasn’t intelligence work. But it was in that area of time when there was no clear legislation that guided any of the police or the intelligence services. So I’m very proud that I was the commander of Zini because in Zini we brought in a whole lot of Recces and we made them part of the family, and we used their skills to great benefit. And we also brought in some of the Special Forces from the non stats as well. So that was a really good experience and I’m very proud to have been part of that. Very sad that Zini was eventually pulled. END OF SIDE A (counter at 545) SIDE B Tony Look, in part because we didn’t have the legal mandate, in part I think some of what is now the big debate around the Scorpions was raging then as well. Because what we were finding in the cash and transit heists…I can’t go into details about that because a lot of that is ongoing and I’m not current with it anymore and I think it would be wrong of me to talk about SAS’ modus operandi now. But the…I want to make it quite clear that this is not a kiss and tell. I’m not trying to sort of blow the whistle on anything, this is very clear, I want to put it on record. So I’ll talk about the SAS stuff in so far as I think it’s not compromising. Part of it was we didn’t have a legal mandate, part of it was that unfortunately a lot of the cash in transit heists were being driven by soldiers that had not been rehabilitated. And there you had SADF Special Forces, there you had MK, APLA Special Forces, all now becoming robbers. And you know what’s interesting today, you look at all of your big armed robberies, they’re all committed with AKs, with R1s, these are military weapons! These are things you can’t go and buy that across the counter. These come from arsenals, military…from government arsenals. And I think that made people feel uncomfortable because at the same time, with this experimental capacity, I was called in one day and I was given a task, word had just come through that a diplomatic vehicle was being used to smuggle drugs in from across the border. And of course I picked it up, we wanted to keep it in-house, and it was part of the counter intelligence thing. It was covert collection encounter, part of the counter intelligence aspect, the security aspect. So I picked up the command of the investigation and that 155 was very quickly taken away from me when it became apparent that this was a diplomatic vehicle, belonging to a South African diplomat, in one of the neighbouring states, and because of the diplomatic status, was being used to cross the border bringing in drugs. And of course as soon as it became clear this was an ANC person – in fact it was an ex comrade, an ex MK guy – the investigation was taken away from me. And then the guys that took on the investigation they then got a whole lot of speed fines, and they came to me and said, can I squash the speed fines? And I said, we don’t do that. We’re not above the law. We are under the law. We respect the Constitution. They said, oh, I must pull strings, and I said, no, no, I can’t do that. And that’s funny enough, I think that little dynamic is still going on today. That when you can…at what time are you above the law and what time are you a servant of the law. And I made it very clear that as long as I’m in command we are always under the law. We are part of the law. Although we experimented with Zini and the other experiment we did was what ultimately became…it was hived off and part of it became crime intelligence in the police now and a little piece of that went on, some of the guys that are working in that went on to become the Scorpions. So I’m not saying that what we did created the Scorpions, I’m just saying that new experiment that we were fiddling with, bits and pieces broke up, and an element of that became the Scorpions, where you would marry together investigators and operators, policemen, etc., etc, prosecutors, and put together really a high level, kick-ass team. So, C11 was very exciting but the agreement I had with Billy Masethla was that this would only be a temporary post for me. That my task was to establish this unit, get it up and running, stabilize it and then I would come back into line, into the field. I wanted to do more field work and in fact there was a position going open as chief director of foreign operations. And I thought ok, if I get that I’ll stay. And then a whole series of things started happening and that became very disturbing, it became very clear to me that the new culture was just something that I would not be comfortable with. We’d seen the drug culture coming in, and then of course the old counter espionage guy and me started picking up evidence of penetration by foreign services into our service. I felt very uncomfortable about that because we knew that this is how services operate, and the sad thing is that the inherent loyalty within the liberation struggle, this is a thing that they’re going to have to deal with. Just because you were loyal to your person, must not be allowed to get in the way of having to censure that person for doing something illegal. Very important. Very, very important. The IRA is dealing with that right now. The IRA has still got a criminal element that wants to steal Irish pounds and launder them on the global market for Irish pounds. So I got very disturbed when it became very clear to me that there was this penetration, in fact there was quite a lot of penetration not just one. In fact the guy that I was lined functionally reporting to was working for one of these intelligence agencies and we had irrefutable evidence of this. And then of 156 course another penetration that was made affected colleagues of mine and this is where the Aubrey Welkin affair comes in. Because ultimately Aubrey Welkin was blown and he was sacrificed and he spent time in terrible conditions in Zimbabwe, directly as a result of that penetration. Now I don’t want to say anything more about that because A: I’m no longer current. B: it’s improper because counter espionage work is always very sensitive work. But I think as a matter of public record we now work in a democratic dispensation and as a democracy the intelligence service is accountable to the people. They’re accountable to the Constitution. And I think that unless we open this healthy debate about the role of intelligence, about the accountability of intelligence operations we’re not ever going to get out of the quagmire we’re currently in. So, I just want to mention what I’ve told you now about this penetration, I’m not going to name the countries and I’m not going to name the people, but when I tendered my letter of resignation in my exit interview, I put this on the record. So I know that when I walked out of there I had done what any officer would do, if he’s loyal to the Constitution, I did my duty to the last moment. And that last moment as without favour, I reported what I knew to the authorities that should deal with it. What they’ve done with it is their problem. I’m no longer…I’m not a policeman, it’s not my job anymore to go and track it down, I don’t care if it’s been sorted out, none of my interest beyond the fact that I’m now a citizen and I want to know what’s happening to my tax payer’s money and I want to know that there’s an accountable service. But it became very difficult for me to work under those conditions. And in fact one of the last discussions I ever had before I left was with Aubrey Welkin, the same Aubrey Welkin. Now I had trained Aubrey Welkin years earlier. We had a system where before we would deploy an agent into field…not an agent, a member…into field, they would have gone through their training program, they would have been mentored, and they then go through a final evaluation. And that evaluation is a one on one intensive evaluation and that’s done by…you would put six of them in the field, or three of them in the field, and then you put the same number of senior guys to observe them. And you’d put them into very difficult circumstances all over the show, in Africa, in wherever. They had to travel…it was about a three week period of time that they would be under surveillance all the time and they had to operate. And you would evaluate them and if they failed they would not be allowed to operate and it’s as simple as that. We were training him to function in a foreign hostile environment and if they failed, then they failed. And in fact we had a guy, he was a commandant, he was the youngest commandant in the SADF at the time, brilliant young soldier, came to us and he failed this evaluation because he just couldn’t understand that Paris doesn’t work on squares, it works on circles and triangles. And he just lost it, completely lost it in Paris. So he was binned. So here’s one of the brightest young soldiers, lieutenant colonel way before his age, and yet he can’t make it in the field, in our field. So that 157 just gives you an example of the standards we applied. And it became very clear to me that these standards were now being eroded. Standard procedures were being done away with, like for example when you come back from an extended deployment you will be re-vetted, you will undergo a polygraph investigation. Suddenly this was done away with. And earlier on we mentioned this radio stuff. I was re-vetted…funny enough the white guys were intensely re-vetted but the black guys weren’t. Funny. Interesting. We were not equal in the eyes of the law. So we accepted that this is the price we pay. We accept that we come from a polarized society. We accept that this is the way it is. And one of the things when I was being re-vetted at that time, I found it deeply humiliating because I had a fairly ignorant young man come to me, and he was horrified that above my house I’ve got a great big tower and a great big antenna…I’ve taken the antenna down just a few weeks ago. And he wants to know what this antenna is. Who am I talking to? I said, well I’m a radio engineer, radio ham, I talk to people. Who? Who do I talk to? I keep a log book, here’s my log book. Log book! What do you talk about? Anything. What do you mean anything? How much does the radio cost? Twenty thousand rand. You spent twenty thousand rand on a radio?! There’s got to be something wrong. It’s fun. I fiddle with Morse code, I belong to a group of international people that do high speed Morse code. So the fun is, we talk at high speed with Morse code, 32 words a minute plus. But why don’t you just phone? No, because… dits and dahs…this cultural difference. This guy couldn’t understand. And one of the first realisations that I had that I did not fit in to this new dispensation was, here in the past I could play a role in Bush talk precisely because I had that skill, that very same skill. And the fact that I was different was a strength before, and now suddenly the fact that I was different was viewed as suspicion. And the fact that the black guys were not being vetted, the black guys were not going through poly…they were coming back after a tour of duty in an embassy where they’d been recruited now by other intelligence agencies and that was not being picked up, and that’s how we could allow that to get through. So I felt there was a double standard there. And it’s like when you go to jump in a parachute, you want to make sure that the guy that’s folded the parachute knows what he’s doing. You don’t cut corners at certain…you just don’t cut corners. Why should we be clever and be different. There’s certain things you have to do right. Sorry, I’m a stickler for…if you’re going to survive in this business this is a profession. It’s not an amateur thing. The difference between an enthusiastic amateur and a functionally efficient operator is this wisdom. There was the famous saying that you get old spies and you get bold spies but you never get old, bold spies. Laughs That was done by Le Carré in one of his books. And we would often teach our people that. So you don’t want to be too bold. You want to be cautious. So that was the first thing when I was severely discriminated against because I happened to talk to people, I talked to Chinese guys and Japanese and Russians and they 158 can’t speak a word of English and we speak an international language. It’s a Morse code language and it’s on code, CQ and etc, etc. So we can talk to each other with Morse code and it’s fun. And I do it. And then I explain to this guy but you play soccer? Yes. Isn’t it silly that there are a bunch of guys risking personal injury for what, 40 minutes or whatever it is per side, just to try and kick a ball into the net the other side. Isn’t that actually silly? Isn’t that as odd as me trying to talk to a Russian with Morse code? And he couldn’t understand that. So I realised look I don’t fit into this thing. Try as I may I’m not going to sort of close that gap. There was that and the vetting, and the other thing that happened that also absolutely shocked me…the vetting officer comes back to me with a great big query. In your vetting process you’ve got to give all of your financial statements. You’ve got to give a list of friends, they interview friends, all that kind of stuff. And in my days, when we were professional operators, one of the biggest no-no’s was debt. If you’ve got debt they pull you out of the field, you will lose your top secret clearance. We were classified to top secret level. They will bump you down to secret or to confidential, which means you can’t operate. It’s taking your licence away. So one of the things we looked after was our debt. We never had debt. As I stand here today the only debt I’ve got is I’ve got a little bit of money I owe on my motor car. I don’t live a life of debt. True as cookies this guy comes back to me and says, no there’s something wrong with me, I’ve got no debt. I mean, I was flabbergasted. And of course one of the big problems there, the reason why these people are being recruited is they’ve got such high levels of debt that other services come to them and say, we’ll pay your debt for you, just work for us. So the whole thing’s not professional anymore. It’s just screwed up. And I then made my decision when I was talking to Aubrey Welkin, and I said, brother Aubrey, listen this is my decision, I’m going to leave now. And he said, no, you can’t go. I said, why not? He said, no, he’s scared. He’s terrified. I said, but you know we’ve done stuff before, we can be terrified, we’ve always worked our way out of a tight spot, let’s work our way again. No, no, no, he’s not sure that he can make it. then I said to him, Aubrey, but do you trust…I mentioned the guy he’s working under…do you trust this guy? He said, no, he doesn’t. You know about these penetrations. Yes, he knows about the penetrations. So I said, well, so you’re operating there now, how can you…! He said, well I’ve got to do it, I know nothing else. Aubrey Welkin, short while later gets arrested. The Aubrey Welkin story is now part of the public domain. I’ve heard now that Aubrey is a broken man. I’ve heard that his wife is a broken woman. I’ve heard that he’s completely shattered. When he was eventually pulled out, they didn’t even take him to a hospital. They didn’t even take him for psychological counselling, they didn’t even take him to debrief him. They treated him like a piece of dirt and they threw him away. And I’m sorry I don’t want to sound angry or bitter because I’m none of those things but I just think that is appalling. That is abysmal. Here’s a young man who gave everything for the new dispensation, for the new 159 Constitution…what could we do today with an intelligence network in Zimbabwe right now! Thank you! So we owe Aubrey a debt of gratitude. He will not talk. He’s broken, but he will not talk. But I think that that kind of story is a very important part of the story. And I’m senior enough and they can come and knock on my door and talk me I don’t really care about it. I haven’t broken any confidences in saying what I’m saying now. I think it’s important that we must say these things. People in the new dispensation must be held accountable. And part of democracy is accountability, so just because you’re a senior intelligence officer does not give you the authority to kick down a door, does not give you the authority to go and work for another intelligence service, does not give you the authority to be a law unto yourself. Because then you’re nothing, nothing worse than what the worst was under apartheid. Interviewer And just very briefly, Aubrey’s story was that he was working in another country, he got arrested by the authorities there, subjected to some extremely harsh conditions in prison and then was released under the circumstances… Tony After many years later. Many years later. They never once counselled his wife. Never once gave the wife any support. Never, never, never. The Zimbabwe service targeted the wife, harassed her like you cannot imagine, broke her completely. I cannot believe that we are so stupid, I cannot believe that we can do this to our own people. I just cannot believe it. It’s barbaric. So I’m afraid…I’m going to talk to Aubrey one of these days again. I’m told that he’s licking his wounds right now, and I’m going to talk to him. But what I’ve told you is what is largely public domain, I’ve given you a little bit of extra insight. And I just think that the reason why I’ve said this is, I know I’ve reported this to the authorities. I know the authorities have done nothing about it, and I think that this is appalling. How can we carry on in a new South Africa where South Africa is playing a leading role in SADC, a leading role in Africa, a highly respected member of the community of nations, and we’re allowing our institutionalized theft to take place. Institutionalized corruption to take place. The tax player’s money is going there. And they’re not giving us a service. It is simply unforgivable. Interviewer When you finally resigned and left, did they sit you down and debrief you? Tony No. Interviewer Why would that be? You’re an experienced and very senior officer, surely the standard procedure would be to debrief you? Tony I was pulled in by a senior guy, I was told that my skills are no longer relevant. At that stage I was far advanced in my doctorate. I was told that this is all totally irrelevant, that unfortunately there was nothing left for me. I was given a job because they couldn’t actively discriminate against me, so I was given a job managing security guards. And I said, I’m not going to do that, sorry. So 160 effectively they cleverly manipulated me into a position where I could either be broken and work like this forever, or I could make a dignified decision to leave. So I made a dignified decision and I did not accept my new command, I did not accept any of those things. I tried to speak to the Director General, he refused to speak to me. What was done up until then, every officer that had ever resigned up until then, the standard procedure was, when you resign, you tender your resignation, you then hand over all of your operational responsibilities in a responsible way to whoever is taking over. The way the networks are worked out, every network is…you’re the handler and then there’s an alternative. So there’s always a plan, in case you get hit by a car. So you hand all of that over, you sign off all your financial responsibilities, you do it in a responsible way, and what then happens normally is, all outstanding leave that is owed to you, you are allowed to take until the day that you resign. In my case I had 38 days of leave due to me. They would not give me my leave. I was the first person that was not…funny, I’ve always played the role of being the first in many things, and I was the first sad, dubious person not to be allowed to take leave. A guy before me that left, a guy called Theuns, he left, he got his full leave. Laughs I didn’t get my leave, and Theuns left without making a fuss. I didn’t want to make a fuss either, all I wanted to do was, I wanted to simply make it clear that as an officer of integrity, I’d sworn an oath of allegiance to my country and it’s like a policeman whose oath is to serve and protect, you serve and protect even if your own life is on the line. And that’s just how it is. Sorry. Maybe I’m naïve, maybe I’m simple, but that’s how it is. So my oath of allegiance is to my Constitution, not to a party and not to an individual, and in terms of that oath of allegiance I will protect. And part of that protection is as a former counter espionage man, I know that foreign services…there’s a war out there between services that the public never sees, and I know that part of that is penetration and I know that if…it is standard operational procedure if you are aware of any activities you will report it. And we reported bank details, we reported clandestine meetings, we’ve got it all…we’ve got enough forensic evidence to put these guys, certainly under more intensive investigation, but probably to put them in court as well. At the end of the day it was all brushed aside. And the director general, Tim Dennis is his name, refused to see me eventually, he absolutely refused me, he refused to give me my 38 days leave, and I was immediately put in an office with a broken light and a broken chair, and that’s where I had to serve out my last month of notice. And I couldn’t read in the office, I could do nothing in the office, I was cut off from everybody, and then I was unceremoniously bungled off into a safe house. And I had to come in every day to sit in the safe house and do nothing, I was not allowed to start looking for a new job. I was treated very shoddily. And you know, I don’t want to make too much fuss out of that because I’m a tough guy, I’ve been through hard things, I’m a proud man, and at the end of the day I sit back and I reflect and I can say with absolute honesty, I served my country with 161 integrity and with pride. And even though the service in the end meted out to me was a little bit shoddy, I don’t want to begrudge those people. If that’s the way they see the world, if that’s what they want to build, then by all means that’s their life. The good news is, I’ve got no allegiance. The good news is, I don’t work for any intelligence service, I never will. I’ve been there, done that, got the t-shirt, I’m not going to do that anymore. So today in my work, I work in a lot of highly polarised societies, I talk to intelligence people, but I’m never going to take money from them, I’m never going to sell myself. Just like you as a journalist, you’ll talk to somebody but you won’t necessarily sell your soul to those people. And that’s just how it is. So in many ways I look back at it, I reflect, I think of Ivan…I spoke earlier on about Ivan…I think about Aubrey, I think about these nameless guys, faceless guys, the Pedros of the world. I think about JEC and these guys. These were all…I walked amongst men. And women, there were women as well, but I walked amongst people with balls. These were people of integrity, these were people that were prepared to go the extra mile. And all I can say is that I’m sorry that this finally happened the way it did. Maybe it was good because it cut the umbilical cord. I don’t hanker for it anymore, I’ve got no more interest in it. I’ve got absolutely no desire. I’ve done that. Been there, done that. I’ve got no illusions, it’s not a glamorous world, it’s a hard…it’s a lonely existence, highly professional life, but very, very lonely. And you know, I’m glad that I’ve done it but I’m not going to do it again. Interviewer Tony, sitting back now, on reflection, you served as a soldier firstly, you did your National Service, then you served as a soldier for Light Horse Regiment, and then you got involved in all the things that you’ve been talking about now. When you look back on it, who were you actually fighting against? Who were you working for National Intelligence against? Tony That notion has grown over time. So at different stages I had different enemies. For me it was fairly clear when I was a soldier that this whole thing, the winds of change, I understood that very clearly. The winds of change to me were the enemy. So maybe I was conservative because change means something new, and maybe one becomes conservative because you cling to the known. This is not uncommon and I’m not ashamed of that. This is how human beings are. I think for me the winds of change came home when I was a little boy, when I heard about Katanga, the Katangese uprising and the cannibalism. This is evil. This is bad. Then Sharpeville. As a little boy, I was five, maybe six years of age, when Sharpeville happened and I had a very high regard for my father and I remember driving in town after Sharpeville had happened and one of these Putco buses, a green Putco bus came past. And boiling out of the bus through the smashed windows this seething sea of angry black people punching the air with their fists, singing songs of liberation. And I was terrified. And I looked at my father and I said, dad, what’s going on? And he said, don’t worry son, it’s going to be ok. And I knew he was 162 lying to me. I knew he was lying to me. And a little five year old boy knew that his father was lying to him. So Sharpeville to me, this whole thing of this angry uprising, angry people out of control, violence. Of course it came to a head when a little bit later two Rhodesian airliners were shot down. These are civilian airliners…imagine Al-Qaeda shooting down a Pan American flight! Look at what’s happened to the Lockerbie thing. Look at what’s happened, look at the millions, maybe billions of dollars that have been spent on the Lockerbie disaster. Who even remembers those two Rhodesian airlines. Is it because white Africans are not relevant? Is it because they are unimportant? So to me that was what the enemy was. Then I think later on when it became very clear for me…now I was a sleg troop at first, you could see in my career. I was sleg in the end and I think at the end, the fact that I was decorated, the fact that I got the commendations I did…I’m not bragging about that, but I think I did my thing, I rose to the occasion and I walked the extra mile. So I think I’ve proven myself. I told you earlier on about my complex relationship with my father. If my dad was looking at me now I’d say, dad I did it, I hope you’re proud of me. I didn’t do it for that reason, I just did it because it was the right thing at the right moment in time. So…today we look at this whole thing when it burst in to my face, the Magoo’s Bar bombing, profoundly evil. The St James Church Massacre, profoundly evil. As a soldier trained in mine warfare and IEDs I understood the mentality of a bomber. It’s a different person, a bomber, it’s a different person. So for me when I was a soldier the enemy was quite clear. The enemy was north of the border, and they happened to probably be Angolan or Cuban or SWAPO and I would kill the buggers. If I saw them I’d kill them. Simple as that. Straightforward. Wasn’t killing people, I was killing uniforms. But for me where it changed was this whole thing when we were deployed into the townships. Because in the townships I became the enemy. Laughs And you’ll see if you look at my timeline, from the townships, before that I was sort of reasonably committed, I did my stuff and I was a reasonably good soldier, I don’t think I was a very good soldier but I was reasonable. I sort of…maybe I stood out from the crowd but I certainly wasn’t the one that stood out very high. But from that moment onwards I became committed. And when I became the enemy, I was now the enemy, the enemy is now ignorance, but you see I’ve grown time over time, I’ve learned, so to me ultimately Shaking Hands with Billy is about the enemy, and the enemy is ignorance, indifference, all of these preoccupations we’ve had in South Africa, these stereotypes about the good guys and the bad guys. It’s all ignorance. So it’s befitting that the word intelligence suggests intellect, it suggests knowledge. And I’m very happy today to work in the knowledge field. So to me that’s what the enemy was about. But you know, we’ve got new challenges. We’ve got new challenges. I wrote in my book, I want to give you a copy of Shaking Hands with Billy, I want to put this on your record as well, please. 163

Interviewer Thank you. Tony I give you copy 56 of 100 copies, so there are not many copies around. And what I’ve said in the front here, is in memory of those that fought on both sides of the political divide in South Africa. It is important to dignify all South Africans if we are to be truly liberated as a nation united by common identity and loyal to one constitution. It was for this sole purpose that so many gave so much in silence. And I want that to be recorded and right at the front here you’ll see that, in my first chapter, I wrote something which I made a spelling mistake which I’ve corrected by hand, and in the spelling mistake I talk about where I come from and who I am. And I talk about the fact that, how do I find myself at this moment in time and space? To understand that one needs to go back to the crucible of my primordial roots, to a time when my personality was being forged on the anvil of Africa by the hammer of endemic political violence. I think those are powerful words those. My personality and the personality of my generation, that means your personality, that means everyone, black, white, pink or green, we have had our personality forged on that anvil of Africa by the fire and the violence of the hammer. We are all broken people, we are all damaged people, every single one of us. There’s none of us, I look at you also, and I don’t know you that well but I’m sure if I had to scratch deeply…I’m sure. We are all broken, damaged people. You say you’ve been hijacked. I won’t talk about you, but you know, we’re broken, damaged people. So I feel very liberated in handing this over and I feel very thankful, and I want to thank the Wits project and the benefactors. You mentioned who they are? Interviewer Atlantic Philanthropy. Tony I want to thank Atlantic Philanthropy for giving us the opportunity because this is a great opportunity and I’m really…you see how enthusiastically I’ve embraced this thing. You’ve given a silent group of people a platform and I have been mandated by many of these operators. When I decided to write the book we had a meeting at a place called Tarentaal, it’s a pub at the CSIR, and I told these guys that I was thinking of writing a book, and they mandated me, the old K guys that were still around, they mandated me to tell their story. So that’s why, only a hundred copies out and that’s why it’s gone mostly to them, so you’ll find these guys who were just known by initials there, they’ve got the other copies. So, yes, that’s to me what the enemy was. What’s the enemy today? There’s still an enemy out there and what do we fight? Well, what’s happening today? Today there’s lots of major events happening. I mean, just take for example the current thing that has happened now where there’s this naïve perception that white people are rich, so what we’re going to do is we’re going to tax them into submission. So we’re going to tax them on their land value. People have got three, four times the amount of tax that they’ve got to pay on land. I haven’t owned two houses, I’m not a rich guy, I’ve been frugal in my life, I’ve 164 kept it together, I could have been rich, I used to have a farm, it was taken from me. What have I got? Are you going to tax me into submission, have you realised those actions are going to eventually damage the economy? Are you realising that that’s going to cause a net flight of capital out of this country ? So we are ignorant. We haven’t thought these things…yes, you know something, I can probably pay the extra amount, but you know something, it’s not a good policy. So I think that’s one of the things we’ve got to do, that’s our new enemy. We’ve got to engage! And not engaging in a confrontational, aggressive way, we’ve got to engage to talk it through. We’ve got to get the combined wisdom. 2+2=7. And because we engage we get a…my view is this, their view is that, so we get a third view which is now the combined view. That’s what we did in CODESA, that’s all our intelligence operations was about that. So that’s the one thing. At the moment there’s another absolutely disempowering thing where white people are having their firearms taken away. This is so profoundly disempowering! Now, I hate guns. I’ve grown up with guns, I used to sleep with a gun in my life, I hate guns! I’ll be more than happy to give them away, but I don’t want them to be taken away. And I happen to have too many. And I happen to have said when I applied for my application, I am willing to give this one up, just give me the choice of which one I can give up. Same calibre, same type, but give me the choice, I prefer this one to that one. You know, they take that away from me. They take away my right to choose. Interviewer In other words your right to democracy. Tony They take away my right to choose! These buggers have taken away, I’m now forced…I don’t want…I was going to hand it back, in my application I’ve written black and white, I know I have a gun too many, this gun is superfluous to my needs, I will gladly hand it over. No, they give me a licence for that gun. Another gun that I want to keep they take away. Is this being vindictive or is this just being inefficient? I don’t know. But the bottom line is they are disarming us. On the premise that it’s arms in society that’s being used for robberies, but the arms…I was the commanding officer of Zini…the arms that we found there were AK47s. laughs They were not .357 Magnums. They were not 9mm Parabellums, they were not 7.65s. They were military grade…the very weapons that have been stolen from armouries under the control of the state. So the policy is flawed. And if you talk about it, then it becomes a racial thing. So that’s our new enemy. We’ve got to engage, to enlighten. Enlightenment, ok. That’s what we’ve got to go for. then we’ve got this whole thing about the Scorpions. These are world class guys, sort it out! Sort it out! Don’t close them down, sort it out. And if you’re afraid of being caught, well then, just don’t do it in the first place. We’re doing research at the moment at the CSIR that we’re about to make public. This is profound research. And it shows that the higher your level of corruption in society the greater is your Gini co-efficient. So corruption drives nil distribution of wealth and it drives unemployment and it drives 165 economic stagnation. We can prove it now, we’ve got a global date set. I’m going to go public soon, in the next two or three weeks I’m a speaker at an Africa Day here at UNISA, I’m going to announce those things then. So corruption is our enemy now, and whoever’s going to fight corruption, whether it’s the intelligence service, they’re not entitle to, it’s not part of their mandate, but the Scorpions can. Certainly the SAPS can. And this is what we’ve got to do now. So the bottom line is this, I think we’ve got to overcome this growing sentiment of this anti white sentiment. And the other day I was told by somebody that white South Africans are going to become like the Jews of the world. They will always have a suitcase fully packed and a little stash of money somewhere overseas. Because they’re always waiting for that knock on the door at night. Now isn’t that sad? The Kliptown Charter, the Congress of the People, that formed the Kliptown Charter, that eventually became the that said, we are all equal in the eyes of the law. That said eloquently that we as South Africans will not be discriminated irrespective of colour, race or creed, we will not be discriminated against. So I don’t want to make a big plea about white and black, I am an African. I state that as a fact, I’m a twelfth generation African, I’m a direct descendant of two of the seven Vryburghers that were the first to ever be given land. One of them came out with Jan van Riebeek, a guy called Jacob Cloete. My grandmother is a Cloete. He’s a (inaudible) Boer, he came through from the beginning, his daughter married the first van der Merwe and their kids were damaged. I’m a descendant of my mother’s side of a Jordaan, the two Jordaan brothers that came out that established the wine industry. La Motte. The estate La Motte is a Jordaan estate. These two brothers come out as refugees from the Spanish inquisition. They’re Huguenots. They come out, they lose their parents on the ship, the Berg China. They land in 1688. They set up these two farms. What happens? Immediately they start establishing their business. The daughter of the one gets raped by a slave. van Mozambique rapes one of my ancestors. So what does that do? The family immediately says, we can’t trust people of another colour. So compassion is seen as a weakness. Now that is our enemy. We’ve got to shift away from this hard society where if you see someone on the side of the road you don’t stop to help them because they could be hijacking you. We are hard, we are callous, we are unfeeling, and the only way to survive 12 generations in this continent is to be hard and callous and unfeeling. And that’s our challenge. Our challenge now is to move to the moral high ground that is captured by the Congress of the People, the Kliptown Charter, the Freedom Charter, now our Constitution, to take ownership every single one of us, to proudly take ownership of that and say, I am protected by this Constitution but I will also perform my rights, duties and obligations given to me under the Constitution. So to me this is something that we’ve got to go for. And in fact what I to just quickly enter into the record if I may, in the front of my book there’s a poem that I want to just quickly read, because 166 this poem so captures what’s going on in my head right now. And I think it’s a beautiful poem and befittingly it’s called An African Soul. And even more poignantly it’s written by an anonymous person, a guy just like me, who didn’t quite make it and he finds himself in London…it could be a woman, I don’t know. But it’s an anonymous person living in London, an ex white South African living in London. And you’ve read this poem I think. Interviewer I have. Tony I don’t know if it did anything for you, but it’s not your story but certainly my story it did something fro me. And I read this poem at my daughter’s 21st birthday and people were in tears around me when I read the poem. So I just want to quickly read this here. It’s called An African Soul. And it goes as follows: ‘Within my soul, within my mind, there lies a place I cannot find. Home of my heart, land of my birth, smoke coloured stone and flame coloured earth. Electric skies, shivering heat, blood red clay beneath my feet. At night when finally alone, I close my eyes and I am home. I kneel and touch the blood warm sand, and feel the pulse beneath my hand, of an ancient life to all to name, in an ancient land too wild to tame. How can I show you what I feel, how can I make this essence real. I search for words in dumb frustration to try and form some explanation. But how can heart and soul be caught in one dimensional written thought. If love and longing are a fire and man consumed by his desire, then this love is no simple flame that mortal thought can hold or tame, as deep within the earth’s own core the love of home burns evermore. But what is home I hear them say, this never was yours anyway. You have no birthright to this place, descended from another race. An immigrant, a pioneer, you are no longer welcome here. Whoever said that love made sense, our love is an imperfect tense. To love in vain has been man’s fate from history to present date. I have no grounds for dispensation, I know I have no home or nation. For just one moment in the night, I am complete, my soul takes flight. For just one moment, then it’s gone, and I’m once again, undone, never complete, never whole, white skin in an African soul.’ Now this poem, I don’t know why the guy’s anonymous because this is a great piece of poetry. This captures so much what’s in my head because I am an African. I will look at Thabo Mbeki in his face and I will shake his hand and I will say I respect him, and I will ask him to respect me for being an African. And the next book I plan to write is this Bones book and it will start with, I am an African, his speech. I think he’s made a grave error in re-racialising South African politics, because he has done it. I was so proud to serve under Nelson Mandela because under Madiba I was part of the Rainbow Nation. And the instant that Thabo Mbeki came to power, he said, there’s no black in the rainbow. He, Thabo Mbeki, re-racialised South Africa. Thabo Mbeki, one person, re-racialised South Africa. When last have we heard the words in the media? When last have we heard any leader of note talk about nation building? I haven’t heard it for a long, long time. And I think one of the challenges that we now 167 have, and the challenge of this project of yours, I think the challenge ultimately goes into, how do we channel these energies into nation building? You’ll be a better judge than I am on this thing because you’ve met more people than I’ve met. I know lots of ex operational people and we talk at a certain level, but you’ve had a pretty good cross section of many elite sort of decision makers, leaders, probably a couple of just rank and file troopies, just ordinary Joe Bloggs riflemen that just did their sort of thing. But, I think if I had to anticipate what your findings are you probably found a lot of good will, you probably found people that are quite proud, people that are sometimes confused, people that are calling for leadership, people that just say, listen guys, you know, tell me what you want of me and I’ll do it. We don’t have that at the moment. I think our challenge is, and I’d like you to record this and please to report this, that ultimately our challenge is to build a nation. And I think one of the ways to build a nation is to acknowledge our awkward history. You see in my book here there’s this interaction between me and the Truth Commission. And there’s a letter there that I talk, in that letter I talk about our unfortunate South African history. We have a very unfortunate history. But we’ve got to have the courage to tell it, and we’ve got to tell it in a respectful way, not to dominate others. And we’ve also got to be listeners. I do some work in Central America and I learned from the Central Americans. They’ve got a deity, they’ve got a religious belief system that says that their creator created man with two ears and two eyes and only one mouth, so you must look more, you must listen more and you must speak less. I think that’s an important lesson there. Because we must listen to each others’ stories, we must tell the story of the Great Cattle Killing delusion. That’s an important story. We must tell the story of Isandlana and Ulundi. These are important stories. The Battle of Ncome - Blood River. These are important stories. And Blood River, Ncome are different things, but they’re the same thing. We must…there’s a fence between those two monuments, we must pull those fences down. This is where we lie. And I believe that veterans can do that. So my call is to veterans to vuka, catch a wake up, wake up! Stop crying in your hands. On the field of battle if you could get up and do what you had to do, we’re not in the field of battle anymore. But now, there’s more opportunities open to us. Get up there, link up, put your hand of goodwill out. I’ve gone to meet old Tony Sylvester in FAPLA and I’ve saluted him. How hard is it to salute your enemy? Isn’t that the greatest thing you can do, is to acknowledge the suffering of the other, the empathy. I mean, as humans, I talk about the hard nation we’ve become. Isn’t our challenge just to become soft again? To become loving and embracing and forgiving and reaching across the divide? To me that I think is one of our biggest challenges. So the way I understand… END OF SIDE B (counter at 512) TAPE 7 SIDE A 168

Tony I have written my book hopefully with dignity, certainly with integrity. I’ve written it for people to at least capture a bit of the history, to criticise, because hey, I’m only a human being, I might have got some things wrong and it’s out of my head and I’ve got Alzheimers and I can’t remember everything, so if I got the dates wrong I apologise, and if some of the facts aren’t quite right they will be verified I’m sure at some stage. But the important thing is there’s empathy and we must learn to empathise with others the plight of others. I don’t want to pontificate here but I think it’s very important that we must empathise. And if we empathise we suddenly come to a new place because the new place helps us redefine the problem and we are all victims. Thabo Mbeki is as much a victim as Anthony Turton is. Because Thabo Mbeki is too sensitive to talk about the fact that HIV/AIDS is whatever and happens to be prevalent more amongst black people for whatever, there are more black people, so you’re going to get more incidents there, for whatever reason! We’ve got a highly disrupted society. The Xhosa people were broken. The Zulu people have been broken. Our country has been broken, for centuries. It wasn’t an apartheid thing, it happened before that. And the instant we can start seeing ourselves all through the eyes of victims then we can start claiming that moral high ground of that, you know, the Freedom Charter. I’m an old spook, I’m an old intelligence operator. I think the greatest document that was ever written in this country was the Freedom Charter. Now isn’t that liberating. Shit, I’m not sure that Constand Viljoen would say that, but I mean, I really believe that. The message in that Freedom Charter is something we can all buy into, so that to me is the challenge and I think that ultimately we now have a chance. We have a chance before us and I think this is what we have to grab. Interviewer I’ve read it in your book, but your…Sharpeville obviously played an important role in your consciousness and in your conscience. You tell a story about a book written about Sharpeville that one day when you were shredding documents you discovered this book and you wanted to give it back to its original owner. Can you take me through that story. Tony I think when I really realised that I was a human being I think was during that time. I spoke earlier on about how shocked I was after that rocket incident, when I realised that I didn’t necessarily have to do that. And I was also taken by the fact that as a little boy Sharpeville had come into my life and I didn’t really ask for it but it happened. And in the end I told you about re-evaluation, we decided…well above my head it was decided that we’re going to shred all the documents and we’re going to get rid of them. And we were busy shredding these documents, but this was a hell of a job, a hell of a job, I mean we’re talking now about tons of documents, thousands of tons of documents. And every covert officer had at its heart a shredding machine. But the shredding machine it was never designed to handle that bulk. We had bulk shredders that would take like entire telephone directories. But 169 they were at head office, and just to get it there was a hell of a mission, so we couldn’t. So we were shredding these documents and the instant we started shredding we lost control. But when we were shredding the documents the shredding machines started burning out, and eventually it was clear we weren’t going to make the deadline, we couldn’t shred all the documents in time. So we then started tearing the documents up. Laughs Now when you tear a document up you can put it back together again. So what had happened you get these tons of documents being torn up by hand into small, tiny pieces and they put them into black garbage bags. And a decision was then made that we would take it to a place…I won’t mention the place’s name…but we took it to a place that had a great big furnace. And this furnace was like the hell of Hades. If ever I had to turn this story into a movie I think the opening scene of the movie would be this story I’m about to tell you now. Because here we arrive in a bakkie, a bakkie load of top secret highly classified documents…imagine if that thing fell off the bakkie, I don’t know. Just imagine the horrors, but nonetheless. We’ve got these garbage bags full of stuff and the doors to this furnace get opened and here we are throwing these bags into the fire. Now as you pick up this black garbage bag and you throw it towards the fire and the radiant heat is so great that the plastic melts, and all these papers fly everywhere. But the papers they explode, they catch on, woof! You get these fireballs. Imagine the special effects. Imagine Stephen Spielberg working on this scene here. You can just see it, the hell of Hades and this sweaty guy throwing these things in, and someone passing it to him and throwing them in. And it’s hot and tiring work and eventually the sort of production line comes to a point where a box gets given to me. I reach down in the box and there are books, and I pause for a second. I love books. I’m a book person. And immediately I feel this, how can you throw away books? And I go back to this German scene, crystal nagt when they started burning the books. You must know that bad things happen when books are burnt. And suddenly I just took a breather and I picked up this one book and…I’ve actually got quite a few books from that box still. In fact maybe I should donate some of those books to your library, because some of those books have still got the BOSS, the Bureau of State Security stamp inside them. And I think maybe I should do that. But anyhow, this particular book was a book called the Road to Sharpeville. And immediately I was taken by the title because Sharpeville had done so much damage to my mental state of affairs when I was a little boy. And here it was being thrown away into the fire. So now, here with this sweat dripping down, reading in the radiant heat of this furnace, this production line building up behind me to get rid of all these packages, I open up this book and in the front page of the book I see some handwriting, beautiful handwriting. And to me it looked like Tobias, but it turns out to be to Mrs Curry. And I was immediately taken by this image, an image sprung into my head and this was an image of Christmas time and happiness and kids 170 excited about Christmas presents and the smell of Christmas pudding in the background. That’s the image that went through my head. And then I turned the next page over and there on this great big purple stamp in government printer’s ink purple was this stamp. And this stamp said, it’s bewystig nommer 23. It was taken on a police raid on the 18th of March 1966. And it gave the address Carisbrook Avenue…something or other Carisbrook Avenue. And it said that it’s a bewyslig nommer 23 and case number G13/155, very official and formal. And then suddenly I sort of thought about this, the rape of society by this secret police. Who give the secret policemen the right to come in and take this book from a person? And then the third thing was suddenly I thought well now’s my chance. Why do I have to burn it? Should I follow orders? Why can’t I just take it home? Why can’t I find that owner? And I then, immediately, just resolved that this is what I was going to do. I didn’t think it through, I just took it home and said I’m going to find the owner. And I started looking and it was not easy because I went to Carisbrook Avenue, and there’s a Carisbrook Avenue, if you look on the map near Rivonia. I thought the , etc, I thought Carisbrook, so I looked around there, I did surveillance…I couldn’t find this whatever number was Carisbrook, couldn’t find it. Then I looked in the telephone book and I placed an ad in the newspaper, anyone knows anyone from Carisbrook Avenue or things that were lost in 1966 please contact me, I want to return these things. And nothing, nothing. And then out of the blue, and this is the miracle of South Africa, the TRC was convened, and the TRC was clearly dealing with a lot of things, bad people that had done bad things. And I was not in that category, but all of a sudden they invented a new category and that was a category of South Africans that had not necessarily…did not fall into the category of asking for amnesty but wanted to record their sentiments. And I thought, that’s me! That’s made just for me, so I contacted the TRC and the first fax I sent through went to the wrong fax number, so I got no answer. Then I eventually…I’ll try again. I sent another one and suddenly after a period of time I got a fax message back, and that fax message was from the TRC and it was written by Mary Burton. And I’ve got all these things in my book here. There’s my first fax that I sent through etc. giving the whole sort of thing what I wanted to do and asking them to help me find the owner of this book. Then Mary Burton gets to me and she says, oh you know, funky stuff, let’s try it. And then they were talking about the register of reconciliation, so I said yes, I want to be part of this register, and then I responded to her, I gave her a little story about this funny South African experience. Then she got back to me and then she…she said that she had actually tracked down the owner of the book and the owner was Daphne Curry who was now living in 7 Dunbarton Road Rondebosch. And she gave me a telephone number, Cape Town 6852939. And Mary had already spoken to Daphne and they knew about it and I went down, I took my wife down, and I actually handed this book over. And in the process I asked for their permission…there’s the 171 handing over, that’s the woman there…and in the process I asked for their permission, before I handed the book over, I didn’t want to be like the state before that had just put their stamp on the inside without their permission. I wanted to ask their permission if I could write a few words in there and I wrote a couple of words and this is what I said: ‘if this book could talk it would tell a unique story about that thing called the South African experience. This book is significant at three levels. Firstly the words written on the many pages are about the history of a major event that happened in South Africa, the impact of which is still reverberating around the country today. Reading this book now many years after the event called Sharpeville took place it now seems so predictable. There’s this deep sense of tragedy in that predictability, so much loss of life. Secondly, and at a more personal level, the second page of this book bears two unique inscriptions, each of which is significant in its own right. The top inscription indicates that the book was given as a gift to Mrs Curry on some occasion in the past. The bottom inscription tells a different story. The stamp, in official government purple ink, indicates that this book was taken from the same Mrs Curry during a police raid on the 18th of the third 1966. This book became bewystig nommer 23 in a security related case that was given the obscene label of G13/155. After this event the book was used by the security establishment to educate elements of the security forces of the truth behind the things which became known as the total onslaught. Thirdly, at a very subtle level, this book represents the miracle that is South Africa. I found this book as it was destined for destruction just prior to the first democratic general election that was ever held in this country. It and many tons of material of a similar nature was to be destroyed, presumably before the ill machinations of the security forces were opened up for scrutiny as they have been by the TRC. When I saw the hand written inscription on the front page I became determined to reunite this book with the rightful owner as part of a personal reconciliation with my own awkward history. In the process I feel healed and I hope that Mrs Daphne Curry and her family may feel this cathartic cleansing too.’ And I then signed it and put my ID number on it. So that’s the story of the book. I found it to be a lovely experience. And that’s really, I guess, my first step to my own reconciliation because I’m now fully reconciled with my own history, I’m fully reconciled with all the oddities and awkwardness of our history and I’m profoundly proud of the story that I told you and I’m profoundly grateful for the opportunity to have the chance to tell that story. Interviewer If you want to add anything now or in weeks, months ahead... Tony There are one or two little things that I just want to do, please if I can. I think what we haven’t done now, we haven’t spoken about this two stage revolution thing. I think that’s important. And I think another thing now is, are we a democracy? What did we do it all for? So before I do that there’s just one more poem that I would like to just read into the record if I can, because this poem is 172 written by myself and it also tells very much of the story of what I’ve spoken about. This goes back to the field of battle and I spoke about the noise of the Eland, the gears and the radios, each crew commander has got a headset on and two radios going at the same time and the battle intercom and a lot of noise and stuff in your ears, and I’ve just tried to capture this in a few words and I’ve called it The Cavalry Commanders Lament. When I wrote this I was very surprised that I could get it out of my head but it’s been thundering around in there for a long, long time and it only came out in 2006 in any sort of workable form and I’m still working on it because I’d still like to change some of the words but this is the way it stands at the moment. It’s called A Cavalry Commander’s Lament and it goes as follows: ‘The Eland’s gears they wind and grind, the radio hissed and spluttered. With a dust choked voice I gave command, H.E. action loaded! The stallion’s kick as the bridge block surged and the demon shell struck home rending flesh from bone and breaking steel, claiming some poor mother’s son. In the dark of night I shed my tear unable to cry out loud, thinking of those poor lost souls, how can we as a people be proud? But in the shadow of the dawn as the darkness yields to light, an unspoken question nags as I yawn, how can we escape this plight? And so the small ideas gets life like a germinating seed taking root in the ruins of a bombed out place. Amongst the rubble where our fears used to breed, as we lead young men with aggression into war girding the softness of their fleece, can we do what has ne’er been done before, dare to think that thought called peace?’ Now this speaks to a time on the field of battle in the fog of war, the stench of cordite and burning flesh in your nostrils. And yet it was very clear that I was thinking of peace and I was thinking about the rubble and I was taken by this little plant, this little seed that grows. And I was amazed, within minutes of soldiers moving in somewhere there’s fire. I don’t know what, I don’t know how, but fire comes, fire burns. And things are reduced to rubble instantly. And this rubble, this monument, I speak elsewhere of this monument to human hope, this home. This is my home, this is my place, it’s my monument to my hope, and we come in and destroy it. and yet I was also taken equally by the fact that very shortly thereafter, the first rains thereafter, all the black carbon is washed away, and you get this new flush of green growth, and you get this little seed that pops up in this broken rubble and that’s that hope. That hope of that seed. And just like the going down of the sun and at night you can’t cry, you’ve got to be tough. You can’t cry in front of your mates, cowboys don’t cry. But at night I would feel, in my sleeping bag, I would sleep in my sleeping bag with my 9mm, sleep like this. Wrote a little story here about waking up in the middle of the night and sine wave, moonlight and sine wave symmetry little story, that was on the same combat operation. And here you want to cry but you can’t. It’s the voice inside you and you can’t cry, it’s not cool, men don’t cry. And yet clearly that little seed when it germinates there’s that new flush of life…so even in the harshest of moments there’s that hope, there’s 173 something that’s good and that’s why when I met eventually, working with Gorbachov, I met with Soetendorp that Rabbi, and he spoke with great eloquence about, man can go for weeks without food, for days without water, but not a moment without hope. So hope is an important thing, an important message of this voices thing. We’ve got to bring the message of hope across, that no matter how hard things are at the moment, we’ve got hope. It could be worse. We do have a lot of good things going for us and I think this is the important thing. Interviewer You’ve told me what that book represents to you a part of revisiting your past and cleansing yourself almost. Do you also view it as a book of hope? Tony Yes I do, and you’ll see the way I’ve written it. I’ve written it in a way that at all times I recognise the suffering of my enemy. And in fact I recognise that my enemy is nothing more than a friend that I haven’t yet discovered. Or friend that is maybe, just like me, confused and under a certain set of circumstances. So I’m sorry I remain the great eternal Afro optimist. I am eternally optimistic. And you know, as dark as things are in South Africa today, there’s Eskom problems and there’s water problems coming down and we’ve got toxic mine water and babies are deformed and bad stuff. But there’s good stuff as well. In the darkest moments of our life K suddenly came up. Suddenly we could do stuff. If we weren’t there at that moment in time I’m convinced we would have just gone down the tubes into more and more anarchy and chaos and full scale civil war. So a little group of people, 100 strong, 120 strong, a very small little group of people, maybe I’ve blown him out of proportion, I don’t know. In my book I’m very conscious of the fact that I’m writing about things close to me, so I try and be objective. Remember I’m a trained academic. I’m also a trained intelligence officer. And I was at the Cold face. So I’ve got sort of three bits of credibility that come together and I’ve tried to apply my mind and I’ve tried to as honest as I can. So I’ve probably got a whole bunch of things wrong but you know that’s my story as I understand it. And I’m very happy to have written about it. I hope that others will take it and will dissect it or trash it or build on it, see some new insights into it. Ultimately I’m a scientist today and scientists work in the field of peer review, so it will be peer reviewed, it will be trashed, people will poke holes in it, or this is wrong, that’s not right, the date’s wrong, fine, it’s an honest mistake. But hopefully it will also bring a message of hope. And the hope that I’ve had…I’ve given a copy of this to Dulcie September’s family. I was very happy. Connie September she’s a member of parliament and I’ve given a copy to Connie September with great humility and great humbleness and I was very grateful that she would accept it from me. I hope she’s read it and I hope she’s got a little bit of comfort, the loss of Dulcie I think was a tragic loss, and coming from a member of the establishment that ostensibly I guess was responsible for her death, it’s made me feel better, hopefully it’s made her feel better. It’s cost none of us anything. And I’ve given 174 copies to various people. I’ve honoured Billy Masethla today who probably doesn’t have too many friends. And I can’t say what Billy has done in the recent past but all I can say is that when I worked with him I found him to be a good man. I salute him for those times. Terence was purged like I was purged. We were both kicked out of the service eventually for various reasons. And I think at the end of the day, I pat myself on the back that we were both kicked out because we were people of integrity and they didn’t want people of integrity around. And you know, if that’s the explanation then great, then so be it. Then I’m honoured not to be part of a dirty business where people steal government money. So I’m glad for that to have happened. So at the end of the day I think we need more of this, not everyone can write, I hope I can write, and not everyone is eloquent in their writing. And I hope that it means something to other people because the few people that have read it…quite a few people have read it…have all generally come back with a positive feedback. I’ve had very little sort of horrifically negative stuff coming back and maybe one day I’ll have enough courage to publish it. At the moment it’s too personal. Maybe I have to depersonalise it and sort of take my father’s stuff out and my wife and what have you…it’s my story to my family, that I believe you reconcile with yourself first, then the immediate people around you, then the people you hurt, then the people in the broader community, and then ultimately with society. So it’s this cascading effect, this ripple effect. I’m fully reconciled with myself and with my family. That’s the purpose of that. I’m now reconciling with other groups…Ace Moema, Telly Moema, I’ve reconciled with those people. I’m fully reconciled with Frank Chikane…I haven’t spoken to Frank Chikane but I certainly have a lot of empathy with his plight. I’ve got a lot of empathy with Shirley Gunn and her family. I’ve never met Shirley Gunn but all I can say is I’m profoundly sorry that Shirley Gunn had to go through those horrific experience, and if I could meet Shirley’s daughter I would love it, just to tell her daughter that…I think it was her daughter that was so traumatised by her mother going to prison for something she never did. Because Adriaan Vlok didn’t have a backbone so…I’m angry at Adriaan Vlok. I think he’s just a repulsive individual. I’m angry at Craig Williamson. But I’m not angry enough to go and fight with him and I don’t really care about them at the end of the day. They’ve got their cross to bear and I’ve got mine, and there’s my chance, I’ve had it. Joe Verster, he wanted to follow me and do silly things like he did. Great, that’s his choice. Where’s he today? Last I heard, I don’t know if it’s true, but I heard he was indicted for fraud somewhere. You know, I’ve never done fraud. I’m a scientist today, I’ve had a honourable life, I can look people in the eye, and I’m happy. So that’s what the book has meant to me and I hope it can mean a sort of similar things to others. Interviewer You wanted to speak about the concept of a two phase revolution, which obviously came to your notice way back in the 175 eighties I guess. Tony Hardekool. Interviewer Yes, exactly. Tony The two stage revolution is a very interesting thing and any serious scholar of this time would be well served in my view to go and look more deeply at this. The belief at the time was that there would be a two stage revolution driven by the Communist Party. And the first stage of the revolution would be the popular revolution, the nationalist element. Where it was realised that the Communist Party at that time consisted mostly of white Jewish males in South Africa. Many of them were foreigners, they were not South African. Joe Slovo was not a South African, he was born in Lithuania. So the feeling amongst the Communist Party, CPSA, Communist Party of South Africa…I’m going back now before Braam Fischer, that kind of time, it was all white intellectuals that had all been traumatised during World War 2, and because of the experience of the Jewish people, tended to attract Jewish members and they tended to be sort of anti establishment and they tended to be anti capitalist. So it was also realised that there’s not enough of these people to make it happen. So they needed a vehicle. And in the case of South Africa the vehicle was going to be the African National Congress. So the African National Congress became the surrogate for the Communist Party of South Africa. Which eventually became the SACP. And then the second part of it was they were looking now at black communists, so you now have got Blade Nzimande and these guys, Moses Madiba and these guys, these are black communists. But that’s all come out of that process. Then it became very clear that there was a clear strategy and we picked this up in Hardekool, we picked it up all the time, all the time. Hardekool was aimed mostly at the Communist Party members. We picked up their chatter before ANC meetings, so we were listening in to their most intimate discussions, because they felt safe they would talk freely on the phone. And we could pick up to the nth degree how they were manipulating the meetings, how they were trying to get their sympathetic people in place, etc. So the first phase of the two stage revolution was the popular revolution, and that happened in 1994. So the government we have today is the product of the first phase of the revolution. Now the second phase of the revolution was designed to be, once the ANC, SACP is now in power, the SACP will regroup, get themselves into positions of authority in all significant ministries, in all significant place…now this sounds very much like sort of loony tunes conspiracy theory stuff, but this was their strategy and I leave it to the listener to determine whether this is happening or not. So the strategy was that they would get themselves into…once they’re in power, under the ANC, they would take over all key positions. And they would then purge the ANC of nationalists and there would only be communist members left. Now I was very perplexed by this and in my various 176 capacities on these different super working groups working with a lot of these ANC elites, I spoke about this to a lot of people. And Terence Trion for example, he laughed at me, he said Tony now you’re talking utter crap. You guys have got it wrong. You intelligence guys, you’ve got it wrong. He was a nationalist. He was purged. Laughs He’s down in Illovo down in the south coast now, he’s purged, he lost his job. laughs And what I find absolutely bizarre was we live today in a so-called democracy where the Communist Party, SACP, has never ever stood in an election on their own ticket. No-one has ever voted for SACP yet they control the place. They control the intelligence service, and no question of doubt about it. Ronnie Kasrils, Tim Dennis, control the intelligence service. They don’t take instructions anymore from the state. In fact one of the big punch ups we had with them early in the amalgamation was the role of the intelligence service, which they saw as being an extension of the Party. So the Party is here and an organ of the Party is the intelligence service. And that’s why you’re getting all this debate around the Scorpions, where the Scorpions how dare they say they swear allegiance to the Constitution. In the mind of the Communist Party indoctrinated individual the security force is an organ of the Party not an organ of the state. And that’s entirely consistent. So I put that forward as evidence for some serious scholar. And to me it’s very clear…I found the other day, quite funny, I was watching CNN, and all of a sudden there was some little mini riot in Johannesburg and there were angry people with Communist Party t-shirts on and they were making a big noise about the fact that the price of food is too high and demanding lower prices, blah, blah, blah. And these were all Communist Party people. Who do they speak on behalf of? Now we enter into the sort of…this scene now, enter Jacob Zuma. Laughs If I go back to my piece of paper on the wall laughs where does Zuma fit in, into the business. And all that I’ve learned…I don’t want to speak disparagingly about Zuma, I’ve got a lot of respect for the man, but I’ve also got a lot of trepidation for the man, because what I’ve learned about Zuma is that he will, as John Robbie says, will attend the opening of an envelope and he will say whatever has to be said, that’s a John Robbie-ism ok, and he said, he will say whatever has to be said. So if he’s talking to white farmers he’ll talk about bringing back the death penalty, and if he’s talking to…he’ll talk to the Black Journalist’s Association, without any concern for the fact that this might cause a problem. With absolutely no judgement, nothing in his head that says this might not be a good idea. And this concerns me because the way I know Jacob Zuma the man, I do not think that he has the moral fibre to resist what is now happening the second stage of the revolution where he is going to become the puppet in the front and Zwelinzima Vavi is going to be the man behind the scenes pulling the lips, the strings. Vavi has even gone on record in the recent past as chastising Zuma, when Zuma spoke about talking to big business about something or other, and Vavi said, no, no, he won’t do that without…so there Vavi played his hand there. If 177 you’re an analyst and you pick that up, there’s your evidence. So I personally believe that the two stage revolution is happening, I believe that our intelligence in all the murky years was actually quite accurate. We might have got some things wrong, we didn’t predict the assassination of Hani for example, but actually we got a lot right. And I think we got more right than we got wrong and I don’t think that we ever got the Communist Party stuff wrong because we had such a deep understanding of that. We had such intensive operations running around these people that we had I think a pretty good insight into what they were doing. So I’m firmly of the opinion today that the two stage revolution is alive and well and happening on our television screens as we watch… END OF SIDE A (counter at 427) SIDE B Tony And this opens another question with this bifurcation of leadership roles you suddenly get Zuma the president of the ANC and you get Mbeki the president of the country. And then sometimes…does the ANC talk as the party in power? Is the government the ANC? Who takes instructions from who? The whole thing is murky and…now nowhere in the world is it considered that, the government is the government and the government consists of elected people sitting in the legislature who , and the executive consists of career civil servants who enact the laws as they be instructed by the legislature, and the judiciary that’s independent. That’s it. It’s called the trias politicus and that’s how the world works. That’s how any developed democracy works. Might not be like that in China, it might not be like that elsewhere but certainly in the developed western democracies that’s how it works. So here today you have this very bizarre situation where the ANC has got a split personality, and I find it very interesting that one of the themes that we’ve been discussing here is my split personality and my split identity as an African, as a white African, and etc, etc. And the country’s split personality. But the ANC has got a split personality as well. And just like we managed to get into the Cuban and the Angolan government’s debate over these very same issues, I think the ANC has got a big challenge on its hands, they’ve got to sort out this split personality and I think the first thing that they’ve got to realise is this two stage revolution, is it or off? Is it real or not? If it is talk about it…well you see right now the president doesn’t want to hear about it because the intelligence agencies won’t be reporting it because they’re controlled by the Communist Party and they’re not going to report it. So now all you’ve got is grey haired, white men like me, and white men don’t count anymore. This country the day of white men speaking authoritatively frankly is over. No-one gives a hoot about what a grey haired, white man says. And that’s one of the tragedies of this country. So, at the moment we’ve got this funny think and the big question is what have we got today? We’ve got the government is the ANC and you’ve got the ANC is 178 government. But sometimes they are and sometimes they’re not. Sometimes the party is the boss, sometimes they’re not. Sometimes you’ve got this thing now with, will the president appoint...Kgalema Motlanthe or won’t he, because he’s not elected but he’ll be appointed…this is unusual. This is clearly a…this doesn’t happen in western democracy. And what’s going to happen after Zuma? Well, we don’t know. How can the party put forward a man like Zuma when he’s got so many things over his head. Is this the image they want to show to the world? Is the world irrelevant? Is the world totally unimportant? Are we going into this sort of Zimbabwe kind of mentality where we can go it alone and we can just kick out everyone because white people have stolen the land and we can just get on with it? White people didn’t steal the land. . Mfecane. Mfecane happened. White people didn’t steal the land. Zulu people killed people. The Zulus killed people and there was no-one left and whiteys came in and took the empty land. No-one stole any land. Yes, there was maybe land theft elsewhere, maybe the 1912 Land Act that was bad and evil and horrible and there’s no doubt about it. But these are complicated things. We can’t simplistically boil it down to one simple thing, white people are bad, get rid of them. So this is our challenge and I think we’re not going to get out of the mess until the tripartite alliance reaches a point of maturity and that tripartite alliance I think is ultimately got to reach some kind of split. You’ve got this factionalism now with the nationalist element and the communist element. And the communist element is being sort of spearheaded by the trade union movement and the Communist Party but the puppet mouthpiece for this is Jacob Zuma. He’s not the leader, he’s not in any way giving direction, he’s not in any way making decisions, he is taking instructions, he is not giving instructions, and I think that’s important. And you get this emasculated Mbeki who’s lost the international respect because his intelligence services collapsed, he’s lost the capacity to intervene in Zimbabwe, he’s made some horrific judgemental errors, and I think he’s eventually going to be judged by history. So we’ve now got a factionalised society, we saw it in the intelligence service, when I decided to leave it was already becoming factionalised and unbeknown to me then the factions were such that they were lining up now with Mbeki, Zuma type thing. so we’ve now got for example Billy Masethla that I spoke so highly of, he’s become a victim of this process. The collapse of the intelligence service, you’ve now got that Vuzi Ndoda Kunene that puts forward all these fake things because the checks and balances have been taken out. You know what an intercept is and you know what a fake thing is if your process is robust. So these are all symptoms of the times, and I personally think that the democratic process is hijacked and I don’t think we’re living in a democracy anymore. I think on paper, constitutionally on paper, we have a democracy. Where in reality we don’t have a democracy because the Communist Party is actually running the country and they’ve never fielded a candidate. I think that’s bizarre. The intelligence agency is taking instructions from Luthuli 179 House not from anywhere else. They’re not accountable to anyone else. So I find that very disturbing indeed and I think maybe this is something that we should investigate because I think the two stage revolution has happened, and I think that the key message is, there’s no more accountability. And we as South Africans must be vocal. Like I’ve been vocal, I’ve been bold and I’ve nailed my colours to the mast and I hope I don’t regret it. If anyone does attack me for it I’ll defend myself vigorously and I will defend myself with words and with ideas rather than with weapons. But I think at the end of the day we will get the government that we deserve, and if we do not hold our elected people accountable, then we’re simply going to get worse and worse government. And that’s going to be bad for government, it’s going to be bad for society, it’s going to be bad for everyone. So it’s in industry’s best interest, just like they rose to the occasion with all of the work…the scenario work etc, in the 1980s, early nineties, business must do that again now. They must re-engage…business is very powerful. Business has got a huge capability of engaging, of talking, and just sort of bring the cold light of day to bear. So I think we are not a functional democracy at the moment. We are failing to meet any constitutional imperatives. You can name any constitutional imperative. I’m aware right now of a number of different bits of litigation that are going to happen. One right now in the Eastern Cape, all those babies that were killed, and there the frustrated people are going to hold government accountable. I’m aware in the Wonderfonteinspruit case people are going to hold directors of companies and middle ranking career civil servants…not senior guys, middle rankers that knew about it. They’re going to hold them accountable in a court of law. And I think that’s necessary and in fact I’m…I don’t want to bias myself but as a scientist at the CSIR I’m supporting that process simply because I believe…where I’m trying lead the CSIR at the moment, I’m in a leadership position there – and where I’m trying to lead the CSIR is to become a fully accountable science body that does what I call science in the service of society. Not to be hijacked by big business, not to be hijacked by those that can pay the most, but if there’s a kid in the Wonderfonteinspruit that’s been poisoned by arsenic because of the mines then we should be there and we should bring the truth…like we’ve done, like my entire history in the intelligence community. I’ve got a thing now called the tooth fairy project, and the tooth fairy project is applying all of my experience from CODESA, from Renamo, all those things, putting that experience to bear now into trying to bring the mining industry to a new understanding and the government and society to a new understanding. And I think it’s going to be a success. I think it’s the right thing to do. We are asked to apply our minds. I think it’s the thing of integrity to do. I’m deeply concerned about the brain drain out of the country. Deeply concerned. Eskom brain drain. A lot of evidence that a lot of engineers left long before the wheels fell off. The wheels are falling off big time. It’s not going to get less for the simple reason that the transmission 180 lines are going to start going down. Why? Because the transmission switches or the big switch gear is only designed to be turned on and off a thousand times. Those were put in 30 years ago. The Kempton Park fire last week, I think you’ll find was very probably failed switch gear. It’s just being switched on and off too often, and my son is an electrical engineer and he explains to me that the lever has to move very rapidly, very far apart and there’s a big arc that happens. And this is done in the presence of a certain gas so there are little air seals etc. And if this thing doesn’t go all the way then it continues to arc and it then overheats and it catches alight and I think you might well find that that Kempton Park is one of those. If that’s the case you’re going to get more of them in the near future. Those are going to be very complicated to fix up because we’ve now got transmission problems. up to now we’ve had generation problems. The same thing’s coming in the water etc. We’ve not maintained the dams, we’ve not maintained the pipelines, we’ve got no maintenance going into the intellectual capital, we have no attempt to retain white professionals. In the last month we’ve had resignations. One as a result of being held at gunpoint. Another one a few months ago because he was shot in a botched cash heist. He’s now in England. This woman that was held at gunpoint, she’s on her way to Australia, not quite left yet, but is going to go. Another guy, one of our fellows, one of the top scientists just resigned. Been offered a job in an Australian University. So we’re losing people at a hell of a rate. There’s no way we can replace the intellectual capital that we’re losing. So I think these are big challenges for us as a nation. And if we can settle our historic differences, and I think we can, in the darkest moments we’ve proved it. We became the only nation in the world to give up nuclear weapons. Why couldn’t we just sit down and respect other cultures, just sit down the way I’ve tried to engage with you now, show respect, show empathy, show insight, and move on? Interviewer I think I’ve asked all the questions I need to at this point. Thank you very much, I think it has been most valuable and I’m sure the library formally acknowledge your… Tony Those two things please ok, that other one. Look it’s been an absolute pleasure and as I say, I’d like to thank the librarian or whoever has driven this thing for…I believe it’s a woman and I believe she’s a visionary person. Interviewer Michele Pickover. Tony Michele Pickover. I’d like to thank her very much because I think it’s an excellent idea. I’ll do what I can to rustle up other good documentation, hard evidence. I’ve got hundreds of photographs, and at some stage one must talk about how to capture those things because…or could they be digitized. I think if you were to establish a digital library, you’ll probably find millions of photographs coming forward. I mean every soldier out there took photographs at some time against regulation. And the one thing 181 that I dealt with in a consulting capacity at one stage was, when I was working with Gorbachov, I had the privilege of meeting an American woman called Barbara (Heinzen?) who at that stage was doing consulting work for the BBC, and the BBC was asking what can they do to stabilized peace in Ireland? And of course the BBC sits on tons of video footage. And the one recommendation was that they should establish a website where for example they show official BBC footage of a bomb blast or an incident. And then they create space, like a blog, where individuals write in and upload their pictures or tell their story. When the Dunblane Massacre happened where was I, this is my story, this is how it affected me. It’s a way of purging. Now that might be a thing to consider here, where you put a couple of photos up, invite other photographs, maybe invite people to tell their story, like a Wikipedia kind of thing. Tell their story, unlike Wikipedia, don’t allow others to come and obliterate it, because that just is a passion killer. Allow people to tell a story, apply rules, if it gets vindictive or people use swear words, then you edit it out. But I think ultimately if people can tell their story they get that bitterness, that anger, out of their souls and I think that’s very important. Interviewer Thank you. Tony We haven’t dealt with this one issue, in closing. I’m grateful for the fact that I can apply my mind and sort of think as I see fit and this is a very welcome approach. Because I think one of the concepts that I’ve learned to use as a useful explanation for why we are where we are today, is this concept of the opening and closing of the frontier. I think it was first articulated by Thompson and Lamar in a famous book that they wrote, and in fact this book was eventually applied to South Africa. There was a book with chapters in it from the American west and South Africa as empirical examples. And I buy into this opening and closing of the frontier. In simple terms what it means is that, a frontier is opened when a dominant power comes to a region and changes things. So say for example, in our case, in the case of Africa, we had all these little tribal groupings, all these different sort of ethnic groupings dotted around the continent and suddenly a dominant power came, white settlers. First it was in fact non settlers, it became the Portuguese that came around the Cape. But they didn’t dominate. They opened the frontier but they didn’t sort of come in in a hegemonic way. There was very little violence between…there was some but not too much. But when the Dutch came in 1652, the Dutch actually opened the frontier. And by opening the frontier they brought in a new legal system, a new cultural system. And a system of for example land ownership. Before that land didn’t belong to anybody, it was nomadic, there were nomadic people and the chief allocated land or you went to the land that was the greenest at the moment to graze your cattle. There were not that many people around. But the frontier was opened, if you use this terminology, in 1652, and was only closed in 1994. So throughout that entire time there was a set of 182 clashing values, clashing legal system, and even under apartheid the frontier was open, because apartheid artificially divided people on the fiction that they were not only racially different but they were also ethnically and linguistically different. So they were tribal in other words. Many black people today will not accept, they will reject this notion of tribalism, and I tend to agree with them. There are elements of tribal identity and I think that is important, but I think it’s been artificially accentuated by apartheid. So if we understand that in 1994 for the first time in this country we got one Constitution for everybody, one franchise system for everybody, one central codified legal system, one centralised political process, we only closed the frontier in 1994…we can even say we only started to close the frontier in 1994. So that means effectively for 350 years, in my case for 12 generations, we have been fighting a set of frontier wars. We don’t talk about the arms struggle as a civil war. It was a civil war. We don’t talk about the arms struggle, particularly the township phase, we don’t talk about that as civil war. That was out and out civil war! We don’t talk about the word civil war at all, but where we do we refer to as black on black violence. It’s ok for blacks to kill each other but you know…this is essentially the issue. So I think at the end of the day this concept of the opening and closing of the frontier is a powerful one, I think it’s a useful one. And if we then understand that we only closed the frontier in ’94, that suddenly helps us to understand what we must do next. Because we now have to consolidate that. We can’t learn from the past because everything that we’ve done from 1652 to 1994 was wrong. It was all done in terms of a paradigm that is no longer applicable. And that’s our challenge. And that’s why I urge these people not to leave the country. Rather rise to the occasion and get excited about this and see what you can do to make a difference. It’s hard to say that if you’ve been hijacked and raped and survived violent crime, and that’s a think we have to do, we have to get that sorted out. Zini showed we could, I think we can still do it. But at the end of the day I just wanted to mention this thing of the closing of the frontier. I think we’ve closed it legally, we now have to close it practically. Interviewer And psychologically. Tony Psychologically as well, yes. There’s a new thing, that poem of mine, the poem White Skin, African Soul, that should no longer apply to any of us. That applies now because we are still grappling with our identity. When we can get up and say with pride that we are South Africans, and when we can stop thinking in terms of race…I mean, I get so horrified that this beautiful thing that’s happened to this country, and then intellectual people immediately re-racialise it. It is such a morally and intellectually bankrupt concept. Why do we go and hobble ourselves when we’ve done all these other wonderful things? So that’s my closing statement. END OF INTERVIEW (counter at 216) 183

Collection Number: A3079 Collection Name: “Missing Voices” Oral History Project, 2004-2012

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