Former apartheid-era National Intelligence Service (NIS) boss Mike Louw is one of three former intelligence operatives who will advise Minister of Intelligence Lindiwe Sisulu on conditions of employment in the intelligence community, including possible restraint of trade agreements.
Louw took over the NIS reins from apartheid spymaster Niel Barnard in the early Nineties. Before that he served a stint as researcher/analyst in the State Security Council, PW Botha’s primary tool in the total onslaught strategy of the Eighties. In January 1995 Louw was appointed the first director general of the newly formed South African Secret Service (Sass).
The Intelligence Services Council and its members were announced by Sisulu during her budget speech in Parliament. Conditions of employment, like restrictions on disclosure of information and restraint of trade, have been mooted over the past year amid concern that agents resigned and used their knowledge in South Africa’s multibillion-rand private security business.
Council chairperson is former National Intelligence Agency (NIA) boss Sizakele Sigxashe, a former African National Congress department of intelligence and security operative who was part of the team established to probe human rights abuses at the ANC’s Quatro camp in Angola. Following the 1999 national election he was redeployed as adviser to then intelligence minister Joe Nhlanhla.
His deputy is Richard Knollys, a former Bophuthatswana Intelligence Service member, later turned deputy head of the intelligence ministerial services. Louw serves as part-time councillor.
The announcement of the council came in the wake of government’s ongoing contact with old order intelligence bosses. It has now also emerged that Barnard had been involved in February’s meeting of South African ministers and officials with an Israeli security, defence and intelligence delegation.
It was the second time Barnard had been involved in initiatives to help resolve the Middle East conflict. In January 2002 he played a key role in the first Israeli-Palestine meeting chaired by President Thabo Mbeki at Spier, outside Stellenbosch.
Barnard is now a consultant after leaving the Western Cape director general post with a rumoured multimillion-rand pay-out following the change of political power to the ANC-New National Party cooperation pact in December 2001.
The Intelligence Services Council was established under the 2002 Intelligence Services Act to make recommendations to the minister on human resource policies, improved salaries and fringe benefits for members of the civilian intelligence community, which includes the NIA and Sass.
According to the Act, members of the council must be “fit and proper persons with a thorough knowledge of the functioning” of the intelligence services. The council must monitor the implementation or review these policies as well as liaise with the Public Service Commission, which regulates all other civil servants.