At last the WM&G is able to disclose the identity of the man behind the momentous Inkathagate scandal.
David Beresford reports
THE Weekly Mail & Guardian can finally disclose the identity of the man behind the Inkathagate scandal, who may have changed the course of South African history.
He is Brian Morrow, a former member of the security branch, who is now trapped in exile from South Africa, because he cannot get indemnity against prosecution for his breach of the Official Secrets Act.
The Inkathagate scandal which followed his disclosures — showing that Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi had been taking secret payments from the police — is believed by many commentators to have fatally undermined the political standing of the Inkatha leader. It is also believed to have compromised covert operations aimed at the electoral defeat of the ANC, as well as bringing an effective end to the careers of the country’s two key security ministers.
But ironically, while self-confessed mass murderers have been pardoned on the grounds that their crimes were committed with “political” motives, Morrow has been unable to get the indemnity that will enable him to return home.
Morrow (34) took the documents from top-secret police files when he fled South Africa in 1991 to avoid pressure by colleagues to give perjured evidence in a dangerous driving case against a fellow police officer.
After the scandal broke, the South African Special Branch apparently managed to identify Morrow as the person who had taken the missing documents and both he and members of his family were the subject of death threats. The British government had to step in to give him personal protection.
Morrow, a warrant officer in the security branch, joined the South African Police in 1986 to avoid conscription into the army. “I saw all the dodgy things they (the security branch) were doing and I thought, no, this is not on. So I just started taking documents.”
The documents he took were from the filing department at CR Swart Square, police headquarters in Durban. The most secret documents were contained in Stratcom (strategic communications) files in a heavily protected room. But for a brief period they were moved into a less secure section while building renovations were carried out. “That’s when I really made hay,” recalls Morrow.
“There was far more there. There were other documents with Buthelezi’s name on and documents with (FW) de Klerk’s name on. De Klerk in one document was congratulating people who had infiltrated Nusas (the liberal National Union of South African Students). I just took what I thought was the best. I didn’t have time to read them, I had to take them very quickly.”
He believes police suspected him of taking the missing documents at the time. On a couple of occasions exits from the building were suddenly blocked and searches carried out in an attempt to identify the culprit.
At one point Morrow began finding messages left on his car windscreen, purporting to be from ANC supporters and appealing to him for help. “I went straight to my boss with them. I figured they knew it was me, they just didn’t have the proof.”
In 1990 Morrow was riding as a passenger in a police car when the speeding driver jumped a stop street in a Durban township, ramming into another vehicle. Under pressure from commanders to give testimony blaming the other vehicle for the crash, “I thought, sod this country. I’m going to go overseas and leak the documents.”
While in England, Morrow and his family received a string of death threats, both by letter and in anonymous telephone calls. One caller told him where he and his wife had been over a succession of days, indicating they were being kept under surveillance.
Pointing out that he had made no demands for payment for the documents, Morrow says: “I just did it on principle.”
Unfortunately, while the principles at stake were recognised by the then state president, De Klerk — who conceded police wrongdoing and demoted former minister of law and order Adriaan Vlok and former minister of defence Magnus Malan — Morrow has been unable to get recognition of them by way of indemnity.
Over the past couple of years he has made repeated approach-es to the South African embassy in London, to ANC representatives and other politicians in South Africa for help in getting indemnity, but without success. His only formal response was a letter from the Ministry of Justice, informing him he had filled in the application form incorrectly.
Brian Currin, the head of the Amnesty-Indemnity Advisory Board set up to process indemnity applications, confirmed that an application had been received from Morrow, but said that the “offence” was committed after a cut-off date of October 1990 and did not qualify for consideration.
The breach of the Official Secrets Act carries a maximum penalty of 10 years’ imprisonment. “I’m not really worried about that,” says Morrow, who now works as a teacher in England. “But it would give the police an excuse to arrest me. People have slipped on soap before in South Africa. People have died `running away’.
“I just don’t think it is fair when people like Barend Strydom (a member of the Wit Wolwe convicted of mass murder) are walking around free.”