Peta Thornycroft
A GABLED mansion in the heart of Kensington, the eastern Johannesburg suburb, served as a “safe” house for intelligence operatives in the Security Police.
It was at this house in the late 1970s and early 1980s where reports submitted by journalists who were informers were scrutinised before being consolidated and sent on to police headquarters in Pretoria.
According to a former security police agent, John Horak, the house had been rented from its owner by a security policeman posing as a debt collector.
Horak says that, to his knowledge, he was one of only two “agents” who operated for the security police on the country’s newspapers. An agent was, he says, a career policeman who worked as a journalist.
The only other agent he knows of was Gerard Ludi, who was a journalist on the Rand Daily Mail in the early 1960s and who infiltrated the underground Communist Party. He testified against party members.
In addition, there were informers. All newspapers, English and Afrikaans, had them.
Horak says, as a guess, that there were 12 or 13 informers at the South African Associated Newspapers (now Times Media Limited) during the 1970s and 1980s. Journalists were poorly paid and those who were informers were usually motivated by need rather than ideology, he says.
The going rate in the early 1980s for informers was between R200 and R1 000 a month, he says, and this was good money for journalists when, for example the salary of the political correspondent of the Sunday Express in July 1980 was less than R1 000 a month.
He also says that many journalists who did not want formally to become informers, or who were not as liberal as the newspapers they worked for, would pass on valuable intelligence because of their ideological beliefs.
Referring to Norman Chandler, the senior journalist at the Johannesburg newspaper The Star whose work as a police informer was reported in last week’s Mail & Guardian, Horak says: “His motive was money. The first time he came to me, in about 1978, he was in trouble with a phone bill. He asked to be reconnected with the security police, and so I passed on the information, and he was put on the books.
“The next time he came to me was after the Rand Daily Mail had closed [in April 1985]. He had gone to work for a public relations company and was retrenched and in trouble over a car he had bought. Once again I connected him.” Chandler has denied he ever worked for the security police.
Horak has given the M&G several names of journalists he says were police informers. Some are now dead, others have left the country, and a few are still in the media. Those still in South Africa may be approached for information by investigators putting together a submission on the press for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
In addition to informers in the press who reported to the security police, journalists worked for the then-South African Defence Force, national intelligence and foreign affairs in South Africa, elsewhere in Africa and overseas.
As more names of apartheid-era informers in the media become public in the next few months there will probably be few surprises in the press. Many journalists suspected who among them were spies.
Conversely, in the climate of paranoia fostered by knowledge of the existence of informers, there was also a good deal of finger-pointing at innocent people.