An overlap between Robert McBride’s outlandish charge sheet and the discredited Meiring report suggests an intelligence set-up, write Mungo Soggot and Stefaans Brmmer
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Robert McBride conspired with Cuban and American diplomats to overthrow the ANC government: that is among the bizarre claims which have kept McBride in a Mozambique prison cell for more than 50 days.
The Mail & Guardian this week gained access to the charge sheet in the McBride case and discovered it was little more than a summary of the Meiring report – a document which has been dismissed as a hoax by President Nelson Mandela and a tribunal of the country’s top judges. The discredited intelligence report, warning of a coup, was presented to Mandela in February by defence force chief Georg Meiring.
The Mozambican charges appear to hinge on a statement by a former military intelligence informer, Vusi Mbatha, who was arrested with McBride and who is named as the second accused in the case.
Mbatha has also been named as the sole source for the Meiring report.
The overlap between the charge sheet and the discredited Meiring report reinforces suspicions that McBride was framed by rogue elements of South Africa’s intelligence community to lend credence to the report after Mandela initially failed to take it seriously. Meiring was forced to tender his resignation after a tribunal of judges, chaired by Chief Justice Ismail Mahomed, rubbished the report.
The charge sheet, which could easily have been culled from a Monty Python script, puts McBride at the centre of an arms- smuggling ring run by Madikizela-Mandela who – along with Meiring’s likely successor Siphiwe Nyanda, General Lambert Moloi, Bantu Holomisa and McBride – stars in the Meiring report.
The charge sheet lists as third co-accused Mozambican arms dealer Alex Mamba (also referred to as ‘Uamba’), alleged to have previously supplied arms to Inkatha.
In 1996, Madikizela-Mandela is alleged to have negotiated in Swaziland with a Mozambican general to train soldiers for “her movement” – christened “Fapla” in the Meiring report. McBride and Mbatha both allegedly became involved. McBride is supposed to have secured guarantees of money and uniforms from officials at the American and Cuban embassies.
In October 1996, claims the charge sheet, Mamba began supplying Madikizela-Mandela with AKM-47s, bombs and Makarov pistols. The charge sheet says that in September last year the final transaction involving the former first lady took place: she allegedly paid R100 000 for 30 bombs.
The charge sheet provides scant detail of the actual transaction which led to McBride’s arrest on March 9, and relies almost exclusively on Mbatha’s testimony.
It says that in January this year McBride and Mbatha met Mamba to discuss an arms transaction, paying $2 500 for a consignment of weapons in February. Mamba was not there and they left the money, returning the following month when they were arrested. There is no mention of the $11 000 McBride is supposed to have been carrying at the time of his arrest.
The M&G has also obtained some details of Mbatha’s statement to the police. Like the charge sheet, it skirts details of the “arms transaction” and instead regurgitates already discredited features of the Meiring report.
Legal sources in Maputo say Mbatha claims in his statement that McBride was working with a number of co-conspirators – including Madikizela-Mandela, Moloi and Nyanda – to topple the Mandela government.
It is understood Mbatha also claims that Madikizela-Mandela met members of the Mozambican army to discuss the coup, and that McBride was ferrying arms for Fapla cohorts. Mbatha also refers to Cuban, American and Russian accomplices all of whom have so far not been traced by the Mozambican police.
Although the South African government has refused to release the Meiring report, it has revealed its salient points: that an organisation called Fapla, steered by senior members of Umkhonto weSizwe, was plotting a coup.
Mbatha and McBride were arrested a week before The Citizen newspaper first published details of the Meiring report.
At a confidential briefing to opposition politicians after Meiring’s resignation, Mandela himself floated the possibility that McBride was framed to lend credence to the report.
Meanwhile, it has also emerged that the South African police have been sending their Mozambican colleagues clippings on the McBride story, omitting articles which have raised the likelihood of a set-up.
The South Africans have insisted they have only been assisting the Mozambicans and not in any way steering the investigation. A representative for Police Commissioner George Fivaz this week refused to discuss questions about South African police activities in the McBride case.
The M&G also understands that Superintendent Lappies Labuschagne – who was withdrawn from the investigation last week following allegations he was an apartheid assassin – was still working on the McBride case on Friday last week.
Sources close to the investigation in Maputo claim Labuschagne was asking his Mozambican colleagues for details of the $11 000 in cash which McBride was allegedly carrying when he was arrested.
Fivaz’s office said Labuschagne was no longer working on the case. “By last Friday he had already resumed his duties in Mpumalanga,” a representative said.
McBride’s possession of the cash remains one of the most curious aspects of the case – a fact clung to by those who insist he is guilty of trading arms.
Nevertheless, a senior intelligence official involved in the McBride probe said this week he and his colleagues were becomingconvinced of McBride’s innocence.
He said there remained “perplexing” factors in the case, but it appeared more likely that McBride had been caught in something in which he was not involved. “We are beginning to get some sort of a feeling that McBride may be more innocent than we thought.”
Some of the South African policemen involved in the case have already linked the Meiring report and McBride’s arrest – but stopped making the connection when the report was scotched by Mandela and Judge Mahomed.
Shortly after news of the Meiring report surfaced in the South African press, the policeman in charge of the McBride investigation in South Africa, Assistant Commissioner Suiker Britz, was reported saying he had met a general and two senior military intelligence officials who had given him “a whole pile of information”.
In an apparent reference to the Meiring report and its relevance to the McBride investigation, he said: “I can’t say whether it is about overthrowing the government. But it is definitely about arms smuggling.”
Both McBride and Mbatha are being held in a prison on the outskirts of Maputo. It is understood McBride sustained minor injuries after fighting with the policemen who arrested him. Mozambican prisons are crammed with people who have been awaiting trial for at least a year.