Kirby
DJ Klatzow: RIGHT TO REPLY
I read with some dismay the article, “Helderberg:The search for invisible blame”, by Robert Kirby (June 26 to July 2). The article, despite its length, carries a very small intellectual component, it is factually incorrect and, unfortunately, displays the prejudices of the author rather spectacularly.
It is sad to read such an article in your paper, seen against the backdrop of the current squalid revelations which are pouring forth from the erstwhile agents of the apartheid regime. The article is, quite frankly, nonsensical and does not address the issues. It would be sensible to deal with the points such as they are that Kirby makes ad seriatim.
Let us start with the first one: “The story goes that Armscor’s hand-in-fist with its creator, the National Party government, hence with Magnus Malan.”
Is Kirby suggesting that Armscor was not hand-in-fist with the NP government; is he suggesting that it didn’t set up front companies to poison people selectively and to unleash cholera, anthrax and a host of other delectable medical horrors on the nation as a whole? Is Kirby suggesting that the crackpot scientists who have paraded themselves in all their scientific ignorance before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission are telling fibs?
The second point: “It is not the purpose of this article to stir the already muddy waters.”
That is precisely what Kirby is doing. He is trying unsuccessfully to calm the roiled waters of the Margo inquiry. It is quite clear from the article that Kirby has not acquainted himself with facts, either by reading the Margo inquiry transcript or, for that matter, the Margo report and, if he has read the report, he has ignored the glaring problems which it raises.
The entire gravamen of Kirby’s argument appears to be that the captain would never have done such a stupid thing as to fly on after a fire and, according to Kirby, this destroys entirely the argument of the second fire. Against the backdrop of the times, this is by no means as preposterous as Kirby would try to suggest.
There is compelling evidence to support the notion that South African Airways (SAA) was, in fact, part of the sanctions-busting mechanism. It must also be remembered that both SAA and Armscor were parastatals, and that the people at the helm of these two organisations were essentially minions of the NP government.
A substantial number of people who flew SAA aircraft were ex-South African Defence Force individuals who would have been brought through the ranks fully indoctrinated in the total onslaught philosophy and in the need to fight the holy war that was being waged in this country.
I agree with Kirby that the decision made by the captain would not have been taken without consultation. It is highly likely that, after the first fire broke out, the captain would have radioed the ZUR, the home radio station, in order to obtain permission to land.
Those of us who have investigated the case more thoroughly than Kirby appears to have done have always suggested that the captain was refused permission to land by senior members of the administration, either at a government level or at top SAA level.
We have also suggested that the first fire was probably extinguished by the crew and that the captain would have had to land the plane with a fire ostensibly extinguished and face a search by a regime which would almost certainly have been hostile to the apartheid regime.
A search would have indicated to the other country that SAA was carrying contraband military equipment. This would have jeopardised SAA’s ability to fly any of the air routes in the civilised world at the time. Seen against this backdrop, the captain’s decision to carry on flying despite the fire is by no means improbable.
Kirby appears not to have taken cognisance of the cockpit voice recorder. He doesn’t mention it in his article. It is on the interpretation of the cockpit voice recorder and the things that went on in the cockpit subsequent to the sounding of the fire bell that various investigators have based their views. This makes his reporting on the subject something less than objective.
It is also important to inform your readers that not only have people such as myself, who have been investigating this accident for six years, come to certain conclusions relating to the nature of the disaster which befell the Helderberg, but there are other parties such as the Flight Engineers’ Association and the Pilots’ Association which have come to exactly the same conclusions.
The Pilots’ Association never spoke out about it for the simple reason that it had the interest of preserving the captain’s reputation as its primary agenda, and the Flight Engineers’ Association never spoke out about it because it appears to have been intimidated into silence by members of the Margo commission.
It may or may not interest Kirby to know that members of the Flight Engineers’ Association who had developed a probable alternative theory as to the cause of the crash were summoned to Cecil Margo’s home, a fact which has been confirmed by other players in the drama.
Once they were at Margo’s home, they were told to drop the inquiry. They were told that it involved questions of national security. How on earth could a fortuitous fire on board a civilian airline involve questions of national security, Kirby?
They were told that, for the sake of their safety and that of their families and careers, they were to drop their inquiry. These are strange words coming from a sober tribunal inquiry which allegedly had nothing to hide and was not involved in any form of cover-up.
It is quite preposterous that people wishing to give evidence were summoned outside the normal operating times of the commission and given any information whatsoever, let alone the intimidatory statements that were made to them, but clearly this doesn’t weigh with Kirby.
Now we come to the missing ZUR tape. ZUR, as Kirby properly says, would have been informed of any major disaster which had befallen the Helderberg. We know that the tape of the period covering the time when we investigators say that the accident, or first fire, would have occurred, has gone missing.
Margo found that the tape had either been over-recorded or had gone missing. If the first option was true, why is it that SAA personnel didn’t go to Margo and say to him, “Here is the over-recorded tape – we unfortunately messed up in the procedure and it somehow got back in the system and it got itself over-recorded”? That never happened, so we must presume that the tape was never over-recorded.
Secondly, how could the tape of the day in question, a vital tape, which would have pushed the inquiry one way or the other, have gone missing? We know that Captain Jimmy Deal was sent in the early hours of the morning immediately after the disaster, down to ZUR, and there, in the presence of Gavin Dick, removed the tape from the equipment where it was being taped.
Deal gave the tape to Captain Mickey Mitchell, who was in charge of the flight operations centre. The tape was then locked in a filing cabinet. How did it get from the filing cabinet back into the normal routine tapes?
Kirby hasn’t addressed this question, and there is no answer forthcoming from the parties involved which, incidentally, involved Gert van der Veer, who was then the CEOof SAA.
I am not at liberty to tell you what Mitchell’s evidence at the truth commission’s hearings were, as it was a Section 29 inquiry, but I would like you to understand that I found his explanations as to what happened to the tape entirely unsatisfactory and that his testimony was contradictory. His answers to my questions during that inquiry, and I questioned him for some two and a half hours, were totally unsatisfactory.
Kirby’s comment that certain individuals in the airline received rather rapid promotion is undeniable. The communications officer at the time who occupied, in terms of senior SAA personnel, a very lowly position at the airline, was promoted to the post of area manager in Miami in a time shorter than it takes to say “fire on board” or “Helderberg”.
How this miraculous promotion occurred has not been explained, and the unwillingness of the officer concerned at the recent truth commission inquiries to explain this miraculous promotion did nothing to allay the fears that I or the commission may have had about the unusual nature of this promotion.
Kirby also ignores the fact that other people seem to have done rather nicely immediately after the Helderberg accident, and if he would like to discuss the matter with me, I would be more than willing to enlighten him about other parties who have done rather nicely outside the confines of SAA in their business ventures, rather coincidental with the advent of the Helderberg and the immediate post-inquiry furore.
Kirby very properly says that the fact that the tape was not kept intact and available for later examination was “quite frankly indefensible”. That is exactly the point.
The parties who knew what had happened to that tape were all present at the Margo inquiry. Each and every one watched Margo casting about in the so-called darkness for the path taken by this tape, and each and every one who had the information to say “I took it out of SAA; I gave it to so-and-so and he put it in the safe”, failed singularly in their duty to enlighten the commission.
Had Kirby taken the trouble to read the Margo transcript, he would have seen that the inquiry came close to some key issues and deftly moved away from these key issues.
The tape recording of the cockpit voice recorder was available to the Margo commission, and the key issue of the discussion about dinner was never discussed. In fact, Margo went out of his way to see that that particular conversation did not get played. The reason given was that the recording involved sensitive private conversations which would have upset the families of the deceased pilots.
However, an examination of this tape recording reveals nothing of the sort, and the failure to play the entire tape to the commission is, quite frankly, inexplicable and indefensible.
There are other issues which are of great importance, the first of which is that the Boeing Aircraft Corporation employed the services of one of the top fire experts in the world to examine the wreckage and to report on it.
This expert, from the renowned firm Dr J H Burgoyne and Partners, came to certain conclusions which indicated that the type of cargo which had produced the damage on the Helderberg was not that reflected in the cargo manifest.
He came to the conclusion that it was likely that it was an accelerated fire and that the type of material involved would have been something which contained its own oxygen.
There is little doubt that one compound which fits the bill is ammonium perchlorate, which would have produced the intense temperatures aboard the Helderberg which damaged the area immediately in front of the right-hand front pallet, but Kirby sees fit to ignore, as did Margo, the Burgoyne report.
It is sad that Kirby has allowed himself to be drawn into a debate without having ascertained the relevant and salient facts beforehand. It might even give rise to the notion that his political biases are being allowed to cloud his more sober judgment of the events.
It would be to everybody’s advantage to re- open the investigation and have the evidence re-examined, and for a new commission to be established to properly investigate the events which surrounded the disappearance of the Helderberg on that awful night 10 years ago.
It is sad to see that Kirby has done nothing to advance the arguments one way or the other, save to cast aspersions of shabby journalism and point fingers at his colleagues, who have no interest whatsoever in anything other than seeing some form of truth coming out in the new inquiry.
Kirby has also allowed his bias relating to the truth commission to emerge, relating, in particular, to the fact that both the Samora Machel inquiry and the Helderberg inquiry were held behind closed doors.
Time constraints made it inevitable that this would have to be so. And Kirby should, as a responsible journalist, know that, in terms of the commission’s regulations, there was no alternative other than to have the inquiry behind closed doors, for to have had it in open court would have required a much longer time to inform the relevant parties who might have had interests in the inquiry, and that time was simply not available.
Dr DJ Klatzow is an independent forensic scientist
n Robert Kirby replies: Hell hath no fury, it would seem, as a forensic “scientist” scorned. Klatzow does us all a great favour by revealing the level of his hysteria. It is understood that Klatzow’s investigation of the Helderberg disaster – apparently amounting to some nine volumes – has been entirely off his own bat.
That Klatzow has been doing all this out of the goodness of his heart makes his testimony even more dubious. If he was being paid vast amounts of money to make such an utter fool of himself, there would be some excuse. As it is, there is that unmistakable gleam of an obsessive mind in his subtext.
Scarcely a line in Klatzow’s response is without error, unsupported supposition and plain silliness. I have read the Margo transcript very carefully, have interviewed Margo and many others, and done all of the things of which I am accused of having neglected.
What alarms most of all is to read in a Sunday newspaper the same Klatzow boasting that last week he was “sworn in” as a commissioner to the truth commission. Would this be so that Klatzow may not only submit his curious theories to the truth commission, but sit in judgment of them as well?