Is Donovan Nel, a spy accused of threatening to blow up the president, a blackmailer or the victim of an elaborate conspiracy? Mungo Soggot and David Beresford report
A bizarre story about a senior intelligence analyst who allegedly threatened to blow up President Nelson Mandela in an attempt to extort R10- million from the state has turned into a trial of South Africa’s intelligence community.
The question on which the future of the country’s most senior spy agency, the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), could turn is whether Donovan Nel is a common blackmailer, or the victim of an elaborate, racist conspiracy concocted by fellow spies in an attempt to destroy him.
The case has striking parallels with the Robert McBride saga. His incarceration in a Mozambique prison, allegedly on trumped-up charges, has already led to the premature retirement of South Africa’s defence chief.
The Nel case strikes at the credibility of the agency which is the eyes and ears of the government, and upon which Mandela and Deputy President Thabo Mbeki are heavily dependent when making executive decisions.
Until November last year Nel was trusted by his superiors to the extent that he had responsibility for compiling reports for the president on the activities of “rogue” members of the security forces believed to be involved in crime syndicates. Today he is suspended from duty, awaiting trial on bail for a seedy plot he is accused of concocting.
The story begins on November 11 1997, when a cleaner discovered an envelope in the men’s toilets on the third floor of the NIA’s Pretoria headquarters. It was addressed to the director general of the NIA – South Africa’s spymaster.
It contained a crude extortion threat: “Now if you act irresponsibly we will blow up parts of Rhulani.” The Rhulani building is the NIA headquarters Mandela opened last December. “And to [Deputy Minister of Intelligence Services Joe] Nhlanhla. We expect that you want Mandela’s visit to go unhindered,” it said. “We want R10- million. We will inform you where to deliver the money.”
The writer of the letter, who purported to belong to a group which condemned the “amalgamation” of the former government’s intelligence services with those of the African National Congress as “racist”, also confessed to the theft last year of several NIA minibuses filled with spying equipment.
The letter was handed to the agency’s security directorate for investigation. As it happened, the directorate was already investigating a case involving anonymous threats by letter – following a complaint from Nel – and the inquiry took an extraordinary twist when the investigators decided there was a link with the bomb threat.
A few months earlier Nel and his girlfriend – an agent with the South African Secret Service – began receiving racist and threatening telephone calls and letters. Nel was classified coloured under apartheid, his girlfriend white.
The letters said things like: “We work with you and no [sic] every move you make. Future male companions of yours will be warned that you were probably fucked by a Kaffir (sies).”
Despite the fact that Nel had made the original complaint – and expressed concern about the slow pace of their probe – the investigators concluded that the bomb threat and the racist letters were all his work. He was arrested in November 1997 and is now out on bail of R2 000. His trial is expected to begin in December.
In the meantime South Africa is left facing the question: is its most important security agency to be trusted?
The proof the NIA’s investigators have offered in the docket includes:
l The discovery of copies of the threatening letters on the agency’s mainframe computer which indicated they had been written on Nel’s terminal. The files in which they were found also contained his notes on the involvement of former members of the security forces in organised crime.
l Evidence that the bomb-threat letter was photocopied on a machine opposite Nel’s office.
l Evidence from a handwriting expert that there was an 80% probability Nel wrote all the letters, and testimony from a psychologist that the contents of the letters fitted his psychological profile.
The police psychologist called in by the investigators was Micki Pistorius, who has won an international reputation for her success in hunting down serial killers in South Africa. She is reputed to have the world’s best track record in this field,
But Pistorius reached a preliminary finding about Nel’s guilt without interviewing him. Instead she relied on Nel’s statement, evidence about the photocopier and computer, and the letters he allegedly wrote, only interviewing Nel after his arrest.
She pointed out spelling errors and corrections made to the text, which she attributed to nervousness.
Ironically, Pistorius’s report contains several spelling errors. She notes that in his statement, Nel “miss spelled [sic] his own name. One only miss spells [sic] ones own name when one is extremely nervous. Why is the subject so nervous?”
Pistorius told the Mail & Guardian this week it was not uncommon for her to reach preliminary conclusions without interviewing a subject. She said she had also analysed the “linguistic process” in the letters, adding that spelling errors were significant because “we are creatures of habit”. She shrugged off the point about her own errors, and denied the suggestion that by reaching a prior conclusion as to his guilt she had boxed herself in for her full finding.
The NIA handwriting expert – who also has a predilection for poor spelling (“dubble consonant”) – connected the stencilled bomb threat to the earlier race letters on the basis of a single character “A” scrawled in a margin as a page number.
The theory underlying the case against Nel appears to be that he was desperately in love with his attractive agent. They had a row and she ended the relationship. Desperate to win her back, he started to write threatening letters to himself and to her in an attempt to persuade her that their love had fallen foul of racists in the intelligence community.
Nel then made the bomb threat in an attempt to raise money which would enable the two to flee South Africa and start a new life abroad. But this theory raises obvious questions. It is unlikely a man of Nel’s experience would believe he would get away with a crude extortion bid.
The computer file containing one of the letters could easily have been planted by anyone with a modicum of computing expertise.
The evidence about the photostat machine could equally implicate other NIA officials who work with Nel and share the same equipment. The identification of the bomb letter with that particular machine was based on forensic examination of a single blank page which had inexplicably been left in the envelope by the alleged extortionist.
There are other question marks against the security directorate’s handling of the case against Nel, the most striking of which is why it failed to act on his repeated demands that he be subjected to a lie-detector test used routinely in the intelligence world.
And why did it not charge him with the theft of the minibuses on the basis of the confession in the stencil letter he is accused of writing. The NIA refused to comment this week, saying the matter was “sub judice”.
The theory being offered in his defence by supporters within the intelligence agency is that Nel – who was an ANC spy from the mid-1980s – has been “set up” by an “old guard” faction at the NIA, in much the same way as seems to have happened with McBride.
The question being asked is: if staff at the NIA are capable of framing one of their senior staff, of what value is their intelligence to South Africa?