OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Tuesday 3.20pm.
A TELEPHONE conversation between apartheid spy Craig Williamson and suspended foreign affairs official Robert McBride on Friday dominated Williamson’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee’s amnesty hearing in Pretoria.
In a bizarre turn of events, a tape submitted by counsel for the Slovo and Schoon families contained, alongside a recording of two interviews Gillian Slovo had done with with Williamson while researching her book, a conversation between Williamson and McBride. The conversation, in which Williamson details his role in the letter-bomb murder of Ruth First, was recorded by McBride without Williamson’s knowledge. There was no indication when and where the interview was conducted and in what capacity McBride was talking to the former spy.
Williamson’s lawyer Allan Levine claimed the interview had been surreptitiously recorded and had then landed in the possession of Gillian Slovo. George Bizos SC who is appearing for the Slovo family explained that Gillian Slovo had obtained the tape from McBride in an effort to find out information about Williamson’s role in her mother’s death. The tape was then mistakenly mixed up with tapes of an interview Gillian herself later conducted with Williamson.
In later testimony Bizos put it to Williamson that he had not sent the letter bomb to the Schoon family out of political motivation, but for personal revenge. The Schoons, Bizos claimed, had been instrumental in blowing Williamson’s cover when he stayed with them in Botswana while posing as an African National Congress sympathiser. After Williamson’s cover was blown, Bizos continued, his career as a spy was over and he had to return to South Africa.