South Africa’s Directorate of Covert Collections used a front company to make Swapo advocate Anton Lubowski appear to be a MI spy. Evelyn Groenink and Pierre Roux report
South Africa’s military intelligence (MI) used a furniture transaction to make South West African Peoples Organisation (Swapo) advocate Anton Lubowski appear to be their spy. But the main purpose of the deal was to plant bugging devices under the beds and in the offices of Swapo leaders.
Lubowski bought furniture in 1989 on behalf of Swapo from an MI front company. MI then made three deposits into Lubowski’s personal bank account, ostensibly as commission.
The Directorate of Covert Collections (DCC) was in charge of both the furniture deal and the entrapment of Lubowski.
The MI payments to Lubowski three months before he was murdered in Windhoek in September 1989 were made to look like legitimate fees and might therefore not have aroused his suspicions.
Lubowski was Swapo’s deputy head of finance at the time and negotiated many business deals for the liberation movement.
The first payments by Swapo for furniture required for offices and homes for new government ministers match the three MI payments to Lubowski in June 1989. The first payment was made a day after Swapo paid for the first batch of furniture.
The money amounted to 5% of the furniture transaction, which is a common commission fee on a business transaction. Swapo paid R2-million for the furniture and Lubowski was paid R100 000.
Former defence minister Magnus Malan repeatedly stated that Lubowski had been an MI spy, showing copies of cheques made out by MI as proof. With his allegation that Lubowski was “his man”, Malan tried to ward off suspicions that it was his military who gunned him down in front of his house in Windhoek, asking: “Why would we murder our own spy?”
Gijima Express, the company posing as a furniture dealer, was, according to military sources, a front for an MI operation.
The Mail & Gaurdian has documents proving that it was a so-called “shelf” company without any assets, run by a businessman with ties to the South African military, and staffed by a known agent of the DCC.
“Military intelligence people framed Anton with these payments,” says Charles Courtney-Clark, who did Lubowski’s personal books at the time. According to Courtney- Clark, any income Lubowski expected was written down and no attempt was made by Lubowski or by him to hide the June 1989 payments.
“We did not really talk about where any payments came from. Most of the time he wasn’t even aware of the exact situation of his finances. He was carefree, not nervous, and would leave the administration either undone or to me. I may just have written these payments in the cash book without talking to Anton about it.”
His official accountant, Leon Raath, agrees that Lubowski consciously tried not to get involved in any corruption: “Anton was even trying to get rid of shares in a fishing company. He was worried that he, as an advocate and a Swapo official, should not have such business interests.
“He obviously found nothing wrong with the MI payments. This means he must either not have noticed them, because his administration was always behind and he was careless with it, or have assumed they were legitimate. Otherwise he would have said something about it.”
The Lubowski operation, under the control of then DCC head for Namibia Koos Louw, amounted to much more than just an attempt to damage Lubowski’s reputation with MI payments.
DCC operative Rich Verster told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission they were trying to recruit Lubowski as an agent and that the DCC agent working for the furniture front company, Rob Colesky, was instructed to befriend Lubowski.
Verster also said there were two other DCC agents who befriended Lubowski and gained access to his home. The DCC used the contact with Lubowski to provide the government-in-waiting with bugged furniture.
Louw, now an admiral in the South African navy, confirmed that Verster and Colesky worked for him, but refused to comment on Lubowski. “I was in Covert Collection and covert means secret,” Louw said.
Lubowski’s friends say he trusted the “furniture salesmen” because the director of Gijima Express was not a South African but a French businessman, Alain Guenon.
Guenon had been introduced to Lubowski by a representative of the French Embassy as someone who wanted to help Swapo.
Guenon was reputed to be close to the Mitterrand family, and an anti-apartheid supporter. He was also close to Winnie Mandela.
When Guenon offered to help Swapo officials who were coming home from exile with offices and furniture, they jumped at the opportunity.
Swapo was weary of Southern African white businessmen, who might be connected to the apartheid regime. Ironically, it was then “anti-apartheid supporter” Guenon who put Lubowski in touch with the DCC furniture operation.
“It was Guenon who found Colesky,” remembers Lubowski’s secretary Nina Viall. “He said this man has a good furniture company, who can deliver on time, and [is] not too expensive.”
Guenon and his company Gijima Express, which employed Colesky to buy the furniture, made a huge profit out of the deal – there was an 83% mark-up on prices and Swapo was invoiced twice for some of the goods.
It is still unclear whether Lubowski found out that there was something wrong with the furniture deal. He was murdered a week after the last payment by Swapo to Gijima.
A year later, Swapo tried to sue Gijima for the overcharging and double invoicing, but was not successful since there were no responsible directors or assets or cash flow left in the company by then.
The former chief investigating officer into Lubowski’s murder, Namibian Inspector Jumbo Smit, says Lubowski was “very carefully and meticulously framed”.
When asked about the bugged furniture deal, the Namibian Director General of National Intelligence, Peter Tshirumba, said he could not comment.