The murder of South West African People’s Organisation (Swapo) advocate Anton Lubowski 10 years ago could have been linked to a South African military intelligence (MI) network in collusion with French businessmen and secret service agents, investigations by the Mail & Guardian have revealed.
The network was out to obtain decisive political influence in the region as well as resources such as oil and diamonds. Based in Windhoek, it sought the Swapo legal and investment guru’s assistance with trade, transport and money- laundering ventures.
Lubowski, who initially trusted the businessmen who approached him, found out they were not the Swapo enthusiasts they claimed to be. He was shot dead after he actively started to work against them and after attempts to blackmail him into co- operating failed.
The “French connection” to the South African establishment, including MI, goes back a long way. Both sides benefited from sanctions-busting, the arms trade and other trade ventures in Southern Africa during the apartheid years.
On the French side, it was mainly state oil company Elf which raked in the profits. Elf, which was recently taken over by Total-Fina, was notorious for its attempts to bribe African leaders. Elf is currently on trial for fraud in France and a fugitive director by the name of Alfred Sirven has been traced by the French prosecution to South Africa.
At a recent tribunal, Southern African political activists stated that the oil company, the French Africa Bureau (at the time led by the son of then president Franois Mitterrand, Jean Christophe) and the French foreign secret service collaborated with South African MI all over Southern Africa. The “French connection” was regularly used as a cover by South African MI.
Alain Guenon, a French Elf representative and a close associate of Thompson CSF, an arms-trading company which dealt with South Africa’s then foreign minister, Pik Botha, was placed close to Lubowski by South African MI in February 1989. He presented himself as a Swapo sympathiser who wanted to help the party with business ventures.
Guenon was introduced to Lubowski by a French embassy official as an anti- apartheid supporter and friend of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. He also impressed with his contacts in French government and industry circles.
Few people at the time were aware that Guenon was an arms trader whose origins were in French right-wing and Foreign Legion circles in the notoriously apartheid-friendly south of France. In this region apartheid lobbyists had power at city and provincial level, and mercenaries freely combined French secret service loyalties with paid work, mostly arms smuggling, for apartheid South Africa.
Guenon had been brought into Namibia by MI as part of an operation code-named Agree, meant to destabilise the Southern African region and bring governments friendly to apartheid South Africa to power in Namibia, Angola and Mozambique.
The first phase of Agree was to obtain key positions in the Namibian government and economy. The network – sanctions busting for South Africa provided good money-making opportunities for those involved – also used these positions to sell arms and make a handsome profit out of commodities such as oil and diamonds. The recruitment of Lubowski was a crucial step in achieving all of this.
Guenon was tasked with recruiting Lubowski, and liaised with MI’s directorate of covert collections (DCC). Guenon brought in DCC operative Rob Colesky to befriend Lubowski. Guenon told Lubowski the DCC man was a furniture salesman who would be happy to provide furniture to Swapo at a good price. The furniture business was then used to deposit MI money into Lubowski’s personal bank account. The money appeared to be a legitimate commission on a furniture deal.
One hundred thousand rand was paid out to Lubowski by Ernst Penzhorn, Botha’s personal lawyer, who had shortly before set up front companies for the DCC as well as an arms channel to Unita. The payments were a potential means to pressure and blackmail Lubowski into co- operating further with the network.
Secret services commonly compromise recruitment targets with payments, saying: “Now you have to work, because otherwise we’ll show the world we have been paying you already.”
Almost simultaneously with the MI payments, Lubowski was asked for his first “delivery” to the network: to bring MI’s money-laundering Mafia connection, Vito Palazzolo, into Windhoek.
Palazzolo, at the time in jail in Switzerland, had served MI well during his stay in Ciskei two years before. A partner of his had set up a money-laundering and sanctions-busting racket in a Ciskei casino. Palazzolo’s services had been so highly appreciated by the South African government that he had been appointed honorary ambassador from Ciskei to South Africa by Botha. Unfortunately, he and Botha’s friend, sanctions-buster Albert Vermaas, had landed in jail. This had led to a money-laundering bottleneck in Windhoek which was holding up the sanctions-busting commodities trade.
But Palazzolo was due out – the ideal candidate to set up a casino for money laundering and sanctions busting in Namibia. DCC head Jan Anton Niewoudt’s lawyer Cyril Prisman, who acted for Palazzolo, made the approach to Lubowski. Prisman asked Lubowski to visit Palazzolo in jail in Lugano to see if the latter could obtain Namibian citizenship.
Lubowski, unaware of the MI link to Prisman or Palazzolo, accepted. He had lost most of his legal practice income since he had “come out” as a Swapo activist and was, as he put it, “in dire need of making a lot of money quickly”. However, he told his then partner, Michaela Clayton, that he was aware of Palazzolo’s Mafia links and would only give him “legal advice and no more than that”.
Lubowski went to see Palazzolo in June and August 1989. Upon his return in August he expressed his discomfort with “requests that had been made”. He told Clayton he was not prepared “to do all that these people wanted from him”. He did not go into details, but friends remember there had been approaches to ask Lubowski to organise casino rights for Palazzolo.
During the six weeks before his murder on September 13 1989, Lubowski grew increasingly uncomfortable with the businessmen and ventures he had become involved with.
“He started to say that he didn’t really know who these foreigners were and that business ventures should rather go to local businesspeople,” recalls a businessman friend of Lubowski’s who does not want to be named.
According to the friend, Lubowski had become especially concerned about a proposed railway between Walvis Bay and Maputo, a plan which had attracted “a lot of scavenging pirates who wanted parts of the railway and concessions in the areas next to it. These were the type of businessmen who would milk the country for their own benefit only, to the detriment of the Namibian people. Anton did not like it at all.”
Lubowski was also presented with a proposal by Guenon: to set up a company, Oil Enterprises, which would acquire Elf oil from Angola, build a refinery in Walvis Bay and then use the railway to distribute the oil all over Namibia, bringing it right to the South African border.
Lubowski was probably not aware of Guenon’s other agenda, which was to sell Elf oil to South Africa, which was then still subject to international sanctions and willing to pay dearly for illegal oil deliveries.
But in August 1989, Lubowski started to feel that he should not participate in this oil-railway project. Again, Lubowski turned out not to be the “perfect agent” the sanctions-busting network had set him up to be. He had not delivered Palazzolo, nor had he delivered the transport venture which would help break the sanctions-busting deadlock.
Lubowski, however, still did not suspect that MIand his “French connection” were working together and that they planned to blackmail him into co-operating. A week before he was murdered, he was presented with a fraudulent invoice by Guenon for furniture which had been paid for by Swapo. Still trusting Guenon, Lubowski signed the payment. There was now clear evidence not only implicating Lubowski in MI payments but also in defrauding Swapo.
Two days before his murder, Lubowski phoned Guenon – who happened to be “on business” in New York – telling him he was “in trouble” and asking him to come back to Windhoek and help him out. But Guenon did not come.
Lubowski then decided to confide in his Swapo friend, Namibian prime minister designate Haage Geingob. Again in good spirits after that long, secret meeting, and back in the office working on Swapo finances, he phoned Clayton to tell her that Geingob would join them for supper and further talks in a restaurant that evening.
Shortly after that, the DCC’s Colesky showed up at the Lubowski home, asking for the lawyer. He phoned Lubowski, presumably to ask when he would be home. Lubowski was shot by a professional assassin upon his arrival at home, before he had a chance to see Geingob again.
Geingob has refused to divulge what was discussed during the confidential meeting with Lubowski shortly before his assassination. It is known that Geingob became close to Guenon after the murder, that he has negotiated important business contracts with France and that he is known as the French connection in the Swapo government.
Shortly after the murder, Lubowski’s part-time book-keeper, Charles Courtney- Clark, told a member of the Lubowski family that Lubowski “had stumbled on things he should not have known, including concessions and a railway line”.
Courtney-Clark “can’t remember what railway line I was talking about. But there was an initiative by Anton and some of the local businesspeople to counter South African MIoperations which included economic activity. It had to do with securing strategic resources in the interest of Namibia and the Namibian people.”
Clark, who joined Guenon in Oil Enterprises after Lubowski’s death, says he “still can’t believe Guenon would deal with the South Africans. He seemed so French- connected. But anyway, after Anton’s death, the oil venture came to nothing.”
Botha, asked to comment on allegations that he personally benefited financially from commodities trade in the sanctions- busting network, and that he is still involved with companies known to have been sanctions busting, denied it as “ridiculous nonsense”.
He admitted to having shares in a commodities trading company, African Trade and Industry Corporation, directors of which share office premises with known sanctions-busting companies such as GMR, but “it is not my company. I just have a few shares in it, less than 2%.”