Former chief director of operations of the National Intelligence Service Maritz Spaarwater takes on a new role as researcher for the United Democratic Movement. Howard Barrell reports
The apartheid superspook who set up the top-secret meetings with African National Congress leaders in Switzerland in 1989 that led to a negotiated settlement in South Africa has broken cover and emerged as a researcher for the United Demo- cratic Movement at Parliament in Cape Town.
Maritz Spaarwater, debonair former chief director of operations of the National Intelligence Service (NIS) under presidents PW Botha and FW de Klerk, has been a significant back-room figure in the UDM since its formation and is understood to have played a role in drawing up its main policy document.
Spaarwater, who was the Botha government’s contact man with Zambian ex- president Kenneth Kaunda, also met Swapo leader Sam Nujoma at the former Zambian leader’s official residence in the late 1980s, so initiating a set of contacts that led to a negotiated settlement in Namibia.
Spaarwater this week confirmed his entry into party politics, explaining that he thought the UDM alone had an agenda for the future. “The ANC, the Democratic Party and the National Party are still functions of the 1910 constitution. They are divisive. They are still fighting apartheid battles – the battles of the past,” he said.
Observers expect that, in his new role as researcher, Spaarwater will strengthen considerably the UDM’s presence in Parliament.
Described as highly intelligent and “a very smart cookie” by those who know him, Spaarwater’s research will feed the perspectives voiced by the party’s two key leaders, Bantu Holomisa and Roelf Meyer.
Spaarwater and Mike Louw, his immediate superior at the NIS during the Botha and De Klerk presidencies, are credited with having fought a long and lonely battle within the former apartheid intelligence services in the 1980s for an accommodation with the ANC and other liberation movements.
Their moment finally came on September 12 1989, when, through the intermediation of Stellenbosch University academic Willie Esterhuyse and in terms of a cunningly crafted resolution of the State Security Council, they met clandestinely with Thabo Mbeki, then head of the ANC’s international department, and Jacob Zuma, then the ANC’s head of intelligence, in a hotel in Lucerne, Switzerland.
Their meeting is described in Allister Sparks’s book on progress towards a negotiated settlement in South Africa, Tomorrow Is Another Country. Spaarwater, supported by a team of three agents, made sure the meeting was secure and participated in these first vital exchanges.
Sparks reports Louw’s description of the first, tense encounter with the ANC representatives in his hotel room: “[Spaarwater and I] could hear them coming [down the passage], talking, and then they came around the corner and they could see us standing there. Thabo walked in and said, ‘Well here we are, bloody terrorists and for all you know fucking communists as well.’ That broke the ice, and we all laughed, and I must say that from that moment on there was no tension.
“When Louw and Spaarwater flew home the next morning, they had a clear message to deliver to [De Klerk]: the ANC was willing to negotiate.”
Subsequent meetings with the ANC involving Louw and Spaar- water followed, including those that made the arrangements for the return to South Africa from exile of the first ANC leaders in early 1990.
Spaarwater, Louw and their boss at the NIS, Nil Barnard, had been obliged to move cautiously in getting authorisation from the State Security Council for the first meeting. There were many in the political and security establishments who were violently opposed to contact with the ANC.
Their Aesopian proposal to the State Security Council read: “It is necessary that more information should be obtained and processed concerning the ANC, and the aims, alliances and potential approach- ability of its different leaders and groupings. To enable this to be done, special additional direct action will be necessary, particularly with the help of National Intelligence Service functionaries.”
Spaarwater said this week that his disillusion with apartheid had taken root in 1978 when it became clear to him that NP politicians’ claims that government policy would reverse the influx of black people to the cities was nonsense. Then serving in military intelligence with the rank of major, he resigned from the NP.
Later, as a colonel in military intelligence, he told a meeting of colleagues: “If I was a black in this country, I would be in Umkhonto weSizwe.” These views earned him “quite a lot of vilification and denigration”.
He resigned from military intelligence and joined the NIS where, it was clear to him, “there was more room for flexible thinking”.
His conviction that there had to be an accommodation with the ANC deepened when two states of emergency – one covering most major population centres in 1985, and a second across the entire country in 1986 – failed to quell popular unrest. “We in the NIS had warned they would not have the intended effect,” he said.
These states of emergency and some NP leaders’ belief in 1994 that their party would win South Africa’s first democratic election convinced him that “politicians have an infinite capacity for self- delusion”.
Intelligence sources say Spaarwater briefly served as head of domestic collections at the newly constituted National Intelligence Agency (NIA) under the current ANC government. But he fell victim to deep-seated suspicions among a few ANC leaders of intelligence officials from backgrounds different to their own.
“It’s a pity,” said one former ANC member now serving in the NIA. “He had a hell of a lot to offer.”
Spaarwater declined to comment on his reasons for leaving the security services.