Terry Bell unravels the murky past of the former Wits fine arts professor who siphoned aid funds into security police coffers, and is now in hiding in Spain
Superspy Craig Williamson’s Spanish connection, Avio Barraclough (75), has gone to ground in Spain fearful of an official probe into his role in apartheid’s dirty war.
The part played by the former art teacher at a posh British school in an elaborate scheme called Operation Daisy has emerged from secret transactions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). For more than four years, Operation Daisy hoodwinked the West and diverted into the South African security services funds earmarked to help fight apartheid.
>From November 1976, money from sources such as Scandinavian aid agencies, the British Overseas Development Agency and independent humanitarian groups found their way to two trust funds in South Africa. Both, it has now emerged, were set up and run by the security police – with Eduardo Joel Favio Barraclough as sole trustee.
He was one of a network of operatives and “sources” in Europe who carried out the orders of the South African security police chief, General Johan Coetzee. Together with confessed murderer Craig Williamson and British-born bomb-maker Jerry Raven, Coetzee was among the nine men granted amnesty in South Africa for the 1982 bombing of the London office of the then exiled African National Congress.
Williamson and Raven are also among a group of security policemen who have applied for amnesty for the letter-bomb killings of academic Ruth First in Mozambique in 1982 and of teacher Jeanette Schoon and her six-year-old daughter, Katryn, in Angola two years later.
It was Williamson who was Barraclough’s “handler” when the Spanish-born art teacher left South Africa after helping to establish one of the most successful projects of larceny ever mounted by the police.
Barraclough had arrived in South Africa in 1974 to take up the chair of fine arts at the University of the Witwatersrand on an initial three-year contract. But within days of his arrival, growing numbers of staff and students were demanding his removal for incompetence.
The administration compromised by appointing him director of what was to become the Getrude Posel Art Gallery. But he remained a professor at Wits, which had an international reputation as a centre of anti-apartheid struggle. He proved the ideal candidate for a scheme to provide a phoney conduit for anti- apartheid funds.
In Williamson, Coetzee already had an agent who was acting as the liaison in South Africa for the Geneva-based International University Exchange Fund. It was a steady source of additional funding for the police.
In mid-1976, Williamson asked leading anti-apartheid lawyer Geoff Budlender in Johannesburg to draw up trust deeds for the Prisoners Support Trust and the Education Research Trust. Barraclough, described as a Wits professor and former council member of the Royal British Society of Sculptors, was sole trustee. The names of Barraclough and Budlender were used to give the trusts a superficial legitimacy. But the deeds Budlender drew up were never registered. Another set, again with Barraclough as sole trustee, was drawn up by a Pretoria legal firm with close links to the government and police.
By then, Barraclough was in danger of losing his job. The police turned to what they called their “friends in the media”. In The Citizen, set up and financed by the government’s information department, Barraclough was portrayed as a liberal- tinged intellectual. His colleagues began to think they may have done him a disservice.
Barraclough played no further part in the trusts as the money rolled in. How much was siphoned off to private pockets and police projects will never be known. But the sums were substantial. In one case, Coetzee took R40E000 and, in the name of John Davis, bought a large tract of land north of Pretoria. It became a training base for apartheid agents. Among the many who trained there was Peter Casselton, a British pilot, mercenary and spy who died in Pretoria in 1997 when a truck he was working on rolled off its supports and crushed him. It was Casselton who first mentioned the fact that a former “Wits professor” had been part of Coetzee’s network.
Williamson also boasted to his lawyer that a South African agent in Spain had “run the local anti-apartheid movement”. The tiny Spanish anti-apartheid movement had no record of Barraclough. But Mike Terry, longest-serving secretary of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement, remembered a Spanish delegate, Pablo Valls, who regularly attended international anti-apartheid conferences. Activists in Madrid also knew of Valls. Late last year, amid growing suspicions, he was asked to resign from the “Support South Africa” network.
The suspicions were well-founded. The name Pablo Valls-Tarrago appears on a list of security police operatives issued with undercover passports between 1986 and 1991. On June 27 1988, Valls-Tarrago was issued with passport P00227389 for use in an undisclosed operation. Valls-Tarrago is the maiden name of Barroclough’s Spanish mother.
But the final link was provided by the spy himself. He made the elementary mistake of leaving a mobile telephone number – as Valls – with the solidarity group, Co-op Africa Austral, in Madrid. It was the same number listed at the former home of Favio Barraclough as the contact for the Anglo-Spanish professor who had worked at Wits.
In a telephone interview, Barraclough said repeatedly that his name had not been mentioned at the TRC hearings. He expressed grave concern that he had been linked with Williamson and others and disclosed he was writing a book which would “give real insights into the South African story”.