Anthony Sampson
Nelson Mandela has reacted angrily to a claim that he was recruited as an “agent of influence” by British intelligence and that he visited MI6 in Britain to thank it for its help in foiling assassination attempts.
“I never visited the headquarters of any intelligence service,” he said on Wednesday.
The allegations were made in the forthcoming book, MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations, by Stephen Dorril, a lecturer at Huddersfield University, and they were met by strong denials earlier this week from Pretoria.
“False and nonsensical allegations against Nelson Mandela appearing in the British media and emanating from shadowy right-wing forces have been repeatedly made in a futile attempt to tarnish his image,” the government said.
“The allegations are baseless and are motivated by a difficulty in accepting that individuals other than those from the ‘first world’ can play an important part in world affairs.
“Some, like those making [the book’s] allegations, do not realise that the colonial era is past – never to return,” it said.
The tone of the government’s response reflected Mandela’s indignation at whites and Westerners who claim credit for the achievements of the African National Congress, and those who cannot believe that Africans can take serious initiatives on their own.
“They show a contempt for Africa,” he said.
It is no secret that, after Mandela’s release from prison in 1991, British intelligence gave some assistance to the ANC; Lord Renwick, who was British ambassador to Pretoria at the time, confirmed that he asked British intelligence experts to train Mandela’s bodyguards and advise on security at his home.
“The intelligence service were involved in these activities, for which Mr Mandela was very grateful,” Lord Renwick said. “But there is no truth in the suggestion that the relationship went deeper than that.”
The report that Mandela was recruited is “an absolute travesty”, he said.
British intelligence sources were equally dismissive. “The idea that we recruited Mandela is crap,” said one official.
British agents were certainly involved with the exiled ANC in Lusaka in the years before Mandela’s release; they established close relations with the black leadership and were seen as being to the left of British official policy.
At a time when Margaret Thatcher – prime minister from 1979 to 1990 – was forbidding British diplomats from having contacts with the ANC, MI6 had its own connections to the movement and gave it information. And while Thatcher was supporting Zulu leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi as an alternative to the ANC, MI6 agents took the ANC more seriously.
But Mandela was in prison at that time. And prison officials were, he says, “very strict about contacts with the world outside, as the prison records show”.
In his book, Dorril says it was “not clear” whether Mandela was recruited in London before he was imprisoned in South Africa. But from the evidence of British diplomatic files it is quite clear that he was not.
Those records show that British officials were remarkably uninterested in the ANC and uninformed about Mandela, even after he became one of the most important black leaders.
It was not until June 1961 that the Foreign Office opened a file on Mandela and, thereafter, its interest was only sporadic; it kept some track of his movements when he fled the country in 1962.
When he arrived in London in June 1962 he was questioned by an immigration official who evidently knew something about him. He was surprised to notice the same official watching him when he left 10 days later, but he had no contact with anyone in the government while in London.
By the time he was arrested and jailed in August 1962, Mandela had still not made contact with any British diplomat or agent: “I don’t think they knew I existed,” he said.
When Mandela made his final speech before being sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964, the information and research department in London – the offshoot of MI6 set up to provide anti-communist propaganda – belatedly recognised that “he was going to be popular figure over the whole continent whether we like it or not”.
There was still no record to suggest that the agency had a special relationship with him.
During Mandela’s ensuing 27 years in prison, British intelligence remained very cautious about making contact with black politicians inside South Africa, knowing such overtures would antagonise the apartheid government.
In fact, an MI6 agent was severely interrogated by the South Africans and declared persona non grata after it was discovered that contact had been made with the white opposition.
There was some evidence that MI6 had frustrated an attempt by the South African secret service, Boss, to allow Mandela to be “rescued” from Robben Island and flown to the mainland, where he would be killed supposedly escaping.
But the scope for British intelligence remained strictly limited by Boss and it was unable to make contact with Mandela in prison.
Dorril also claimed, in an interview with Scotland’s Sunday Herald, that Mandela helped provide MI6 with information about Libya’s funding and arming of the Irish Republican Army. He was said to have picked up the information when he was persuading the Libyan President, Moammar Gadaffi, to hand over for trial the Libyan suspects in the Lockerbie airliner bombing. Dorril also alleged that Mandela “told his MI6 handlers about Libya’s attempts to develop chemical and biological warfare capabilities, as well as informing them about South Africa’s secret nuclear arsenal”.
This was dismissed by ANC sources, noting that the West had opposed Mandela’s initiative to embrace Libya’s leader. Mandela’s friendship with Gadaffi was the key to a Lockerbie settlement.