Barry Streek An extraordinary claim that Western intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, were behind the earliest phases of the armed struggle against apartheid in South Africa, was published this week. The claim, printed in the latest edition of the investigative magazine Noseweek, suggests that the Western intelligence agencies funded the National Committee of Liberation (NLC), later renamed the African Resistance Movement (ARM). The article is based on previously unpublished National Intelligence Services documents in which the former government’s intelligence arm says that the liberation movements were being backed by Western intelligence agencies. One of the people named in the article, Randolph Vigne, a key figure in ARM, said from London this week that the suggestion of Western intelligence funding for the organisation was “total and absolute nonsense”.
NLC-ARM, formed by dissident members of the Liberal Party, initiated its campaign of violence against buildings and strategic installations in 1963, but collapsed after a number of members – including the former president of the National Union of South African Students, Adrian Leftwich – were arrested, and others, including Vigne, left the country. Another member of ARM, John Harris, was convicted for exploding a bomb at the Johannesburg station that killed an elderly woman and injured a number of other people. He was subsequently executed. The Noseweek article quotes extensively from a document, allegedly prepared by another leading ARM member, John Lang, which stated that NLC-ARM had acquired a four-seater aircraft, a 45-ton boat and various other assets. This document is said to have come into the possession of the security police at the time. The article says that with one exception, the late DE Montague Berman, the founders of NLC-ARM were not communists and it then speculates on who would have funded them.