Howard Barrell OVERABARREL
Britain’s campaign to seize the Falklands Islands back from Argentina in 1982 provided the backdrop for a delightfully executed deception against a South African journalist. For a number of years, the journalist, who shall remain nameless, had maintained a fruitful (though proper) relationship with a locally based British diplomat who was not entirely unrelated to Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service. The spook had given him a number of stories for his newspaper – and the tip-offs had always proven reliable. Then, as the British task force steamed across the Atlantic for the Falklands, bristling with armaments, our journalist was taken to one side by the diplomat and given another confidence. Our journalist had no reason to doubt what he was told. South Africa, the diplomat whispered, was secretly supplying Argentina with missile technology for use against British forces. >From a folder by his side the diplomat drew the evidence. He passed over a series of photographs. They showed crates, bound for Argentina, being loaded on to an aircraft in a remote corner of Cape Town’s airport. Our intrepid seeker after truth was horrified – as, too, was his editor. The story was to be splashed across South African newspapers. Shock! Horror! We were helping the Argies fight the Brits! Magnus Malan, then minister of defence, rushed to deny that South Africa was supplying arms to Argentina. Under pressure, Malan went further: he promised that South Africa would never help the Argies in any way in their fight against the Brits. That undertaking was all the Brits had wanted. There had never been an ounce of truth to the tale that South African missiles were headed for Argentina. The choice titbit passed to our journalist had merely been a ruse to extract a public assurance from South Africa that it would not give any weaponry to the Galtieri regime. The Brits had achieved their objective. Far be it from me to suggest that another journalist was similarly deceived last weekend into writing that our South African spooks were investigating a plot involving Cyril Ramaphosa and two foreign governments, Britain and the United States, to replace Thabo Mbeki as president at the next full conference of the African National Congress in 2002. Far be it from me, also, to imply that some over-zealous ally of our beleaguered president, acting on his or her own initiative, of course, used an intermediary to leak this story to the journalist concerned. Likewise, I hesitate to suggest that several considerations could have motivated such a leak. One, to kibosh further talk in the ANC that Mbeki is losing his grip. Another, to portray any plotting against Mbeki as necessarily unnatural, traitorous, imperialist in character and deserving of our spooks’ attention. And third, and most importantly, to pre-empt the putative launch of Ramaphosa as a candidate to unseat Mbeki by obliging Ramaphosa to deny – much like Malan had been obliged to do in the Falklands context – that he was of a mind to do any such thing. These, however, have been the effects of the story – whatever the intentions of whoever leaked it and regardless of whether the story is true in any respect. Ramaphosa went on AM Live early on Monday morning to give the required assurance – and sounded wholly credible in doing so. Loose talk against Mbeki in the ANC has gone largely quiet – for now. And a further muffler has been applied to our already muted national debate: the impression has been created that none should be tempted to remind Mbeki that he is subject to democratic recall. Remarkably, by midweek, neither the presidency nor the security services had seen fit to deal seriously with the story, either by knocking it on its head or explaining the reasons for the investigation that is alleged to be on the go. Notwithstanding the convention not to comment on what the intelligence services are or are not investigating, here was an instance that required an immediate explanation. Why? Because plotting to overthrow the president, prime minister or any other political figure at his or her party congress by due electoral process is the very stuff of democratic politics – whether or not a few inducements or bank-notes are forthcoming from a foreign power. We have needed reassurance on this story because the presidency – the most powerful institution in our political life – has, over the past six months, not only been uncommunicative. It has also, at times, projected a strange and aggressive insecurity, bordering on the irrational. As a consequence, and in the absence of a regular flow of information from it, confidence in its approaches to problems is not high. This leads to the kind of speculation in which I am now engaging: using one conspiracy theory about the presidency in an attempt to explain another conspiracy theory involving it. And this is scarcely the stuff of which a healthy and democratic national dialogue is made.
I yearn for the day when the presidency allows those who must communicate its perspectives the access, the resources, the powers and the discretion they need to do their job properly. So, too, should Mbeki: it should improve the press he receives and make his life very much easier. If the journalist responsible for the Ramaphosa-plot story has been “had” by one of Mbeki’s allies or some other set of interests, there is no disgrace in this for him. Journa-lists are forever getting tip-offs, some of them quite detailed, and must often evaluate their reliability on the basis of scant independent evidence. Stories involving the intelligence services are particularly difficult to appraise. I have, at the time of writing, heard only one powerful reason to doubt that the story originated from within the presidency or the ANC. It is that it would have to be a very stupid ally of Mbeki’s (no doubt some such people do exist) who told a journalist that both the Minister for Intelligence, Joe Nhlanhla, and Mbeki were driving or being briefed on the investigation. A brighter ally would have taken care to leave their names right out of it. In the words of a senior ANC member with extensive intelligence experience: “The attempt to directly associate Joe’s and Thabo’s names with the investigation leads me to believe this story comes from somewhere else.” >From where else? One suggestion is that former apartheid security personnel gene-
rated the story to embarrass Mbeki and to try to destabilise the ANC. Another is that one of the bigger Western intelligence agencies was responsible for it, and timed its release to weaken Mbeki and his input at the Millennium Summit, which begins next week at the United Nations and at which Mbeki is due to assume the role of chief representative of the developing world. There may be a precedent for the latter. When, a few years ago, Mandela was due in the Middle East, where he was expected to try to take forward the peace process, a story surfaced alleging he had close personal and financial ties with Libyan leader Colonel Moammar Gadaffi. Who knows?