A police captain has revealed that he found two men with electronic equipment in the office of Western Cape premier Gerald Morkel late one night last year.
Captain Renier Strydom told the Desai Commission inquiring into the alleged bugging of the premier?s office that he found the two men in the office after midnight on November 8.
One of them was sitting in the premier’s chair, holding the receiver of the premier’s phone to his ear, and the other was on one side with a large black box with ”a whole lot of buttons”, and electronic equipment attached to it.
The men, a Mr Niehamer and a Mr Lorenzo Lombard, said they were from a private security company and were sweeping the office for electronic bugs.
Strydom said that when he confronted them, the men contacted a Mr Steyn, a consultant to the province’s then-director general, former spymaster Dr Niel Barnard.
Steyn told him that because Morkel was ”high profile”, the sweeping was being done so that few people would know about it.
Strydom said he waited about ten minutes for the men to finish, then escorted them out of the building.
He said anti-bugging sweeps of the building were regularly carried out by police, and that he had never known a private company being used to sweep.
He reported the incident to his superior.
The Desai commission was appointed by current premier Peter Marais, a New National Party member, who ousted his Democratic Alliance predecessor Gerald Morkel and Barnard.
Meanwhile, the head of the National Intelligence Agency in the Western Cape described on Monday how a highly sophisticated device capable of monitoring conversations up to 4km away was found in the provincial legislature’s offices.
Arthur Fraser told the commission that the device — a Watchdog WS100 — was found on March 5 this year after an NIA sweep of the offices.
The commission was appointed by the Western Cape’s New National Party premier Peter Marais, who ousted his Democratic Alliance predecessor Gerald Morkel and Morkel’s director general, former spymaster Niel Barnard.
Fraser said his staff had already completed the sweep when they were told that the device was in the possession of senior provincial official Pierre Beneke.
Fraser said he asked Beneke the same evening why he had not told the NIA that he had the device.
He said the Watchdog would have been ”significant” for the sweep because it had both defensive and offensive capabilities.
It could function as sweeping equipment for bugs but could also monitor signals from targeted areas 24 hours a day, and could be remotely operated.
Fraser, who showed the box-like device to the commission, said the mounting on the watchdog matched four screwholes in a strongroom in the legislature building.
Fraser said while he was in Beneke’s office, he discovered two women provincial employees removing boxes of official documents, apparently to Beneke’s vehicle.
Fraser said he called acting provincial director general Dr Gilbert Lawrence, who asked Beneke to return the boxes to the premises.
An NIA technical expert — whose identity was not made public at Monday’s hearing — told the commission that the Watchdog could be used to scan frequencies over a radius of about 1 000 feet with its normal antenna, but that its range could extend to 4km if it was coupled to an outside antenna.
An operator could also download information from it using a computer in another town or country.
Several senior members of the ANC in the Western Cape, including provincial leader Ebrahim Rasool, attended the morning’s hearings. – Sapa