The Party faces embarrassment over contract with the notorious Aggett interrogator. The man whose company ”bug-proofed” offices for the former Democratic Alliance-led Western Cape government is the same apartheid security policeman who led a 62-hour interrogation of activist Neil Aggett before his death in detention.
Aggett committed suicide 20 years ago after 70 days in detention, torture and the marathon interrogation session presided over by Stephan Peter Whitehead, then a security police lieutenant. Whitehead is now the boss of TSCM Services, a Pretoria-based private security company embroiled in a bugging and spying scandal in the Western Cape.
A commission under Judge Siraj Desai this week started public hearings into the spy scandal.
Hennie Bester was the community safety MEC in the DA provincial government that was ousted by an African National Congress-New National Party coalition last December. Bester told Judge Desai that he took political responsibility for the decision to employ security consultants early last year.
”It was a time then of great and intense political contestation. I had a very keen sense we were being observed and watched… It was a time of unbelievable suspicion and distrust.”
Bester, who now leads the DA opposition in the province, had ”no problem” with the fact some of the consultants were former apartheid agents; they were hired because they were professionals, he said.
Bester’s words may yet come back to haunt him and other role players: Bester, with the then-DA cabinet and provincial premier, Gerald Morkel, bears political responsibility for the hiring of TSCM and individual security consultants, questionable pedigrees and all.
And Niel Barnard, who led the apartheid-era National Intelligence Service (NIS) until 1992 and later became Western Cape director general, cannot escape responsibility either. He ran with the ball provided by the politicians, handpicked at least some of the consultants referred to by Bester and brought in TSCM later last year to, on their version, safeguard the provincial cabinet and administration against surveillance attempts.
TSCM is managed and co-owned by Whitehead, who graduated from the police security branch to the NIS during the mid-1980s, where he rose to deputy director level before going private. His partner Lorenzo Lombard is a bugging and counter-bugging expert who was an assistant director in the NIS.
Advocate George Bizos, who appeared for Aggett’s family at the 1982 judicial inquest into his death, this week said he was surprised that Whitehead, ”having regard to what became known in the Aggett inquest, should be employed on such sensitive work in a democracy”.
Referring to the former NIS careers of both Barnard and Whitehead, he quipped: ”People find each other, don’t they?”
The death of Aggett, a medical doctor active in the trade union movement, sparked labour stoppages and civil society mobilisation against detention and was widely condemned abroad. The inquest absolved Whitehead and his security branch colleagues, but Bizos and others managed nevertheless to use it to publicise how political detainees were tortured and abused.
During the inquest it emerged that Whitehead, dubbed ”the Controller” in some press reports at the time, had been watching Aggett for three years before his December 1981 arrest. During the latter part of Aggett’s detention at Johannesburg’s notorious John Vorster Square, Whitehead was directly in charge of the interrogation.
Whitehead told the inquest he had decided to intensify the interrogation between January 28 and 31 as Aggett was about to cooperate, make a statement and ”get matters off his heart”. Whitehead claimed he had Aggett’s consent, but the fact of the matter was that for 62 hours his subject was bombarded with questions, deprived of sleep and had no opportunity to wash or change clothes.
A co-detainee testified that afterwards Aggett told him: ”I have broken.” On February 4 Aggett wrote an affidavit in which he complained, not for the first time, of torture. ”Lieutenant Whitehead blindfolded me with a towel. They made me sit down and handcuffed me behind my back. I was shocked through the handcuffs. I don’t know what they used to shock me with.”
The next day Aggett’s body was found hanging in his cell.
Neither Whitehead nor Arthur Cronwright, in overall charge, has applied for amnesty to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Only a marginally associated policeman, William Smith, did so in connection with the treatment of Aggett and others detained at the time.
In his book No One to Blame, Bizos describes Whitehead as a ”plump, bespectacled 25-year-old lieutenant [who] never looked me in the eye” and as ”a thoroughly unsavoury character”.
During the inquest Whitehead admitted he and security branch colleague Paul Erasmus gained access to the home of Aggett’s elderly parents outside Cape Town barely a month after his death. The family was in Johannesburg consulting lawyers ahead of the inquest when the two offered money to the domestic worker to keep their visit secret.
The Cape attorney general decided to charge both men while the inquest was under way. Although Erasmus pleaded guilty to charges of searching without a warrant and received a R200 fine or three months’ imprisonment, charges against Whitehead were withdrawn.
And in a bizarre twist, Bizos says he learned much later that his chambers had been bugged during the inquest. ”The police would play the transcript of our discussions in preparation of cross-examination and rehearse the possible answers with plenty of time to choose the most plausible.”
But back to the present: Next week TSCM is expected to appear before the Desai commission to defend the role of the company and the WatchDog, a device it installed in the provincial administration buildings at a reported cost of nearly R40 000. The DA administration and TSCM have maintained the device was a scanner which would pick up any listening devices, or bugs, planted after an initial ”sweep” by TSCM — in other words a counter-surveillance measure. Others have claimed the WatchDog could be used offensively as a bug.
TSCM claims that it is not involved in active espionage: ”We do not engage in bugging, wiretapping or electronic espionage.” Its main function is ”technical surveillance counter measures” — the initials for the company name and the technical term for debugging.
The first claims that some offices of the provincial administration were bugged emerged shortly after the new ANC-NNP government was installed in December last year. This followed the NNP abandoning the DA to align itself with the ANC. Barnard was asked to vacate his position soon afterwards.
Among the information so far heard by Judge Desai is the discovery of the WatchDog, pointed out in a cupboard to senior officials of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), the post-1994 successor to the NIS. The WatchDog had earlier been installed in a ”surveillance proof” safe room where politicians and officials conducted sensitive meetings. The room sported aluminium garden furniture worth R5 119 to which, apparently, bugs could not be attached.
Judge Desai has also heard how Whitehead’s colleague Lombard and another man were found busying themselves with the telephone in the premier’s office two minutes before midnight on November 8. A policeman on a routine inspection found them there.
On Tuesday Bester told the judge about the paranoia that led to the employment of individual consultants and TSCM. He said he had found it odd to meet in the safe room, but did not question it.
”Our suspicions were that we were being surveilled [sic] by agents of the national government.”
Bester also referred to ”serious reservations over the political impartiality” of the NIA. (Documents retrieved by the commission show such reservations dated back to at least late September 2000. Barnard wrote at the time to Morkel that future relations with the NIA should depend on written guarantees that no provincial cabinet members or officials were under surveillance.)
Bester defended the establishment of an intended ”knowledge management unit” to do research the NIA failed to provide, although he said the idea was not for the unit to operate covertly or in competition with the NIA.
Between March and October last year the unit’s character changed from one based in Bester’s community safety department to a specialist information secretariat directly responsible to Barnard.
Judge Desai has also heard allegations that the provincial administration bypassed tender regulations in the acquisition of these services and equipment.
If indeed the DA government was under surveillance attack and could not trust the NIA, it may have been justified in turning to the private sector to protect and inform itself. But breaking tender regulations, if indeed this happened, is inexcusable — as may be the political mistake of hiring the man who presided over Aggett’s interrogation.
- Whitehead this week maintained it was ”unfair” to haul up events of 20 years ago, and said doing so would harm his business. He said he was not directly involved in the Western Cape operation, and that he was only a ”partner” in TSCM.
Asked specifically about the Aggett episode, he said:”There were no mistakes. I’ve never been found guilty of anything in my life.”
He denied the security branch had bugged Bizos during the Aggett inquest: ”I don’t know of anyone who was investigated or charged [for that] & We didn’t do it.”
He refused to say more.