The Western Cape government continues to employ two of the apartheid-era National Intelligence Service (NIS) operatives handpicked by former provincial director general Niel Barnard, who set up and headed the NIS until 1992.
The Mail & Guardian has established that the two are NIS protocol officer Irene Engelbrecht and NIS surveillance and collection operative Herman du Toit.
Engelbrecht worked for Barnard as personal assistant and executive secretary at the NIS and for a short time while he was constitutional development director general. She accompanied him abroad and acted as German translator for his deputy. According to her CV, she briefly served in the South African Secret Service (Sass) before rejoining the office of her former boss. The provincial administration later moved her to the office of the community safety MEC.
Du Toit remains in the Department of Community Safety, where he started working in May last year. Previously he was based in Cape Town and KwaZulu-Natal for the NIS, and also worked in Zambia, West Africa and Belgium. He also recruited and handled agents, ran special operations and ”collection operations” in the United States, Benelux countries and Africa, according to his CV.
Earlier this month the Desai commission heard five of the 11 security consultants were former NIS members — like the two owners of TSCM Services cc, which swept provincial administration offices and installed the WatchDog anti-surveillance device. The consultants and TSCM were hired without advertising the jobs and on apparently irregular contracts, signed after employment commenced.
In another development, the Western Cape representative of the National Intelligence Coordinating Committee (NICOC), Gordon Brookbanks, has been relieved of official duties. Senior national intelligence officials on Wednesday confirmed an investigation was under way into possible disciplinary action.
Brookbanks has been named in a memo of July 2001 to Barnard by former NIS operative Piet Smit, who started working for the Bureau for State Security in 1975. He moved to the NIS, which posted him to Portugal and the US, and stayed on at Sass until 2000.
According to the memo, Brookbanks agreed with prevailing misgivings about the quality of information provided by the National Intelligence Agency to the province. Brookbanks had also drafted a report to then community safety MEC Hennie Bester outlining why he could not perform his NICOC role, and sharply criticised police intelligence to his NICOC bosses.
Two of the former NIS security consultants maintained before the Desai commission this week that the Western Cape information unit in the former director general’s office was not an alternative intelligence structure. But it also emerged that Barnard was well informed of developments in national intelligence circles. And the commission was told of regular contact between Barnard and President Thabo Mbeki on ”intelligence-related matters”.
By the middle of last year the Western Cape information unit knew of moves to establish a presidential intelligence unit. In Smit’s July 6 2001 report, he states that Nel Marais — another former NIS member hired by Barnard as security consultant –had recounted how ”President Thabo Mbeki requested ex-Sass director general Billy Masetlha to help develop a system, which could provide the president with reliable intelligence. Former Sass director Super Moloi was to assist him.”
Although the presidential unit was officially formed in November last year with Moloi, a former representative in Canada, a member, it was only formally announced this year.
In January Barnard also attended the Palestine-Israeli summit chaired by Mbeki at Spier Estate outside Stellenbosch.
Explaining that the provincial information unit only used open sources such as newspapers, the Internet and interviews with academics, Smit struggled to explain why the National Intelligence Agency was never approached for assistance. All state departments and organs can request the agency for help under the 1994 Strategic Intelligence Act.
The men at the heart of the unit, Smit and Louis Steyn, another NIS operative, were both approached by the former director general while he was in Pretoria. They started working for the community safety department and its then political head, Hennie Bester, from April 2000 on short-term, hourly paid contracts. Early last year they transferred to Barnard’s office, where they were joined by fellow NIS member Magdalena Maritz some months later.
On Monday NIS colleague Nel Marais, who worked in the research directorate of the apartheid spy agency from 1985 and later at Sass until late 2000, admitted everyone should already know the information contained in the provincial cabinet briefings compiled by the unit if they read widely.
The Desai commission heard that in nine months the unit presented seven provincial cabinet briefings; an eighth was in progress when the political changes led to a new government. Desai commission investigators could not find these records. Smit testified how just before leaving provincial employ last December he made 15 copies of each for every MEC and the cabinet secretariat and then wiped clean the hard drive of his computer for ”good house-keeping”.
This follows the discovery by Desai commission investigators of a box of documents, including classified records, behind a door in the messenger and tea lady’s room.