Startling new claims about South Africa’s apartheid-era intelligence activities are made in a book by former National Intelligence Service (NIS) agent Riaan Labuschagne.
The book, On South Africa’s Secret Service, was released in December. In it Labuschagne describes his 15 years as an undercover agent for the NIS. He reveals:
- The existence of a secret arm of the NIS, directorate K, which Labus-chagne believes had ‘executive powers†— in other words operated its own hit-squads;
- Allegations that former Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda was an ‘agent of influence†for both the NIS and British intelligence;
- How one arm of the South African security services often didn’t know what the other was doing, resulting in the killing of highly placed NIA agents;
- How the NIS maintained close relations with other intelligence organisations, including those in many African countries, despite official disapproval of apartheid;
- How he ‘ran†as agents a very senior member of the Zimbabwean Central Intelligence Organisation and an Umkhonto weSizwe operative named as Guy Ndhlovu;
- How he recruited the Soviet military attaché in Gaborone; and
- How, after 1990, he conducted regular break-ins and searches of the African National Congress head-office in Durban.
On South Africa’s Secret Service is published by Peter Stiff, who has cornered a niche market of books on South Africa’s various covert forces. Labuschagne’s book draws on Stiff’s somewhat fictional style, so most of his claims are not backed up by supporting evidence, but his service in the NIS appears to be well documented.
Labuschagne describes how he was recruited in 1981, while still a university student. After having been recommended by a woman friend who was an NIS member, he was persuaded to take diving parties to the Seychelles during vacations to collect ‘routine low-grade intelligence†on the islands.
He wasn’t told that the intelligence was being gathered ahead of the disastrous coup attempt by Mike Hoare’s mercenaries, which the NIS was secretly supporting. While he was there the coup plot unfolded and he was lucky to escape.
Later, after two years’ national service in the navy, he was accepted into the service’s counter-intelligence division as an undercover field operative.
His first major task was the bringing in of the Russian military attaché in Gaborone, Anatoly Polozok, who had dropped a hint that he wished to defect — at a price. Labuschagne says Polozok provided the South Africans with significant intelligence on Cuban and Soviet military plans in Angola, before it was passed to the Americans, who could afford his hefty price tag.
The good relations with the CIA were mirrored by many covert contacts with African intelligence organisations and figures of influence.
Although Labuschagne’s characterisation of Kaunda as an ‘agent†is perhaps exaggerated, his description of frequent informal contact between senior NIS officer Daan Opperman and the Zambian president has a ring of truth.
Another anecdote describes how the desk of Alec Erwin (now minister of trade and industry) in the Congress of South African Trade Union’s Durban offices was subjected to regular searches by Labuschagne’s NIS team after the unbanning of the ANC in 1990.
‘It was usually in disarray and the searches produced a wealth of intelligence material,†Labuschagne alleges. By contrast, searches of then ANC intelligence chief Jacob Zuma’s office produced nothing.
Posing as a liberal Afrikaner, Labuschagne began a successful infiltration of the ANC’s senior circles in KwaZulu-Natal, getting close to provincial leaders Mosiuoa Lekota and S’bu Ndebele. His cover was blown when they were warned off him by Mo Shaik, then a senior figure in ANC intelligence.
Labuschagne resigned from the NIS in 1993 and now lives in the Eastern Cape, where he has become a church minister.