National Intelligence Agency (NIA) files come in Manila folders that get softer with handling. There is space on the front to list the people authorised to open them, and a detailed routing form to record their passage through the agency. ”GEHEIM–SECRET”, they say in smudged red capitals, while red corners warn of dangerous contents even when they are racked in the archive.
Open one up — if you don’t get a bit of a charge from doing that something is wrong with you — and take a peek. Wonder like the rank civilian that you are at the way the clerical meets the cloak-and-dagger. There are source numbers, details of surveillance and task lists, and perhaps scrawled edits: ”use font Times New Roman”, or ”international terrorist”, fiercely crossed out and replaced with an enigmatic file reference.
Cigarettes and weapons are being smuggled out of Rand airport, a source might have warned, or, Jonas Savimbi’s plane is being serviced in South Africa. The information is fascinating, potentially explosive (although, in this particular case, old enough to have lost some of its charge), but it is the secrecy of the knowledge, and the occult rituals that surround it, that provide the real frisson.
More importantly, and more worryingly, all those bureaucratic sigils put the imprimatur of the state on the contents of the folder, and seem to absolve the rest of us of the obligation to verify its authenticity.
That is one reason ”intelligence” is such a powerful weapon in the spin wars that have become ever more dizzying since Bulelani Ngcuka’s infamous off-the-record briefing, and the airing of the false counter-claim that he was apartheid agent RS452.
Information that has passed through the hands of spies, or is about spies, is in itself exciting.
The hoax emails were calculated to take advantage of our susceptibility to all this. We were supposed to feel as though we were reading over the shoulder of some hacker agent as the conspiracy to keep Jacob Zuma out of the Union Buildings unfolded in real time. It worked, up to a point; the ANC’s national executive committee conducted a formal investigation. For the rest of us, the emails were a queasy insight into the kind of thinking that was encouraged — and is stubbornly entrenched — in sections of the NIA and other intelligence agencies.
Just how stubborn became evident when a report with the thrillingly enigmatic title Special Browse Mole was leaked, seemingly from within the NIA, whose operatives appear to have got it from the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA). The document raised some pretty strange-sounding allegations against Zuma and his supporters: funding from Libya and Angola, coup chatter in the army, rumours of insurrection on the hard left.
The NPA was tantalisingly vague about its origins, but that didn’t stop newspaper editors from lining up to denounce the claims as fantasy, and we were treated to the unedifying spectacle of Frank Chikane, Director General in the Presidency, dismissing the document as the work of foreign agents. Perhaps he thought we would believe him because no South African spy has such good grammar as is found in the browse.
Either way, the desired effect of the leak was obvious: to inoculate Zuma against the allegations by making them look crazy, to cast the prosecuting authority in the same dubious light as Billy Masetlha, and to win endorsement for these views from both the punditocracy and the highest office in the land.
It worked spectacularly. To suggest now that the document was a genuine, if tentative, assessment of allegations that might merit further investigation is to invite ridicule.
So the solid turns to dew, lies dance with the truth, and the most consequential choices hang upon gossip and misdirection.
Such machinations have a long history in spy agencies, and not just in South Africa. In another capital an imperious president, in the dying days of his term, is currently offering an object lesson in how not to spin intelligence.
George W Bush last week commuted the 30-month prison sentence handed down to Lewis ”Scooter” Libby for his role in the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity to the press, in an effort to discredit her Iraq-war-critic husband.
If the United States has these problems, should we sit back and relax? We cannot. The US has more than 200 years of building democratic institutions. We have 13, and a surfeit of politics.
The ANC was able to laugh off the inspector general of intelligence and run its own inquiry into the emails. Parliament’s joint standing committee on intelligence is more jealous of its secrecy than the minister it is supposed to hold accountable, and spooks whose allegiance to the Constitution is secondary to their politics are more active than ever.
The commission set up by Ronnie Kasrils to investigate the workings of South African spy agencies is a good start — but it is only a start.
The politicisation of intelligence is an old problem. But if the courts, Parliament, the government and the media can’t shake off the spell of the Manila folder, we face something much more serious: the capture of the political process by spooks. To be sure, even democracies need practitioners in the dark arts, but they also need to keep them in their place. Right now, that place is where they are most uncomfortable: in a hard, bright light.