Siyabonga Cwele chairs Parliament’s joint standing committee on intelligence. He spoke to the Mail & Guardian about the committee’s Special Browse Mole report.
What process did you follow to arrive at your conclusions?
We did not conduct a primary investigation. Most of the work was done with the [National Security Council] task team [that is currently investigating the Browse report]. Then we met with the ministers in the [security] cluster and the head [Leonard McCarthy] of the Directorate of Special Operations [DSO].
Are you concerned about how the report will be used politically?
We are concerned only about facts before the committee. Our task and the mandate given by this Parliament are to look at those facts and produce a report as a matter of accountability to the public. How others may interpret it is up to them.
The task team includes the National Intelligence Agency, South African Secret Service [SASS] and the police. Were you not worried that inter-agency rivalry coloured their findings?
I’ll be honest, we were concerned about those matters. But it was a task team of the security council, which went beyond the police, which were perceived to be the main rivals and our understanding was the National Prosecuting Authority/DSO were supposed to be part of that. So if they didn’t participate or didn’t cooperate — [they] can’t then complain that there was a rival element.
We have been managing with rivalries even within NIA, within SASS, we know everyone wants to be first and run to the president and they forget the coordination part and end up messing things up. That is why the committee has been stressing for a long time the importance of coordinating structures like the national intelligence coordinating committee.
The report makes much of ”information peddlers”, but as I understand it no one was paid.
The way they work is that they may not look for direct payment. These are business people who are looking for contracts.
Our main concern with the information peddlers is that they are using invasive methods [like bugging or hacking], and they are distorting information, sowing divisions within the government.
Our President, [Thabo] Mbeki, is spending all this time trying to create stability in Africa. If, at the same time, these information peddlers are sowing confusion in Africa and creating destabilisation, that is not in our national interest.
But other agencies have been happy to use their information in the past, notably in foiling the Equatorial Guinea coup.
It is quite clear that these people feed information to all the structures of the system.
Our concern is what they do with it. If you say, ”I ignore this information,” do you keep it in your system? We are worried about databases. Because the way you keep it in your system matters. If you say you are getting information from a person who is prejudiced, then why are you keeping it.
If they are so dangerous, why didn’t you name them?
So as not to compromise ongoing investigations.
The motivation for the Browse report seems to have been: ”Jacob Zuma is suspected of various crimes; here he is travelling around and doing things that cost a lot of money, where is the money coming from?” What is wrong with that?
If an individual is involved in crime, there are certain processes that you follow to investigate. You don’t say, ”This is just an unauthorised investigation,” and you don’t say, ”This is just something that was prepared by my chaps, I asked them to prepare a more coordinated report.” If you didn’t believe it, you shouldn’t have instructed them to compile it.
We felt that if we let the senior managers pass the blame to the more junior ones, that’s not correct. You don’t instruct people to compile something and when the problem comes pass the blame to someone and say ”well I never believed it”, and leave the smaller fish to fry. That would be wrong.
You seem to conclude that the Browse report was leaked by Ivor Powell, but there is no proof of this.
If you read it carefully, we say [the leak] ”originated” [with Powell].
BLUFFER’S GUIDE TO THE BROWSE MOLE REPORT
The Special Browse Mole Consolidated Report is one version of a Scorpions document that summarised intelligence reports about the fund-raising activities of African National Congress (ANC) president Zuma.
Senior Scorpions investigator Ivor Powell was tasked by the unit’s boss, Leonard McCarthy, to survey information suggesting that Zuma was raising funds from African leaders, and fomenting unrest locally in support of his cause. If sufficient indications were present, a formal investigation might be instituted.
Powell, working much as a journalist, undertook a ”browse” of information available from sources with good contacts across the continent and within the ANC and its alliance partners.
Those sources, described by the government and Parliament’s joint standing committee on intelligence as ”apartheid era” information peddlers, did include three former apartheid operatives, all of whom work with the current NIA and the SASS from time to time.
Other sources included at least two veterans of the ANC’s own underground structures, and state officials. None of them was paid, and none undertook intrusive surveillance on behalf of the Scorpions.
Taken together, the information that they provided sketched an alarming picture of African heads of state hostile to Mbeki, who were funding Zuma’s presidential bid.
Zuma’s local supporters, it was suggested, were preparing the ground for street level insurrection and possible military support for a Zuma ”coup”.
Some of the information was incorrect or exaggerated, it seems, some of it was clearly credible.
McCarthy, in July 2006, passed on this initial ”browse” to his boss, Vusi Pikoli, and to the directors general of the NIA and SASS, who were better placed to investigate some of the claims.
Later a second version of the document was prepared, which treated some of the claims more sceptically. That version has not been made public.
In May 2007, the report was leaked to the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu). The task team set up by the government to investigate the Browse report suggests that the leak ”originated” with Powell because he was in possession of a similar copy, but there is no hard evidence that he was responsible.
Subsequently Cosatu’s copy made its way to several media organisations, and was broadly seen as a boon to enemies of the Scorpions as it purported to provide evidence that the unit was acting outside its legal mandate.
The South African Communist Party, which is bitterly opposed to the Scorpions investigation on Zuma, then asked the parliamentary committee to investigate.
Meanwhile, the task team continues its own investigation, with possible criminal prosecutions.
Scorpions boss Leonard McCarthy still insists, however, that early-stage informal investigations of this kind are necessary to the unit’s work, and that the claims of the Browse report would have been more thoroughly tested had the process continued.