As South Africa’s military-industrial complex boomed, it brought the business world into a close relationship with the South African Defence Force.
When Johannes Maree, the chief executive of mining and steel giant Barlow Rand, became the chief executive officer of Armscor in 1979, mingling between business and government elites increased and the private sector became focused on satisfying the military’s growing appetite.
The defence industry also penetrated academic research centres such as the University of Pretoria’s Institute for Strategic Studies and the Rand Afrikaans University, whose faculty was recruited to produce research for military audiences and advise the government. Most significant in the nexus of research and militarisation was the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), an ostensibly academic research institute.
In fact, South Africa had placed its premier scientific research facility at the service of the apartheid government with the aim of making the regime militarily strong enough to survive diplomatic pressure and the United Nations arms embargo, which most countries other than Israel were observing. As the United States Defence Intelligence Agency reported, the CSIR and Armscor were helping the apartheid regime “withstand anticipated pressures to change its racial policies”.
Industrial espionage
With such ambitious goals and so few allies, scientific exchanges with Israel became essential. This included casual forms of industrial espionage, such as gleaning secrets over beers and in dorm rooms as South African scientists attended conferences and foreign universities.
The Israelis and South Africans were already talking. Louw Alberts, who served as director general of the ministry of mineral and energy affairs after his time at the Atomic Energy Board (AEB), fondly recalls his own visit to Israel and Israeli nuclear scientist Yuval Ne’eman’s lectures at Pelindaba. He still hangs a picture of Ne’eman on his living room wall.
According to Alberts, these high-level exchanges were very common, though he claims the cooperation dealt only with the harmless field of nuclear isotope application for medical uses and food irradiation.
But these scientific exchanges between Israelis and South Africans went beyond innocent civilian research. Just a week before Prime Minister John Vorster’s historic trip to Israel in April 1976, a secretive visit took place during which a team of South African military intelligence officials toured the offices of Israel’s renowned Council for Scientific Liaison, a scientific espionage unit known by its Hebrew acronym, Lakam. It was Lakam that had masterminded Israel’s 1968 operation to divert the Scheersberg A’s cargo of uranium to an Israeli naval vessel in the middle of the Mediterranean.
As a result of the arms deals signed by Vorster and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin later that month, a formal exchange programme was drawn up between the Israeli National Council for Research and Development and South Africa’s CSIR. Immediately after Vorster returned from Israel, many of these new scientific agreements began to go into effect.
Older agreement
But more important than any new pacts signed by Vorster and Rabin was a much older agreement, a contract that was broken, consensually, in the interest of both nations.
In late July 1976, as South Africa’s black townships convulsed with violence, the minister of mines and labour, Fanie Botha, flew to Israel. Botha was mesmerised, as Vorster had been, by the biblical sites he recalled from his Sunday-school education. Between high-level meetings, Botha recalls, ‘I wanted to see places from the Bible, wells from the Bible — some of them are still working today,” he marvelled.
But Botha’s hosts at the Israeli ministry of defence did not leave him much time for biblical or historical tourism. He arrived before dawn at Ben-Gurion Airport and was met by the former Israeli Defence Force chief of staff, General Chaim Bar-Lev, the namesake of the infamous Bar-Lev Line that Egyptian forces breached on the first day of the Yom Kippur War.
After allowing him a few hours of rest, Bar-Lev drove Botha to the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission for a meeting with its director, Uzi Eilam. From there, Botha was driven south to Yavne, where he had lunch at the Soreq Nuclear Research Centre and visited the facility.
After Soreq, Botha was whisked away to a meeting with defence minister Shimon Peres. In the following days, he dined at the homes of Bar-Lev and Eilam, visited a tank repair facility and an air force base, and met senior managers at Israel Aircraft Industries. Botha was even granted a one-hour audience with Rabin— hardly the itinerary one would expect of a minor Cabinet minister. In the South African press, the visit was reported as an exploration of cooperative mining ventures and mineral production.
In fact, it was a sensitive nuclear negotiation focused on the 500-ton stockpile of South African uranium that had accumulated in Israel since shipments began in 1965. Israel had consumed the Scheersberg A cargo by this time and Dimona needed yellowcake to fuel the weapons programme. The 500 tons of safeguarded South African uranium would be enough to fuel Dimona for the next five to 10 years and produce enough reprocessed plutonium for dozens of nuclear bombs.
Secret relationships
Within months of starting the job in January 1976, Botha found himself at the centre of one of the government’s most secretive and delicate relationships.
The previous year, Binyamin Blumberg, chief of Israel’s Lakam, had approached intelligence chief Hendrik van den Bergh with a request to buy another 100 tons of yellowcake. Although Vorster approved the sale, Botha’s predecessor in the mining ministry was reluctant to cut a deal with Israel on something as sensitive as uranium — a reticence that cost him his job and paved the way for Fanie Botha’s rise.
Botha, a political climber who had set his sights on the defence ministry, knew that a sensitive deal like this could make his career.
Now, with a more amenable mining minister in office, Blumberg requested the yellowcake once again, and this time he also asked South Africa to lift the safeguards that had remained in effect since the bilateral agreement of 1965. Since the AEB had negotiated the original contract in 1965 and the ministry of mines oversaw the AEB, such a deal could not go through without Botha’s approval.
Lifting bilateral safeguards meant that South Africa would no longer have a right to inspect the sealed drums of yellowcake, as it had in the past, nor would it be allowed to verify whether Israel was using the uranium for peaceful purposes. The Israelis could now use the South African raw material as they liked without any contractual obligations hanging over their heads. Botha did not dare second-guess Vorster and Van den Bergh and, after returning from Israel, he went ahead and lifted the safeguards.
Atomic bombs
In return for the yellowcake and the lifted safeguards, South Africa received 30g of tritium, a radioactive substance that thermonuclear weapons require to increase their explosive power. Thirty grams was enough to boost the yield of several atomic bombs.
The substance was delivered to South Africa in small instalments over the course of a year between 1977 and 1978 as Vorster’s scandal-tainted administration struggled to hold on to power and PW Botha, his archrival at the defence ministry, set his sights on the premiership.
Well into his 80s, Botha’s memory of the deal is clear. He was told by his counterparts in Israel that the safeguarded yellowcake could be very useful to Israel in the nuclear field.
“I didn’t sell it to them, I didn’t give it to them, but when I became minister they had it,” says Botha. “But they couldn’t use it unless South Africa lifted them [the safeguards]. So that’s what I did.”
This an edited extract from Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa published by Jacana this week.