No more Mr Nice Guy
THE men were in high spirits when they reported for duty at the Drill Hall on Monday morning. Dick’s companions laughed out loud as he commented wryly: ‘Let’s face it, our time with the cops in Soweto was good experience – good experience of how shitty it is to try and go to war with a bunch of arseholes.’
As PJ entered the room, Dick couldn’t resist a last barbed remark about the failure of Operation Xenon. ‘That useless bunch of flatfoots haven’t got a hope of stopping the political unrest.’
PJ was the senior staff officer intelligence at Wits Command, and the top brass at DHQ (Defence Headquarters) were giving him sleepless nights over the shocking level of unrest and agitation by leftist groups on university campuses and at public protests against PW’s regime. He was close to breaking point, and every time the telephone rang, he almost shat himself with the stress. There was nothing worse than getting a call from Magnus’s office, asking what he was doing to reduce unrest in the Johannesburg area.
‘The president’s had a guts-full of those commies in Joburg running riot!’ were the words etched into his brain. He realised that Magnus’s staff officer was only the messenger, but if he heard that voice on the other end of the phone even once more, he’d jump into a Ratel himself and go and blow up that bunch of kaffir-lovers one by one.
His mood written all over his round face, PJ walked into the briefing room.
‘Steer clear of the boss! He’s in a foul mood,’ Dick warned in a whisper. After all, he could read PJ like a book, and he was fully aware that the big boys at DHQ were livid that, despite his enthusiasm, Operation Xenon had been a dismal failure.
‘That hammer you were supposed to smash against the heads of the rabble in Soweto didn’t work,’ barked PJ, obviously highly uncomfortable. ‘You can’t go to war with the fucking cops. They are stingy about sharing intelligence, and without it we would never have been able to identify the ringleaders of the unrest and remove them from society.
‘So now we’re taking the fight to them!’ PJ boomed so unexpectedly that a couple of the men in front of him immediately shook off their hangovers, opened their eyes wide, and paid attention. ‘No more Mr Nice Guy for you lot. The gloves are coming off, and you will take on the enemy in every way imaginable. Fuck the rules. The orders from headquarters are to collect as much information as possible about the underground networks, recruit informers and eliminate the enemy.’
You could have heard a pin drop in the room as his stunned audience waited for those last words to sink in. Had they heard PJ correctly? The majority of them were intelligence officers who gathered information about the enemy, handled informers, and drew up reports on the enemy’s plans and movements.
Had they understood him correctly? To eliminate surely meant to take a life. ‘Oh shit, has the boss just given us a licence to kill?’ Paul said in a feeble attempt to break the sombre atmosphere. His words were not yet cold when PJ turned around in the doorway and bellowed that he wanted to see Paul and Dick in his office.
The first thing you saw on entering PJ’s office were the protruding ears in the framed photograph of Magnus that hung on the wall directly behind PJ. Seated at his desk in a wheeled chair, reading an intelligence report, PJ seemed smaller in stature than he was. Dick knew it must be a sensitive report, because both the front and back covers of the brown file bore a familiar red X and the dire warning: TOP SECRET.
PJ closed the bulky file quickly and leant back in his chair, apparently calm again after his mighty outburst of sturm und drang in the briefing room. Dick and Paul prepared themselves for a lengthy session as PJ outlined the tasks he had in mind for them.
They were well aware that he regarded them as confidants. They were the two with whom he could share even the most sensitive information, knowing they would never drop him in the pooh.
‘Boys, what you are going to do for me after today stays between the three of us, understood? This is for volk and vaderland. The commies are practically at the gates. The Swart Gevaar is no longer far away in South West and Angola. It’s here. They are sharpening their pangas on our front stoeps, in Soweto and in Sharpeville.
‘It would be great if we had a couple of those goodies that are lying at Pelindaba to turn the shacks into a little Hiroshima, but that’s not the only place where disaster is looming. Right here on our doorstep – around the corner from the Drill Hall – the fucking communists at Wits and RAU are plotting murder and mayhem against us under the cloak of front organisations. That has to be stopped, and fast, or we are going to see our arses!’
The climax to PJ’s diatribe against the enemy was interrupted by a knock on his office door before he could tell Paul and Dick why he had called them in.
It was Colonel Wim Beyers, the media liaison officer at Wits Command. There was no love lost between PJ and Les about the methods applied by the military in the battle against the ANC in Johannesburg. Les had a good relationship with leftist journalists at newspapers such as the Weekly Mail, Vrye Weekblad and Star.
Consequently, PJ didn’t trust him at all and, in fact, the two men had little time for one another. Wim was a harsh critic of the covert operations and dirty tricks carried out by PJ and his men against the enemy, and had warned him frequently about the dangers of such activities being exposed by the media. PJ firmly believed that Wim was guilty of selectively leaking information to the press, and considered it his personal duty to make Wim look bad whenever possible.
‘Yes, Colonel, what can I do for you?’ PJ asked tersely as Wim walked in. ‘Good morning, colleague, I hope I’m not interrupting anything devious,’ Wim responded, throwing a newspaper report down on the desk in front of PJ. ‘Are some of your guys responsible for causing this shit?’ he asked.
The banner headline and front-page report from the previous day’s Sunday Times screamed:
GRISLY PHOTO WAR ON THE ANC
Sunday Times investigation by De Wet Potgieter in Pretoria, Nic van Oudtshoorn in Sydney and Frik Ahlers in Bonn.
The South African Defence Force has mounted a costly and secret propaganda war against the African National Congress through the distribution of thousands of high-quality anti-ANC booklets. Some of the booklets – they contain gruesome photographs of victims of ANC atrocities – have surfaced in Australian primary schools, where they have led to a public outcry.
This week the SADF confirmed that it was involved in the project, and insisted that the military had a legitimate role in opposing ANC propaganda abroad. It rejected any inference that the involvement was illegal or irregular.
A Sunday Times investigation has established that the printing work was undertaken on contract by a Pretoria publishing company, Publication Scan.
Its owner, Mr Vink Kloppers, was recently named in a Sunday Times investigation as the recipient of unauthorised police equipment for his game farm in the Northern Transvaal.
Inquiries have indicated that:
• The publishing operation involved certain aspects of the production and the distribution of anti–Oliver Tambo postcards and a glossy book, Face to Face with the ANC.
• A senior military officer, Mr Kloppers and an employee of the publishing company travelled to West Germany last November to set up a distribution network for the books.
• The senior military officer in charge of the operation is a friend of the printer and was a guest at his game farm – the same farm which was equipped, a preliminary police inquiry reveals, with irregularly acquired police kit.
• Payment for the job was done at least partly in cash – on one occasion R40 000 in used R50 notes was handed over to the printer.
The security for this ‘top secret’ project was so bad that the booklets lay around the printer’s offices in full view of casual visitors.
The card project was floated under the name of a fictitious organisation, ‘The Alliance for the Promotion of People’s Rights’ with a false Sandton address.
It was aimed at whipping up foreign opposition to the ANC – particularly at the time of Oliver Tambo’s world trip, during which he met a number of heads of state.
The booklet, Face to Face with the ANC, contains shock pictures of necklace and bomb-blast victims. Five hundred copies of the booklet were sent to people in Queensland, Australia, a number of them primary school children.
While PJ read the story attentively, Wim sat down, watching him closely, as if trying to interpret his facial expressions.
‘I must say, the guys did a good job. The enemy can’t have known what hit them,’ was PJ’s dry response as he passed the article to Dick and Paul. ‘No mate, sorry to disappoint you, but this wasn’t our project. If my boys were involved, we’d have done an even better job. It certainly wouldn’t have leaked out in the newspaper,’ said PJ with a knowing look at Wim.
Almost before Wim had left the office, PJ shifted into a more comfortable position in his chair, a smug smile spreading across his face over the way he had humiliated Wim in front of his subordinates.
‘Right, where were we before being so rudely interrupted?’ PJ asked Dick. ‘Colonel, you were telling us that the enemy is here, in our midst.’
‘Oh yes. As of now, you will focus on that bunch of agitators plotting to make the country ungovernable while they hide behind the banners of leftie organisations like the Five Freedoms Forum, End Conscription Campaign, COSAS, Black Sash, COSATU and the rest.’
What took place that day in Colonel PJ van den Berg’s office was the start of a heinous plan that, in later years, would cause the worst pain and anguish imaginable to so many people as the details were systematically divulged at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and by the media. There would be a great spewing of the guts, but very little reconciliation.
PJ was a desperate man. His balls were on the block, and he was by nature the kind of man who liked keeping his bosses at DHQ happy – actually, he was a regular arse-creeper who would sell his own mother to score a few Brownie points with the generals.
And so, he effectively gave Dick and Paul carte blanche to disrupt the enemy by any means imaginable. Indeed, without putting it in so many words, he gave them permission, if needs be, to commit murder.
Paul hadn’t been so far off the mark after all when he’d joked earlier that morning that old PJ was issuing them with a licence to kill.
With the help of plenty of cash for bribes, it didn’t take Dick and Paul long to recruit some outstanding contacts at Wits University. The campus was virtually cleared of pamphlets, brochures and other literature distributed among students by the FFF, ECC, Black Sash and others, or which had been compiled on the campus and printed in secrecy.
The damning evidence – boxes of it – and other extremely useful proof and documents about the dirty tricks perpetrated against leftist organisations during that bloody era ‘inexplicably’ ended up, in due course, in my hands at the Sunday Times, where I was an investigative journalist. Some time afterwards, incriminating confessions and signed affidavits made by concerned accomplices with blood on their hands were added to the collection, as perpetrators tried desperately to avoid being blown away by the torrential winds of change.
Efforts to recruit moles in the myriad front organisations for the banned ANC were well under way when Major Johan Laubscher was transferred to Wits Command as commander, with specific orders to take control of the ‘dirty tricks department’ and, at the same time, draw the top secret team of agents in the Johannesburg city council into his operations.
Dick quickly teamed up with Johan, and the two booze buddies eventually became the brainpower of the unit. It was at this point that the entire unit went covert and started operating undercover. Neither of them ever wore uniform again. They were transformed overnight into secret agents who planned their missions behind closed doors.
‘The first thing you have to organise for us asap, Dick, is an operational headquarters where we won’t attract unwelcome attention,’ was Johan’s first order. ‘A smallholding somewhere, so that we can come and go at all hours without the neighbours asking questions. Put the place in your name and I’ll arrange for the rent money to be available without delay.’
As it turned out, it wasn’t that simple to get funding from the generals at DHQ, but PJ arranged for payment from the Wits Command regimental funds.
‘Fuck,’ said Dick, breaking the silence as he and Johan scoured the area around Johannesburg in search of suitable premises for the operational headquarters. ‘That anal bunch of generals in Pretoria are cunts. They have the nerve to expect us to do their dirty work, but they won’t even release the funds so that we can do a decent job.’
Johan agreed fully, but, as an officer, he felt obliged to appease his underlings and promised that he would make sure sufficient money was forthcoming to carry out the operation.
The two men were starting to think they would never find a suitable property from which to plan and execute the operation, when they stumbled on the perfect place. It was fairly close to Johannesburg, yet isolated enough and adjacent to a minor arterial road between Pretoria and Johannesburg, which would allow quick access to targets and flashpoints in the Golden City.
No. 17 Diepsloot was a smallholding north of Sandton and a stone’s throw from Kyalami. The team lost no time turning the property into their new operational headquarters. A military petrol tanker was moved to the plot, and radios and antennas set up in the homestead to facilitate communications with PJ and his group at the Drill Hall.
In between locating premises and the move, Dick and his buddies also found time to recruit sources and agents among the leftists.
At that stage, all members of the group were still driving vehicles issued by Military Intelligence. Dick had a Toyota and Paul a black Chevrolet. However, PJ was worried that cars originating from MI could compromise their cover and activities, and he obtained authorisation to draw vehicles from the government garage instead.
This turned out to be great fun, since they could choose from BMWs and Mercs to lightning-fast Ford Granadas. These were vehicles normally garaged in Johannesburg for the use of cabinet ministers, so the boys were thrilled. False number plates were made for all the vehicles. Johan chose a red BMW733, and Paul settled for the same model.
Johan’s brother Frikkie also moved to No. 17 Diepsloot. He was a full-time student at Rand Afrikaans University (RAU), who had joined the defence force on a short-service contract. However, he maintained his studies while taking part in the covert operations, driving to and from his lectures on campus in a Mercedes, courtesy of the state. His older brother Johan was considerate enough to make sure that no operations were planned during periods when Frikkie was writing exams. After all, he didn’t want to miss the fun.
It wasn’t long before the boys had reduced the cars to mechanical wrecks, and PJ was inundated with complaints from the government garage. In desperation, DHQ finally released funds for the purchase of vehicles. Dick acquired a yellow Mercedes, Paul got himself a bakkie, and Johan chose a cream Merc.
The campaign kicked off with propaganda and projects designed to disrupt the enemy. At night, the group invaded Johannesburg’s central business district armed with cans of spray paint and defaced numerous buildings with graffiti. But that was just the beginning.
The Johannesburg newspapers had raved about a local production, Somewhere on the Border, which was being staged at the Market Theatre. Beeld’s review of the controversial drama singled out the performance of a young Afrikaans actor, Andre-Jacques van der Merwe, for praise, and predicted a bright future for him. The Star and the Weekly Mail called the play ‘daring and courageous’, lauding its ‘powerful anti-conscription theme’ at a time when the NP government refused to tolerate such ‘unpatriotic propaganda’.
Night after night, Somewhere on the Border played to full houses. Against the background of draft dodgers being labelled traitors, the play was considered nothing less than heresy against the bitter struggle to defeat the ANC and the Rooi Gevaar – treason against not only state, but nation!
Little wonder, then, that a vast number of white South Africans took great pleasure one morning from newspaper reports about an assault on two Johannesburg actors. Andre-Jacques and his co-star, André Lombard, were the victims of a particularly vicious attack. According to news reports, it was little short of a miracle that the pair had survived the assault on a quiet street in the early morning hours.
Needless to say, no one was ever arrested by the police in connection with the incident.
It was several years before one of the ringleaders came forward with details of what had happened that night and what had prompted the attack. In a sworn affidavit made available to me, he stated bluntly: ‘This was among the most important of our clandestine operations planned at No. 17 Diepsloot, and it was intended to teach those two bastards a lesson.’
The military hierarchy viewed plays like Somewhere on the Border as part of the Total Onslaught against white South Africa. They found the drama so offensive that, behind the scenes, it became part of the dirty tricks strategy adopted by the security forces to hit back hard and decisively against any such affront. Three members of the Johannesburg city council’s spy ring were involved in the operation.
It was anathema to the defence force that someone like Andre-Jacques had the temerity to betray his own people and take part in an anti–South African play that cast aspersions on the entire struggle against the enemy. In the bunkers at Blenney, the SADF’s subterranean command centre adjacent to DHQ in Pretoria, high-ranking officers from DCC made it clear that the political connotations of portraying national service in such an execrable light amounted to an unmitigated act of treason.
‘How the moer can that cunt be so two-faced?’ PJ fumed as he conveyed the sentiments of his bosses in Pretoria to his men. ‘Not so long ago, he was everybody’s hero when he played the role of Vaatjie in Vleuels, that popular TV series.’
Early on the night of the assault, everyone gathered at No. 17 Diepsloot. Five vehicles would be used. ‘Tonight we are going to beat those two traitors to a pulp,’ promised Nicky from the city council excitedly while they were attaching false number plates to the cars. This was his first operation with the military group and he made no secret of his disdain for the useless pricks who were too scared to do national service.
The liquor had been flowing since early afternoon, and the Klippies and Coke had not only loosened the tongues, but also boosted bravado and aggression with every tot. Young Frik had made a special effort to leave the university early, so that he could take part in the night’s events. He had found favour within the group by recruiting attractive female students from RAU and Wits – not just as bait that could be used to compromise and blackmail targets, but also as willing participants in the steamy sex orgies that became a regular feature of life both at the smallholding and, later, at a Johannesburg hotel.
It was well past midnight when an exhausted Andre-Jacques moved behind the wheel of his car at the Market Theatre and began driving home through Braamfontein. He didn’t notice the five vehicles following him along the quiet streets of central Johannesburg, but at a red traffic light in Sturrock Park, he realised he had a problem. A car suddenly raced past him and screeched to a halt in the intersection, blocking his way. Simultaneously, he saw the lights of another car that had pulled up behind and almost against his own, while two more vehicles boxed him in on both sides.
‘The idiot still wanted to talk, but we pulled him out of his car and started hammering him with truncheons and bare fists,’ one of the attackers related gleefully afterwards. ‘He still thought he was going to lie down on the ground and plead with us, when we started kicking him from all sides.’
Andre-Jacques might have been an actor, but he was no moffie. He fought back bravely, even while trying to reason with his attackers, but he quickly realised that they were filled with hatred and that he was about to be beaten to death on that tarred city street.
At one point, he was knocked to the ground by a truncheon blow from behind. The gang fell on him like a pack of wild dogs, laying in with their boots from every direction. As he lay there, helpless, waiting for the final blow that would end his life, he kept seeing the hatred in the eyes of his attackers – assailants who spoke the same language as he did.
He survived only because his co-star, André Lombard, happened to be driving along the same route and, seeing the fracas, stopped and ran to help. ‘So we grabbed him and gave him a good hiding as well,’ Dick reported.
The interruption gave Andre-Jacques the chance to struggle to his feet. With blood streaming down his face, he stumbled to his car and pressed the hooter repeatedly in desperation.
Aroused by the noise, residents switched on lights in several surrounding houses and the gang realised that the game was up. Like thieves in the night, they made a fast getaway.
And that was effectively that. In a country riddled with hatred, those on both the left and right of the political spectrum knew that the guilty parties would never be brought to justice. For some members of South African society, there simply was no justice; even if an overzealous young detective had somehow managed to identify the perpetrators, someone, somewhere, would have found a way to hide the truth behind the vicious deed.
Their successful attack on the two actors spurred the Diepkloof team to further action against the commies in the entertainment world, and Jennifer Ferguson’s appearance at the Market Theatre was the next target.
Young Frik used his charm to round up a group of ‘right-minded’ students at RAU for the Ferguson operation. Ferguson’s links with ANC structures and her blatant support for the struggle had landed her on a shortlist of potential targets.
‘That red bitch needs to be taught a lesson once and for all,’ was one of the comments about her political convictions during the planning phase of the operation. ‘There’s no room in South Africa for kaffir-lovers like her.’
A number of tickets for her performance were purchased from Computicket at state expense and with taxpayers’ money. Young Frik was the cheerleader for the group of students. He gave each member a ticket and instructions to sit in different sections of the theatre.
The rest of the team was made up of the usual suspects – Dick, Paul and members of the Johannesburg city council’s security department. Among them was Monty, a close friend of PJ’s and a military police sergeant.
‘Now we have to go and listen to Jennifer’s kak music with a bunch of fucking leftie arty-farties,’ Dick complained on the way to the Market Theatre.
‘I’m going to beat the crap out of a couple of these lefties tonight,’ Monty replied as he handed his ticket over at the door. The boys had been hitting the bottle hard all afternoon at Diepsloot to build up Dutch courage for the action that lay ahead.
The theatre was packed and the audience was impatient to see Jennifer on stage. She entered to loud applause, except from a small number of theatregoers – strategically scattered among the fans – who clapped half-heartedly to avoid arousing suspicion.
Jennifer had just finished her second number and the audience was quietening down for the next song, when the first four students disrupted everyone in their immediate vicinity by pushing past people seated in their row and walking out. Jennifer paid them little attention, but, as she started bantering with her audience, another six people stood up in different parts of the theatre and staged an exit as well.
As they reached the door, the rest of young Frik’s youth commando rose to their feet to leave. The change in mood was almost palpable. Those who had genuinely come to see the show sensed something was wrong, especially after government officials had made disparaging statements earlier in the week about performers who used their music to broadcast an anti-conscription message.
But Jennifer was no walkover, as she would show a few years later when she became an ANC office-bearer. She launched into her next number, and the atmosphere changed almost immediately from impending doom to total surrender to her music.
And that was when all hell broke loose. It started with a few coughs and sneezes from people in the back rows, but the sounds were largely drowned out by the music. Then, as the coughing and wheezing spread throughout the theatre, there was panic.
Every member of the dirty tricks brigade had come armed with a can of teargas. The aerosol containers had been specially designed for the defence force’s fight against urban terrorism. If you didn’t know what the innocuous white aerosol cans contained, you would have sworn they were nothing but no-name deodorants.
Dick and Monty released the first salvo, spraying teargas towards the back of the theatre. No one knew what had hit them. First there was a burning feeling in the throat, which got so bad that people coughed their lungs out to get rid of the dry, choking sensation.
And then the tears came. They streamed down your cheeks, and wherever teardrops or perspiration landed on your body, it burnt like fire.
In the blink of an eye the entire audience was overcome. Those who had never been teargassed before probably imagined they had been attacked with some or other lethal poison. The panic spread and everyone surged towards the exits. They had no way of knowing whether they were about to die, but as fear took hold their only thought was to get outside, into the fresh air.
The culprits, only too aware of what effect the teargas would have, made sure that they left before the stampede and stood outside, relishing the discomfort of their victims.
Fortunately, teargas is fairly rapidly neutralised by fresh air. A cool breeze helped the victims recover quickly from the burning in their throats and dried their tears. Most were visibly relieved when they realised that they hadn’t been attacked with something far worse, like mustard gas – that dreadful toxic vapour that caused the horrible deaths of so many soldiers in the trenches during the First World War.
Monty was far from ready to call it a night. Clearly, the audience had realised that the show was over and they might as well go home. Armed with his aerosol can, Monty began walking up to cars as if he wanted to ask the passengers something. As soon as someone rolled down a window, he sprayed teargas into the vehicle. He went from one vehicle to another in the parking lot, causing havoc, until a couple of people, already thoroughly fed-up that their evening had been ruined, noticed what he was doing and tried to apprehend him.
It was laughable to see the brave soldier take to his heels as he realised the odds were against him and he was about to see his arse. He hared off down the street, where Dick and the rest of the gang picked him up and sped away. For the next few days, the newspapers were filled with reports about the incident, but the police never did find those who were responsible.
A slight breeze was blowing as seventeen-year-old Alta Klaasen made her way through Johannesburg’s streets and high-rise buildings to school one morning. The entrance to the Drill Hall was guarded by two national servicemen, with whom she had struck up regular conversations over the past few months. She found the shy young man with red hair rather attractive and looked forward to the mornings when he was on duty. When he was on night shift, she stopped to chat to him for a while on her way home in the afternoon, and sometimes stayed so long that she had to run for the bus.
Nothing could have prepared her for the events of that winter morning, 30 June 1987, which would change her life forever. For the rest of her days she would have to live not only with the mental scars, but also with the terrible physical disfigurement that she suffered.
Alta had barely reached the Drill Hall’s main entrance, and was reaching into her bag for the sandwiches she had made for her favourite troop, when something – perhaps that legendary feminine intuition – told her to turn around. Whatever it was, she never really understood what happened to her on that day of sorrow.
But one man’s face would be burnt into her memory forever, though at the time she wondered fleetingly why such a nondescript character was hanging around the Drill Hall. He looked far too much of a weakling to be a soldier.
Hein Grosskopf looked Alta straight in the eye as he climbed out of his Valiant bakkie. Alta remembered thinking that the young man with the outsize spectacles looked like a real nerd, not someone you would normally associate with a zef Valiant that would be more at home in Johannesburg’s southern suburbs.
‘What are you looking at?’ she challenged him, as he got out of the vehicle. ‘I’m not for sale,’ she said cheekily, as Hein turned without a word and started walking briskly in the direction of the Ster-Kinekor cinemas.
For Hein Grosskopf it was a wonderful day, because on that cold morning, this brave MK soldier would perform an act of heroism for the struggle that would make him proud until the end of time. A product of the unapologetically Afrikaner Linden High School in Johannesburg, he was a quiet child; as unlikely a candidate for the struggle as his classmates were – archetypal Afrikaner boerseuns who couldn’t wait to do their bit for volk and vaderland.
After six months of military training in Angola, Hein was sent to the ANC headquarters in Lusaka, where he spent the next six months planning the attack on Wits Command. The intention was to detonate a powerful bomb in Quartz Street that would destroy a wall in the military building and cause casualties.
Back in South Africa, Hein acquired the Valiant bakkie with an automatic gearbox, and began secretly constructing a bomb containing 120 kilograms of explosives. It was designed to release as little shrapnel as possible, so as to limit injuries to civilian passers-by. He rigged the bakkie’s transmission in such a way that he could park the vehicle in gear. It would then roll across the street and onto the sidewalk outside the Drill Hall automatically.
Hein had almost reached Sterland when he heard the Valiant’s engine revs start climbing, and knew that his handiwork had been successful.
Alta was a step or two from the entrance when the bomb exploded, throwing her to the ground like a rag. She didn’t know what had hit her. Blood poured down her face and, where just seconds before there had been a twinkling eye for her troopie, there was now a bloody mass. The young troop had also felt the full impact of the blast, but he’d been flung into the guardhouse, where he lay unconscious for several minutes.
When he came to and saw the blood from his head wounds soaking into his uniform, he stumbled around in confusion among the wounded lying on the ground in pools of blood, groaning and pleading for help. In the distance, the first sirens began to wail.
As glass from shattered windows rained down on the city streets, Hein sprinted for the motorcycle he had earlier parked a few blocks away. He rode to the flat in Linden where he had been living, threw a few things into a bag, and headed for the Botswana border and exile.
Years afterwards, in November 2000, Hein said in his application for amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that he was proud of the ‘small’ role he had played in the freedom struggle. Asked by the amnesty committee why he had not returned to South Africa and contributed to the upliftment of the masses, he said it was ‘impossible, for personal reasons, to bring my young children to South Africa with me’. He never came back to the land of his birth, choosing instead to raise his children in Britain.
Alta Klaasen, who lost an eye in the blast, was the only one of Hein’s sixty-nine victims who was prepared to meet him face to face thirteen years after the attack. Evidently terrified of his own people in South Africa, Hein turned up at the TRC hearings surrounded by at least five members of the police VIP protection unit.
Alta, who insisted on confronting him behind closed doors about his act of terror, told Beeld afterwards: ‘He said he was sorry about what happened to me, but I got the impression that he really felt no remorse at all.’
‘He seemed almost light-hearted, and he was very proud of what he did.’
With the Drill Hall blown to smithereens, PJ and the rest of the personnel at Wits Command had to move to other premises with whatever of their equipment had survived the blast. They had no idea who had caught them so unawares and dumped a load of crap on their doorstep in the form of a powerful bomb.
Safely installed at Diepkloof, far from the blood and gore of Quartz Street, Dick and his group moved swiftly to tap every possible source for information about who had planted the bomb. Not one of them would have dreamt that the culprit was a Boer.
Wits Command moved into Armadale Place, around the corner from the Drill Hall. It was a high-rise office block that housed all the colours and flavours of downtown Johannesburg’s cosmopolitan mix. It was hardly ideally suited to the high-level security needed to safeguard the city’s military headquarters against terror attacks.
On the same floor, two Israelis ran a business selling medicine to blacks. The owner of the building wanted them out, and asked PJ if his guys couldn’t do ‘something’ to get rid of the two men.
‘PJ led us to believe that it would be worth big money to us to get them out of the building,’ Dick said afterwards. ‘He warned us that Joffel (Major General Joffel van der Westhuizen, officer commanding Witwatersrand Command at the time) knew nothing about the plan.’
Dick told PJ it would cost money to get the job done. PJ managed to lay his hands on R1 000 from somewhere, but thought it only fair that he should pocket R500 himself.
At first, scare tactics in the form of anonymous threatening phone calls were used, but without success. The two thick-skinned bastards weren’t at all intimidated when ‘Pete from Lusaka’ called at the most ungodly hours of the night and warned that they would be dealt with. ‘You are selling poison to our black brothers,’ he threatened. ‘We are coming to take revenge.’
When this had no effect, and after a tyre with threatening messages and an exploding Russian RGD5 hand grenade in their backyard awakened the entire neighbourhood but still failed to move the Israelis, it was time for Plan B.
Every day, the medicine men parked their old Peugeot in the basement at Armadale Place. Early one morning, Dick and Paul watched as they pulled into their parking bay and then, while Paul followed them up to their office, Dick emptied a bottle of paint stripper on the car’s bonnet. It etched the shape of a snake into the Duco.
The next day, it became clear that the two foreigners knew full well who was behind the dirty tricks to which they had been subjected. They simply stormed into PJ’s office and accused his people of burning ‘a cobra’ onto their car. That was the end of the campaign against the two Israelis, and they were still in the building when Wits Command moved out.
Meanwhile, Operation Sitdown, as the clandestine military training of Johannesburg’s security officials was known, began winding down.
Frik Barnard, head of the city council’s law enforcers, who operated from the old jail at The Fort, was also a major in the Citizen Force, attached to Wits Command – hence the close ties between his men and PJ’s dirty tricks brigade.
The dying days of the training period saw a number of incidents that made the front pages of the newspapers, but to this day the perpetrators have not been unmasked – though everyone knew that some or other mysterious military or police unit must have been responsible.
One can only imagine what those behind bars on Robben Island, like Walter Sisulu, must have felt when they learnt how their loved ones were being persecuted.
It was shortly after 1 a.m. when Dick and Paul picked up one of their informants, Doctor, on the way to Soweto.
‘Here, hold this,’ said Paul as Doctor opened the rear door and climbed into the vehicle. The bottles in the bag Paul picked up from between his feet and handed over clinked together softly.
‘Jeez, boss, are we planning to start a riot in Soweto?’ Doctor asked as they drove off and he looked into the bag on the seat beside him.
‘Shut up and show us the quickest way,’ said Paul tersely as Dick’s familiar giggle filled the car.
It was pitch-dark and icy cold, but the tension was palpable in the vehicle as Dick, following Doctor’s directions, turned off the tarred road and switched off the headlights, proceeding down the dusty street using only the parking lights. All three occupants had their ears pitched for the telltale, unnerving whistles used by the comrades to warn residents of Soweto that Casspirs carrying soldiers or maBoeries in unmarked cars were moving towards houses that had become targets.
But the night was still, and it seemed the whole of Soweto was sleeping peacefully. Yet the residents knew the silence was an illusion and that the slightest mistake could end with a smouldering tyre around your neck.
‘There … on the left, there at the high walls,’ whispered Doctor, as if afraid that he would awaken the occupants of the house. He was an old hand who had no conscience; long since recruited by Dick’s gang for a lot of money, and whom they severely beat up when he drank too much. Whether his drinking habits were a way of dulling his conscience about what he was doing to his own people only he would know.
No whistles cleft the night air and not a single light was burning in the street. Dick stopped the car and Paul moved behind the wheel, while the other two carefully removed the bag of bottles. Nimbly as a gymnast, Doctor sprang to the top of the wall with a single leap. Pretty fleet-footed for a drunk, Dick thought, handing the bag up to Doctor before joining him on top of the wall.
‘Fuck, I’m glad there aren’t any dogs,’ Dick said nervously. Group operations were one thing, but getting the job done here in the middle of Soweto with an information whore like Doctor, who had no loyalties, was not child’s play. Anything could happen.
If they got caught, Soweto’s law of the jungle would come into play and the next day PJ and the brass in Pretoria would shrug their shoulders and deny any links to them. The defence force’s lie factory – the squad of former journalists who now served as liaison officers and covered up the dirty tricks time and again with their spin-doctoring – were well versed in concocting shit stories that carried just enough elements of truth to be swallowed by their erstwhile media colleagues. More accurately, they spread disinformation, as directed by the ComOps division.
‘To hell with ComOps,’ Dick decided, forcing himself to concentrate on the task at hand. ‘Doctor, take two of those petrol bombs out of the bag, and I’ll take the other two. Where’s your lighter?’
Doctor crept right up to Dick and gestured for him to be quiet. In the inky darkness, he took one of Dick’s hands and indicated the direction of the carports adjoining the house. Just then, someone opened the back door and walked out into the night. Dick was petrified, and he heard the faint tinkle of glass as Doctor trembled and his two petrol bombs touched.
The night-walker coughed as he started urinating a stone’s throw from the men. Then he farted, and they could hear him shaking his cock before putting it back in his pants and going back into the house, whistling softly.
The interruption lasted less than a minute, the man obviously not wanting to be out in the cold any longer than necessary, but it felt like an eternity to the two saboteurs. ‘Let’s do the bloody job and fuck off,’ was all that Dick could manage without his voice betraying his fear.
At the carports, they placed a petrol bomb on the roof of each of the cars and withdrew a short distance before lighting the fuses of the remaining two bombs with shaky hands. They released them as soon as the long fuses were lit, as if they had burnt themselves.
The bombs were still hurtling towards the cars when the two men turned as one and ran for the wall. They cleared it even faster than they had entered the property and were in the idling car as the first flames shot into the sky. Paul, who had stayed in the car, worrying about what was happening on the other side of the wall, wasted no time getting the hell out of there, headlights shining.
They knew that in the confusion no one would take notice of the car speeding away. Experience had taught the dirty tricks experts that it took at least a few minutes for victims to come to their senses and look for anything that might identify the perpetrators.
The following afternoon, the front page of the Star carried a photograph of the two burnt-out vehicles and a report that the home of Mrs Albertina Sisulu had been petrol-bombed. Police reaction to the attack was simply that it could be attributed to the ‘raging power struggle’ between the ANC leadership’s internal and external wings.
The afternoon papers also reported that Mrs Sisulu had narrowly escaped death thanks to her neighbours, who had managed to put out the fire before it could spread to her house.