Wolves in sheep’s clothing
IT was early morning, far too early for any normal person to be up and about, when the pager beeped. ‘Oh fuck, who’s looking for me now?’ Ferdi groaned silently, his addled brain telling him to turn over and go back to sleep. It was only about three hours since he’d dropped Brenda off on the way home from the club.
After spending years behind bars, he was enjoying every moment of his freedom. He’d walked out of prison with a new lease on life. Ever since Joe had come to his cell to recruit him, the future had looked rosy. Actually, ‘rosy’ was too soppy for his tough-guy image. Suffice it to say that an eventful life as a hit man and ‘godfather’ in Hillbrow’s underworld had beckoned him at the prison gates.
Which was precisely why Ferdi could not afford to ignore the pager’s insistent beep-beep. Only one man could be calling him so early and so urgently. The tall, well-built man turned over lazily in bed and kicked back the sheets. In his former life as a young policeman and rugby player, Ferdi had always been big and fit, but thanks to regular workouts in prison he was even bulkier and tougher now. After all, what else was there to do all day behind bars except pump iron?
With one eye open, he grabbed the Motorola off the bedside table and pressed the button to shut the damned thing up. At the same time, he tried to see who the hell wanted him at this early hour. ‘Please call Jack van Staden,’ was the message on the pager screen.
‘Now what the fuck does Joe want me for?’ Ferdi mused out loud, stumbling towards the telephone in the living room.
‘It’s Ferdi, sir,’ he said when he heard the voice at the other end. The conversation was brief and to the point. He replaced the receiver and walked back to the bedroom to get dressed. ‘Jesus, my head’s going to burst,’ he thought, but he pressed on, promising himself that he’d start cutting back on his coke-sniffing habit. He took a shower, reflecting, not for the first time, on how stupid this Jack van Staden must be to imagine that he didn’t know his true identity. When he’d been recruited in prison almost a year before, he’d accepted the man as Jack, but in the interim had found out that, in fact, he was the one and only Joe Verster, head honcho and managing director of the Civil Cooperation Bureau, who had sought him out in jail to become their state assassin.
Even Ferdi’s CCB handler, Lafras Luitingh, still believed that he was known only by his code name, Louis, but the truth was, assassin or not, Ferdi was no arsehole. Theuns Kruger, the CCB’s big-mouth money-man, had let slip the real identities of both Joe and Lafras.
The effects of a hot shower on a hangover were simply amazing. Ferdi felt like a new man by the time he arrived at the Ponte building in Hillbrow for his appointment with Jack (aka Joe). He wasn’t looking forward to the briefing, though, as Joe could be somewhat exhausting at times. As an ex-cop, Ferdi approached things differently than the pongos (military types) did.
Both Joe and Laffies were in the flat when Ferdi entered. This was his first visit to the CCB safe house. Without further ado, Joe told Ferdi who his next two targets would be. ‘That trade union coolie, Jay Naidoo, is giving the government far too much shit from the mineworkers,’ was the way he pronounced Naidoo’s death sentence.
Then Joe made it quite clear that Dr David Webster was an absolute priority for Ferdi. ‘Listen, pal, Webster isn’t a target for recruitment. He has to be eliminated,’ came the order. No one in that apartment was in any doubt about why Joe had recruited Ferdi in prison.
A large part of his duties with the CCB involved the infiltration of crime syndicates to sign up members as informants. His image as the Hillbrow godfather was perfect for this role, especially since the government was convinced that the ANC’s MK and the PAC’s APLA cadres were close allies of common criminals in the underground struggle against the regime.
As his superiors droned on about what political turds the targets were and why it was essential for them to be taken out, Ferdi interrupted impatiently. ‘Okay, okay, I get it. Do you honestly think I know fuck-all about what’s going on around me? I might be a jailbird, but I read Vrye Weekblad, the Weekly Mail and New Nation regularly. I know who the bloody enemy is.’
What Ferdi did not know at that stage, but learnt later from news reports, was that Webster – a lecturer and activist from Wits – had been deeply involved in such groups as the Detainees Parents’ Support Committee since its inception in 1981; the Five Freedoms Forum (FFF); End Conscription Campaign (ECC); and the Detainees’ Education and Welfare Organisation. Interestingly enough, these were some of the organisations that Dick and others had been gathering intelligence on, in conjunction with Martin Hennig’s city council unit. Hennig and his spies were later unmasked as Johannesburg’s mini-CCB.
Webster, a world-renowned anthropologist, had done the research for his PhD thesis among the Mozambican communities living on the South African border. Indeed, it was his regular trips to communities at Kosi Bay that had aroused serious concern among South Africa’s spy chiefs. The border area was one of the routes used regularly to smuggle arms and provisions from South Africa to RENAMO in Mozambique, and it was feared that with his close contacts among the local population, Webster might stumble on this traffic.
The South African government had been placed under increasing pressure by RENAMO Branca, the group of white Portuguese businessmen behind RENAMO, to get Webster out of the area.
From the detailed file about Webster’s movements that Joe handed to him, Ferdi put two and two together and realised that someone, or another group, had already carried out extensive surveillance on the target. He didn’t know that, in addition to Dick’s team of spooks, another agent, Tony Naude, had also supplied a wealth of information to both the police and the defence force.
Ferdi’s dossier included a black-and-white A4 photograph of Webster and two addresses. He had a beard in the photograph, which was extremely clear. There were also various vehicle registration numbers and a couple of newspaper clippings about the academic to fill in the background of the man who had to be killed.
‘Ferdi, I want you to listen carefully,’ said Joe, the veteran Recce. ‘We know you are the guru of Johannesburg. You know the underworld and that’s why we believe you are the best man for the job. But please bear in mind, you are to ask as few questions as possible and do nothing to draw attention to yourself. The risk that we can be found out is simply too great to do anything stupid,’ warned Jack/Joe.
By now, Ferdi had quite forgotten about his headache and tiredness and his brain had shifted into top gear. The killer instinct was kicking in. There was a job to be done, and there was good reason why he had been chosen to perform certain tasks as a state assassin.
The conversation was brief and businesslike and, when Joe had finished, Ferdi took the lift to the ground floor of Ponte, ready to go to work at once. He went straight to Brenda, to pick up her white Ford Laser. On the way home, he popped in at a CNA to buy a Johannesburg map book so that he could pinpoint Webster’s home address.
On arrival at his house, Ferdi quickly switched the number plates with false ones and drove to Eleanor Street in Troyeville. Once there, he realised that it would not be easy to monitor the Wits academic’s movements to and from home. His house was in a short, quiet one-way street, which, just to make things more challenging, ended in a cul-de-sac.
Over the next few weeks, Ferdi returned to the location regularly, always using different vehicles with false number plates. Once or twice he took Brenda with him, on the way back to her house after having breakfast in Bedfordview. Sometimes he went in the morning; but Ferdi carried out surveillance on the house at various times of the day and night in order to establish exactly what Webster’s daily pattern of movement was. On two occasions, he was fortunate enough to see the slim, bearded man with spectacles pull up and climb out of his vehicle in front of the house.
Following a final debriefing by Laffies about the progress of his spying on Webster’s movements, Ferdi switched into operational mode, so as to be ready at any time should the opportunity arise to strike the target.
His brain was spinning, but the big, bulky man, who evoked fear and trembling among Johannesburg’s whores and junkies, forced himself to focus so that nothing could go wrong. ‘I like to look my victim deep in the eyes when I shoot him to kingdom come,’ Ferdi had bragged on a recent visit to the Kiss nightclub. ‘But, my china, an aluminium baseball bat works just as well when you want to crack a guy’s skull open.’
Now there was no more time for big talk and bullshit, Ferdi told himself while he looked up his underworld associate George Mitchell’s phone number.
‘Howzit, my bru?’ he greeted George cheerfully. Life was exciting and Ferdi was high on the job he had to do. ‘Listen Georgie, I want to borrow that shotgun of yours to go and blast some guineafowl in Natal over the weekend.’
That was the pretext under which Ferdi got his hands on the weapon, but there wasn’t a game bird in sight when he fired the shotgun repeatedly while driving up and down a deserted road on Johannesburg’s outskirts. Moving both slowly and at high speed, he took aim at targets from a moving vehicle, over and over, at close range and from a distance.
‘No, George, this is a shit piece of gun,’ was Ferdi’s terse comment when he returned the weapon. ‘My Buksie is much shorter and easier to handle than this.’
Buksie was a shotgun too, but it was a very special assassin’s gun. No wonder Ferdi called it Buksie. With a sawn-off barrel and modified butt that effectively turned it into a pistol grip, Buksie was any assassin’s dream.
‘Fuck, Ferdi,’ was Calla Botha’s first reaction when he heard that Ferdi planned to use Buksie to take out ‘that red academic wreck from Wits’. Calla was the only man that Ferdi trusted with his life. Their friendship had been forged in the police force, and both were hardened rugby players who had scrummed down together for years. They had always been so close that many would have sworn they were brothers. And, in fact, they were – blood brothers. ‘Why the hell do you want to use Buksie? Why not just take a nine-mil, blow the cunt full of holes and be done with it?’ Calla suggested.
‘No ways. Do you want us to wake up the whole fucking neighbourhood by starting a small war in that quiet street? That would just draw attention. Buksie will bark once, and people will think it’s a car backfiring. After all, emptying a whole magazine of nine-mil rounds on the guy would have the same effect as a single shot with Buksie,’ Ferdi explained.
Calla said nothing, realising that his old chum had obviously done his homework before approaching him to drive the death car.
‘Hey Calla, you’ll have to drive right up to the guy, because I want to look him in the eyes when I waste him.’
‘That’s fine, but are your bosses going to cover us if the boys from Brixton start looking for us after we’ve done the job?’ Calla asked, seeking reassurance that the cops would not be a problem.
‘Calla, my old friend, don’t you know me better? No one is going to come anywhere near us. We are the Hillbrow phantoms. We pull the hit and then we disappear without trace. This hit comes right from the top, so the big brass and the political assholes at the Union Buildings had better cover us, otherwise they’ll see their own arses.
‘Don’t forget, Staal, Chappies and old Slang might be undercover operators for the CCB now, but their roots are at Brixton Murder and Robbery, and there’s no way they will let the Brixton boys pick us up for this hit. That connection is worth gold to us as back-up for future jobs that we’ll have to do to score points against the ANC. Region 5 of the CCB is mostly made up of ex-bobbies that we can depend on if the shit hits the fan,’ Ferdi assured his partner.
The nonchalance vanished as soon as Ferdi became serious and started discussing the modus operandi they would use to take Webster out as quickly and quietly as possible.
‘From now on, we have to make sure that every surveillance trip we make to his house is operational, to the extent that we can go straight into action if the target is there and we can blow him away. You must fucking well help me to remember that every time, no matter what car we take, we use the false number plates. We can’t slip up on that and make trouble for ourselves,’ Ferdi reminded both himself and Calla as they discussed strategy.
‘Oh, ja, and the most important is the balaclavas. I’ll put them in the bag with Buksie so that we don’t forget them.’
That Friday night, a whole crowd of gangsters and their whores joined Ferdi and Calla at Bella Napoli in Hillbrow. They were in the mood to party, since no one had to go to work the next morning. Midway through the evening, when the booze was flowing, Calla noticed that Ferdi was withdrawn and far too quiet for his liking. The man seemed to be in another world, definitely not his usual self.
‘What the fuck’s bothering you, buddy?’ Calla asked as they stood next to one another at the urinal, taking a leak. Although there was no one else in the men’s room, Ferdi glanced around cautiously before answering.
‘I’ve got a hunch that tomorrow is the day we’re going to nail Webster. It’s May Day, when the fucking communists celebrate Workers’ Day. We should blast him on their own bloody holy day. That will really send a message to those pricks that we won’t take any shit from them and their bliksemse sacred day.’
There and then, Ferdi told Calla to pick him up early the next morning. ‘And stop drinking now, so that your head is clear tomorrow,’ were his parting words before he and Brenda went home.
It was not yet light when David Webster and his partner, Maggie Friedman, rose that Saturday morning. It wasn’t all that early, but the heavily overcast sky made for a dark and gloomy day. At first they thought they would have to sacrifice their regular morning run with their dogs at Crown Mines, but fortunately it stopped raining soon afterwards. The streets of Johannesburg were quiet and empty when Ferdi and Calla began making their way to Eleanor Street. For most people, it was a welcome public holiday, a chance to sleep late and mark Workers’ Day by throwing a steak on the coals and having a few beers later.
For the two political activists, it was also a joyous day, the very first time that 1 May would be officially recognised in South Africa as Workers’ Day, as it had been elsewhere for so many years.
For their dogs, the bleak and cloudy day offered an ideal opportunity for fun and they barked happily as they played and ran among the mine dumps at Crown Mines with David and Maggie. On the way home, they popped in at a nursery to pick up some plants, then drove to their favourite bakery in Hillbrow for bread rolls straight from the oven to have with brunch.
The men in the white Ford Laser spotted David’s vehicle as soon as he turned into Eleanor Street.
‘Well, fuck me!’ said Ferdi joyfully. ‘Workers’ Day is our lucky day. Thanks, Karl Marx.’
Following the bakkie slowly and at a distance, Ferdi fired a verbal broadside at Calla. ‘Ja, and you didn’t want to get your lazy arse out of bed, because no one goes out in such crappy weather, hey!’
Like a well-oiled machine, the pair moved into action. Methodically, as though programmed, their brains moved into top gear and adrenalin pumped through their veins. In the passenger seat, Ferdi slammed a cartridge into Buksie’s rump and clicked the safety catch to red. Calla maintained a steady speed as he fished the balaclavas out of Buksie’s carry-bag and tossed one into Ferdi’s lap. With one hand on the steering wheel, he used the other to pull the mask over his head, glancing around quickly to make sure that none of Webster’s neighbours were in their gardens and might be watching. Everything was quiet. It was ideal bed-weather, after all, so who wanted to be outdoors in the cold?
David stopped outside the house and asked Maggie to take their track-suits and the groceries inside, while he went around the back of the vehicle to let the dogs out. The Ford Laser drove up slowly from behind, but David didn’t even notice. Ferdi’s window was rolled down and the balaclava covered his head and face.
Just as David moved to open the bakkie’s back door, Ferdie leant out of the window, Buksie in hand, and called: ‘Webster!’ It was then that David realised there was a vehicle next to him. As he turned, he looked straight into Ferdi’s brown eyes, burning like hot coals behind his mask. Ferdi was satisfied. He had looked Webster in the eye. He was the last person to see the Wits academic’s eyes shining with life.
At the very instant that he squeezed Buksie’s trigger and felt the weapon jerk in his hands, he knew the job was done. Calla put his foot down on the accelerator and they raced down quiet Eleanor Street, turned left and made their getaway from Troyeville.
Maggie was so busy gathering up parcels and tracksuits inside the vehicle that the sound of the gunshot didn’t even register. It was only when the murder car sped away that she became aware of it.
The next moment, David stumbled around from the back of the bakkie, clutching his bloody chest.
‘I’ve been shot with a shotgun, get an ambulance,’ were Dr David Webster’s last words before he collapsed at Maggie’s feet. The police and paramedics rushed to the scene, but there was nothing they could do for the dying man. Ferdi had fired at such close range that a paramedic found the cardboard plug from the shotgun cartridge embedded in Webster’s chest.
Ferdi was ejecting the used cartridge from Buksie’s barrel when, from the corner of his eye, he noticed that there was a car behind them, and he quickly reloaded the gun. His nine-mil was on the floor between his feet in case of a shootout, but fortunately the other car overtook them and drove on without incident.
Oddly enough, the mood in the Ford Laser was sombre, and there was no whiff of triumph as the assassins joined the stream of holiday traffic and made their way home. It was a little after 10 a.m. when David Webster took his last breath on the pavement outside his home in Troyeville.
The first thing Ferdi and Calla did was get rid of the balaclavas. After dropping Calla and taking the Laser back to Brenda, Ferdi turned his attention to Buksie, literally smashing the murder weapon to pieces. A few days later, he threw the remains into the municipal dam at Nylstroom.
Webster’s assassination was a media sensation, both in South Africa and abroad. Allegations that a Third Force was responsible for all the gruesome efforts to destroy the ANC’s underground network resurfaced in newspapers and on television.
At the Union Buildings, the NP politicians started feeling hot under the collar – again – as tricky questions rained down on South Africa from all corners of the world. Military and police generals, facing relentless pressure, decided a diversion was needed to turn attention elsewhere. After all, they were the ones who had to bear the brunt of such fuck-ups and clean up the government’s mess, time and time again.
Within days of Webster’s murder, it was announced that advocate Tim McNally, Attorney-General of the Free State, and General Krappie Engelbrecht of the police had been appointed to investigate the killing. The irony was that Krappie and the members of the CCB’s Region 5 were old pals from Brixton Murder and Robbery.
As it happened, Calla was reading the report in Beeld about McNally and Krappie’s appointment when the two assassins stopped at the Hyperama in Roodepoort for Ferdi’s appointment with Lafras Luitingh. Calla stayed in the car, and it wasn’t long before Ferdi returned with an envelope full of cash.
‘Here, old buddy,’ he said, shoving R5 000 into Calla’s hand. ‘That’s your fair share of the job you helped carry out.’
Laffies had paid Ferdi R15 000 in cash for the Webster murder and Ferdi himself had decided that Calla deserved a share.
‘Thanks. Did you see this about Krappie?’ Calla asked.
Ferdi scanned the report quickly, then said dismissively: ‘Ha ha ha. Don’t worry, the “Sweeper” will take care of things. The general always covers the tracks when people are wasted. We’re safe.’
Exactly how safe they were was open to question, as media speculation and allegations were getting ever closer to them. More and more fingers were being pointed in the direction of the CCB and its number one executioner, Ferdi Barnard. In Johannesburg’s underworld, the whispers were also getting louder. Even Dick and Paul climbed on the bandwagon and opened their big mouths, spreading one rumour after another in the pubs. Talking shit and spreading gossip had long been their forte.
By November, six months after Webster’s death, the silence about his assassination was so deafening that the police were forced to do something to dispel the belief that they were involved in an official cover-up. Ferdi and Calla were detained for questioning under Section 29 of the Internal Security Act. This draconian piece of legislation had been aimed at the commies and the ANC kaffirs. To be picked up in terms of that law spelt shit, big time. You could be held for as long as the government liked, and you would sit until you were ready to sing. It was definitely not for sissies.
McNally and Krappie were supposed to get to the bottom of accusations that Webster was the victim of a state conspiracy. It wasn’t irregular, therefore, for Krappie to visit the two suspects in the police cells. But he didn’t want to interrogate them about the Webster murder; merely to safeguard the cover-up campaign.
‘Good day, boys,’ he greeted them in characteristically friendly fashion while a police constable locked the cell behind him. ‘So tell me, Oubasie, is everything all right?’ he asked, shaking Ferdi’s hand. ‘Are they treating you well enough here? What’s the food like? Who has come to interrogate you so far?’ Krappie asked.
‘I want you to listen to me carefully. We are going to get you out of here, but you have to keep your bloody mouths shut. If you go and open them, I will not be able to guarantee your safety outside. Neither Joe, nor the prez, nor anyone else will be able to save you if you drop us.’
That was the purpose of his visit – to warn the two men to remain silent. There wasn’t the slightest suggestion that he was genuinely investigating Webster’s murder, and he left the cell as quickly as he had arrived.
‘Hmmm, what did I tell you, old buddy,’ were Ferdi’s first words after the brief visit. ‘We’ve just witnessed the Sweeper in action. I can’t believe the old man could honestly think we would fucking pimp on them.’
Life in the police cells was tolerable and visitors came and went at will. Section 29 was, after all, applicable only to commies and the ANC kaffirs. For Ferdi and Calla it was home comforts and decent treatment all the way. Meanwhile, they were out of harm’s way and the newspapers couldn’t reach them with their crappy questions.
Their buddies came to visit, and there was no problem finding out what was happening on the outside. No one could accuse Ferdi and Calla of panicking. In fact, detention offered an escape from panic and the senseless quest to nail Webster’s killers.
And, to crown it all, one of DCC’s men paid a visit – not casually, but with a purpose; and Ferdi and Calla didn’t mind at all hearing what the vibes were outside. They cracked up with mirth when they heard who the defence force had named to probe the CCB and the hit squads. It was none other than Lieutenant General Witkop Badenhorst – that hardy veteran of South West; the fighting general who, years before in Sector 10, had done a splendid job of fucking up SWAPO. He’d been a brigadier then, and a superb terrie hunter who had distinguished himself as an excellent soldier – until fame and fortune turned his head.
‘What the fuck are you telling me, huh?’ was Ferdi’s reaction when the DCC guy told him that Witkop had been appointed to investigate allegations of a Third Force and the CCB’s activities. ‘My God, man, what are you telling me?’ Ferdi reiterated, highly amused. ‘Old Witkop, of all people! That’s fucking good news for us, but actually, it’s enough to make you puke. That doos is the boss of both Joe and the CCB! How the fuck can he conduct the investigation? I must say, Vlokkie and Magnus are masters at covering things up. Thanks to them, we’re safe,’ said Ferdi smugly, winking at Calla.
Two days later, Ferdi and Calla were released. That there was no evidence against them, and they were free to go, were the last words spoken to them as they signed out.
In the interim, Dick had taken his discharge from the defence force a month before the assassination. He didn’t really have much choice, as the young troops didn’t like what they perceived to be his ‘attraction’ to them at all. He was no longer a soldier – or rather, a spy – but, thanks to that inimitable esprit de corps, he stayed in touch with his old buddies.
These bonds were further reinforced when Dick took a job as barman at the Cardiff Hotel. Almost overnight it became the place where the spy ring met to consume vast amounts of liquor and talk shit. The Johannesburg city council’s undercover operatives were also regular visitors. Dick was not only able to stay abreast of events, but also offered unsolicited advice on dirty tricks that were still being staged regularly.
Criminal attacks and intimidation by the faceless monster against leftists in the Golden City continued unabated. Houses mysteriously caught fire during the night, hand grenades detonated in people’s gardens and activists were assaulted without reason, while the long arm of the law appeared totally disinterested in bringing the unknown perpetrators to book.
But, despite everything else that was going on, the newspapers simply would not let the ghost of Webster’s murder rest. The Star and Weekly Mail made damn sure that the government could not sleep peacefully at night. There were just too many persistent rumours of a Third Force operating behind the scenes. And then the Star dropped a bombshell when the highly secretive operations of the city council’s dirty tricks squad were divulged by an insider. The newspapers spared no one as the heinous truth was bared day after day on their front pages, to the government’s great consternation.
In the end, the authorities had no alternative but to call Judge Victor Hiemstra out of retirement to head a commission of inquiry into the activities of the Johannesburg city council’s spy ring.
Almost a year after Webster had been shot to death, the Hiemstra Commission opened its hearings in Johannesburg.
One of the first witnesses was a former senior supervisor in the council’s information department, Johan Beetge, who testified that it had been his impression that the administrative head of the information network, Frik Barnard, had merely used it as a front for the military. It turned out that Barnard was a major with Military Intelligence.
Then the shit really hit the fan. Hannes Gouws, former section head in the city council’s information department, who had been the Star’s Deep Throat and source of all the gory details about the spy ring, laid bare his soul in front of Judge Hiemstra.
‘I worked with a group of people at DCC,’ Gouws confessed. ‘Together with people from the city council and the defence force, we burnt down houses. We assaulted people, beat up actors and broke bones. I heard that the people who shot Webster were in the group I worked with.’
He also testified that he was cooperating with the Harms Commission, appointed to investigate the death squads.
There was no stopping Gouws as he publicly laundered the dirty tricks squad’s soiled linen. At DHQ and Wachthuis, military and police generals ran around like headless chickens, trying to put out fires. The services of the defence force’s ComOps division and the StratCom boys from the police were hastily enlisted to help with disinformation campaigns and cover-ups in a desperate attempt to contain the damage.
‘Look, Colonel,’ was the order to Vic McPherson, the police StratCom expert and best friend of many a journalist at the newspapers as well as the SABC, ‘feed as much crap as possible to your contacts so that we can manage this ball of shit coming out of the Hiemstra hearings.’
It was damage control born of sheer panic. After all, old Vic was a master of his craft, and many a day he had laughed up his sleeve at the way journalists swallowed his propaganda, disguised as tip-offs, like hot cakes. There was no doubt that the man was good at what he did, and no one was better in a crisis – a consummate illusionist when it came to disinformation.
But, for the first time in the history of National Party rule, the dam wall had been breached and a river of blood flooded the collective conscience of ordinary South Africans with information about dirty tricks, Third Force activities and death squads.
In Johannesburg it was Judge Hiemstra, and in Pretoria Judge Louis Harms, who were systematically prising open the heart of the whore. There was no end in sight.
And just to rub salt in the wounds, Gouws testified about the close links between the Johannesburg city council’s information department and the defence force, the inseparable Siamese twins. Every one of the city council agents was connected to the military in some way or another.
Members of the defence force and the city council had been drawn together in a team to perform certain tasks in 1986 and 1987. Task teams did not always consist of the same people.
‘Among other things,’ Gouws said, ‘it was decided to assault an actor so that performances of a play that portrayed the defence force in a bad light would have to be stopped.’
Gouws could not recall the actor’s name, but thought the play might have been Somewhere on the Border.
Many of the orders had come from Major Johan Laubscher of the defence force. Operational decisions were usually taken at a farm owned by the defence force near Fourways in Sandton, Gouws testified. The property was, of course, the Diepsloot smallholding rented by Dick on Laubscher’s instructions.
The unit had set fire to a house in the Yeoville area after Laubscher identified it as ‘an ANC headquarters’. Gouws, who took part in this attack, testified that the men worked in pairs. ‘One guy would smash the windows and pour petrol into the house. The second guy would then set it alight.’
The military component of the arson team consisted of Johan and his brother Frik (the RAU student), Dick Greyling and Paul de Swardt, while Nico Cronje, Nic Vlok and Gouws were from the city council. Part of their job was the regular intimidation of people in Soweto.
‘People were beaten and slapped and threatened that their houses would be burnt down,’ said Gouws when advocate Gilbert Marcus asked if violence had been used against the ECC, UDF and Black Sash. ‘I was personally involved in eleven or twelve acts of intimidation. Major Laubscher had the names and addresses of people who had to be intimidated.’
Gouws added that the activities of the defence force and the city council were so closely intertwined that it was impossible to tell them apart.
The military and police propaganda machine had smothered the slightest whisper of hit squads or a Third Force for far too long. The media pounced on every snippet and revelation that emerged at the Hiemstra Commission, and shouted the details in banner headlines and on street posters. Revenge was sweet. Everyone had always known there was a dark force operating in the shady world of dirty tricks and espionage, but no one had even succeeded in exposing it.
The cherry on top was what Gouws had to say about the Webster murder. The generals and their executioners held their breath for fear of what would happen next and, when Gouws told Judge Hiemstra that Paul de Swardt had killed the Wits academic, there was panic at the highest level and a mad scramble to apply damage control.
Gouws testified that a few days before appearing at the commission, while he and Dick Greyling were having drinks at the Cardiff Hotel, Dick had told him in the utmost confidence that Paul had murdered Webster. The word spread rapidly and, when it reached Paul, he immediately telephoned SAPA and vehemently denied that he was the assassin. He made the call from the Cardiff Hotel, where Dick worked. Beeld reported that Paul left the hotel with two military men shortly afterwards. At the time, the hotel was the regular watering hole of the military and city council agents, who were locked in an unholy alliance and who used the premises to plot and plan operations behind closed doors.
The defence force’s ComOps personnel had sprung into action to ensure that neither journalists nor Brigadier Floris Mostert, who was investigating the Webster murder, could reach Dick and Paul. Floris reported directly to General Jaap Joubert at police headquarters, Wachthuis. Oom Jaap was a seasoned detective, appointed national head of detectives by Adriaan Vlok specifically to coordinate the Webster probe.
However, that proved easier said than done. Between Joe Verster and his CCB cohorts, and Krappie Engelbrecht in the police, it was all but impossible for any detective to do his job properly. Floris and Jaap were screwed at every turn by Krappie and Co. Unthinkable as it might seem, the police had launched an investigation into the activities of alleged death squads and were hunting the Webster killers on the one hand, while, on the other hand, and at the same time, certain elements within the police were trying to scupper such investigations at all costs, their efforts sanctioned from on high within both the general staff and government ranks.
The situation became so acrimonious that at one point, in sheer desperation, Jaap Joubert leaked details about their investigations to journalists, hoping this would stop the cover-ups.
Gouws had barely finished telling the commission about Paul before ComOps swung into action to ameliorate the effect of his words.
PJ himself rushed to the Cardiff Hotel and picked up Dick and Paul.
‘Boys, you and your fucking big mouths have caused shit, big time,’ he told them angrily in a corner of the bar. He ordered them into his car there and then and drove to the defence force’s legal representative. Advocate Roux and Colonel Rusty van Rooyen were expecting them.
After lengthy discussion, it was decided that the two men had to go into hiding. Dick protested, pointing out that he was no longer a serving member of the defence force and could do as he pleased, but PJ, on the recommendation of the legal counsellor and Colonel Rusty, nipped that supposition in the bud.
‘For God’s sake, Dick, do you really want Floris to pick you up and hold you under Section 29 until you make a statement that he’s happy with? Floris is already on your trail, and you know that bloody crack detective. He’s like a pit bull, and once he gets the scent he doesn’t let go.’
PJ knew what he was talking about. Floris was the former murder and robbery commander in Cape Town. He had no time for politics. Not even the security police had been able to divert him in his pursuit of Webster’s killers.
No sooner was Dick back at the Cardiff than Paul pulled up behind the hotel in a white Mercedes. He’d borrowed the car from Danny Zietsman, a friend of PJ’s.
‘Right, buddy, your loose lips have stirred up all this shit for us. Now we have to lie low,’ was Paul’s only reference to Dick’s chat with Gouws. ‘We have to take the pain, but at least it’ll draw attention away from the real assassins,’ Paul comforted himself about the situation he found himself in.
The two men had just got into the Mercedes when Floris walked through the hotel’s front door. He had wasted no time and wanted to grab Dick and Paul while the iron was hot.
From the hotel, Dick and Paul drove straight to Nelspruit, where they spent a few days with friends of Paul’s while waiting for the dust to settle. Then they moved to Boksburg and hid out with the Zietsmans while making plans to disappear somewhere on the platteland.
Floris, meanwhile, travelled to Stellenbosch to question a young engineering student who had done his national service with Dick and his dirty tricks squad. Snowy Pretorius was a second lieutenant who had been trained as an intelligence officer in Kimberley in February 1988. From December 1988 he was attached to Wits Command, and Floris hoped that Snowy could tell him where Dick and Paul were hiding.
Twenty-year-old Snowy was more than happy to give Floris a sworn affidavit about his time in the military.
‘My job was to collect information about anti-government organisations, and I came to know Dick Greyling and Paul de Swardt. I am aware that the Johannesburg city council also operated an intelligence network, in collaboration with Military Intelligence.’
Two days before Webster was shot, Snowy wanted to photograph graffiti in Yeoville. ‘Someone in the office suggested that I ask one Paul de Swardt to take the photographs, since he was already working in the area. I was not told what he was doing there. As a result, I did not go.’
In March 1990, Snowy went to see Dick at the Cardiff one night. Dick told him that he and Paul had trained people on a farm to do certain things. ‘I came to the conclusion that the tasks he referred to were aimed at people and intended to cause harm. Following this conversation I told Dick that in the light of what he had told me, I thought Paul had something to do with Webster,’ Snowy told Floris.
‘I believed there was a connection, because I’d been told that Paul was working in Yeoville at the time Webster was shot in neighbouring Troyeville.’
While Floris was in Stellenbosch, PJ was trying feverishly to get Dick and Paul out of Johannesburg as soon as possible. Every news hound was on their trail, and PJ got cold shivers when he thought about what the generals in Pretoria would do to him if any newspaper tracked them down. Dick’s big mouth in particular would cause General Joffel to shit himself, and PJ wasn’t going to let anything jeopardise his relationship with the generals.
The fugitives were still relatively safe in Boksburg. Danny and PJ were good friends, but they didn’t want to push their luck too far. It was a fairly cool evening when the group gathered around a braaivleis fire to punish a few Castles and throw ideas around about their next move.
‘Hell, Danny, we have to try and help these guys,’ said PJ by way of introduction. ‘Paul and Dick are in the shit, and if they don’t disappear, I’ll be swimming in it with them.’
So PJ and Danny came up with the idea that Paul should hit the road for the Far Northern Transvaal and see if they couldn’t set up a business transporting tomatoes from the Gants processing plant.
Danny and his wife Stephanie were involved in the import and restoration of trucks from England, and they would help by providing the vehicles. Paul and PJ left the very next day on a reconnaissance trip. When they came back, they were beaming from ear to ear.
‘Dick, my old buddy, we are going to make millions,’ were Paul’s first words when they saw one another. ‘We’ve even organised a safe house between nothing and nowhere. Neither Floris nor any other flatfoot will track us down there.’
Paul wasn’t bullshitting about the desolation of the place. Mopani was nothing but a godforsaken small rail siding on the main line to Zimbabwe, between Messina and Louis Trichardt. There was no longer even a stationmaster, and the railway cottages stood empty and abandoned. It was just the place for the fugitives to vanish into obscurity.
Transven was the company responsible for moving the Gants products from Venda to the Witwatersrand, and the guys hoped they would be awarded the road transport contract. If they succeeded, they would all be in the pound seats.
In August 1990, another soldier joined the group at Mopani. Choppy van den Berg had just been discharged from the defence force, where he had worked for Paul.
‘It was me, Danny Zietsman, PJ, Dick and Paul who lived there,’ Choppy recalled. Things were going well and money seemed to be no object. After all, the military wanted to keep Dick and Paul happy, quiet and out of harm’s way, so they paid. Each of the men had a fancy car, and it was an easy drive to Messina or Louis Trichardt for nightly drinking sessions.
Choppy and Paul each had a BMW 320, Dick a Mazda 626 and PJ a Merc. ‘All the cars were rented from Imperial. The branch at Jan Smuts Airport, and I think they were in PJ or Stephanie’s name,’ according to Choppy.
‘I lived with them for eight months. First at Mopani, and then I moved with them to the farm, Masequa, outside Louis Trichardt. The transport business never really got off the ground, but that didn’t seem to bother any of them. Nor did they seem to be scared of the cops picking them up, because Dick and Paul often travelled to Pretoria and Johannesburg.’
It seemed obvious that someone high up – higher than the generals in the top echelon of government – had issued instructions for the group to be left alone. Even General Jaap Joubert felt that his hands had been tied. Although he and Floris knew about Mopani, they dared not go there to apprehend the men.
Choppy was convinced that Dick and Paul knew who had killed Webster. ‘They were protected by the defence force and they were well taken care of, as long as we stayed far away from Johannesburg and didn’t make waves,’ he observed. ‘It became very clear to me that they were used as lightning conductors to turn attention away from the real assassin’s identity.’
It must have been boring at times for young men to hide in the dusty environment of Mopani and Masequa. Sex and booze have always been good mixers, and one of the group, who was married, got involved in a sizzling affair with a young doctor in Louis Trichardt. Loverboy also bought a vintage Daimler that he planned to restore. The car was abandoned on the doctor’s farm when the group eventually returned to the Witwatersrand.
The highly imaginative scheme that was going to make the spooks all filthy rich turned out to be nothing but more pie in the sky. They never won the transport tender, and the trucks stood idly gathering dust.
When things calmed down and interest in Dick and Paul waned, they quietly slipped back home and picked up their lives. The military’s financial generosity came to an end as well, and Dick found himself in something of a bind. With no job and no home, his sister had given him a place to sleep in Johannesburg, but he had to find a way of generating some cash.
Apparently, his loyalty came cheap. He offered documents – boxes full of them – and his story as a member of the defence force’s dirty tricks squad in Johannesburg to me. The deal included a sworn affidavit about his life and times as a spy, and earned him the princely sum of R500.
Needless to say, there was a fresh outbreak of panic in official circles, but the damage was less harmful than before, since by then both the people of South Africa and the media were punch-drunk. They had been hit so often with tales of death squads and CCB operatives in acrylic wigs and cheap sunglasses turning the Harms Commission into a circus that nothing shocked them any more.
Oh yes – in June 1998, Ferdi Barnard was finally convicted by the Pretoria High Court of murdering Webster, and of a string of other crimes. Two years after being sentenced to life imprisonment, he finally admitted guilt, but by then it was too late. Ferdi was one of numerous operators who refused to apply for amnesty, and although it was at the TRC that he told the truth, possibly for the first time in his life, it didn’t help him in the least. His career as one of apartheid’s executioners had its genesis behind bars and, his belated revelations notwithstanding, that’s where it ended.