Government residence, Pretoria, October 2005, Week one
THERE WERE MANY TASKS and I was seized by another matter. I stared at the file. It was very thick and uninviting, and I was dog tired. It was undated and purported to represent the joint findings of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), the National Intelligence Coordinating Committee (NICOC) and the South African Police Service (SAPS) regarding the leaking of sensitive information from the elite crime-busting Directorate of Special Operations (the Scorpions) to the media. I stared at the logos on the cover – NICOC, NIA, SAPS – and felt my bed calling. I yawned again and stretched. Not the kind of bedtime reading I cared to wade through in the dead of night. But I had been impatiently waiting for it well before the Macozoma incident and instead of leaving perusal to the following day I began to page slowly through the weighty tome.
I had arrived home late after a very long day seemingly chasing shadows. Eleanor had an appetising meal ready for me in our ministerial home on the government’s Bryntirion estate in Pretoria, close to the Union Buildings. It was a splendid parkland setting, offset by intimidating security fencing and police-manned access gates. It boasted a presidential residence, a palatial Herbert Baker guesthouse decidedly creaking in places, and a score of double-storey residences for government ministers spread out across the tree-lined grounds with their extensive lawns and flower beds. Compared with the great Herbert Baker, the architects of the ministerial residences were not up to designing even an outhouse. Most of the homes, like the one I resided in, were box-like, gloomy and shabby with uneven floorboards – much the worse for wear – dating back to the 1940s. Just a few were uninspired post-1970s erections. Eleanor, who had done much with her decorative talent to brighten the abode, waited for me to finish my meal.
‘Your man Billy was here delivering a hefty file,’ she puckered her nose. ‘I put it on your desk,’ adding, ‘Rather ill at ease I would say – didn’t care to wait for you – out of here like a shot.’
At last he’s delivered the long-standing report, I muttered to myself. I had been pressing for it for weeks, sensing it might be linked to Masetlha’s strange behaviour. My suspicions had been aroused by the Macozoma scandal and the elusive phantoms that had invaded my life. I assumed Masetlha was at last rushing the report to me, given the inspector general’s investigation hanging over his head. I banished all thought of bed and sat down at a battered desk eyeing the document as though it was a jack-in-the-box. I was getting attuned to Masetlha’s ways. He would have known I was working late at the ministry, where he could easily have handed it to me. But that gave him the opportunity to leave it at the house, where he knew we wouldn’t come face to face. What was more, only he as head of NIA had signed off on the report. There were no corresponding signatures from the heads of the other two agencies whose logos adorned the cover. Yet it was supposed to be a joint investigation. In checking up with them later, I discovered they had not seen it at all, which rendered it a non-report. In fact, the police commissioner, Jackie Selebi, his one-time close associate from Soweto days, was indignant that the report had not passed by him, and made it clear to me that he was losing patience with his old chum. Although the two had issued a joint statement denying media reports about an angry dispute between them, I sensed this was a public relations spin and that there must indeed have been a basis for that account.
With relief I noticed that the actual report was under a hundred pages. The rest of the file, the bulk of it, consisted of attachments and inserts, hundreds of pages, of sections and subsections from this Act and that Act, letters between department heads, analyses of media reports, with dubious guesswork and nothing really substantive about where the media leaks were emanating from. The DSO/Scorpions and certain of its officials were prime suspects. But much was subjectivity dressed up in an ostensibly objective guise.
This was the world of ‘link charts’ in diagram form featuring a prime suspect at the centre with lines linking him or her to others. These links were made by dint of phone intercepts, mobile phone billing records, or occasions when the individual was observed having coffee in a cafe with someone else who, once identified, would end up as yet another link in the chain of contacts spiralling out from the centre of the chart. The chart itself was like a spider’s web with a photograph of every contact in his or her specific place. I once had enquired about a suspect linked to a foreign embassy. The allegation was simply based on a phone call. What, I asked, if the call was innocent, an enquiry about obtaining a visa, for instance? Did that merit the opening of a file; the development of a link chart; the wasting of precious time and resources; the addition of one more name as part of a fishing expedition? There had been a tentative explanation from a shifty case officer. Sorry, I said, something like that needs to be substantiated and not simply based on a phone call. But I received no response apart from an unblinking dinosaur-eyed gaze. I have no doubt that it was this kind of stubborn insistence that led some to assume I was shielding foreign agents.
I had to read and re-read the report to be sure I understood what it was getting at. It was well past 2 a.m. The ministerial estate was dark and silent – almost eerie. Only Mbeki, an inveterate night owl, would be wide awake, busy surfing the internet – the thought spurred me on in my endeavours. Better read every damn annexure. I pored over page upon page of bureaucratic documentation. It was just the type of paperwork with which disgruntled bureaucrats relish taxing their minister. And then as I was nodding off I sat up with a start. Nestling between a few substantial annexures I came across a dozen pages of emails.1 I could easily have missed them had I been idly flicking through the attachments – as most ministers were inclined to do. The names Saki Macozoma and Bulelani Ngcuka jumped out at me, and an email message between them with the provocative title ‘Death knell’ and the sentence ‘we are making sure the Zulu bastard is nailed to the cross’ almost jolted my eyes out of their sockets.
I scanned further emails, one containing the promise by Macozoma to see to ‘the promotion of Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka’ to the deputy presidency. As previously explained she was the wife of Bulelani Ngcuka, former National Director of Public Prosecutions (NDPP), under which the Scorpions resided. As I have related, Phumzile had been promoted by Mbeki to replace Zuma as his deputy in June 2005. The mail was dated February, well before Zuma’s June dismissal. How on earth could Saki possibly have guessed that Schabir Shaik would be found guilty the following June and that the judgment would sink Zuma, consequently forcing Mbeki’s hand? That was impossible unless Macozoma was a brilliant clairvoyant. There was no way he could have been forewarned unless the judge was in his pocket. And, anyway, a good four months away from the judgment the judge could not have already made up his mind. This alone pointed to a concocted email that had been backdated in a crude attempt to provide credibility to Macozoma’s promise – and ensnare the gullible. Those manufacturing or manipulating such emails would pepper the text, made up of truths and half-truths, with such ‘predictions’ and backdate the correspondence to prove credibility – a simple conjuror’s trick.
But the most obvious pointer to the fact the emails were fake was that they were not encrypted. The supposed plotters would certainly have taken the trouble to use a coded programme to ensure the security of their dangerous exchanges. They would be courting disaster, including imprisonment, by taking such an absurd risk. None of them were fools. They were all highly educated and aware of the need for secure communication. I shook my head in disbelief. There was reference to ‘nailing’ Masetlha, and isolating him from the ‘Chief’ and the ‘reigning [sic] in of Motlantle [sic]’ and need to ‘seek Bulelani’s assistance in uncovering where Motlantle [sic] got his [recently purchased] house from’. That was a reference to the ANC secretary-general, the highly respected Kgalema Motlanthe. The idea that comrades who had been involved in the struggle would be so blasé about their security as to plot in such a reckless and naïve manner was absurd. Further, these were people who were often in each other’s company, living in close proximity, encountering one another in their daily activities. Why on earth would they run the risk of mailing one another when they could easily converse in person? The observation ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive’2 repeatedly came to mind as I contemplated such utterly crude attempts to mislead, misdirect and sow confusion. The tragedy is that it often works. Those who manufacture the mischief are clearly encouraged by the ease with which the politically naïve fall for their ruses. Those with common interests jump at the chance to raise a commotion.
A few pages on I was even more startled to come across the names of Tony Leon, the Democratic Alliance leader, and Anton Harber, the editor of the Mail & Guardian, elaborating on the ‘Whiteman’s Struggle’. This was in a ‘chat room’ conversation with unlikely bedfellows from the old white regime serving the new: policemen and prosecutors such as Johan and Izak du Plooy, Gerrie Nel and General Roos involved in the work of the National Directorate of Prosecutions and the DSO/Scorpions. Without any regard for their security they had blithely conspired to foment splits within the ANC and supposedly planned how to plant dubious stories in the media. The idea that such clued-up individuals would be communicating nefarious plots in such a manner, which could open them up to charges of treason, was unbelievable. And Harber and Leon would certainly not align themselves with such reactionary twaddle as the ‘Whiteman’s Struggle’. This was bizarre.
In fact, the most jarring of reputed statements was that of the state prosecutor Gerrie Nel, saying of Judge Sisi Khampepe, who was then presiding over the Scorpions’ future in a judicial commission: ‘This woman has our future in her hands. It’s either she sides with us or she goes the Kebble way.’ Crooked business tycoon Brett Kebble, benefactor of ANC Youth League leaders among others, had died under mysterious circumstances, and here was a state prosecutor being prepared to ‘openly’ advocate the elimination of a judge. This was sheer fantasy. And as for motive, it was not as though Nel’s whole career as a much sought-after jurist would go down the drain if the Scorpions were to be dissolved. He could get a job anywhere. It hardly followed that he would be prepared to kill to save his career. It seemed to me that the nonsense was primarily aimed at those who wanted to believe that a conspiracy aimed against Zuma actually existed. The mails purportedly stemmed from two groups of plotters not necessarily in league but both aiming at preventing Jacob Zuma from becoming president of the country. The one was an ANC faction around Macozoma and Ngcuka, and the other a white supremacist group around Tony Leon.
All thought of sleep banished, I read the emails with total concentration, studying and considering every line, fullstop and comma. Although not an expert in electronic communications, I had enough knowledge of emails to understand that computer-generated mail had a fixed consistency following automatic machine-defined protocols, conventions and formats over which the sender had no control. These had nothing whatsoever to do with a person’s compilation of his or her message. This applied to the setting of sender’s name, address, date and time sent, with commas, fullstops and symbols automatically generated by the computer in the send and receive field, which follows a strict pattern, spacing and order. If the sequence of such automated punctuation is inconsistent, which was the case with the mails I was studying, then the protocols were not computer-generated but manufactured by hand, as in laboriously typing out the format on a keyboard. And I could see the sequences between various emails were inconsistent. They could not therefore be genuine. Someone had gone to extraordinary lengths to make them look as though they were.
In due course, the inspector general would employ IT experts to forensically examine the emails. Much more knowledge relevant to electronic mail and computer coding was beyond a novice like me. All the technicalities aside, the actual ‘political’ subject matter of the emails was unsophisticated and extremely crude. That alone should have raised doubt about their authenticity since people like Macozoma, Mlambo-Ngcuka, Tony Leon and Anton Harber just did not talk and write like that.
My initial reaction as the first light of day was seeping through the curtains of my study, with the sound of early birds stirring, was a chilling sensation. The house was dark and silent. I paced up and down in the study, the old floorboards creaking, as I collected my thoughts. I visualised an uproar in the country. If these fake emails were leaked to the media, an occurrence which had become only too common, the opposition, not to mention the likes of the waspish Tony Leon, would be apoplectic. It would put the government on the back foot, desperately fighting against the perception it was up to no good. There was not a moment to lose. I drafted a letter to Masetlha raising my concerns about the emails and enquiring about their origin. With that letter on the record, I began to feel at ease, since by that action I had at least covered the government against any allegation of dirty tricks, which in my view the emails were designed to provoke. But it was not only damage limitation that had to be attended to. It was trying to figure out who was behind the mischief and what was Masetlha’s role. One had to avoid being bogged down by the disinformation but instead look for its source. The air had become thick with conspiracy. I needed some fresh air and paced up and down on my lawn with the dew-laced grass squelching underfoot. Two inelegant hadedas, with their long decurved bills, were stalking about looking for worms as dawn arrived. Extremely nervous creatures, they took flight at my appearance, emitting their shrill haaah-dah-dah cries as though from some place in purgatory – a mocking chorus to the spectres I was hunting.
Wide awake, almost disbelieving what I had read, I decided to re-read the twenty or so emails. In so doing I realised how even the most obvious errors could be easily missed.
A short mail from Bulelani Ngcuka to Saki Macozoma, subject ‘The death knell’, on 6 February 2005, in response to Saki, indicating that he would provide him with some financial security, ran: ‘I’ll appreciate that Bulelani. I’m in dire straits man, I really am. I’ll wait for your call – Bulelani.’ I sniggered in disbelief. That was Bulelani addressing himself, instead of Saki. Who were these guys making such blatant errors?
As if that was poor workmanship, just a few mails later, Saki wrote to Phumzile, Bulelani’s wife, on 26 April, indicating that he would be helping Bulelani to the tune of R5 million ‘as a token of our gratitude.’ In her letter of thanks Phumzile expresses her appreciation. But her reply was dated 20 April – six days before he had sent her the letter. Surely once such blatant errors were pointed out, no person in their right mind would believe the trash – or so I thought.
It was going to be a perfect spring day, with the jacarandas starting to bloom in their stately mauve colours. I decided to take my early morning run around the estate, which kept me fit and focused in my advancing years. No point in trying to sleep for an hour or two at the most. The exercise would help to order my thoughts: nothing like the loneliness of the long-distance runner in moments like these. There were stirrings on the estate at the police post, and a civil servant was already washing a vehicle outside his bungalow in the early morning sunlight.
A feature of Bryntirion is the nine-hole golf course on which I sometimes chanced my arm. I jogged past Trevor Manuel and Alec Erwin, two early birds, teeing off at the first hole, taking advantage of the early morning light. They would be over and done before 7 a.m. and soon afterwards begin their day at the finance and public enterprise ministries respectively. When it came to the economic policy of the country, they were part of Mbeki’s inner circle and consequently objects of the growing ire of the left. Inveterate wits, they hurled advice at me: ‘Pick up the pace. The spooks are on your heels.’ If only they knew. It was nesting time for the resident plovers. The so-called blacksmith variety makes the distinctive ‘ping ping’ sound of metal striking metal. Whether golfer or jogger, you had to be on the lookout for their nests, for if you got too close, the male would swoop down on you like a Battle of Britain Spitfire and peck at your head. The nests were camouflaged in the rough terrain beside the fairways and the dive-bomber sorties were designed to divert one away from coming across them in spring when eggs had been laid. Now why did that remind me of plans being hatched?
I lost no time in briefing Mbeki in person. He had been dismayed about Saki Macozoma’s surveillance and keenly awaited the inspector general’s findings. More adept at computer technology than any of his ministers, he could easily see the fault lines of the emails. Like me, he was most perturbed. I lost no time either in bringing things out into the open. Call it the Dracula treatment – expose that which is sinister to the light of day. I issued a media statement warning the public of ‘hoax’ emails doing the rounds.
That evening I met Anton Harber to brief him; and the following day I briefed Tony Leon and his chief whip, Douglas Gibson. It was hard to say what they actually thought. They were certainly grateful that I had alerted them, Anton Harber included. I could not help thinking, however, they might be in two minds: that the emails, as fabricated as they were, might either be from Mbeki supporters out to damage Zuma or from Zuma supporters out to harm Mbeki. A classic example of spy versus spy. Paranoia was playing out in the political and media sphere. The ANC’s opponents would be only too pleased to hear about yet another example of brutish factional infighting within the ANC. To my mind, even a scant reading of the emails showed they were obviously fake and that the aim was to reinforce Zuma’s claims of a conspiracy against him. With my inner knowledge I deduced that a secondary aim was to get Masetlha off the hook on the ground that the correspondence justified the surveillance of Macozoma. But unless someone was as informed as I was, how could they possibly see that?
I was intrigued too by the references to Motlanthe. I believed he was an honest man and do to this day, and felt that he might have been caught up by doubts about conspiracy and his responsibilities as ANC secretary-general. The implication that he had somehow benefitted from ill-gotten gains inclined me to the view that whoever was responsible for formulating the emails might be seeking to win him to their side. I knew of no such indiscretion on his part and dismissed the references to his newly acquired home, which was by no means a luxurious mansion.
A recent fire at Luthuli House came to mind. It had occurred on the weekend when the surveillance operation against Macozoma began. Why had Billy Masetlha, according to eyewitnesses and a media report, been so determined to get inside the burning building? It was said he had donned fireman’s gear and had made a beeline for Motlanthe’s vacant office on the seventh floor where the fire had broken out. I had a hunch that there was a compelling motive behind this, for I had got wind of the fact that copies of the emails were being left anonymously at his door. The pieces of a complex jigsaw puzzle were beginning to fall into place. I met the inspector general, Zola Ngcakani, and it was agreed without fuss that he would extend his investigation to cover the emails, their veracity and source.
The appearance of those fake emails made me increase my usual vigilance. In wishing to contact Anton Harber to brief him that evening, I found myself resorting to the tradecraft of the clandestine days of struggle. I did not wish to contact him directly, given that he was obviously a target of forces which might include elements within my own services. I consequently decided to use a mutual friend as go-between. I got my driver to take me to David Beresford, the writer and journalist, who resided in Parkview, Johannesburg. He had been a reliable source of information when I was chief of MK military intelligence in exile. Back in South Africa I sometimes dropped by for a chat and a drink. There were two entrances to his house. My driver usually parked at the front entrance, as we did that evening. I explained to David that I needed to speak to Anton Harber, who lived close by, and that he should not mention my presence, but simply ask him to come over. I instructed David to ensure that Anton use the rear entrance which was out of sight of my driver. Though I had forged a good relationship with my driver, he was after all provided by the NIA and could conceivably be reporting my every move to the likes of Masetlha. David, who had written a bestseller about the IRA,3 was amused by the intrigue. With a twinkle in his eye, and without any question, he did exactly as I requested. Anton Harber arrived within ten minutes and the two of us had a private discussion in which I briefed him of his supposed involvement in high treason. Anton is an unflappable, softly spoken man and he took in what I was explaining without any sign of agitation.
Driving back to Pretoria that night, I mused about the surreal situation that had come to pass in the country. There I was, a chief of the intelligence services who dared not trust my own driver, a man I had grown fond of and who I believed had become loyal to me. I mused about Anton Harber, a patriotic South African with impeccable anti-apartheid credentials, who had done much by establishing his newspaper, the Mail & Guardian, during the apartheid years as a crusading mouthpiece for justice and truth. He had been targeted by the NIA, was being smeared by the emails, and the minister was indulging in clandestine methods of engagement with him. The irony was that journalists like Beresford and Harber had once been under the watchful eye of the apartheid spooks, and were now targets of bumblers in the NIA. When I got back to Bryntirion, those ubiquitous hadedas were hunting insects. One sight of me and off they flew in their ungainly way, emitting their hideous shrieks, which sounded like infants in distress.