Pretoria, March 2006 to March 2007
THE VOICE AT THE END of the line was indistinct and aggressive: ‘Balula here, I want the same treatment as Macozoma!’
I didn’t know a Balula and told the man so.
‘Balula! Balula!’ He grew irate and continued yapping. We remonstrated and I put the phone down.
When I checked with my secretary, she too had thought the caller, who first came through her, was a Balula, but added ‘from the ANC Youth League’.
I called back to apologise to Fikile Mbalula, who snapped at me, saying I had pretended not to recognise him. I reined in my temper and asked what he wanted.
In an aggressive tone he told me he believed he was under surveillance by NIA, and demanded the same treatment I had afforded Macozoma.
I told him that as with Macozoma’s complaint we needed information. If he wished I was ready to meet him and have the acting director general, Manala Manzini, present, but we needed facts.
He said he would be at my office within an hour. In the event he kept Manzini and me waiting for three hours.
He arrived in a sullen mood, swaggering in as though in a school yard, not bothering to apologise for being late. He provided a flimsy story with no facts, simply a suspicion that a stranger in the street outside Luthuli House appeared to have taken an interest in him. He could provide no identification of the man whatsoever. Hardly the stuff we could go on and certainly nowhere akin to Saki Macozoma’s complaint, which provided vehicle registration numbers, photographs and witnesses. He kept yawning during the meeting, eyes puffed and watery.
I explained that of course we would look into the matter. I arranged for him to have a further discussion with Manzini, and requested he put his complaint in writing. Manzini later reported that there was nothing of substance forthcoming, and we never received anything in written form nor did we hear from Mbalula again on the matter – except in the media.
The ANC Youth League, spoiling for a scrap, was among the first to issue a statement decrying the treatment that Billy Masetlha had received. ‘We reject the report by Ngcakani … as nothing else but a cover-up … on the basis that Kasrils and Ngcakani were implicated.’1 Implicated because we were referred to as conspirators in the fake emails? That was a laugh.
The Youth League’s stance reflected deepening division within the ANC, which could not be laughed off. In the prevailing climate – perceptions of spy versus spy, accusations of abuse of state power and resources, and fierce contestation between support for Mbeki and for Zuma – analysts were bound to see issues through such a prism.
Even investigative journalists like Sam Sole and Nic Dawes, who only had minor insight into Muzi Kunene’s role, saw things that way: ‘the situation may not be as clear-cut as a surface reading of the emails suggests. Firstly, mixing fiction with fact for a particular impact is a well-known intelligence technique … Whether this is the case … is not clear. But either way, the emails are evidence of a high-level conspiracy: either against Zuma if they are even partially true, or against Mbeki if they are false.’2
The two journalists from the Mail & Guardian were not the only ones to deal with the saga in a so-called even-handed manner, seeing no virtue in the incumbent President Mbeki, who must also, in their perception, be as culpable as Zuma. Time has since revealed how adept Zuma was in posing as the innocent victim of an odious conspiracy.
Journalist Paul Vecchiatto took a different approach, dealing with the facts before him, and avoiding any presumptions. He homed in on the smoking gun of the IG’s report – the technical inconsistencies of the emails. He quoted one of the country’s top national IT specialists: ‘The controversial email spoofing by members of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) has been described as “the work of amateurs with little or no understanding of technology” by Mervin Pearce, a member of the board of directors of the International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium.’3
Vecchiatto continued: ‘Pearce says the fact that spoof emails could have been generated through technology such as “anonymisers” – web-sites that help mask the original identity of the sender – or through an “email impersonator” indicates the sender [more accurately, the manufacturer] in this case had very little real knowledge about the internet or IT in general.’
The next step in the email saga was the proposed investigation by the independent ANC task team set up by Kgalema Motlanthe. It was the political commentator Moshoeshoe Monare who commented that ‘the hoax emails issue has ensnared Motlanthe’ in a conflictual situation with Mbeki, explaining, ‘When Motlanthe and a handful of the party’s executives resolutely refused to accept a government report dismissing contentious emails as fake, it was a reaffirmation of an extra-parliamentary ANC that did not trust … its own president and state organs.’4
The task team was headed by the ANC veteran Hermanus Loots (alias James Stuart). Other members of the team were the veterans Sophie Williams de-Bruyn and Joe Jele and the retired military generals Gilbert Romano and Jackie Sedibe.5 They were reinforced by the advocate Patric Mtshaulana. He had joined MK in the 1976 generation. I had enjoyed a good relationship with him in the Angolan camps, where he had been harassed for expressing critical views and I had defended his right to express himself.
That all was not well within the task team was evident when we learnt that General Sedibe resigned at the outset and later so did Joe Jele. It took well over a year for the task team’s report to be ready for presentation to the NEC. We patiently sat and listened as Hermanus Loots presented the findings, accompanied by Sophie Williams de-Bruyn, General Romano and Advocate Mtshaulana. Joe Jele’s absence was notable but not explained.
The gist of the findings, as explained by Loots, was that the emails were genuine and that the inspector general’s report was flawed. In particular, Billy Masetlha was vigorously defended. It was argued that the IG was wrong in finding that Masetlha was the author of the emails. ‘In our view,’ Loots explained, ‘this was unfounded,’ and the inquiry absolved Masetlha of guilt. If Masetlha was the author, the team argued, why would he want to discredit Judge Khampepe, as he was himself involved in her commission? That was an odd deduction. For me the logic was faulty. Copies of the report were handed out, and I jotted down some notes as Loots held the floor.6
Loots rejected the contention that Masetlha was the author of the emails. Yet the IG had never said he was. What the IG discovered was that Masetlha had paid Muzi Kunene for that task. The IG’s specialists, the criminologist, police and the IT experts were conclusive in the view that the emails and chat room documentation were bogus. The IG’s position was that the criminal proceedings he had recommended would hopefully reveal further evidence, including who was responsible for creating the emails.
What was surprising about the Loots report was that it showed no interest whatsoever in Muzi Kunene, despite his chequered past, his connections with the IFP and SADF intelligence, and his link with Masetlha and with Zuma, even if that was cursory.
While NEC members such as Alec Erwin and Frank Chikane observed at the meeting that the Loots report found no NEC members party to manufacturing the emails, and argued with others for its rejection on the grounds they were not authentic, as proved by the IG, I was skimming through the attachments to the documentation before us. It appeared that the task team needed to understand how easy it was to ‘hack’ or intercept computer traffic and discussion groups. One annexure described a very strange night-time odyssey. The team had been taken to the offices of a computer specialist who was adept in the art of ‘hacking’. In what read like a hammed-up version of a bad play, Mr X, the hacker, proceeded with his demonstration to the group. I well remember the lines, which went something like: ‘Okay, so the equipment is prepared and we will now seek to intercept [pause] … this is the tense part [pause] … look how my hands are trembling [pause] … I must take a drink of water …’ Then eureka! The hacker strikes it lucky. Out of the blue, by sheer fluke, he and the team are party to communication intercepts of Tony Leon engaged in chat room discussion at that very moment in time. How impressive. Like children at a magic party, the observing team appeared – according to their report – to have fallen hook, line and sinker for one of the oldest tricks in the world. No doubts were raised about the coincidence of the chat room being in operation just at the right time for the demonstration. No thought that Mr X might have conceivably concocted the chat room mail and simply had this handy on a prerecorded tape ready to switch on for a naïve audience. Loots and his colleagues had swallowed the bait.
I enquired who had taken the team to Mr X’s office and who had conveyed them there. Loots replied that Billy Masetlha had done so. This caused consternation and anger in the NEC. The report was dismissed then and there on the technical grounds that the engagement of the hacker was illegal and the involvement of Masetlha was unprocedural. Unfortunately, it meant that the NEC did not reject the entire Loots report for the utter nonsense it was. The NEC could easily have done so, for virtually all but a small minority were of that view. Pallo Jordan and Baleka Mbete requested that the minutes of the meeting reflect the view that there had been an intelligence project to destroy the ANC; that lessons from the saga needed to be learnt; and that further investigation as recommended by the inspector general was required.
In the end, the NEC resolved that there was no conspiracy against Zuma originating from within the ANC, though he might have been subject to what it called ‘hostile action by forces opposed to the National Democratic Revolution’. In this regard, it shifted the suspicion about the origin of the emails to ‘reactionary forces’ which, the ANC noted, had historically used whispering campaigns as devices ‘to disrupt and destroy progressive movements worldwide’.7 It was not only Zuma who had such suspicions. Revolutionaries all over the world had cause to be vigilant. There were countless CIA-type machinations that had unseated people’s leaders and governments through assassinations and coups. Charlatans and demagogues, however, played on such fears and twisted suspicions to their advantage when need arose.
I was not happy with the outcome of the meeting, but at least the NEC had not been deceived and hooked like so many others. The problem was that this type of walking on eggshells to maintain the peace boded ill for the future. All manner of problems could be dealt with by invoking counter-revolutionary foreign forces bent on destroying the ANC.