State Security Agency capture: Smoke, mirrors, lies and fabrications with dollops of shocking truth

In an extraordinary assertion, former State Security Agency (SSA) Director-General Arthur Fraser has suggested that residual networks of apartheid-era operatives were so powerful they were able to direct the course of post-apartheid history and usurp the functions of the democratic state.

A few months before the publication of the High-Level Review Panel into the SSA, handed to President Cyril Ramaphosa in March 2019, Barry Gilder, former MK combatant, Deputy Director-General of the South African Secret Service, and later the National Intelligence Agency (before being sidelined to Home Affairs) published The List, a work of fiction (he maintains) about the recruitment and infiltration of the ANC by apartheid security forces.

The List was published in September 2018 and must have been written long before June 2018, when Gilder was appointed by President Cyril Ramaphosa as a member of the High-Level Review Panel, chaired by Sydney Mufamadi. In fact, Gilder said he began writing The List after the August 2016 local elections, during which the ANC lost three more major metros, besides Cape Town.

The panel, on which Gilder served, found in its recommendations that from around 2005 there had been growing politicisation and division in the civilian intelligence community “based on the factions in the ANC”.

This was aggravated, said the panel, “by the fact that many of the leadership and management of the intelligence services have come from an ANC and liberation struggle background and have seemingly, in some cases, not been able to separate their professional responsibilities from their political inclinations”.

The situation, the panel found, had become “progressively worse during the administration of the former President (Zuma) with parallel structures being created that directly served the personal and political interests of the President and, in some cases, the relevant ministers. All this was in complete breach of the Constitution, the White Paper, the legislation and other prescripts”.

From 2009, when Zuma took office, said the panel, “we saw a marked doctrinal shift in the civilian intelligence community, away from the prescripts of the Constitution, White Paper and legislation and plain good practice. This was most publicly reflected in the change of name from ‘national intelligence’ to ‘state security’ ”.

Most seriously, said the panel, this doctrinal shift was “reflected in the increasing turn to covert structures and projects, the Principal Agent Network and SO (special operations) projects, and was taken to extremes in the proposals contained in the Strategic Development Plan”.

Gilder’s novel takes its title from an alleged legendary list of ANC leaders who had spied for the apartheid state and that had been handed to Nelson Mandela by former apartheid spy boss Niel Barnard.

It is notable that while Gilder has created finely drawn fictitious characters who animate his novel, he drops in only one real name: Niel Barnard.

On page 160, Gilder has one of the characters, Amos Vilakazi (now secretary of the ANC economics desk in London) meet with apartheid Security Branch recruiter Otto Bester in a pub.

In the scene, Bester informs Vilakazi, whom he has known since childhood, that his unit has been moved from the police to the National Intelligence Service (NIS).

“And they are intelligent. I can tell you. They better understand what you and me are doing. And their head, Niel Barnard, is a bright, bright man; damn bright man.”

Niel Barnard’s name pops up all over when you least expect it.

Like in November 2018 when Mail & Guardian journalist Ra’eesa Pather revealed that Barnard was suing the State Security Agency for millions.

In his court application, Pather says Barnard claimed that President Jacob Zuma, with the assistance of then-state security minister David Mahlobo, had extended a contract Barnard had with the agency. Barnard has reportedly been embroiled in this little spat over R24-million since 2016.

Barnard had a contract with the agency, you ask yourself?

Well, yes, and no.

The contract, according to court papers, was for “intelligence services” and had been a verbal one. In meetings, Zuma, said Barnard, had given “a partly written, partly oral agreement” to extend the contract. Mahlobo has, unsurprisingly, denied any knowledge of the contract between the then President of the Republic of South Africa, the SSA and Barnard.

It is not known whether the SSA security contract with Barnard was “off the books” or whether there is an official paper trail. Barnard would not be so foolish as to approach the courts without enough legal ammunition. The matter, which is still pending, has flown below the media radar.

Barnard again features, albeit obliquely, in the presence of retired Lieutenant-General Andre Pruis, who was one of nine members of the Mufamadi High-Level Review Panel.

Pruis, according to Daily Maverick opinionista Nel Marais, had joined the police in 1989 as a brigadier. At the time of his appointment, some were of the opinion that the then DG of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), Niel Barnard, wanted Pruis in a senior position in the police to keep Barnard informed about sensitive issues in the Security Branch. Both Pruis and Barnard were previously attached to the University of the Free State.

Then on 11 February 2010, in his second State of the Nation Address celebrating 20 years of freedom, Jacob Zuma, after welcoming the usual list of dignitaries, guests and alliance partners acknowledged, out of the blue, “the role played by former President PW Botha” who “initiated the discussion about the possible release of political prisoners”.

Botha had been dead since October 2006.

And then this:

“President Botha worked with the former Minister of Justice, Mr Kobie Coetzee, who was in turn assisted by Dr Niel Barnard and Mr Mike Louw. They played a significant role in the process leading to the release of Madiba.”

While Zuma might not have written the speech, it is significant that someone sought to include and thank apartheid leaders through Zuma. Was it mere protocol? Still, there’s Barnard, all these years later.

The characters in Gilder’s novel refer to “the signs” — endemic corruption and deadly factionalism — which his chief protagonists debate is clear evidence that old apartheid networks which had infiltrated the ANC were still hard at work.

We turn now to another work, not fiction, according to its author, veteran intelligence operative Arthur Fraser. Fraser, Director-General of the SSA until April 2018 when he was shifted to the Department of Correctional Services, penned a 78-page response to the High-Level Review Panel which he sent to President Cyril Ramaphosa April 2018.

The panel’s report itself, charged Fraser, was “a reckless breach” that had rendered vulnerable the country’s national security. Fraser pooh-poohed the process the panel had embarked on to reach its findings. He accused it of relying on “selective information” and warned that the panel should “steer clear of personal vendettas”.

Fraser, in his report, has attempted to respond to each of the damning findings and pronouncements in the panel’s report. The central thrust of his criticism is that the panel had been selective and biased in its investigation and had failed to take into account just how deep the continued reach of former apartheid-era spooks in the new democratic state was.

In this deep state, these “nation wreckers” had acted as “information peddlers” in an attempt to influence and profit from various post-apartheid administrations.

The former SSA DG said that while the panel’s report did refer to information peddlers, it did not mention the names of the intelligence formations or that “these peddlers were members or operatives, during the apartheid period”.

Fraser maintains that these former apartheid operatives “had access to public officials. Their modus operandi was to create a need for their services by, among others, producing and then releasing information about this or the other threat, or risk”.

These info pimps would then approach the relevant mandated public institution, department, or ministry and propose a solution “to the threat or risk at the same time indicating their capacity to assist in the provision of the solution, etc. at a cost — as they charge for their services. They even work for foreign intelligence services inside and outside the border of the RSA for money”, said Fraser.

Information peddlers, according to Fraser, have had access to every single president of South Africa since 1994 and included private individuals and intelligence and security firms “whose targets were politicians, especially in the governing party”.

The bulk of these information mercenaries, said Fraser, “were members of the former Stratcom programme of the apartheid government”.

How all of this came to pass and how we ended up with a captured state which squandered around R1.5-trillion during Zuma’s presidency is the key issue both the High-Level Review Panel as well as several other commissions of inquiry are attempting to unravel and understand.

In 2014 Jacques Pauw, writing then for City Press about the R1-billion plunder by the country’s spies of a “slush fund”, exposed how Fraser, then second-in-command of the National Intelligence Agency (later to become the SSA), “had embarked on a project to expand South Africa’s intelligence capabilities. It was known as the Principal Agent Network and had a limitless budget.”

“Millions of rand in cash were transported in suitcases from a state money depot in Pretoria Central to ‘the farm’ – the nickname for the agency’s headquarters, otherwise known as Musanda, on the shores of the Rietvlei Dam, South of Pretoria,” wrote Pauw.

Pauw says Fraser had “remained defiant” throughout a two-year forensic investigation by the SSA and which had implicated him in “misappropriating hundreds of millions of rand and fingered as a possible treason suspect”. Pauw says he had been horrified to learn of Fraser’s appointment by Zuma as SSA Director-General in 2016.

Fraser joined the NIA in 1995 and was later the agency’s Western Cape head between 1998 and 2004. Before he was appointed Director-General by Zuma, Fraser had headed the hugely powerful operations division of the NIA.

Fraser resigned in 2010 after a purge of the service by Zuma and ostensibly to “pursue personal endeavours”. In the flip-flopping world of lies, deceit and paranoia, Fraser was viewed as an Mbeki appointee. He had been worked out by Gibson Njenje when he became NIA Director-General in 2009.

Njenje had replaced Manala Manzini in the position.

It was Manzini and Fraser who had established the Principal Agent Network, a parallel intelligence network with no oversight and which allegedly spent R1.5-billion of public funds.

In April 2018, amaBhungane investigative journalists Sam Sole and Susan Comrie wrote that the Principal Agent Network had been established in the early 2000s during Fraser’s first stint in the intelligence services, and had run until 2009.

The Principal Agent Network agents, according to Pauw’s research, had allegedly conducted illegal surveillance and had squandered R48-million leasing properties and a further R24-million procuring 293 cars and employing a wide network of “highly suspect undercover agents”.

“Most damning though are the allegations that Fraser’s family members benefited from the project, a charge they deny,” wrote Sole and Comrie for amaBhungane.

In 2009, an internal probe was instituted by then-Minister of State Security, Siyabonga Cwele, to investigate Covert Support Unit maladministration between 2007 and 2009.

Two classified 2013 reports, by former Inspector-General of Intelligence, Faith Radebe, also found that “financial controls were non-existent”, with millions in cash repeatedly being siphoned off to the Principal Agent Network.

Writing for amaBhungane in 2010, Sole said that Fraser’s departure at the time had thrown the service into chaos as 100 high-level covert sources under Fraser had been stranded without pay since December 2009.

“As head of operations, Fraser controlled the top-secret source register and it’s understood payments were handled by the ‘Covert Support Unit’ which fell under him.”

Fraser, in his April 2019 report, slammed the panel for what he termed a “preconceived belief” that” intelligence officers who may have been members, and/or supporters, of the ANC are the perpetrators of the misdemeanours committed within and outside the SSA”.

He said High-Level Review Panel members Barry Gilder and Silumko Sokupa “were fully aware of information contradicting this belief”.

Fraser claimed when he had been appointed Director-General of SSA on 26 September 2016, “I found the Apartheid Principal Agent Network units, inclusive of Information Peddlers, reincorporated into the covert structures of the SSA including in the SO (Special Ops).”

A priority at the time, he said, had been the discontinuation of the SO operations.

What the High-Level Review Panel should have done, said Fraser, was obtain details of these information peddlers and established “the extent of their penetration into the democratic civilian intelligence services”.

(In plain language: Look over there! Nothing to see here! - Ed)

It could also have found, he suggested, “that the so-called factionalisation of the intelligence services is more the result of manipulation by Information Peddlers in co-operation with those in the democratic civilian intelligence services. That the Information Peddlers and the GP11-type Principal Agent Network units manipulated both the civilian intelligence services and clients of the civilian intelligence services and of Crime Intelligence, at least”.

Two members of the High-Level Review Panel and a leader of its secretariat would have been aware of this information, said Fraser, but the panel “did not attend to aspects of reality” because it was “straitjacketed by its pre-conceived beliefs”.

The manipulation and production of reports “intended to cause discord and factionalism” had begun “long before 2005” and had been caused by these apartheid-era leftover forces, Fraser said.

“The High-Level Review Panel would, therefore, have noted that the factionalism in the democratic civilian intelligence services and Crime Intelligence is not a mere reflection of an inability, on the part of former members, or former supporters of the ANC, to be consistently professional in the execution of their intelligence work,” he said.

An effective panel, said Fraser, “would have most probably recommended to the President that the democratic civilian intelligence services should dismantle the Apartheid Principal Agent Network units, wherever they exist, at least”.

Fraser said that the mandate of the SSA was to gather intelligence inside and outside the country. This differed from the past where domestic intelligence had been located inside the NIA, with foreign intelligence situated within the South African Secret Services.

In 1994 the ANC had argued at the Transitional Executive Council intelligence negotiations for the establishment of separate internal and external intelligence services, while former NIS negotiators had proposed a single service. In 2009 Zuma’s administration reversed the decision.

The Mufamadi report found that this amalgamation of the services by Zuma “was a monumental blunder. Apart from the fact that it did not take place on the basis of a formal change of policy involving parliamentary and public consultation and was initially irregularly effected. It did not achieve its stated intentions of reducing expenditure, effecting better co-ordination, reducing duplication and so on. It might have achieved some of those in small measure, but it created more problems than it solved”.

Fraser said that the establishment of the SSA had necessitated “a new corporate structure that, ideally, should be fit for purpose and similarly, systems and processes for effective corporate governance were amended. The above developments also caused considerable movements of personnel and managers”.

The Sigint (spook-speak for the interception of electronic signals) capacity of the civilian intelligence structures, “an exceedingly important and strategic tool”, said Fraser, had been included in this new structure.

“The SSA has, however, witnessed during the period coinciding with the above changes, serious challenges such as abuse of authority, breaches of the laws governing its legislative mandate, the intelligence products have been of an uneven quality and break-ins have occurred where money was stolen.”

The establishment of the SSA, said Fraser, swallowed four entities: the National Intelligence Agency, the SA Secret Service, Comsec (a company owned by the NIA) and Sanai (The South African National Academy of Intelligence) and not only the NIA and SASS, as the High-Level Review Panel had asserted.

One of the reasons for the appointment of the review panel was the issue of alleged abuses of the SSA through either the lack of adequate controls over the agency or through the abuse of those mechanisms.

With regards to the Principal Agent Network, Fraser said that several investigations had been implemented “over several years until 2011 when it was suspended”.

He explained that the principal agent network was a method of “force multiplication” during which agents were recruited from outside the SSA and trained, in turn, to recruit and handle sources and agents “in or close to targets of legitimate interest to the agency”.

“However, it appeared to the Panel that the Principal Agent Network evolved into a methodology designed to avoid or bypass the procedural requirements for recruitment of staff, disbursement of funds and procurement,” said Fraser.

Internal agency investigators, as well as the Office of the Inspector-General of Intelligence, had all probed the Principal Agent Network, said Fraser.

Fraser said the Principal Agent Network had had “other consequences which seem not to have been addressed with the seriousness warranted”.

“One such is the large number of claims made against the Agency and the Minister by former Principal Agent Network members involving allegations of breaches of contract by the Agency. These have amounted to hundreds of millions of rand.”

The High-Level Review Panel assessment of projects, said Fraser, had breached intelligence protocols rendering the strengths and weaknesses of intelligence operations “public matters”.

“The intelligence capacity of the state or lack thereof is laid bare for all to know, including enemies of the State. I also believe that this publication of the report constituted a reckless breach and rendered vulnerable our nascent democratic state.”

Bearing this in mind, he said, he would attempt with “trepidation”, to explain the NIA Covert Support Unit, the Principal Agent Network, “their relationship and how they were controlled”.

Covert support, prior to the establishment of the Covert Support Unit, said Fraser, had been provided by a private company. This same company had been contracted by the National Intelligence Services prior to 1994. The company had later merged with a UK firm in 1998.

“This multinational auditing company therefore had sight and knowledge of all covert operatives, entities and logistic requirements of the deep cover (Principal Agent Network type) operations of the NIA.”

The CSU had been conceptualised to “mitigate the operational security risks” and to provide “appropriate cover and administratively manage the cover for all NIA covert operations”.

The Covert Support Unit, he added, was audited by the Auditor-General and the Internal Audit, and was accessible to the Inspector-General of Intelligence.

Fraser said prior to 1994 “there had always been a covert capacity (Principal Agent Network-type) both within NIA and SASS. These covert structures were, however, fraught with inherent challenges based on the disparate ideological outlook of former foes”.

Due to the clandestine nature of this function, he said, it had been difficult to “assess, monitor and oversee the application of trade craft within the context of a new democratic dispensation”.

In 1999 the Principal Agent Network’s covert capacity had been reviewed and “a top management decision was taken to resurface these structures for a number of reasons”.

The NIA had established, said Fraser, that the structures “only focused on former liberation organisations, and secondly, there was little control over their revenue generation from the businesses that they were using as front companies”.

Fraser said it was these “same individuals who previously infiltrated liberation movements, who later migrated into intelligence structures after amalgamation and continued their practices and management of sources stemming from the former Apartheid era into the democratic dispensation”.

In 2006, top management of NIA had decided to establish a covert-capacity (Principal Agent Network-type) operation, said Fraser. The operational networks of this operation would be used also “to mitigate security risks in relation to South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 Fifa Soccer World Cup and beyond”.

The conception, design and implementation of the Principal Agent Network programme had been led by the head of the chief directorate and was also implemented by the Directorate.

“I supported the Principal Agent Network programme (for domestic collection),” said Fraser.

The Covert Support Unit, he said, provided support to the chief directorate “in so far as managing the cover for different Principal Agent Networks”.

Payment of agents had been the responsibility of operational members while payment for movable and immovable properties (renting and so on) had been the responsibility of the Covert Support Unit “but utilising the budget of the specific chief directorate. So the Covert Support Unit accounted, additionally, to the affected paying chief directorate”.

Fraser accused the High-Level Review Panel of being selective in reporting breaches by the Covert Support Unit, saying that while several had been reported to the panel, it “concentrated more on the Principal Agent Network” which was “extensively investigated”.

“The question is, therefore, why would the High-Level Review Panel reopen an investigation done and concluded by a constitutionally independent competent authority whose mandate is entrenched in law and whereas the High-Level Review Panel lacks the requisite jurisdiction to do so?”

Fraser accused the panel of doing “no more than what is disingenuously peddled in Jacques Pauw’s book”.

“This is a disservice to the Head of State, even if it is designed to impress him. Our task as intelligence officers, is to provide proper intelligence and advice and not praise prose to our political Principals.”

He said that the panel had generalised the dysfunction and the politicisation of the SSA and that this was “misplaced and unfortunate”.

“As a consequence, it creates a fertile climate for polarisation within the agency. I have empathy for the thousands of professional, patriotic intelligence officers whose integrity has been tainted in the gist of this report. In this regard, I refer to intelligence officers who may have been members, and/or supporters of the ANC within the state machinery who have been singled out as the nexus of all wrongdoing. I know that in the main, what is projected in the High-Level Review Panel’s report is not true.”

In other words, fiction.

Fraser ended with the announcement that he had no desire to “save my former position as an intelligence professional at the expense of the truth and my obligations to alert and forewarn the Head of State about actions that, in my view, compromise the capacity, integrity and security of the state”.

Be that all as it may, we are compelled again to quote Marx, Groucho, not Karl.

“Who are you going to believe, me or your eyes?”

Marikana, rampant crime, the systemic criminalisation of state-owned entities, the pervasive SAPS corruption, the extent of the Gupta family’s devastation of South Africa, with the assistance of Jacob Zuma and his loyalists, tells a different story. So does the evidence at various commissions of inquiry.

Where were the intelligence services then? And how did this all happen?

The rest is smoke and mirrors, a saucy blend of fiction and fact with scant regard for the truth.

Seventy-two pages of it.

For many, there is only one way to establish a functional intelligence service in South Africa. Flush everyone out and start all over again. DM