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South Africa
Spy Versus Spy Goes Awry (Column)
The Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg)
November 26, 1999
By Howard Barrell
Johannesburg - A Zimbabwean friend who underwent intelligence training in
East Germany in the 1970s says he learned only one thing of value on the
course. It came in a section on body language: he says it equipped him to
tell, with unfailing accuracy, if a woman is willing to go to bed with him.
For security reasons he won't share the secret with me.
My own brief and lamentable career in intelligence with the African National
Congress in the mid-1980s was less informative. It did, however, convince me
of three things.
One: anyone who wants to join an intelligence outfit is probably unfit to do
so. Entry should be granted only to those contemptuous or aggressively
sceptical of the business and its practitioners.
Two, a second requirement of admission should be a prodigious capacity to
endure boredom - without having to resort to fantasy to maintain interest in
the job.
And three, women are better at intelligence work than men. They get on with
the job quietly. On the other hand, men - and this almost certainly has
something to do with their troublesome extra appendage - tend to need
recognition. And being "seen" usually means an end to efficacy in the nether
world.
At the end of my brief career as a spook, I discovered I was not alone in my
doubts about intelligence work. I read a book by Phillip Knightley, an
accomplished British journalist, called The Second Oldest Profession: The Spy
as Bureaucrat, Patriot, Fantasist and Whore.
Knightley retells the stories of many of the major modern intelligence coups.
And he shows how, in almost every case, these "coups" were nothing of the
sort. Instead, the information they gleaned was invariably either already
known or useless; or, where it was neither, it was rarely acted upon.
Knightley shows that engaging in the second-oldest profession has about as
much to do with gathering useful information as engaging in the world's
oldest profession has to do with love. Both are vacuous, though titillating,
substitutes for the more readily available mundanities of life.
This is all brought to mind again, of course, by the revelations of spying in
Pretoria and Cape Town.
Surveillance of German diplomats is not difficult to understand. Senior
government officials confirm that German spies, rather like their American
and Russian counterparts, have been "quite busy" in South Africa recently.
Why? Perhaps because we are influential among developing nations. So, if the
Germans can ascertain our position at, say, the new round of World Trade
Organisation talks in Seattle, this could be useful.
But videotaping the German embassy? In the hope of capturing on film South
Africans recruited by the Germans dropping in to drop off their secrets?! Oh
dear.
The surveillance of the Democratic Party is another matter. Nobody in
government has yet seriously disputed the material accuracy of what the DP
established. It found that telephones at its national and regional
headquarters in Roeland Street, Cape Town, were being bugged within Telkom.
It also found that its caucus room and chief whip's office in the Marks
Building in the parliamentary compound were being bugged by means of a laser
beam directed against the windows of these rooms from neighbouring 120 Plein
Street, which houses government ministries. The laser method, although now
old technology, is still "very effective if you have direct line of sight",
according to an experienced intelligence professional.
Let us grant Minister of Intelligence Joe Nhlanhla what he has asked for: our
trust that neither the National Intelligence Agency nor the South African
Secret Service had anything to do with the bugging. Let us assume he is too
savvy to lie or to withold other information that may be relevant. But, as we
await the fruits of the police investigation, let us indulge - as we are
entitled to - in our own idle speculation.
One possible explanation is that "old order" members of the security services
set up the surveillance to embarrass the ANC and the government. If so,
however, why allow discovery to occur now - at the end of a sitting of
Parliament, just before the silly season, six months after a general election
and 12 months before local elections? And why use methods of bugging of which
it is so difficult for the victim to produce the physical evidence. Why not
use an old button-sized bug that the DP could wave around in its outrage?
A second scenario: a foreign agency set it up to embarrass the government.
Well, many of the same reservations apply here. Plus one more: why on earth
would a foreign agency endanger what would presumably be valuable penetration
agents in the South African services in an operation promising rather limited
rewards?
A third scenario: the DP is a nest of traitors; and this a fact known at this
stage only to a few secret servants of the state.
Really? Tony Leon MP has a vicious tongue. Yet it is an honest tongue. James
Selfe MP has a sense of humour that would make a hangman blanch. And Ken
Andrew's monotone could send you to sleep even while sentencing you to death.
But revolutionaries? Forget it.
A fourth: one of the many local freelance spook outfits was hired to bug the
DP. But why then use Telkom and a state installation on top of a state
building? And who would its client be? Who would care enough about what the
DP thinks or plans to do? Dominee Cassie Aucamp's Afrikaner Eenheidsbeweging?
Or the ANC?
A fifth: people in the intelligence services are bored witless. The devil,
and fantasy, found work for their idle hands.
A sixth: the surveillance dates back to the bad old days of pre-1994 or even
pre- 1990. But, if so, by what feat of dereliction was the equipment allowed
to stay in place for another five or 10 years?
A seventh: when the new intelligence services were set up, some former ANC
intelligence operatives were held back to constitute a separate service whose
existence has not yet been disclosed. And, excited by their party's recent
attacks on the DP, these guardians of the revolution decided to bug it and
have been providing the ANC whip's office with apparently innocent, though
very good, information on DP intentions ever since. Surely not.
Take your pick, or dream up your own. The speed and coherence of the police
investigation may be the most reliable indicator we get as to which is right.
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