Bedknobs and Broomsticks – a dossier of credible lies
Johann van Loggerenberg, who headed the South African Revenue Service’s (Sars) elite crime-busting unit, and nearly the entire top management, quit the tax authority after reports about a “rogue unit”.
Was it a “psych op”? he asks in this edited extract from his book.
Between August 2014 and April 2016, more than 30 articles were published by the Sunday Times about me, the so-called “rogue unit”, Ivan Pillay and, ultimately, Pravin Gordhan.
They created and helped to advance the Sars “rogue unit” story and cast aspersions on a number of other key Sars employees. This all led to Sars replacing virtually the entire top management of a once-proud state institution.
First, I would like to share a key piece of history with a bearing on how the “rogue unit” narrative developed.
To me, some striking similarities are apparent if one compares what happened to us at Sars with the disinformation campaigns that the state intelligence machinery used against liberation movements before 1994. During the 1980s, the “total onslaught” years, the apartheid regime had a very powerful and secret weapon — a unit known by its acronym Stratcom, for Strategic Communications. It was a shadowy unit, buried deep in the recesses of the Security Branch. Even today, very little is known about its operations.
This unit, among other things, was engaged in what militarists would call “psych ops” — psychological operations. They paid journalists to plant and advance stories, placed and managed journalists in media houses, issued leaks and rumours, and put together seemingly credible dossiers and stories — all aimed solely at discrediting the “enemy”.
The most famous Stratcom operation was called Romulus. This came to light at the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the mid-1990s. According to a South African Press Agency (Sapa) report on the testimonies of Stratcom head Vic McPherson and operative Paul Erasmus in 1997, Operation Romulus had sought to bring Winnie Madikizela-Mandela into disrepute with the aim of discrediting the ANC and to “sow division within the ranks of the liberation movement”:
“A document, titled Dissemination of Suitable Material re Winnie Mandela Abroad: Discreditation of the ANC, said a ‘veritable mass of material’ was forwarded to the media ‘with the specific objective of using Winnie Mandela … to discredit the ANC as a whole’.
“Articles highly critical of Madikizela-Mandela appeared in early 1991 in leading British newspapers — the Sunday Times, The Times, The Independent, Daily Express and other newspapers.”
This report describes Stratcom as “the propaganda apparatus of the apartheid security police”. McPherson explained to the TRC exactly what Stratcom did.
“Strategic communications is the planned, co-ordinated execution of a deed and/or the presentation of a message by means of various communication instruments to: change the attitudes, values and views of individuals, and/or a group of persons and/or to create the required attitude and/or to maintain an existing attitude; to neutralise hostile propaganda and/or to utilise hostile propaganda; and to reach national objectives.
“Stratcom can be seen as political warfare as utilised in the Republic of China or psychological warfare as utilised in Europe or civic action as utilised by the Americans or active measures as utilised by the old Soviet Union. Stratcom was a covert operation and was conducted in secret ...
“[T]he way we have trained our people and instructed our people is usually to work on an actual or a factual incident or event and then perhaps add on and that will eventually lead, say, to disinformation or [falsehood], something extra to a story …”
Over the years, I kept an everexpanding file of all the dossiers and allegations that had surfaced from before and since the inception of the Special Projects Unit, renamed the National Research Group, that became the High-Risk Investigations Unit — the unit that became known as the “rogue unit”.
These maintained that Gordhan, Pillay and I were racists, that we were opposed to [President Jacob] Zuma, that we had entered into unlawful tax settlements, spied on taxpayers, intercepted communications and so forth.
There was a common thread to all of these allegations: they relied on a little bit of fact, which lent a veneer of credibility to their content. The rest was fiction, just like Stratcom’s propaganda communications.
I called this file “Bedknobs and Broomsticks”, because it reminded me of the movie from my childhood. Bedknobs and Broomsticks used special effects, with both real-life actors and animated characters. As a child, the combined effect seemed very real to me, even though it was just fiction. I saw an analogy there.