Ex-CIA spy: How my tip-off led to Mandela’s arrest

A FORMER CIA spy has revealed it was his tip-off that led to the arrest of Nelson Mandela in 1962. Donald Rickard claimed South African police swooped in Durban after he gave them advance notice of the future president’s journey to the city.

The former spy agency operative made the taped admission – in an interview for a film – just two weeks before he died at 88.

He also told director John Irvin that, at the time of the arrest, Mr Mandela was ‘the world’s most dangerous communist outside the Soviet Union’.

Mr Mandela, who died in December 2013, served 27 years in jail for resisting white minority rule, before being released in 1990. He was elected as South Africa’s first black president in 1994.

The interview appears to confirm long-held suspicions that he was being trailed by the CIA.

It is expected to put renewed pressure on the agency – which is known to have worked closely with its South African counterparts in the apartheid era – to release documents about its involvement in Mr Mandela’s arrest and support for the apartheid government.

Mr Rickard, who officially worked as US vice-consul in Durban on the east coast of South Africa, retired in the late 1970s to a remote area of Colorado.

But in March this year, he told Mr Irvin that he knew Mr Mandela was going to Durban in 1962, the Sunday Times reported.

He said he believed Mr Mandela was about to ‘incite’ the local Indian population in a communist-led mass rebellion against the apartheid regime, paving the way for Russian intervention.

Mr Rickard told the director: ‘If the Soviets had come in force, the United States would have had to get involved, and things could have gone to hell … We were teetering on the brink here and it had to be stopped, which meant Mandela had to be stopped. And I put a stop to it.’

The ex-spy described Mr Mandela as being ‘completely under the control of the Soviet Union, a toy of the communists’. His disclosure clears up the 54-year-old mystery of how South African security forces knew precisely where Mr Mandela – one of the country’s most wanted men – would be.

Yesterday Ronnie Kasrils, who worked alongside Mr Mandela as a senior African National Congress member and later served as a minister in his government, described the arrest as a ‘most shameful incident of betrayal’ that ‘certainly hindered the struggle against apartheid’.

‘It is clear the regime and its spooks worked hand in glove with the CIA,’ he said.

‘The CIA needs to come clean on what happened.’

Mr Mandela always denied he was a communist, but following his death, the South African Communist Party said that in 1962 he was ‘not only a member of the then underground South African Communist Party, but was also a member of our party’s central committee’. Friends of Mr Mandela contested the claim.

Mr Irvin’s film Mandela’s Gun will be previewed in Cannes.