Dark heart exposed
Representative Council and, later, the leftist National Union of South African Students (Nusas).
During these years, Williamson interacted with (and reported on) several generations of student leaders from almost every English-speaking university.
Interviewed by Ancer, several of them report that suspicions about Williamson abounded, but the liberal impulse to believe, forgive and understand stayed any serious investigations of a double life.
After Nusas, and purportedly without a passport, Williamson was catapulted (accompanied by his medical student wife, Ingrid) into the Geneva-based International University Exchange Fund (IUEF). This Nordic-funded body fronted for liberation movements around the world, but particularly in Southern Africa.
This was when the police informant turned to espionage by passing information to apartheid’s notorious Special Branch.
Despite Williamson’s hints to the contrary, there’s no hard evidence that he passed on deep Cold War secrets to Western intelligence agencies.
But, here, regretfully, Ancer leaves an intriguing question hanging. Might Williamson not have been working for the British, too? This question isn’t asked out of mischief or malice. It simply connects the dots. Williamson’s Scottish-born father, Herbert, had a claim on British citizenship. If this right was exercised, his son might have travelled under the cover of British papers, and maybe he even worked as a double agent.
Imperfect infiltrator
In Geneva, the ever-dutiful, everpractical Williamson was drawn into the IUEF, eventually becoming deputy to its Swedish director, LarsGunner Erikson. But efforts to infiltrate (and divide) the ANC and the Pan Africanist Congress in London were imperfect; indeed, these may well have been the moment every spy fears — overreach.
His undoing came in an exposé in the British press after the defection of a South African agent. He immediately absented himself from the IUEF and called his SB handler, General Johann Coetzee, who flew to Europe to accompany Williamson and Ingrid back to South Africa.
On landing, he was lauded by the local press — especially the then odious Sunday Times — which played off the metaphors of the Cold War spy-writer, John le Carré. It’s not surprising that, in apartheid circles, he became something of a hero. But an exaggerated James Bond-like characterisation of himself rendered him a figure of fun, even in the Special Branch.
Williamson continued to work in apartheid’s cause: building its international work, serving on various security bodies and participating in South Africa’s wicked policy of regional destabilisation. It was in servicing the latter that the spy turned into an assassin.
Personal anguish
If Ancer is measured in the early part of the narrative, he draws from the depth of his craft — and his personal anguish — to describe Williamson’s role in the assassinations of three people. Journalist, academic and political activist Ruth First was killed by a parcel bomb in her office in Maputo in Mozambique. Fellow anti-apartheid activist Jeanette Schoon and her six-year old daughter, Katryn, suffered the same fate in Lubango in Angola.
For these killings and the bombing of the ANC office in London, Williamson appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) amnesty committee in September 1998. According to an eyewitness, he was “not even remotely apologetic” for his role in these atrocities.
But in the legal bounds of the TRC process, Williamson’s 21-day performance was enough to be granted the amnesty he sought.
But what incenses Ancer — and should incense us all — is that the man on the book cover’s sole interest was in reproducing what he regarded as his birthright: wealth and racial privilege.
This is a beautifully written and meticulously researched book; it’s a story told with disarming intellectual honesty and great passion. It’s destined to become a minor classic about apartheid’s ruinous path.