Spies shape SA’S political path
From Mbeki to Zuma to Ramaphosa, the facts and fictions of the intelligence networks have shadowed political players and settled power struggles
There were intelligence lapses, President Cyril Ramaphosa wearily conceded when he testified to two commissions about the eight-day insurrection in July last year. Absent from the reports that came his way was any warning of the wave of violence that would destroy infrastructure and shopping centres.
“The targeting of malls and infrastructure was unforeseen, that never surfaced in any of the reports,” he said.
Such details are rarely part of the raw intelligence that reach operatives, but rather the product of subsequent analysis, and the absence suggests this was not done properly, if at all.
Instead, the reports on Ramaphosa’s desk spoke of diffuse discontent, linked most discernibly to the imprisonment of former president Jacob Zuma for contempt of court.
He could not pinpoint the cause of the failure of intelligence, but the Zondo commission on state capture, at the time of hearing his testimony in August and more expansively in volume six of its report released last week, found the explanation in the criminalisation of the intelligence services from the time leading up to the ANC’S Polokwane conference in 2007.
They worked in the service of Zuma, with the state a distant second, recruiting and arming operatives outside of standard process.
“It would be very sad indeed had those activities had a relationship to what happened in July,” evidence leader Paul Pretorius commented while questioning the president, before dismissing his attempts to characterise the disarray of the State Security Agency (SSA) as something unfortunate, rather than deliberate.
“The events of the state security saga from 2007 to now could hardly be termed a lapse. They were a concerted exercise of state governance and executive control. They weren’t mistakes, they weren’t slip-ups. This was a deliberate pattern of mis-government, which has possibly had the most serious consequence for our state.”
What happened to the intelligence reports is moot. These are meant to be shared with the cabinet as classified information. Then-state security minister Ayanda Dlodlo said intelligence was delivered from December, followed by alerts of various degrees of severity from about May. But Police Minister Bheki Cele testified that he received nothing after December, claiming he was left in the dark, relying on scraps of information “good Samaritans” on the ground saw fit to pass on as storm clouds gathered in Kwazulu-natal. Dlodlo dismissed his complaint, saying: “That is just theatrics.”
She insisted reports of impending violence were shared with the police and the National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure from as early as December 2020, but added that anyone expecting her to declassify these as proof that the SSA performed its duties diligently was dreaming.
Dlodlo was shifted from state security to public service and administration a month after mayhem swept through Kwazulu-natal and swathes of Gauteng, and resigned shortly afterwards to take up a position at the World Bank. But, while still at intelligence, she allowed the work of Project Veza, which uncovered the excesses of former SSA director general Arthur Fraser, former intelligence ministers, and the general manager of special operations Thulani Dlomo, to be discredited and classified.
Zondo said it was an indication, along with the sidelining of former SSA director general Loyiso Jafta, that the political manipulation of intelligence work continued. Jafta had testified that Dlomo recruited a shadowy protection force for Zuma and that firearms disappeared from the SSA and were never fully recovered. Some were found loaded with ammunition that did not belong to the agency, the report notes. Six months later arms caches were found in flashpoints as Kwazulu-natal burned. Dlomo, described in the Zondo report as a law unto himself, was arrested for fomenting the unrest but released without charge.
Ramaphosa responded by bringing intelligence oversight into the presidency. The director general of the SSA now reports directly to minister in the presidency Mondli Gungubele. Sydney Mufamadi, who headed the high-level panel that delivered a report on intelligence abuses in 2018, is now his security adviser.
These steps could not save Ramaphosa from the past, in the form of Fraser taking information about the theft at his farm to the police in an apparent bid to weaken him before the ANC’S next leadership struggle in December.
There have been whispers that he learnt about the burglary because he has long-standing ties to members of the presidential protection network, or that he carried on conducting unlawful surveillance after he was moved from the SSA to the correctional services department, with his loyalty to the Zuma camp intact.
The fact that a spy would step so boldly out of the shadows to front an attack on a sitting president suggests he is not acting alone.
Other sources counter that Fraser’s narrative owes more to invention than intelligence, in a repeat of the game of bluff of the so-called Spy Tapes he delivered to Zuma to allow the arms deal charges against him to be dropped for long enough to allow him to be elected president.
The real conspiracy was the release of the recordings of the conversations between prosecutions director Bulelani Ngcuka and Scorpions head Leonard Mccarthy to the president-inwaiting for this purpose, not their dithering for fear of the political implications of indicting him ahead of the Polokwane conference.
The Zondo report recommends that the Hawks resume an investigation into Fraser’s Principal Agent Network, which was halted at the wish of Zuma, conveyed by then-state security minister Siyabonga Cwele, in the same manner that an investigation into the Gupta family’s grip on Zuma was stymied. It surmises that Fraser, who ran this parallel spy structure, was repaying the favour when he saw to it that Zuma was freed on medical parole in the wake of the July violence.
The report stated it was “difficult to understand” why Ramaphosa, in 2018, appointed Fraser to head the prison services.
It also warns that sight must not be lost of the fact that false intelligence reports could destabilise the country.
The counterintelligence attacks on the authors of the Browse Mole report, which tried to follow the money that funded Zuma’s political and legal manoeuvring, stand as proof of how intelligence was drawn into the power struggle between Zuma and Thabo Mbeki, well before the former became president.
In 2006, Mbeki fired the director general of intelligence, Billy Masetlha, who had been suspended by intelligence minister Ronnie Kasrils for intercepting communication by “public figures” understood to include politician-turnedbusinessman Saki Macozoma.the illegal intercepts were used to fabricate “emails” alleged to have been sent between Macozoma and other Mbeki allies, which were part of a disinformation campaign against them. The emails were aimed at influencing the ANC’S internal leadership battles in Zuma’s favour.
In 2001, safety and security minister Steve Tshwete announced that Ramaphosa and ANC heavyweights Mathews Phosa and Tokyo Sexwale were being investigated for their alleged involvement in a “plot” to oust Mbeki.
The three were named in an affidavit by ANC Youth League Mpumalanga member James Nkambule, who died in 2010, as funding a plan to remove Mbeki as ANC president at its December 2002 national conference.
Nkambule claimed his information was based on reports from the National Intelligence Agency, while Mail & Guardian at the time reported that an ANC intelligence unit operating out of Luthuli House had investigated Ramaphosa and others over the allegations.