Stratcom insider lifts the lid on apartheid atrocities

AT THIS time of fake news, of populism and misinformation, of privateers in the state security system and of state capture by the governing party, this book could not be more urgent or apt. It is a disturbing and furious attempt by Erasmus to explain his own depravity and that of his colleagues, bosses and governments operating under the Stratcom project. Erasmus frames this within the tyranny of the racist, banal and ideological state during apartheid. This book is a letter from history, a visceral confession to South Africans and a letter of love to his family. Paul Erasmus died on July 14, 2021.

EXCERPT

PERHAPS it shouldn’t have been so, but the story that made the headlines in the 1970s was not the one of the sexual abuse and violence towards conscripts. It was the elephants. The media at the time alleged that senior politicians, MI and police were involved in the wholesale killing of elephants. Horrified by these deaths, Beyers had faithfully committed that to paper too.

One day, a vehicle pulled up outside the SAP post and a very drunk General Lothar Neethling, Chief Deputy Commissioner of the SAP, stormed into Beyers’s house and demanded fresh meat, biltong, alcohol – and the dockets relating to both the rapes and the elephants. Beyers did not co-operate.

Neethling, who was later to head the SAP forensic science department and earn notoriety as the go-to man for poisons to be used against activists and enemies of the state, stood up to Beyers’s defiance. A furious exchange took place, during which Beyers told Neethling to get out of his house or he would open fire.

Beyers’s next visitor, a few days later, was Colonel Ogies Viljoen, who had been sent from the Security Branch (SB) Head Office to sort out this upstart sergeant. Once again, Beyers refused to comply with the order to close the cases, even when Viljoen told Beyers he was “destroying SAPSADF relations” and could, in fact, pose a serious threat to the good name of the SADF. He said Beyers had no right to “interfere” in what were internal matters

– matters that should be dealt with by the Military Police.

Beyers stayed on for a while, determined to stick to his guns, contending that he had taken an oath that superseded any other considerations. He refused to be bullied by anyone to close the dockets, to get rid of evidence or “forget about what happened”. The threats, however, became impossible, relentless and more ruthless. Eventually, Beyers was compelled to accept a transfer to John Vorster

Square, where he was overlooked time and again for promotion.

Nannie disobeyed direct orders from an SAP general to throw hand grenades at Uniformed SAP Radio Branch members – another example of the many false flag orders we were given. In another incident, Nannie and I were ordered to kill an SAP station commander. It was Nannie who took the initiative and refused this order, as the officer issuing the instruction was drunk and we ignored the obvious lunacy of the command.

Beyers is dead now, lost to the post-traumatic stress disorder and depression that took him to his early grave. Like me and many others in the SB, he had reached saturation point, unable to contain in himself the numerous crimes and cruelties that we perpetrated on behalf of apartheid.

Beyers told me about the attacks on the gay soldiers years later when it was revealed that the SADF was running what it termed the Aversion Project, headed by Dr Aubrey Levin. The project identified gay conscripts and, in order to have their homosexuality “cured”, submitted them to “treatment”, including electric shocks.

The project was also linked to some 900 gender reassignments in the 1970s and 1980s, which were performed under top-secret conditions at 1 Military Hospital in Voortrekkerhoogte.

Levin was finally convicted of sexual assault in Canada, to which he had emigrated when apartheid ended. He was a professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Calgary until 2010 when his licence to practise was suspended by the authorities there.

Even the slightest suggestion of a man being gay was an effective denunciation. When Arthur Mcgiven, a BOSS operative, defected to Britain in 1978, one of the damage-control measures that the SB used to discredit him was to point out that he was gay. The Little Hitlerites on the tenth floor spread the same story about me – a classic case of smearing a person in a strongly homophobic South Africa.

The Mcgiven case was an example of the SB’S own machinery being used against a member of its own system. As Mcgiven had worked among us, we were instructed to use every available contact and the media to spread the story, not only of his “perverted” sexuality, but also that he was “never trusted by BOSS” and they were “going to kick him out anyway”. To the best of my knowledge, however, the only intelligence Mcgiven revealed was Helen Suzman’s “S” number – her SB Head Office file number. The indomitable Suzman then, in Parliament, asked the Minister of Police not only about the existence of the file, but also whether he would let her have a look at it herself.

The SB had, however, been using WH10 to intercept correspondence from Mcgiven to his parents in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs, and I was responsible for evaluating the material collected, looking specifically for anything that could be used to further discredit him. Although I never did uncover anything incriminating, part of the plan was to pass information to the Rand Daily Mail sub-editor and SB source, John Horak (later a colonel based at the Head Office), whose handler was my subsection head, Lieutenant Koos Venter.

I expected to be able to resign early in 1986 as Linda’s projected earnings for the first quarter of 1986 were realistically estimated at R300 000. My resolve to leave the force was further strengthened by rumours circulating that open violence was surging in the country.

In June 1985, activists Matthew Goniwe, Sparrow Mkhonto, Fort Calata and Sicelo Mhlauli had been killed by SB members in a joint SB-MI operation in the Eastern Cape.

Then Victoria Mxenge, wife of human rights lawyer Griffiths Mxenge, was murdered on 1 August 1985, around the same time that activists Brian Mazibuko and Toto Dweba were killed, Mazibuko on the East Rand and Dweba in Natal.

Many others mentioned in intelligence reports were also murdered.

This increasingly bloody atmosphere was affecting us foot soldiers at John Vorster Square, no longer sure that we wouldn’t one day be drawn into the killing squads, particularly now that the government was more and more determined to crush the unrest by whatever means possible. We were told that we were involved in a life-and-death struggle, and that the country was teetering on the brink of disaster.

All I could think about at that time was getting out of there. But this wasn’t to be.

¡ Confessions of a Stratcom Hitman is published by Jacana Media and retails at R290.