The day the dry-cleaning van came to Liliesleaf Farm

ON July 11 1963, most of Umkhonto weSizwe’s high command were gathered in a cottage on Liliesleaf Farm, the family home of operative Arthur Goldreich in Rivonia, Johannesburg.

As Bob Hepple tells it in his memoir, Young Man with a

Red Tie, the blueprint for Operation Mayibuye — a planned guerrilla invasion — lay on the table.

Hepple writes: “It is about 3pm when a van is heard coming down the drive. The geese that roam between the main house and the outhouses cackle loudly. Govan Mbeki goes to the window. He says: ‘It’s a dry-cleaning van. I’ve never seen it before.’ Rusty Bernstein then looks out and exclaims: ‘My God, I saw that van outside the police station on the way here!’

“Mbeki collects the document and some other papers and I see him putting them on the small stove in the room. The back window is open and I help Mbeki, Walter Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada jump out of it. There is a second or two as I move back near the door, with Bernstein next to me and Raymond Mhlaba sitting next to the window. The door bursts open. Detective Sergeant Kennedy rushes in: ‘Stay where you are. You’re all under arrest.’ ”

Hours later, the men are handcuffed and driven off.

Hepple continues: “Mbeki manages to whisper that Operation Mayibuye had been found and says: ‘This is going to be high treason, chaps.’ ”

To this day, nobody knows for certain whose tip-off exposed the Liliesleaf base — and resulted in life sentences for six of the 10 men arrested.

The theory favoured by Liliesleaf researchers and CEO Nicholas Wolpe — whose father Harold, Walter Sisulu’s lawyer, was arrested at the farm and later escaped — is that the CIA tipped off the police. The US spy agency’s man in Natal at the time, Donald Rickard, who handled operatives inside the ANC, did not deny involvement when questioned recently by Wolpe.

Other possible informants include a neighbour’s 10-yearold son who played with the Goldreich children, or a dentist who came to take an impression of Sisulu’s mouth for a disguise. It is likely that the raid was the result of a tipoff and not the culmination of infiltration or surveillance by the police. On the day of the raid, officers said: “We’ve hit the jackpot.”—

Picture: BAHA/ALF KUMALO GREAT DIVIDE: Police watch the huge crowd outside the Palace of Justice in Pretoria in December 1963 during the Rivonia trial, in which Nelson Mandela and his comrades who were arrested at Liliesleaf Farm faced charges of treason

HIDE-OUT: The main farmhouse at Liliesleaf in 1963