Summary:
The
rash of reports over "spying" has not eventuated in the promised
judicial commission. Meanwhile, the Government currently employs almost
three times as many intelligence agents as it did at the height of the
"total onslaught" - and despite guarantees in the Constitution, many
South Africans are not confident that their mail and phones are
secure.
1996 had hardly been ushered in when Police Commissioner George Fivaz
startled the nation by announcing that there was evidence of systematic
spying on himself and other senior police officers. Fingers were
immediately pointed at the National Intelligence Agency [NIA], which
furiously denied any involvement.
A welter of claims and counter-claims followed. Dirk Coetzee, one of
the NIA agents alleged to have been spying on the police, not only
denied all such responsibility but suggested that the chain of
accusation might be traceable all the way back to the murder of the
civil rights lawyer, Griffiths Mxenge, in 1981.
Electronic bugs were indeed discovered in the offices of several
senior policemen and another such device was discovered in the car of
the Minister of Land Affairs, Derek Hanekom. The head of the SABC, Ivy
Matsepe-Casaburri, announced that she too had evidence that she was
being bugged.
Such claims were not new: back in July 1994 there had been reports of
the removal of a bugging device from President Nelson Mandela's
bedroom, and another from Telecommunication Minister Pallo Jordan's
office as well as an illicit search of Justice Minister Dullah Omar's
office while it was being de-bugged.
But this time the claims did not stop. An N1A agent popped up to say
that he had been spying on National Party councillors in Gauteng at the
behest of Deputy President Thabo Mbeki and Safety and Security
Minister, Sydney Mufamadi - a claim they indignantly rejected.
A senior intelligence source briefed the press with the news that the
doubling of foreign embassies in South Africa had meant that the number
of foreign spies in the country had "increased tenfold - the guys at
counter-intelligence are swamped". Most of this? he added, was trade,
technology and industrial espionage.
Yet the next development was an accusation of industrial espionage
against South Africa. The accusation was directed at Denel Informatics
and Home Affairs officials, and was launched by Laser Optronic
Technologies, a firm bidding against them for a government
contract.
Next came news of an attempted frame-up of the former Foreign
Minister, Pik Botha, in which someone had gained access to the secret
files of the Foreign Affairs department and deliberately falsified a
document there. Finally, it emerged that police were investigating the
possibility that bodyguards employed by Mbeki had been spying on him,
seeking to obtain his confidential documents and listening to his
private telephone conversations.
To date not one of these allegations has been disproved and hard
evidence has actually been furnished of the spying against both Hanekom
and several senior police officers. Meanwhile rumour is rife: bugs are
said to have been found in the offices of several parastatals and in
some cases officials have been sternly warned by management not to
discuss sensitive matters over the phone. It is, in the current state
of knowledge, impossible to confirm or deny such allegations and
rumours. All one can say with certainty is that the anxieties they
reflect are widely shared.
Under the long nightmare of the apartheid regime South Africans got
used to the notion that neither their letters nor their telephones were
secure and, despite a constitutional guarantee of the right to privacy
and the inviolability of one's private communications, many assume that
the bad old ways are still in place, with agents merely reporting to a
new set of political bosses.
This may, in fact, be entirely untrue. While Mbeki termed the
undoubted spying on the police "a serious attack on South Africa's
security", he also argued that there was no evidence pointing to who
might have placed the bugs: "It could be drug smugglers, car theft
syndicates, money launderers or the perpetrators of the KwaZulu-Natal
violence."
And, of course, beyond that there is the clear possibility of a good
deal of paranoia, of people imagining surveillance which does not
really exist. But even that possibility bespeaks a climate of fear,
suspicion and anxiety which is very much at odds with what one ought to
expect to find in a democratic society which is, at last, at peace with
itself and its neighbours.
Yet it is impossible to be critical of such anxieties when the chief
of police, no less, is sending out circulars to his senior officers
warning them to take precautions against surveillance. If Fivaz, a man
of spotless record appointed under the democratic conditions of the new
South Africa, does not believe that his constitutional rights are being
respected, how can anyone else? Or again, if such distinguished and
transparently honest citizens as Hanekom and Matsepe-Casaburri can be
bugged, is anyone at all safe? The attempt to frame Botha and
the allegations of espionage against Mbeki raise similar
worries.
The spying issue is thus about a lot more than cloak and dagger. We
have a virtually brand new Constitution, guaranteeing all manner of
rights, but for that Constitution to mean anything it has to be
credible. Many African states, as also the states of the former
communist bloc, had fine sounding constitutions which never attained
any credibility with their citizens, partly because it was apparent
that the governments of those states had no real respect for them and
were spying on their own citizens.
Not only did this mean that any notion of civil rights under such
regimes was stillborn but, since citizens knew they were being spied on
but their government always denied this was so, the very notion of
trust in government - the most basic building block of any new
democracy - was never established. The price of such distrust was very
high: because they did not trust their phones or their mail, people
stopped trusting government altogether; because they thus did not trust
their government about economics, people smuggled their money overseas;
because they did not trust government to protect them, people took the
law into their own hands; and so on.
The intelligence
community
This continuous eruption of spy stories has inevitably focused public
attention on the nation's new intelligence community, now consisting of
the NIA, the South African Police Service’s [SAPS's] Crime Intelligence
Service(ClS), Military lntelligence[Ml] and the Secret Service
[SASS].
