Security Branch (South Africa)

Organisational structure

The Branch's national headquarters were in Pretoria, at the Compol Building (also called the New Government Building) from November 1963 and then at Wachthuis from 1967. There were nineteen regional Security Branch divisions, including divisions for the Witswatersrand (headquartered in Johannesburg at John Vorster Square), the Western Transvaal (headquartered in Potchefstroom), the Eastern Transvaal (Middelburg), the Northern Transvaal (Pretoria), the Far Northern Transvaal (Pietersburg), the Eastern Cape (Port Elizabeth), Border (East London), the Western Cape (Cape Town), the Northern Cape (Kimberley), the Orange Free State (Bloemfontein), the West Rand (Krugersdorp), the East Rand (Springs), Port Natal (Durban), Natal (Pietermaritzburg), Northern Natal (Newcastle), and Soweto. Each division had its own branches, several of which, in the north of the country, were at border posts, where the Branch could monitor the movements of exiles. There was also a division for Oshakati in what was then South West Africa.

In the 1980s, the Branch had 14 sections, many of which had their own regional units or divisions, and which included research desks for the ANC, PAC, and South African Communist Party (SACP). Several sections were renamed and redesignated during the 1991 restructuring. In the 1980s, however, the sections were the following:

• Sections A: Information collection
• Section B: Informants
• Section C: Anti-terrorism
• Section D: State property
• Section E: Detainees
• Section F: Inter-departmental and research
• Section G: Foreign intelligence
• Section H: Secret funds
• Section J: Liaison to the State Security Council and its joint management centres
• Section K: Inspectorate
• Section L: Database and information centre
• Section M: Namibia
• Section N: Technical
• Section O: Training

The best known of these sections, the C-Section and G-Section, are notable primarily for their prominent role in countering resistance to apartheid.

C-Section: Anti-terrorism

The C-Section of the Security Branch, founded in 1979, was nominally its "anti-terrorism" unit, and housed its counterinsurgency and counterintelligence activities, with almost exclusive focus on the domestic anti-apartheid movement. The TRC called it the "special forces" of the Branch.

C1: Operations (Vlakplaas)

The operational arm of C-Section was Section C1, sometimes known by the name of its headquarters at Vlakplaas. It was based on a similar counterinsurgency model used successfully by the Selous Scouts in Rhodesia (itself allegedly partly funded by a special account of the Security Branch) and then by Koevoet in South West Africa, which the Security Branch had helped establish . Many of the white officers at C1 were drawn from Koevoet or the SAP Special Task Force, and many had specific counterinsurgency experience or specialised training, such as in explosives.

C1 was responsible for the "rehabilitation" of terrorists: it housed activists who had been "turned" – usually under torture, but sometimes voluntarily – and recruited as police informants, known as askaris. The informants usually returned to their political organisations and infiltrated further into anti-apartheid networks as double agents, gathering intelligence for the Branch. Initially, they were treated as informants and were paid from a secret account; later, they were officially, though covertly, recruited as SAP constables and paid a police salary. Some – most famously Joe Mamasela and Tlhomedi Ephraim Mfalapitsa – defected entirely and became full-time Branch officers. The use of askaris seems to have resulted in considerable tactical successes, but perhaps more significant were the internal divisions it wrought within liberation movements. These divisions are exemplified by the spate of necklacings in the late 1980s and by cases like that of Stompie Seipei, whose throat was cut after he was falsely accused of being a police informant. Allegations and rumours that certain politicians spied for the Security Branch or for other intelligence agencies during apartheid are not uncommon even in post-apartheid South Africa.

Section C1 also housed a notorious paramilitary death squad, which killed dozens of anti-apartheid activists, many of them former informants or people who had refused to become informants. In the late 1990s, Eugene de Kock testified at length about killings and other illegal acts committed by the unit, which he commanded from 1985 to 1993. In 1996 he faced criminal prosecution and was sentenced to 212 years and two life terms, though the TRC granted him amnesty for the several crimes it found to have been politically motivated.

C2: Research

Section C2, headed in the 1980s by Martin Naudé, identified, monitored and interrogated activists. Its intelligence was often used to capture activists, with an eye to interrogating them and recruiting them to C1 as informants. C2 maintained a so-called "Terrorist Album," a large album of photographs of suspected anti-apartheid activists, which informants were encouraged to peruse.

C3: TREWITS

Also under the command of the C-Section from 1986 and designated Section C3 was the highly secretive Teen Rewolusionêre Inligting Taakspan (Counter-Revolutionary Intelligence Task Team, best known as TREWITS). Though housed within the Branch, TREWITS was a subcommittee of the State Security Council (SSC), and also contained representatives of the National Intelligence Service and of the Military Intelligence and Special Forces branches of the South African Defence Force (SADF). It was formed to coordinate and assess operational information, primarily in reference to liberation movement bases (especially ANC and MK bases) in neighbouring countries. In practice its primary function was target identification. Former Security Branch head and Police Commissioner Johan van der Merwe confirmed that TREWITS existed, but denied that it had evolved to include targets inside South Africa, as claimed by other former Branch officers. It was established in September 1986, moved into its own offices in Pretoria in January 1987, and was disbanded in 1992. Its existence was not public knowledge until the TRC hearings.

G-Section: Foreign intelligence and Stratcom

Under the leadership of Piet Goosen and Craig Williamson, the G-Section of the Security Branch carried out operations outside South Africa, like C-Section with a focus on anti-apartheid activism and thus on South African activists in exile. Section G1 was responsible for foreign intelligence, Section G2 for Strategic Communications, and Section G3 for counterespionage. Its intelligence network in Africa (the "Africa Desk") was based in Malawi and focused on Zambia and Tanzania; in Europe, the network was sometimes based in London and sometimes in Brussels. One of the objectives of the Section was the infiltration of ANC and other anti-apartheid structures abroad – it was revealed at the TRC that an anti-apartheid group in Spain in the 1980s had been set up at Williamson's suggestion, funded by the G-Section, and headed by a Branch agent. Other activities of the Section in foreign countries included:

• The assassinations of Ruth First and Jeanette Schoon;
• The 1982 burglaries of the ANC, PAC, and SWAPO London offices; and
• The 1982 bombing of the ANC's London offices.

G2: Stratcom

Housed in the G-Section (and in the D-Section after restructuring in the early 1990s) was the Branch's Stratcom unit, so named after the Strategic Communications Branch subcommittee ("Tak Strategiese Kommunikasie," TSK; best known as Stratcom or Stratkom) of the SSC. In January 1985, the SSC through this subcommittee approved a new policy, also commonly referred to as Stratcom, which entailed the intensification and coordination of the intelligence services' disinformation activities. The SSC subcommittee, which included representatives of the National Intelligence Service and SADF Military Intelligence as well as the Security Branch, was reorganised for this purpose, and in subsequent years the Security Branch set up its own dedicated Stratcom unit, which reported to the Minister of Law and Order and to the Stratcom subcommittee of the SSC. From 1989 to 1990, the Branch's Stratcom unit was run by Vic McPherson. Historian Stephen Ellis said of the projects pursued under the Stratcom policy (an assessment that the TRC agreed with):

Although these projects were in theory concerned with the dissemination of information and disinformation, many involved blackmail, libel and manipulation of such a mischievous type that, in situations of acute unrest, they could lead to murder and other bloodshed.

Elsewhere, the TRC defined Stratcom as "a form of psychological warfare waged by both conventional and unconventional means." According to former Branch officers, Stratcom had both "hard" and "soft" sides. The "soft" operations involved propaganda and disinformation , and general "dirty tricks," especially harassing and intimidating activists "by damaging their property; constant and obvious surveillance; making threatening phone calls, and firing shots at houses or throwing bricks through windows." These were already fairly routine for the Branch by the 1970s, but later were formalised and coordinated under the Stratcom unit and selected more strategically for political impact. For example, in July 1988, after the government had failed to have Cry Freedom banned – it was a film about the death of Steve Biko in Security Branch custody, and the Cabinet worried it would be "inciteful" – Minister of Justice Adriaan Vlok authorised an operation in which officers placed dummy explosives in cinemas around South Africa, to provide a pretext for seizing and banning the film. Typical Stratcom activities for which officers subjected amnesty applications to the TRC included:

graffiti, fake pamphlets, pouring paint remover over vehicles, disrupting protest gatherings though the use of stink bombs or teargas, theft, threatening phone calls, blackmail, framing, assault, slashing of car tyres, bricks through windows, loosening wheel nuts and bolts of vehicles, firing shots at houses, and arson and petrol bomb attacks on vehicles, homes and buildings.

"Hard" Stratcom involved "active measures," especially so-called contra-mobilisation . At the TRC, Vlok conceded both that Stratcom had been official state policy and that it had been illegal and unlawful. Hard Stratcom, he said, was an artefact of the late-80s shift in national security policy towards stricter internal counterinsurgency measures, necessitated by intensifying internal resistance to apartheid.

Activities

Interrogation and torture

The Security Branch had access to all political detainees in the system, including those arrested by other elements of the security services. In the north of the country, many were detained in Johannesburg at the Gray's Building or, from 1968, at John Vorster Square police station, where the Branch had offices on the top two floors. The lifts in John Vorster Square only went up to the ninth floor, and detainees on their way to interrogation were walked up the staircase from the ninth floor to the tenth floor. The Branch used interrogations not only to extract information from detainees but also with an eye to "turning" them and recruiting them as permanent agents.

Allegations that the Branch subjected detainees to torture first surfaced in the early 1960s, and escalated as a series of deaths in custody was reported. The TRC later concluded that all branches, offices, and levels of the Security Branch had used torture "systematically," both as a means of obtaining information and as a means of terror, usually with the knowledge and probably the condonation of senior officers. Effectively permitted by the law to prolong detentions indefinitely, officers frequently interrogated activists for weeks or months at a time, often combining different methods over that period. Methods of torture included prolonged solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, dangling detainees from the window, beatings, and electric shock. Also common were psychological threats and intimidation, especially with interrogators claiming that the detainee's peers had already informed on him. These interrogation methods were also used by units of the Branch stationed in neighbouring countries, especially on SWAPO activists in Owamboland and Oshakati in what was then South West Africa.

In relation to the Security Branch "particularly but not exclusively," the TRC further found that

a considerable number of deaths in detention occurred, either as a direct result of torture or as a consequence of a situation in which the circumstances were such that detainees were induced to commit suicide.

Prominent deaths in custody following detention and interrogation by the Security Branch include those of Neil Aggett, Ahmed Timol, and Steve Biko. In 2017, a second inquest found that Timol had died after members of the Branch pushed him out a window or off the roof at John Vorster Square. The verdict in a second inquest into Aggett's death is currently pending.

Surveillance

From its establishment, a central mandate of the Security Branch was to investigate and gather intelligence about suspected opponents of the state, both for the purpose of prosecution and for the purpose of guiding and justifying the imposition of banning orders under the Suppression of Communism Act and later legislation. According to the TRC, the justifications it provided were often "flimsy." The Branch intercepted private mail and telephone calls and physically surveilled suspected anti-apartheid activists. For example, Soweto Security Branch officers testified that Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the wife of Nelson Mandela, had been subject to constant electronic surveillance by phone taps and bugs, and that Jerry Richardson – a member of her Mandela United Football Club, and famously the killer of Stompie Seipei – had been a police informant.

Propaganda and disinformation

Under Stratcom, the Branch pursued disinformation campaigns to tarnish the credibility of anti-apartheid activists, to sow internal divisions in the anti-apartheid movement (or even provoke internecine violence), and to cover up its own officers' involvement in various crimes. More than once it attempted to frame activists as police informants. Stratcom's activities in relation to media propaganda appear to have grown out of initiatives and networks established by the government in the 1970s and publicly exposed in the 1978 Information Scandal. McPherson, the former head of Stratcom at the Branch, claimed that the Branch nurtured a network of "friendly" journalists, some of whom were paid Branch informants. At the TRC, he announced that he had provided the Commissioners with a confidential list of journalists who had been "friendly" with, sporadically on the payroll of, or regularly on the payroll of the Security Branch. This list might well have been unreliable – the one name McPherson disclosed at the hearing he later withdrew when the journalist in question, Fred Bridgland, strenuously denied the allegation. However, the revelations about Stratcom, and the list of friendly journalists in particular, have occasionally been revivified in post-apartheid South Africa, through accusations that certain individuals were or remain "Stratcom agents."

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela

Along with Peter Mokaba and Chris Hani, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was apparently a central target of the Security Branch's "concerted disinformation campaign against the ANC and the South African Communist Party." Officers from different divisions disagreed about whether Madikizela-Mandela had been targeted, but some – among them McPherson and Paul Erasmus – testified to the TRC at some length about attempts to tarnish Madikizela-Mandela's reputation as a means to damaging the credibility of the ANC and of her husband. Under Operation Romulus, the Stratcom unit fed intelligence on Madikizela-Mandela – including about the murder of Stompie Seipei and her alleged affair with Dali Mpofu – to national and international media.

One of the most prominent post-apartheid "Stratcom" scandals occurred in 2018 when a clip of Madikizela-Mandela was released posthumously as promotional material for the documentary Winnie. In the clip, Madikizela-Mandela claims that prominent liberal journalists Anton Harber and Thandeka Gqubule-Mbeki "actually did the job for Stratcom" while working at the Weekly Mail during apartheid. The Weekly Mail was in fact the newspaper which broke the Stratcom story in 1995. When the Economic Freedom Fighters repeated the claim, Harber and Gqubule-Mbeki successfully sued for defamation. The South African National Editors’ Forum has expressed concern about the political exploitation of Stratcom as a means to undermining the media.

Sabotage

The Security Branch was responsible for the 1987 bombing of COSATU House, the Johannesburg headquarters of the ANC-aligned Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU); the 1988 bombing of Khanya House, the Pretoria headquarters of the Southern African Catholic Bishops' Conference; and the 1988 bombings of Khotso House, the Johannesburg headquarters of the South African Council of Churches and United Democratic Front (UDF). The TRC found that the attacks had been "authorised at the highest level." Indeed, Vlok, then the Minister of Justice, testified that he had personally authorised the attacks on COSATU House and Khotso House, in the case of the latter to fulfil State President P. W. Botha's request that the building should be rendered "unusable." The Branch carried out numerous other attacks on buildings housing civil society organisations, political groups, and their leaders, including the 1982 bombing of the ANC's London offices.

Extra-judicial killings

The Security Branch was responsible for extrajudicial killings, especially of anti-apartheid activists . The TRC concluded that its officers had carried out many political assassinations, "frequently with the authorisation or involvement of senior Security Branch personnel." The Branch carried out some very prominent assassinations, such as those of Griffiths Mxenge, Ruth First, and the Cradock Four. It used gunshots, various kinds of explosives, and, in at least one case – that of Black Consciousness activist Siphiwe Mthimkulu – thallium. In 1989, the Branch also carried out the attempted murder of Frank Chikane, at Vlok's instruction, by lacing his underwear with a nerve agent. Targets were sometimes killed in or abducted from neighbouring countries, especially Swaziland, and were often ambushed based on information obtained from the Branch's informants.

Koevoet

In 1976, during the Border War, the Security Branch launched "Operation K," which evolved by 1979 into what was known as Koevoet ("Crowbar"). Koevet was a counterinsurgency unit in South West Africa, based in Oshakati and Rundu, and undertook both operational and intelligence-gathering activities, primarily against SWAPO and its armed wing. Louis le Grange, then South African Minister of Law and Order, called it "the crowbar which prises terrorists out of the bushveld like nails from rotten wood." It worked very closely with SADF, and on some accounts was a joint operation with SADF, but, in its early years, was formally located under the Security Branch. Its founding commander, Johannes "Hans" Dreyer, was a senior Branch officer; many other personnel were drawn from the Branch; and many of its black members were recruited through Branch networks in Ovamboland. In 1985, the unit was transferred to the South West African Police, and before that it had already attained a degree of autonomy from the SAP (and even from SADF, whose operations it was supposed to be supporting). However, in 1983, a significant number of Branch personnel had been withdrawn from Namibia and transferred from Koevoet to Section C1, the Branch's new internal counterterrorism operations unit, whose organisational culture acquired resemblances to that of Koevoet . Among those transferred from Koevoet was Eugene de Kock, who commanded C1 from 1985.

Other cross-border activities

Especially during the 1970s and 1980s, the PAC and ANC were highly active in neighbouring active countries, where they were in exile from repression within South Africa and accommodated by sympathetic regimes or opposition parties. The Security Branch was thus involved in several operations outside South Africa. It had a close working relationship with regimes in Swaziland, Malawi, and (after 1986) Lesotho – along with SADF's Military Intelligence division, it set up a joint security task force with representatives of the Basotho police and defence force. In one notable example of Branch activity outside South Africa's borders, the Branch was involved in target identification for the SADF's 1985 raid on Gaborone. Several Branch officers applied for amnesty from the TRC for their roles in gathering intelligence for and planning the raid, and they testified that they had attended planning sessions with SADF as representatives of the Branch's national office and of several of its regional divisions.

Contra-mobilisation

From the mid-1980s, the SSC grew to emphasise the principle of "contra-mobilisation": counter-propaganda to mobilise popular opposition, especially among "moderate blacks," to the liberation movements, especially the ANC, and to sow and exploit internal divisions within those movements. The state's role in contra-mobilisation necessarily had to be concealed, so it provided covert logistical, political and financial support to what the TRC called "surrogate forces." As early as 1985, the SSC through Stratcom sought to exploit conflict between the ANC-aligned UDF and the Azanian People's Organisation (AZAPO) – a memo was circulated with a list of possible themes that could be used, such in a covert pamphlet campaign, to further entrench divisions between the groups. The state's contra-mobilisation policy eventually escalated to the point that security forces were willing to actively facilitate violent conflict between factions of the anti-apartheid movement. SADF seems to have been the main player in implementing contra-mobilisation efforts along these lines, but the Security Branch was the key channel through which SAP sponsored and participated in any such efforts, and did play a role. For example, one Branch officer claimed that, amid the political violence of the early 1990s, the Alexandra Security Branch routinely attempted to inflame tensions between the ANC and Inkatha in Alexandra, including by driving through the township at night firing guns "randomly" and naming ANC members to Inkatha.

Apart from provoking conflict, the security forces facilitated it by providing support to the groups involved – specifically, the TRC noted, groups opposed to the ANC and its allies, the UDF and Mass Democratic Movement. In the mid-1980s, the Branch collaborated with Reverend Mzwandile Maqina, whose group AmaAfrika was involved in the UDF-AZAPO violence in the Cape, though Maqina was later handed off to Military Intelligence. The Branch also supported Inkatha-aligned vigilantes, such as the A-Team in Durban, from 1985 at the latest. Later, in another example, several members of Section C1 of the Branch admitted to having provided arms for the Ciskei and Transkei coups plotted by SADF under Operation Katzen. The weapons were channelled through a private company which was ostensibly under contract with the anti-ANC Oupa Gqozo but was in fact a SADF front. C1 head Eugene de Kock and others claimed that the provision of arms had been authorised by the commander of the C-Section and by the head of the Branch itself. Indeed, the provision of arms and funds was probably the Branch's biggest contribution the political turmoil of the democratic transition of the early 1990s. As revealed during the Inkathagate scandal, the Branch had materially supported Inkatha-aligned groups since at least 1986, when it provided covert funding for Inkatha's establishment of the United Workers' Union of South Africa as a competitor to the ANC-aligned COSATU. Later, in the early 1990s and by then operating under the CIC, the Branch, especially C1, supplied arms seized in Namibia to Inkatha. Some officers also testified to having provided Inkatha with weapons training.

Some members of the security forces also supported the white right wing with information, arms, and training. However, in the early 1990s, there was also apparently a Stratcom operation, known as Operation Cosmopolitan, under which the Security Branch infiltrated right-wing groups like the Boere Weerstandsbeweging with the aim of persuading them to accept a peaceful democratic settlement.

Commanding officers

Du Plooy, Geldenhuys, Coetzee, and van der Merwe all went on to serve as national Commissioner of Police.

Notable members

Several Security Branch agents are household names because they made extensive disclosures in TRC hearings, in criminal trials, or in the press, usually in the mid-to-late 1990s. Others, especially known askaris and those who carried out interrogations of detainees, had attained a reputation among anti-apartheid activists well before then. Well-known former members include:

• Gideon Nieuwoudt
• Craig Williamson
• Eugene de Kock
• Dirk Coetzee
• Paul Erasmus
• Butana Almond Nofomela
• Joe Mamasela
• Charles Sebe
• Harold Snyman
• Olivia Forsyth

List of killings carried out by the Branch

Below is a non-exhaustive list of killings known to have been carried out by the Security Branch. Unless otherwise specified, the Branch's responsibility for the killings listed was established by Security Branch members who confessed their own involvement, especially in amnesty applications to the TRC. The list therefore does not include killings which the Security Branch is merely alleged to have carried out, or even killings which the TRC found the Branch responsible for without receiving corroboration from participants in the act. Most recently in the case of the Cradock Four, there has been and remains considerable mystery and contestation around the question of the level at which certain killings were authorised, and whether, for example, the State Security Council sanctioned or ordered them.