Author: Gerry Gable | Date: July 2007

South African intelligence officer makes failed attempt to entrap Searchlight

Eleven years ago, when Searchlight first exposed the existence of a rat line of killers and saboteurs that ran from mainland Europe via Britain to the newly democratised South Africa, it was clear that a continuing crisis existed in that country’s security and intelligence services which had started during the dying days of the apartheid regime. The assassination of Chris Hani, a leading ANC member, in 1993 and a wave of bombings appeared linked to people who had worked for the racist regime.

After the fall of apartheid some of its old aparachniks were embraced by the new intelligence service, clearly as part of a deal to make use of their experience and expertise. What seems to have been overlooked, or deliberately ignored, is that some of those who continued to give their services were more than just professionals. They were killers and torturers who had originally been employed to subvert and spy on students, academics, trade unionists and large sections of both the black and the white communities.

One example was the former Dutch mercenary Ronnie Deuster, who had served in the Balkans during the bloody conflagrations there after the collapse of Yugoslavia as a state. When he was looking for fresh fields in which to kill, he found his way to South Africa on two occasions, and was employed to join groups organising assassinations and sabotage.

At that time a major plot was under way to kill Nelson Mandela, the South African President. It was no great surprise when we exposed the role in it of British nazis associated with the elite nazi group the League of St George and former activists in the National Front, forerunner to the British National Party and the leading racist party at the time. What shocked us was the involvement of South African intelligence operatives such as Arthur Kemp and Cliff Saunders, who suddenly popped up in the UK and Germany.

Kemp, who is now living in England and is active in the BNP, was able to open doors with his book about the South African neo-nazi AWB. The nazi NPD in Germany loved it and him. He went on to write a massive tome The March of the Titans first published as a hardback book and then on the internet.

In March this year we returned to the story because Kemp and Lambertus “Bep” Nieuwhof, who had a conviction and 12-month sentence in South Africa for a terrorist crime, were both occupying highly placed and sensitive positions in the BNP.

Searchlight’s exposé prompted a flurry of activity stemming from South Africa.

It started with an approach from Deuster, who told us that he had now returned to live in South Africa. He appeared to be trying to track the movements of one of our team whom he knew from 11 years ago when he was a paid informant of ours.

He even suggested that he might be able to help us with “the type of work I used to do”, which broadly amounted to killing people. We ignored these offers as well as his attempts to use us to get in touch with a former British police officer.

What followed proved the involvement of the South African intelligence services in rushing to protect Kemp and Nieuwhof.

Two sister organisations of Searchlight in the Netherlands and Germany received emails from a man called Francois Strauss. He described himself as “a member of management of the South African National Intelligence Coordinating Committee (NICOC), which is a statutory body put in place after our first democratic elections in 1994, to coordinate intelligence produced by the South African intelligence community.

He eventually contacted our publisher by email with a very strange request for a representative of a major state intelligence service.

What he wanted to know was whether we could provide training for some members of his team. He wanted them to gain a working knowledge on how to tackle South Africa’s enemies in the UK and Europe. He wrote that he believed we had a similar analytical approach to the issue as himself.

He even sent a brief CV of himself complete with photo, assuming it is actually him. It was clear he had served both the old and new South African governments.

We told him that we had experience of training police officers and of research projects for the European Parliament. We explained that if we had a better idea of what he was looking for we might be able to help, but we would wish to undertake any training in the UK not South Africa.

On advice from our ANC contacts we asked why he could not obtain the required training from the Institute for Strategic Studies, (ISS) which carries out research and analysis for the South African intelligence services.

His shock response was to attack his own colleagues as effectively useless, this in an email to someone who was a complete stranger to him. “Perhaps you are not as well informed as to the capacity of this institute,” he wrote. “The ISS … have been contacted, but their knowledge on the subject is, well, anecdotal to be diplomatic. They are in no position to offer training that would add value to our efforts.”

By this time he was getting pushy, saying that his people had to obtain visas and make flight arrangements and he needed to get moving on this.

Alarm bells had gone off at Searchlight after the first approach, but now we smelt a very large rat.

Shortly afterwards he gave us the following list of the areas in which he wanted us to train his team, one of which would have contravened British criminal law:

• Techniques in spotting activities of these people when it is still low-keyed;

• Techniques in spotting support by elements in official state departments;

• Deep access to the Internet sites used by the extreme right;

• Strategic analysis pertaining specifically to the extreme right – not general strategic analysis;

• Socio-political programmes to neutralise hate crimes stemming from actions by the extreme right.

Searchlight immediately sought contact with a representative of the South Africa’s security service stationed in this country. After a meeting lasting over an hour we handed over a large dossier of material we had gathered on Kemp, Nieuwhof, Deuster, Strauss and Leonard Veenendaal.

His first reaction was to suggest that this was all some kind of hoax. We pointed out that Strauss was writing to us from a genuine NICOC email address. He then promised a quick response. When, after hearing nothing, we contacted him again, he became obstructive about Veenendaal, said the whole matter was under investigation and promised an initial response within two weeks.

After the two weeks were up we contacted him for a progress report. He replied that he was leaving on a month’s leave.

So we still have nothing from the South African security services about what appears to be an unofficial operation by a rogue element, but a growing clamour for answers from within South Africa itself.

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