Tales from South Africa: The South Africa Lobby that wasn't part 1
This is going to be a series of true stories from South Africa. The time period I wish to cover overall stretches from the 1960s to the present day. These stories will get into global espionage, Israel, American politics and foreign lobbies. These posts will be long and context heavy because this history is unknown to western readers. I will try to highlight the actual conspiracies and intrigue so that you can skip all the context if you want. I want to tell the story of both the conspiracies and the men aboard the sinking ship of South Africa. If there is enough interest in the topic I will make a general for these posts instead of posting them here. But for now I think this is the appropriate place.
I would first and foremost like to warn you that this post will probably be the longest of all. It will be the heaviest on context and the lightest on conspiracies. The conspiracies that will follow the events described here will only make sense in context. I hope that in doing this here, the next few posts can be a lot shorter because all of this context will be redundant. This particular post will be much less about how the apartheid system worked in practice and much more about apartheid era politics.
The Nature of the Beast:
The party of white minority rule in South Africa was the National Party, founded in 1914. Explaining the first few decades of their existence and their brief foray into power in the 1920s is not necessary for this story. It is better for our purposes to start in 1948, when the National Party obtained power that would not be lost until 1994. What needs to be understood about the year 1948 is the distinct existence of three ethno-classes. The blacks, at the bottom, inhabited the world of unskilled labour, farm labour, and mine work. The Afrikaners were relegated to the middle with agriculture, skilled labour, and small businesses, and the English occupied the top with management, ownership of conglomerates, and full control over the civil service.
This three-tier class system became extremely relevant for the National Party in 1948, both in terms of determining their platform and their shock electoral success. The Afrikaner voting demographic was seen as a cohesive alliance between farmers and labourers, both under the unhappy rule of the British. Thus, National Party policy has a number of unusual traits. Firstly, it was focused on Afrikaner advancement in the civil service and big business where the Brits dominated, and secondly, it was focused on creating Afrikaans self-rule with equality between Brits and Afrikaners. The policy of racial segregation was viewed as protective of the Afrikaner people. I am only going over this because it is relevant to what is about to follow.
Detailing their specific policies and positions would be outside of the scope of this post. But the basic thing you need to understand is that the national party achieved its goals by around 1966 in empowering the Afrikaans whites and now had to think about the best way to keep the spoils. There were two camps here. A military industrial complex camp and an intelligence glowie camp. This came to a head with prime minister B. J. Vorster, who was favourable to intelligence and psyops and had an outward looking foreign policy aimed at making friends for the increasingly unpopular apartheid regime. This series of posts will explore the shenanigans of both of these factions, starting with the intelligence faction during the days of John Vorster.
The Intelligence Faction Triumvirate:
I must add to begin with that nobody in South Africa has ever referred to these three men as the "intelligence faction". Newspapers at the time referred to them as the 'triumvirate'. Before I introduce you to the men themselves, I will tell you what these men had in common that brought them together. They were from the branch of the National Party in the north of South Africa, in other words the place where all the blacks live. Therefore, they had a much deeper appreciation for the severity of the problems in South Africa. Their opponents, the military faction, came from the Cape, where a dogmatic sense of complacency and adherence to the status quo prevailed. Not all of the individuals that will be mentioned were born in the North, however the ones that were not aligned themselves with the heavy hitters that were. A lot of the politicians from the North were therefore mavericks driven by the sense that they had a war to fight that could not be won with bullets. The triumvirate, as I will now introduce, embody this.
Hendrik Van Den Bergh: Hendrik Van Den Bergh was born in the North of South Africa in 1914. He acquired the nickname 'Tall Hendrik' for his enormous stature. If you want to get an idea for his eccentric personality you should know that during the second world war he was interned for membership in a pro German paramilitary group formed largely by returning athletes from the 1936 Olympics who were impressed by their nazi hosts. This he shared in common with John Vorster, who was the Prime Minister during his political career. Tall Hendrik was the godfather of South African intelligence. He built the entire South African intelligence apparatus. And by the 70s he headed a bureau of his own creation called the Bureau of State Security (BOSS). With the support of Vorster, van den Bergh managed to turn BOSS into one of the most ruthless and efficient bureaus in South Africa. This pissed of the military faction to no end, given that his power and his advocacy for intelligence operations over military options minimized the department of defense in the Vorster government. The event that raised his profile the most was the capture of the Russian spy Yuri Loginov. If you want one quote that sums up his career:
I have enough men to commit murder if I tell them to kill. I don't care who the prey is. These are the type of men I have.
Eschel Rhoodie: Rhoodie was born in 1933 in Cape Town. He began his career as a bureaucrat in the office of information. The office of information was in essence the propaganda arm of the apartheid government intended to promote South Africa's image abroad. This department was for a long time the clown in the constellation of state. Eschel Rhoodie rose through the department through the notion that South Africa was on the receiving end of an immense negative global propaganda campaign that would need to be fought with every means possible, including dirty tricks. He maintained that this had to be done covertly and over the heads of the foreign affairs ministry due to their inability to do the job. This is something to keep in mind for later. By 1972 when Rhoodie achieved the position of Secretary of the Information Department he was the outsider's outsider. He was not well connected in the Afrikaans secret societies and social circles that defined apartheid politics. He had also never held an elected position. However, vand den Bergh, the iron fist of power behind the Vorster government took a shine to the maverick Rhoodie. Both men agreed that the war for public opinion could not be won with bullets. There is a quote from Rhoodie that sums him up quite well:
In the obscure field of psychological propaganda and warfare, hypocrisy is king. No government worth its salt will admit to it. No government worth its salt is not a participant, one way or another. As Paul Blackstone of the University of South Carolina in the USA wrote, they are all involved in "the dark, obscure field of covert political warfare".
Cornelius 'Connie' Mulder: Doctor Connie Mulder, born in 1925 was in the heyday of his career the 'crown prince' of the National Party. Mulder had the right disposition to be succesful in the deeply conservative and christian world of the National Party. His doctoral thesis as titled: The Influence of the Bible in the forming of the Afrikaans National Character. He cut his teeth in politics with a mayorship before moving on to a seat in parliament, where he would achieve various ministerial positions. Namely, the Ministery of the Information Department in 1968. Dr. Mulder was relatively conservative in disposition (which was a pre-requisite to achieve 'crown prince' status in the party) but had a deep pragmatic bent. Thus, he was easily persuaded by van den Bergh and Rhoodie to bolster covert international propaganda efforts through the information department. I have the least to say about him because by my account he is the least remarkable member of the triumvirate. As you will come to find out his story will be defined more by the stories of the other two. It should be said however, that Dr Mulder's enormous personal charisma and skills of persuasion helped make the schemes to follow possible.
By 1973 all members of the triumvirate held the positions ascribed to them in my writings and had formed their alliance towards the common goal of creating an international propaganda campaign. By 1974 Mulder and Rhoodie, having agreed on a course of action for the department of information, convinced Prime Minister Vorster to allow them to embark on a 5 year global propaganda campaign, funded by a slush fund under a secret account in the Department of Defense. Rhoodie claims that Vorster gave him and Mulder permission to conduct the campaign in any way they wished, legal or otherwise, in as much secrecy as possible. As it will turn out, having your rivals in the military faction know about the dirty tricks slush fund will prove to be a massive pain in the neck.
Vorster gave approval for this program because in his view, the department of foreign affairs had proven itself completely inadequate in reaching US officials through official means. Therefore, he was willing to try covert means.
As for the secrecy, Rhoodie speculates in his book 'The Real Information Scandal' that Vorster developed a phobia for conducting covert operations in an official capacity after his secret program to arm the Biafran breakaway state was uncovered by the CIA. This is impossible for me to prove or disprove at the moment, I may look into it at another time. Regardless ,it is my first CONSPIRACY of the post.
Rhoodie sums up the program as follows:
The objectives were obvious: To try to get to the opinion formers and the decision makers in the world, to influence their stand on South Africa, to create channels of communication through which South Africa could channel its messages so that, ostensibly, the message or argument would be that of an independent individual or organisation. Politicians, Members of Parliament, religious leaders, top business people, newspapers, individual newspapermen, the anti-apartheid organisations, labour unions, student leaders — these were the targets. So was the establishment of workable links with Black Africa for I believed, intensely, that acceptance by the moderate states in Africa was the key to acceptance by the rest of the world. The place to start was the French speaking states which did not suffer from anti-White hysteria as the old English colonies of Tanzania, Nigeria and Kenya did. In addition, Dr Mulder, General Van den Bergh and I set our sights on Israel. Until Mr Vorster’s triumphant visit to Israel we three remained the only top people in the Government who believed the lot of Israel was also tied to South Africa and vice versa. Brand Fourie, on more than one occasion, tried to stop me from developing the Israeli connection.
The Methods also obvious: Persuasion. Logic. Facts. "Independent opinions" from "independent" observers. Using conferences and seminars. Books, magazines, television stations. Institutes. Newspapers. Visits to South Africa. Buying goodwill. Buying influence or space in newspapers. Advertising through front organisations. Sowing confusion among the anti-apartheid community. Setting up alternative organisations to the World Council of Churches. Getting shareholders to fight corporate disengagement. Paying out money to people so that they would not do what they intended to do.
The only consideration they had was that Barbie would be of use to them, to aid the United States in trying to find other German leaders and seek out the Communist spies in France. In obtaining arms and oil, and in fighting the anti-apartheid, anti-South African left wing brigades overseas, South Africa has, and will, continue to use methods which may be immoral in Utopia but otherwise are the right and only weapons to use against people, organisations and states who employ these methods on a massive scale to destroy our society.
Prime Minister John Vorster
Jesus this post took me a long LONG time to compile. I wanted to write in my section on Israel into this one but I figured that it would make the post far too long. So whenever I next get free time, I am going to explain the intelligence triumvirate and their shenanigans in Israel, everyone's favorite subject of conspiracy theories. But in the mean time I hope you found this post interesting. I know it doesn't neatly fit into the theme of the thread, but I also know that without this context the juicy shit that is to come will make no sense. So please excuse this eyesore.