How the CIA defeated Apartheid
and placed the ANC in power
http://www.africancrisis.co.za (March 08 2007)
This is the most important article I found on the web in my more than five years on the web. The original discovery was by a military friend of mine overseas. He found the book, and then later, I found this article. An alert reader in the UK found this. This article is the follow on by Dr Cummings to his book, The Pied Piper (1985). Dr Cummings was a CIA agent in the Middle East. This is an extremely important article and it explains what went on behind the scenes in this country. -- Jan
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A Diamond Is Forever:
Mandela Triumphs, Buthelezi and de Klerk Survive, and ANC on the US Payroll
by Richard Cummings
International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence (Summer 1995)
Nelson Mandela is the president of South Africa, an event of monumental significance in world history. This great personal triumph is for him a vindication of his struggle. But now that the South African elections are long past, the record must be set straight about what really happened and why. The press has concealed as much as it reported; ideologues of all stripes have rushed around to rationalize their hypocrisies, and American politicians have been spreading around largesse as if the money were their own. That the results were so perfect, historically so symmetrical, is rather remarkable.
But, those with power, or who are connected to it, do not want the facts about the funding of the election to be known because it would reveal a pattern of deception and control, both to influence the outcome and to moderate the African National Congress. And those on the radical left don't want it known that the ANC has compromised itself by joining the list of organizations taking money from the United States, because they think it will hurt the cause of revolution. Everyone involved, across the ideological spectrum, has therefore joined in a kind of game to cloud the minds of outside observers.
Most hypocritical perhaps was the attempt to make a devil out of Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi by characterizing him as the tool of the oppressors and an obstructionist in the transition to democracy. His anomalous situation in post-apartheid South Africa led to suggestions that he was an enemy of democracy, and the cause of dissension that led to violence in an attempt to disrupt the electoral process that black South Africans struggled for decades to achieve. Chairman of the Inkatha Freedom Party and chief minister of KwaZulu, this prince and descendant of Shaka Zulu was then cast in the role of villain and reactionary. But it was not always so.
ANC and the CP
The triumph of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress in South Africa was, for many years, viewed in certain circles as an extremely undesirable result. During the Cold War, the power of the South African Communist Party in the ANC made the ANC unacceptable as a holder of power in a post-apartheid South Africa. Yet, because apartheid and the white supremacist Nationalist Party were anathema to the rest of Africa, and because white racism fueled the sentiments for communism among the black majority in South Africa, a reliable black alternative to the ANC became essential. As Harry Rositzke, the Central Intelligence Agency station chief in New Delhi from 1957 to 1962, and coordinator of operations against Communist parties abroad from 1962 until his retirement from the CIA in 1970, wrote in 1977: "In Africa, an area of primitive, unstable states, Soviet influence is substantial in Somalia, Guinea, Nigeria, and Angola. The support of black independence movements against the Rhodesian and South African governments may extend that influence. The training of five thousand African students each year in the Soviet and East European universities is a direct investment in the future leadership of a largely illiterate continent." {1}
Noting the "Chinese competition the Soviets face in ... the South Africa liberation movements", Rositzke argued candidly for covert action in the Third World: "Do we try to make a deal with the leftists - covertly at least to start? Do we take any covert political action to ensure the continued supply of chrome from a black Rhodesia that threatens to boycott its sale to the United States if we do not withdraw our investments in South Africa? However unlikely these scenarios, we cannot forecast what will happen in the economic world to threaten our prosperity." {2}
These concerns led to a policy that did not distinguish between anti-communism and opposition to apartheid. Indeed, they became synonymous in South Africa as that policy came to a head in the Reagan administration. As Gregory Treverton has observed: "For the Reagan administration, the intended signal was anti-communism. For it, there was nothing incompatible about supporting anti-communism in Angola and anti-apartheid in South Africa." {3]
United States anti-apartheid policy was always primarily a tool of its anti-communist policy. And that anti-communist policy was directly related to the preservation of American "prosperity" and economic self-interest, as Rositzke explained. To this end, the CIA funneled money into Africa Bureau, a London-based anti-apartheid group headed by the Reverend Michael Scott, an Anglican priest dedicated to ameliorating the harsh apartheid policies of South Africa in South West Africa. Dan Schecter, Michael Ansara, and David Kolodney wrote in 1970, "The United States remains involved in channeling money to various factions within southern African liberation movements, hoping, of course, to mold them in pro-Western directions". {4}
Long before the Reagan administration, white liberals in the United States and South Africa understood the threat of communism in South Africa and took action, in concert with the CIA, to undermine that threat, even if this delayed, by necessity, the end of apartheid. And ultimately, Buthelezi became a key figure in that effort.
The leading American liberal politician to first become actively involved in the anti-apartheid movement was then United States Senator Hubert Humphrey (Democrat, Minnesota). In 1960, a press agency, International Features Service, was established, largely to disseminate the thoughts of Senator Humphrey to the people of the Third World, including Africa. International Features was quickly reorganized as a not-for-profit organization, Peace for Freedom, liberally supported with CIA funds through the International Development Foundation and the Price Fund. {5} Another organization launched with CIA assistance was the United States-South Africa Leadership Exchange Program (USSALEP) when the African-American Institute, a CIA conduit, agreed to add USSALEP to its existing projects. {6} A key functional area of USSALEP was, and is, "flexible independent exchanges, providing opportunities for leaders in any variety of fields to confer with colleagues". {7} In 1983, Harris Wofford, later a US Senator from Pennsylvania, and then, as now, a member of the management committee of USSALEP, stated that Buthelezi deserved support because he had stayed in South Africa, unlike leaders of the ANC, and had not engaged in violence. {8} Wofford made it very clear that he was speaking not only for himself, but for his organization. Wofford served as President Kennedy's special representative to Africa from 1962 to 1964 before he became associate director of the Peace Corps. The implication was clear: Buthelezi was with the West, but Mandela, who often espoused pro-South African Communist Party sentiments, was not. And a major non-governmental backer of USSALEP was AMAX, the American mining giant, on whose board have served former Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
The Lowenstein Intervention
In 1959, Allard Lowenstein, then a foreign policy aide to Senator Humphrey, traveled to South Africa and South West Africa to gather data on the effects of apartheid in both territories. During the course of this trip, Lowenstein was approached by the CIA in South Africa and requested to smuggle out of South Africa a "Cape colored" student, Hans Beukes, a member of the anti-SWAPO Herero tribe from Rehoboth, South West Africa. {9} Beukes would later be accused of subverting SWAPO when it expelled him in 1976. {10} Lowenstein would later write Brutal Mandate, a book on his South African experience. A leading American liberal who had served as president of the National Students Association and civil rights activist, Lowenstein was recruited to the CIA in 1962 as an expert on southern Africa. {11} From 1962 to 1967, Lowenstein traveled to that part of the continent and had contacts with various southern African personalities, both in Africa and the United States, providing the agency with his assessment of their political leanings, and their reliability.
The ANC had taken up armed struggle on 16 December 1961 with the founding by Nelson Mandela of Umkhonot We Sizwe, "Spear of the Nation", and with its Communist support, was becoming a threat. Mandela was a cult figure of the Left who had enormous appeal. Until his capture, his ability to elude the police had made him a folk hero. In the spring of 1962, Lowenstein was contacted by both the American Committee on Africa and the CIA-supported American Society for African Culture, which were joining forces for a demonstration and protest march on behalf of Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and the seven others who had been arrested by the South African police when the ANC underground headquarters was discovered. While the United States did not want Mandela in power, neither did it want him martyred. The arrested leaders were on trial and faced the possibility of the death penalty, which in South Africa was administered by hanging. Because of the organized pressure, Mandela and Sisulu were not executed but sentenced to life in prison, with Mandela remaining on Robben Island as the preeminent figure in the African National Congress. After the day to day operations of the ANC passed to Mandela's far less charismatic law partner, Oliver Tambo, who had fled to Zambia, the ANC was seemingly neutralized without the United States to blame.
Other Choices
The CIA was looking for alternatives to the ANC. To the ANC's left, the CIA directed money to the ultra-black nationalist Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) which had organized the demonstration, from which the ANC abstained, that led to the Sharpeville massacre in the spring of 1960. {12} As early as 1961, Mandela had discounted the Pan Africanist Congress because, he asserted, "there is no doubt in my mind that they preached an extreme form of racialism". {13} Mandela believed the abandonment of non-violence and the introduction of the use of force to be justified because, "[N]o leader is going out to say we want peaceful discussions because the government is making that kind of talk senseless. Instead of getting a favorable response, the government is more arrogant. The African reaction can only be a show of force." Notes of the secret interview given by Mandela to Patrick O'Donovan were provided to Allard Lowenstein in London by Mary Benson, an anti-apartheid activist. {14}
To rival Spear of the Nation, which had begun a campaign of sabotage against "the symbols of apartheid" by staging rocket attacks against police stations, the PAC launched Poqo, a mass movement modeled on the Mau Mau in Kenya. Claiming a membership of 150,000, it engaged in acts of terrorism. Although it never achieved the strength of the ANC, it did come back to haunt South African politics by initially refusing to take part in the first one-person, one-vote non-racial elections in the country's history. Having become the CIA's Frankenstein's monster, the Pan Africanist Congress ceased to be an acceptable alternative to Mandela and the ANC, but it continued to pose a sufficient threat to possibly disrupt the electoral process.
Throughout the 1960s, Lowenstein made considerable use of his expertise on revolutionary movements in southern Africa in ways that would have an important impact on US policy. From his vantage point in the intelligence community, he argued for an anti-Communist alternative on the Left, becoming a key figure, in the parlance of the agency, of the "good wing" of the CIA. As a CIA operative once described this element in the agency to Harris Wofford, "If you only knew what we're really doing, the liberals and the leftists, the democratic leftists, what we're supporting around the world, you'd see that we represented the 'good wing' in the CIA". {15} And in his pursuit of an anti-Communist left alternative in South Africa, while he acknowledged that the blacks had ample reason to resort to violence, Lowenstein faulted the ANC, as did the agency, on the grounds that it was engaging in armed struggle with support from the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, not to mention its alliance with the South African Communist Party. {16} In his 1966 swing through southern Africa, Lowenstein conferred with representatives of the ANC in Dar es Salaam, whose headquarters in which they met featured a large portrait of Mao Zedong. When Lowenstein asked them how he could be of help, the black South Africans told him that what they needed was money for arms. They were engaged in armed struggle and wanted weapons, not the limited support Lowenstein had provided in the past, and which China had eclipsed. At this point, Lowenstein concluded that the ANC was unreliable and uncontrollable and therefore totally unacceptable. {17} But as the entire Cold War liberal structure began to come apart during the Vietnam war, Lowenstein turned his efforts to getting rid of President Lyndon Johnson and to replacing him with Senator Robert F Kennedy (Democrat, New York) and to his own political career, winning election to Congress as a Democrat from New York in 1968. He would not return to the South African scene until the late1970s, when, following a stint as one of President Carter's ambassadors to the United Nations, he traveled extensively in southern Africa at the behest of the CIA and Harry Oppenheimer, scion of the South African DeBeers and Anglo-American gold mining and diamond empire. In the interim, the fruitless search for an alternative political group to the ANC continued as violence escalated in South Africa, and it become increasingly threatened by the possibility of a revolution led by the South African Communist Party and the ANC.
Zulu Rising
During this period the fortunes of Buthelezi began to rise. Although in the pay of the South African government as chief minister of the KwaZulu government, Buthelezi steadfastly refused to permit KwaZulu to be turned into a "homeland". To do so would have constituted an acceptance of the government's apartheid policies. This posture of at least nominal independence, as well as his identification with the mythic Zulu people led Buthelezi to be able to play both sides with consummate skill. He was never a sycophant to the National Party, which had formalized a system of total racial segregation, and which had controlled South Africa since 1948, when the old United Party of Jan Smuts had been defeated. Buthelezi appealed to those who never had any use for white liberals like Helen Suzman, whose Liberal party had been outlawed, and who maintained a life of luxury in the midst of a system she purported to detest. As the cast of "Wait A Minim", the South African musical comedy mocked, "the only thing the liberals hate more than apartheid is the blacks".
Buthelezi, highly intelligent and articulate, played the role of the radical conservative, to the increasing attention of the United States. Capable of appearing fiercely traditional in tribal dress one minute, and handsome and immaculate in a Saville Row suit the next, Buthelezi began to capture the imagination of the power brokers. He not only spoke all the languages of South Africa, he seemed to speak to the economic and political needs of the country, with its astonishing diversity, as well. There was a vacuum and he appeared to be the only player capable of filling it. With Buthelezi and his ideas for a federal republic of South Africa, investment would be safe, and whites and blacks could be placated. Even his appeal to royalty, his professed loyalty to the King of the Zulus, Goodwill Zwelethini (also his nephew), impressed whites who sought modest change in the context of stability, and blacks, for whom royalty had always held a certain attraction as a dimension of African pride. If a black African leader for South Africa could have been created by the Reagan administration, it would have been Buthelezi. With Ronald Reagan in the White House and William Casey at CIA, the "good wing" would be out and the hard line in. There was no such thing as a Left alternative to communism in this ideology, only a Right alternative that was indeed "right". Under Reagan, Buthelezi would fit the mold, as Jonas Savimbi did in Angola, where South Africa and the CIA together aided his efforts against the leftist government, with its pro-Soviet sympathies.
Indeed, conservatives worldwide began to support Buthelezi, with particular support coming, according to a former US "Africa hand", from Germany through such conservative semi-political foundations as the Adenauer Schiftung and the Ebert Schiftung, much in the manner that DCI Casey was able to get other countries such as Saudi Arabia to aid the contras in Nicaragua. {18} According to this source, Buthelezi had been promised a "Greater Natal" by hard-line apartheid Prime Minister P W Botha, who offered him the possibility of having white areas such as Durban in his power base. With such an increase in his domain, were an election to happen, he would be able to command at least the five percent that was ultimately established as a basis for a seat in the cabinet. Along with white representation in the cabinet, he would be a sufficient force to moderate the polices of a leftist government under Mandela, and block either nationalizations or confiscatory tax policies. {19} But before this scenario began to take hold, the liberals gave it one more shot to find an alternative to Mandela and the ANC who would not be so conservative as to alienate the majority of blacks, who might still turn to the far left. At this point in the 1970s, Allard Lowenstein once again entered the scene, with Buthelezi playing to both liberal and conservative factions.
According to South Africa expert Professor William Foltz of Yale University, Buthelezi was being "courted by South African big business and some American corporations" during the1970s. {20} He mentioned AMAX, the mining giant with extensive South African holdings that was also a USSALEP backer through its AMAX Foundation, as one of these. The effort to approach Buthelezi, Foltz explains, was led not by American business interests, but by the liberal part of South African industry, particularly Harry Oppenheimer, whose Ernest Oppenheimer Memorial Trust, the charitable arm of Anglo-American, was also backing USSALEP; Helen Suzman; and Clive Menell, chair of Anglovaal Holdings, Ltd, a mining giant. Menell lives across the street from Oppenheimer in South Africa, and entertained Buthelezi in his home in the presence of Professor Foltz. Foltz explains that Buthelezi's refusal to let KwaZulu be a homeland made him attractive to the Oppenheimer crowd, as he could not be seen as a tool of apartheid. Although highly ambitious and sensitive to slights, real or apparent, Buthelezi was regarded by his advocates as a "reasonable and interesting alternative, at least a serious player". So Wofford was right. USSALEP, launched with the CIA's help and passed along to power South African and American corporate interests, could proclaim by 1980 that it "receives no funding, direct or indirect, from the United States, South Africa, or any other government", was now behind Buthelezi, seeing nowhere else to go.
Lowenstein Redux
By the mid 1970s, the exploitation of uranium in South West Africa had made South Africa's role there a major international issue. The large block of nonwhite Third World countries pressed for South West Africa's independence. In April 1975, Allard Lowenstein attended a key symposium on "The Outlook for Southern Africa", which was backed by the Johnson Foundation. Funded by USSALEP and the Johnson and Johnson pharmaceutical company, the meeting was held at the Johnson Wingspread conference facility in Wisconsin. The symposium explored ways to prevent the worst from happening from the point of view of the American, South Africa, and British companies that invested heavily there. South Africa was described as "the Saudi Arabia of minerals", and South West Africa had once again become vitally important to the West because of Britain's dependence upon it for uranium. {21} Rio Tinto Zinc, a multinational mining company based in Britain, was exploiting the Rossing mine, the world's largest single source of uranium.
Lowenstein's presentation at the Wingspread symposium was a classic "good wing" analysis. Will we identify with the oppressed people, including those of South Africa? Because Africans were finding that the only way to produce change was through violence, this was playing "into the hands of the Soviet Union and China", who were providing money and training which were, in fact, producing results. Lowenstein asked the rhetorical question and tried to answer it: "Can we influence Africans to accommodate their demands in less violent ways? Only if we pressure for the necessary reforms at an acceptable pace. This means finding ways for South Africa to get out of Namibia and Rhodesia, to permit Black regimes to develop in both states. Instead of 'buffer states' there might emerge on the border of South Africa the appearance of privileged sanctuaries so that the pressure for change within South Africa would be stepped up. As the international dimensions proceed, they are the priority; the domestic ones should follow. Eventually, changes within South Africa will have to occur. If they do not come nonviolently and in a rapid, evolutionary way, they will be forced with sabotage, violence and warfare." {22}
At the United Nations, he clashed with US Ambassador Andrew Young over US policy in Zimbabwe/Rhodesia. Lowenstein was strongly opposed to Robert Mugabe and wanted a role for white liberals. He also visited South Africa where he held lengthy meetings with young Afrikaner Nationalists. After his UN service, Lowenstein came back in from the cold. His involvement with the powerful white liberals of South Africa and his relationship with Frank Carlucci, appointed deputy director of the CIA by President Carter (and who had been stationed in South Africa when Lowenstein traveled there in 1959), enabled him to continue his work in southern Africa in the summer of 1979.
This vitally important trip was financed by Anglo-American, which paid Lowenstein $7,000 for his services, $1,000 to his aide, Mark Childress, and $1,000 to Lowenstein's secretary. Provided for the summer's expedition were a comfortable house in Johannesburg, with recreational facilities and domestic servants, and full transportation, including return air fares on the Concorde for Lowenstein, Lowenstein's three children and Childress. All of this was arranged by Hank Slack, the American Director of Anglo-American and the former son-in-law of Harry Oppenheimer. {23} Lowenstein was working closely with Deputy CIA Director Carlucci, who stated categorically that "Lowenstein would report to me". {24} And there was much to report.
Lowenstein first consulted with Theo-Ben Gurirab of SWAPO, at SWAPO headquarters in New York City, then departed for South Africa. There he held meetings with Buthelezi, Harry Oppenheimer, Helen Suzman, South African Foreign Minister Pik Botha, and P W Botha, the South African Prime Minister. He also met with Mandela, still incarcerated on Robben Island. {25} Richard Moose, Carter's Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, told Sam Adams, formerly of CIA, that Lowenstein was talking to "a lot of opposition groups". {26} What Lowenstein was doing was laying the groundwork for a flexible American policy in South Africa, in alliance with the wealthy South African white liberals and the "verlicht" Afrikaner Nationalists, to dismantle the structure of apartheid without Marxist revolution. Lowenstein's role in this venture was cut short when he was shot to death in 1980 by Dennis Sweeney, a former recruit in the civil rights movement in Mississippi, but the legacy of his involvement remained a potent one. Carlucci, who admired Lowenstein and was greatly influenced by him, shared Lowenstein's assessment that the problems of South Africa could be "worked out". {27} And Buthelezi had good reason to believe that he was, at the very least, part of the solution and not the problem.
US Aid
With the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980, United States and South African intelligence (BOSS, the South African CIA) increased cooperation on behalf of Jonas Savimbi in Angola. The CIA authorized $15 million for Savimbi's UNITA. {28} In South Africa, with German money coming to him, Buthelezi was fast becoming the darling of American conservatives, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan's Ambassador to the United Nations, as a "sound anti-Communist alternative". {29} The Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal took up his cause. But, according to Professor Foltz, there was a significant split in the Reagan administration. Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Chester Crocker, was "opposed to Buthelezi" and "playing a much more complicated game". {30} Foltz explains that Crocker thought it wise "not to see any single person as the answer". {31} Foltz also credits the British Ambassador to South Africa at that time, Sir Robin Renwick, as being "highly skillful" in his efforts to prevent violence and bring about a peaceful solution in South Africa. (Renwick is generally acknowledged with having obtained Mandela's release from prison, a task made easier by the fact that his government had not imposed sanctions on South Africa, thereby giving it some leverage with the white regime in Pretoria.) But he argues that the "whole situation was sliding rapidly" and that the "logic" of the Reagan administration's policy was "coming apart". {32}
The support of American industrial interests for Buthelezi began to diminish when it appeared that he might not be able to deliver in the face of enormous public support for Mandela. The final push, Foltz explains, was the 1986 US sanctions legislation, which altered the situation irrevocably. Now a legend among American blacks as a symbol of the triumph through struggle over apartheid, Nelson Mandela could no longer be shunted aside. The ANC had become the ultimate force in South Africa, and Buthelezi, with his base limited to the Zulus, was without a national organization capable of overcoming it. But, with financial support still coming to him from Germany, Buthelezi was, according to Foltz, able to retain the services of the powerful Washington public relations firm, Black, Manafort. Buthelezi and his people continued to use the rhetoric of the Cold War, "not about the ANC but the ANC and the Communists". {33} But the mining companies were no longer interested and Buthelezi's support was limited to "the fast buck people in Natal". {34} And while Buthelezi might, at one point, have been able to get the five percent needed for a cabinet position, the "old Africa hand" argued (incorrectly, it turned out) that Buthelezi would be "hard pressed" to carry the Zulu vote. Because the young Zulus are now more urban than rural, and identify increasingly with the ANC, he maintained, Buthelezi's power base was substantially eroded, notwithstanding continued German support and support from private American conservative groups. {35} Foltz puts it more forcefully: "He [Buthelezi] is playing a destructive and scandalous role now". {36} But who was actually paying for that role and, in effect, funding the bloodbath that lasted until Inkatha reentered the elections?
Reenter the United States-South Africa Leadership Exchange Program (USSALEP), by now no longer stating that it does not receive funds from any government directly or indirectly, but indicating overtly that it is funded, in part, by the United States Agency for International Development (AID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). In its 1992 Program Update, in a short note entitled "Transition to Democracy Project", USSALEP proclaims:
"The $8,000,000 cooperative agreement, under which subgrants of $4.8 million for the African National Congress (ANC) and $2.6 million for the Inkatha Freedom Party was to be disbursed by September 30 1992, was extended for an additional fifteen months in order to utilize the full amount obligated by USAID. The purpose of the project is to build administration capacity within the ANC and the IFP organizations to enable them to participate more effectively in the negotiations leading to a new constitution and democratic government. Due to the very stringent disbursement conditions (which, for example, eliminated the category of salaries as a permissible expenditure category under the original budgets), coupled with administrative/absorptive capacity limitations of the sub-grantees, only approximately 45 percent of the $7.4 million could be expended during the originally scheduled, thirteen-month project life.
"The monies disbursed to date have been used to: (i) acquire or rent office space to house central and regional staff, (ii) purchase and install computer hardware and software and train personnel needed to establish effective management information systems, and (iii) pay for sundry travel, consulting and workshop expenses relating to the above and to the formulation of policy options and negotiation positions.
"USAID and USSALEP are presently in discussion with the subgrantees to identify new areas of expenditure not previously included in their budget proposals. Among those being considered is the critical one encompassing peace initiatives." {37}
Hired as project manager of the Transition to Democracy Project was Stanley Kahn, a South African sociology professor on the faculty of both the universities of Witwatersr and and Cape Town. Kahn had served as executive director of the Funda Centre in Diepkloof, Soweto and was the recipient of a USSALEP Alan Pifer Fellowship to visit the United States to "survey the contribution of community colleges to adult education". {38} Kahn was later promoted to Director of USSALEP South Africa.
Kahn may be a fine fellow, but it still sounds a lot like "walking around money". And if salaries were being paid to ANC and Inkatha, who was getting the money? Mandela? Buthelezi? And if these groups were getting the money, who decided that more than twice as much should go to the ANC as to Inkatha? Notably, Harris Wofford continued to serve on the Board and Council of USSALEP, which dispensed the funds from the AID budget that Wofford voted for as a senator. His past legal practice has involved major clients in Africa. Apart from this seeming conflict of interest, American taxpayers should be concerned that their money was being used to influence the outcome of an election in a foreign country, however overt this funding might now be. Most of the old players are still there: Harry Oppenheimer, who funds USSALEP through the Anglo-American & DeBeers Chairman's Fund; Clive Menell, chairman of Anglovaal Holdings, Ltd (contributor and Board and Council member), and an old Buthelezi backer; and Hank Slack, now president and CEO of MINORCO in London (contributor and Board and Council member), as well as all the major industrial concerns, American, international and South African, that control the vast mining interests of South Africa and the rest of its economy. The result of all of this funding of the competing parties? R W Johnson, a native of South Africa and a fellow in politics at Magdalen College, Oxford, on leave from Oxford to write about current South Africa and also to serve as national co-director of the Launching Democracy project, a public information service for all South African political parties, sponsored by the Institute for Multi-Party Democracy (one wonders about the source of its funding), observed:
"Some of the killing is political: currently the largest set of victims are Inkatha officials killed by the ANC, though the most publicized recent killing was that of Chris Hani, the SACP (Communist) leader, by the white Right. The Azanian People's Liberation Army, the armed wing of the Pan Africanist Congress, carries out anti-white atrocities from time to time, and, of course, Inkatha takes its vengeance on the ANC with fair regularity." {39}
As the whites were panicking, a state of emergency was declared in KwaZulu because of the inability of Mandela, Buthelezi, King Goodwill Zwelethini, and de Klerk to come to an agreement on how to resolve the impasse and get Inkatha back into the election process. {40} Buthelezi denounced what he described as "a lengthy Machiavellian manipulation commenced, right at the start of our negotiations, with attempts to marginalize our Inkatha Freedom Party". {41} If he was referring to the inequitable distribution of the US AID money between the ANC and Inkatha, he certainly made up the difference from the Germans. And how effective giving money to the ANC will be in wooing it from its South African Communist Party ally remains to be seen. Mandela insists the ANC is not Communist, but that it remains loyal to its oldest ally and friend. {42} Moreover,the relisting as a USSALEP sponsor of the African American Institute, a CIA conduit in the past that helped launch USSALEP, also means that CIA money still, in all probability, flows covertly to certain organizations in South Africa. The most likely candidate for US assistance was the CIA's old client, the Pan Africanist Congress (whose overt support the ANC would never accept), to keep it in the electoral process and then accept the results. But the amount of money given to the Pan Africanist Congress has surely been miniscule, given its lack of a function at this point of history. The purpose was not to get it votes, but to keep it quiet.
Educating Voters
After the supposed failure of former Secretary of State Henry A Kissinger (now an international business consultant) and former British Foreign Minister Lord Carrington (who has served on the board of Rio Tinto Zinc, which controls the Rossing uranium mine in Namibia) to bring Buthelezi into the elections, all seemed to be lost. {43} But an amazing last minute reprieve was finally achieved, and the elections went forward in the midst of bombings by white extremists. Helping the Independent Election Commission to supervise them to make sure they were "fair" was the South African Fair Elections Fund (SAFE), funded largely by American interests and headed up by the liberal Kennedy loyalist, Theodore Sorensen, who had $7 million at his disposal for "voter education". According to Ian Williams of the New York Observer, "many of those involved in SAFE haven't concealed their hopes for an ANC landslide". {44} And while Williams reported AID's funding of both the ANC and Inkatha, he neglected to mention USSALEP, the e'minence grise of the whole sordid business. But even with AID funding much of the election, and SAFE providing additional assistance to assure the right kind of acceptable "left" victory, Ronald Brown, President Bill Clinton's man at the Department of Commerce, announced $140 million in aid to South Africa.
A good portion of this will find its way into the pockets of North Carolina academics and their institutions, Duke, Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State. They are participating in the $350 million South African research and manufacturing center to be built in Muizenberg, a suburb of Cape Town. The project has the backing of the ANC. {45} This may help explain why conservative, anti-Communist Senator Jesse Helms (Republican, North Carolina) has failed to denounce the US AID funding of the Communist-backed ANC - he makes an unlikely pair with Harris Wofford. Actually, the only institution that should cry fraud is North Carolina's predominantly black university, Northern Carolina A&T, Jesse Jackson's alma mater, which has mysteriously been excluded from the AID boondoggle.
The ANC and Buthelezi both shouted "fraud" as the election came to a close. The one party that began to pick up surprising support in the election's final hours was the old bastion of white supremacy, the National Party. It appealed to the "colored" vote, those of mixed race who tend to be better educated and own property, and to conservative blacks. F W de Klerk, holding black babies, managed to remind South Africans of every color that "majority rule" on the African continent can be less than paradise. Rwanda, Somalia, Angola, Zaire, and the Sudan are shattering reminders of the chaos so often associated with post-colonial "liberation". He managed to do the impossible: prevent the ANC from getting the two thirds seats in parliament it needed to ram through an economic agenda that is supported by the South African Communist Party. In four years, de Klerk's party will be in a position to form a coalition with Inkatha, not unlike the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance in Namibia (formed with Allard Lowenstein's support and assistance), which also managed to prevent the prevailing revolutionary group, SWAPO, from getting the two thirds it needed to nationalize the mineral wealth.
Once again, white American liberals have failed to appreciate the innate conservatism of some black Africans, and their willingness to work with whites, even their former oppressors, out of fear that they might lose their property to a "revolutionary" regime, even one financed by the US government and supported by Jesse Helms and Harris Wofford, the "Odd Couple" of American politics. If a post-Mandela ANC splits apart, as some South Africans have predicted, and with the South African Communist Party marginalized, a National/Inkatha Party could well become a real force in South Africa. There is a certain logic to this; the Boers and the Zulus have always had a common enemy: the British and their English-speaking South African allies in the mining industries. But the Boers and Zulus, both pro-business, pose no threat to the great companies and families that have controlled the South African economy since the Boer war.
Mandela's Democratic Moves
Meanwhile, Nelson Mandela has made all the right noises, from the point of view of his American supporters. He pledged not to confiscate the property of whites and not to tax in a way that will discourage foreign investment and profit. He also made it clear that he will not tolerate disorder; after the election he urged everyone to go back to work and back to school. Mandela did not spend all those years in prison to preside over a country in chaos and anarchy. Like Buthelezi, who is actually a close friend of his, Mandela is a descendant of African royalty. If the ANC and Inkatha have accepted US dollars, as they have, from the Americans who caused the perpetuation of apartheid for Cold War reasons, there is more than enough irony in this to justify their actions. Mandela has started to resemble his predecessor in African liberation, Jomo Kenyatta. Kenyatta had been jailed for a very long time on charges of being a Mau Mau terrorist, and then was released in time to stop a violent revolution. Kenyatta suppressed his opposition and allowed the whites to keep control over the Kenyan economy. But Alec Erwin, a white Communist ANC candidate, declared that there "was nothing sacrosanct" about limiting the budget deficit to six percent of the GNP, as the IMF had required the ANC to pledge prior to granting a loan. If the ANC could stop mentioning this IMF requirement as part of the ANC's program, clearly more was necessary to make sure the worst did not happen. {46}
The Voters' Choice
The election results, which all the parties long ago accepted as "free and fair", produced some surprises, with the ANC polling 62.5 percent, less than the 67 percent required for control over the constitution, but more than enough to control patronage and twelve cabinet seats. De Klerk and the National Party (NP), which won control of the Western Cape, got over twenty percent, enough votes to allow de Klerk to be one of the two executive vice presidents and to gain four cabinet seats. The NP probably got a higher percentage of the black vote than did the Pan Africanist Congress, a relic of Cold War history, which received scant support in the election. Also disappearing into oblivion was the Democratic Party (DP),which was nothing more than the reconstituted old Liberal Party that Allard Lowenstein had backed. Once banned by the primitive white racist South African government, and later reinvented as the Progressive Party with the help of Harry Oppenheimer, the DP was basically the personal vehicle of Helen Suzman, who spent as much effort fighting the ANC as she did apartheid.
Mandela indicated that he would consider offering cabinet posts to representatives of parties which polled less than the required five percent, a carrot to the Pan Africanist Congress if they agreed to behave themselves. Inkatha received over ten percent, enough to put Buthelezi in the cabinet and give Inkatha a total of four cabinet seats - a result his critics said was impossible. His total was augmented, and de Klerk's reduced, by the fact that some white Afrikaners voted for Buthelezi on the national level and the NP on the provincial level to bolster black opposition to the ANC. The white separatist Freedom Front ended up with about three percent, indicating that the white racist call for a boycott of the elections was only marginally successful. Together, these three provided an opposition bloc of over one-third of the voters, not counting those who boycotted the election. {47} Buthelezi, whose Inkatha also carried KwaZulu/Natal, which his critics claimed he would never be able to do, summed up: "I'm grateful that up to now, in spite of all the skullduggery and the cheating, so far it has not flared up into any conflict or violence". {48}
And it is not likely to. Buthelezi is now the Home Minister, which puts him in charge of internal affairs and makes him the boss of Sidney Mufamadi, the black chief of police who is also a member of the central committee of the South African Communist Party. The late Joe Slovo, South African Communist Party chairman, was head of Housing and Welfare before his death. Joe Modise, the black commander of Spear of the Nation, is Minister of Defense (albeit assisted by the existing chief of staff, General Georg Meyring, a white Afrikaner, who remained in his post); after the change in government Derek Keyes, de Klerk's white Afrikaner Minister of Finance continued to run the economy from the same position. Mandela's selection of the ANC's Thabo Mbeki as the other executive vice president left the able Cyril Ramaphosa out of the cabinet and the government entirely, although he remains as the chairman of the ANC, in which capacity he is in charge of drafting the new constitution. Mandela's incredible balancing act made it possible, overall, for there to be something for almost everyone, at which the CIA probably heaved a considerable sigh of relief. {49} With the Cold War over, the view seems to be who cares if a couple of Communists clank around in the South African government as long as things are basically under control?
A Carat a Day ...
The Goldsmith Commission, which had investigated the role of the police in the violence prior to the elections, subsequently looked ahead to 1999, when the "real" elections will take place. There will be a need for new leaders who comprehend the serious economic problems of the country, as perceived by the International Monetary Fund. USSALEP no doubt stands ready to provide these leaders. The only question is whether the United States government will continue to finance their campaigns.
But while the pundits debate the first year of the Mandela era, DeBeers continues to control eighty percent of the world's diamond trade, "with fifty percent of these diamonds by value coming from the company's own mines in South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia". {50} Jonathan M E Oppenheimer, Harry Oppenheimer's grandson, the son of Nicholas F Oppenheimer of Johannesburg, deputy chairman of the great mining giants, the Anglo-American Group and DeBeers Consolidated Mines, Ltd, the latter founded by Cecil Rhodes with the backing of the Rothschilds, represents the next generation of Oppenheimers as he continues his work as a management trainee at N M Rothschild & Sons in London. {51} Politicians may come and go, but as the DeBeers ad claims on television, "a diamond is forever".
Funny Peculiar Postscript
Subsequently, reports came of widespread election fraud in KwaZulu Natal where Inkatha won its "victory". In some areas, more votes were counted than the census recorded people living there. Nevertheless, the ANC did not seriously challenge the results. Key ANC candidates who were not elected on the national or provincial levels were rewarded with big jobs in either Mandela's government in Pretoria or in the Inkatha-dominated government of KwaZulu/Natal. Reporting for Newsday from South Africa in May 1994, Dele Olojede wrote:
"[T]he great South African political settlement is fait accompli. Mandela is in Pretoria, where Buthelezi will serve as his home affairs minister in charge of federal relations with provinces. In the Natal provincial capital of Pietermaritzburg Friday night, Inkatha Chairman Frank Mdlalose was duly sworn in as premier at the inaugural session of the provincial legislature. His candidacy was unopposed. The ANC accepted three of ten positions in Mdlalose's cabinet. And when Zulu King Goodwill Zwelethini swept into the chambers, the ANC bench jumped up along with everyone else to shout, in salute, 'Wena ndlovu!' ('You're the elephant')"
Or the donkey.
Richard Daley, the legendary major of Chicago, would have approved totally. That AID money wasn't wasted at all. King Goodwill expressed confidence that, now, peace would surely reign in "my kingdom". {52}
References
1. Rositzke, Harry, The CIA's Secret Operations - Espionage, Counterespionage and Covert Action (New York, Readers Digest Press), 1977, page 254.
2. Rositzke, supra, at 256, 266.
3. Treverton, Gregory F, Covert Action: The Limits of Intervention in the Postwar World (New York, Basic Books), 1987, page 220.
4. Schecter, Dan, Ansara, Michael, and Kolodney, David, (African Research Group), "The CIA as an Equal Opportunity Employer", in Dirty Work 2, The CIA in Africa, Ellen Ray, William Schaap, Karl Van Meter, Louis Wolf, editors (Secaucus, New Jersey, Lyle Stuart, 2nd printing, 1980), page 51; first published in Ramparts in 1970 and referring to The Politics of Unity by I Wallerstein.
5. Schecter, Ansara, and Kolodney, supra.
6. Schecter, Ansara, and Kolodney, supra.
7. "The USSALEP Story 1958-1980".
8. Interview with Harris Wofford, 18 May 1983.
9. My sources for this were: Tom Gervasi, who served as a counterintelligence officer assigned to the Army Security Agency and the author of Arsenal of Democracy I (New York, Grove, 1978), and Arsenal of Democracy II (New York, Grove, 1981), and who was writing a history of the CIA at the time of his death, allegedly from lead poisoning from handling toy soldiers he collected; Sam Adams, who served with the CIA in the Southern Africa Branch, DDI, at the time Allard Lowenstein worked for it,and then switched to the Southeast Asia Branch, and who was writing a history of the role of the CIA in Vietnam at the time of his untimely death from an alleged heart attack. Gervasi's book was never published, while Adams's unfinished manuscript was finally published in 1994, years after his death denied him the opportunity to both complete it and defend it against his critics. The book has so far attracted little attention, but it was reviewed in this journal by Richard R Valcourt: see "Vietnam's Curious Numbers", International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol 7, No 2, Summer, 1994, pages 235-240. Adams was at my house in Bridgehampton for dinner not long before his death. He was in excellent health. See Sam Adams, War of Numbers (Steerforth Press, South Royalton, Vermont, 1994). See also William Chafe, Never Stop Running: Allard Lowenstein and the Struggle to Save American Liberalism (New York, Basic Books, 1993), note 13, page 494: "It is noteworthy that the NSA's international vice-president, who was working for the CIA, once again asked Lowenstein to do some student government chores while in South Africa". Chafe does not elaborate further, but because Lowenstein attended the Congress of the National Union of South African Students while in South Africa during the trip and had kept up his ties to the CIA-backed US National Student Association, the smuggling out of Beukes would constitute such a "chore".
10. Interview with then SWAPO Representative to the United Nations, Theo-Ben Gurirab, 5 May 1983. Curiously, Gurirab, whom I interviewed at SWAPO's headquarters in New York and a close advisor to Sam Nujoma, the SWAPO leader and currently Namibia's head of government, referred to William F Buckley Jr as one of his closest friends in New York. Buckley has acknowledged serving in the CIA.
11. Gervasi and Adams, note 9, supra, were my sources for this. This is confirmed by a document in Lowenstein's CIA file which I obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. Document No 10, dated 19 February 1962, a memorandum addressed to the Chief of Personnel, Security Division, OS, from the Chief of the Contact Division, OO, states: "It is requested that priority security checks be procured on Subject as described in the attachment. Our deadline is 23 February 1962 for approval to contact Subject on an ad hoc basis. Subject reportedly has stated that he had done some work for CIA. If he were used in a [whited out] capacity, then this is an indiscretion regarding which our field representative would like to know something about the background before contact is made." Other portions of the document are whited out. This document has been confirmed to me by two former CIA station chiefs (Moscow and Saigon) as a "recruitment document". The "work" for the CIA to which Lowenstein was referring is clearly the smuggling of Hans Beukes out of South Africa. As the former Moscow station chief explained to me, Lowenstein was not a CIA "agent", which is a term of art referring usually to foreigners under contract with the agency for specific periods of time and for specific purposes, but rather a "consultant" to be used on an "ad hoc" basis. Such people, I was told by the former Moscow station chief, are generally older than the normal recruits to the agency. Lowenstein's situation at the time of his recruitment was that he was in his thirties, an academic who taught courses on the politics of southern Africa. Academics in such situations have been routinely recruited to the CIA. While such persons can be used as analysts, the former Moscow station chief explained, they can also perform "operations", as Lowenstein did, including the providing of funds to political organizations. Ironically, while the CIA was recruiting Lowenstein, the FBI, on 29 March 1962, concluded that Lowenstein had never been connected to the CIA, noting that as late as 9 January 1961, the CIA had advised the FBI that Lowenstein never had a relationship with the intelligence agency. Evidently,the FBI checked no further after that date, as Chafe indicates when he concludes, "None of this evidence is definitive". Chafe, supra. Further, in a letter dated 23 January 1985 to Bancroft Littlefield, a former Lowenstein aide who had married Lowenstein's ex-wife after she had divorced Lowenstein, Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said: "Based on representations made to me, I can say that Mr Lowenstein was never an agent (italics added) of the CIA". Chafe, supra, note 20, page 509. To Chafe, this is also not conclusive.
As explained, Lowenstein was not a CIA agent and was not recruited as one. He was recruited as an expert consultant. When I requesteda copy of the letter from the CIA to Hamilton, Thomas K Latimer, Staff Director of the US House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, wrote on 5 August 1985: "Mr Hamilton has asked that I respond to your letter of 30 July 1985 regarding certain correspondence to this committee from Mr Briggs of the Central Intelligence Agency. The correspondence you referred to is classified and therefore cannot be released. I regret that we cannot be of assistance to you in this matter." They are clearly hiding something. Further, the exchange between the CIA and the FBI is an example of the ongoing war between those two agencies over turf and budget.
12. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), whose executive board was taken over by the AFL-CIO, gave the money for the establishment of The Federation of Free African Trade Unions (FOFA-TUSA) in 1959, which was intimately connected with the PAC. Barry Cohen, "The CIA and the African Trade Unions", AFRICA magazine, September 1976, Dirty Work 2, supra, page 77. Jay Lovestone, who served as the Director of the Department of International Affairs for the AFL-CIO, "was one of the Central Intelligence Agency's most important men". Ioan Davies, African Trade Unions (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1966), page 201. A former member of the Communist Party, USA., Lovestone, who was actually expelled from the Party, waged the Cold War from his vantage point in the American labor movement. In "Fight US Subversion of Trade Union Movement in Africa!" B S Nyameko directly accused the CIA of creating the Pan Africanist Congress to undermine the Communist-backed African National Congress. He wrote: "Throughout Africa labour organizations are infiltrated by CIA agents posing as private individuals or under nonofficial cover, as employees in private companies or as US Embassy staff in the Information Department and Labour Attache' men succeeded in establishing the PAC in 1959 to disrupt our ANC". The African Communist, No 87, Fourth Quarter, 1981, pages 56-57.
13. O'Donovan, Patrick, secret interview with Nelson Mandela, 30 May 1961. It is widely believed that the CIA fingered Mandela to the South African police, which would have been an inside job, almost certainly one of the white liberals pretending to be a supporter. Lowenstein was privy to the secret interview and may well have participated in the fingering of Mandela.
14. Cummings, Richard, The Pied Piper: Allard K Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream (New York, Grove, 1985), page 136.
15. Interview with Harris Wofford, supra. Other CIA "good wingers" of that generation included the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr (See Coffin, Once To Every Man: Atheneum, 1977); author and naturalist Peter Matthiessen, for whom the Paris Review was his cover and who, according to James Linville, the Managing Editor of The Paris Review, is "haunted by the CIA". Conversation with James Linville, Oxford, MS, April 1993, at the 40th anniversary celebration of The Paris Review (The New York Times first reported Matthiessen's CIA employment); Gloria Steinem, who worked for three years for the Independent Research Service, an organization totally supported by the CIA and whose purpose was to disrupt Communist youth festivals. This was first disclosed by Ramparts and later reported in The New York Times in 1967. See Press Release, 9 May 1975, Redstockings of the Women's Liberation Movement; letter from Jane Barry of Redstockings, 19 February 1987, and ultra liberal author/activist Robert Sam Anson (Interview with Robert Sam Anson, May 1985). The theoretical intellect behind "good wing" ideology in the CIA was Harry Rositzke, who argued that democracy and capitalism were not necessarily synonymous and that the United States should support progressive social democratic or democratic socialist approaches in critical countries. See Rositzke, supra, page 268.
16. See Allard Lowenstein and John Marcum, "Force: Its Thrust and Prognosis", in South Africa in Transition (New York, Praeger, 1966): "In the absence of internal collapse in Portugal and of external intervention in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, the period of violent upheaval may be prolonged. Neither collapse nor intervention now appears likely, and the legacy of European settlement in southern Africa may consequently be hatred and destruction of catastrophic proportions. This prospect will not dissuade Africans from force. It will be recalled that Americans fought an extended War for Independence that was prompted by grievances that look paltry compared to those now present in southern Africa." Praeger, the publisher of the paper, which was given at a conference at Howard University in 1963 sponsored by the American Society of African Culture, a CIA front, was later revealed by Ramparts, to have had a CIA affiliation.
17. Interview with Hal Minus, Lowenstein aide on 1966 trip, March 1981.
18. Telephone interview, 5 April 1994.
19. Paul Taylor of The Washington Post has provided an excellent overview of the South African scene prior to the elections in "Outlook", Washington Post, 3 April 1994.
20. Telephone interview with Professor William Foltz, 4 April 1994.
21. "South Africa: Policy Alternatives for the United States", Report of a Wingspread Conference convened by the Johnson Foundation, April 1975, Racine, Wisconsin. Others in attendance were George Hauser of the American Committee on Africa; Africanist Gwendolen Carter; and Donald F McHenry of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace and later Andrew Young's deputy and then replacement at the United Nations in the Carter administration. See also Alun Robert, The Rossing File (London, Namibia Support Committee, CANUC, 1980).
22. Wingspread Report, supra.
23. Letter to Hank Slack from Ernest Wentzel, 12 June 1979; telephone interview with Ernest Wentzel, Johannesburg, 9 August 1983.
24. Interview with Frank Carlucci, 19 July 1983.
25. Memo by Mark Childress, undated.
26. Moose quoted by Adams, telephone conversation with Adams, 1982.
27. Interview with Carlucci.
28. See Treverton, Covert Action, supra, at pages 220-221.
29. Interview with Professor William Foltz, supra.
30. Foltz, supra
31. Foltz, supra. See, generally, Chester Crocker's memoir, High Noon In Southern Africa (New York, W W Norton, 1992).
32. Foltz, supra
33. Foltz, supra.
34. Foltz, supra.
35. Interview, supra.
36. Foltz, supra.
37. USSALEP 1992 Program Update, Vol 1, No 1,January
http://www.africancrisis.co.za/Article.php?ID=11102&
Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html
http://www.africancrisis.co.za (March 08 2007)
This is the most important article I found on the web in my more than five years on the web. The original discovery was by a military friend of mine overseas. He found the book, and then later, I found this article. An alert reader in the UK found this. This article is the follow on by Dr Cummings to his book, The Pied Piper (1985). Dr Cummings was a CIA agent in the Middle East. This is an extremely important article and it explains what went on behind the scenes in this country. -- Jan
_____
A Diamond Is Forever:
Mandela Triumphs, Buthelezi and de Klerk Survive, and ANC on the US Payroll
by Richard Cummings
International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence (Summer 1995)
Nelson Mandela is the president of South Africa, an event of monumental significance in world history. This great personal triumph is for him a vindication of his struggle. But now that the South African elections are long past, the record must be set straight about what really happened and why. The press has concealed as much as it reported; ideologues of all stripes have rushed around to rationalize their hypocrisies, and American politicians have been spreading around largesse as if the money were their own. That the results were so perfect, historically so symmetrical, is rather remarkable.
But, those with power, or who are connected to it, do not want the facts about the funding of the election to be known because it would reveal a pattern of deception and control, both to influence the outcome and to moderate the African National Congress. And those on the radical left don't want it known that the ANC has compromised itself by joining the list of organizations taking money from the United States, because they think it will hurt the cause of revolution. Everyone involved, across the ideological spectrum, has therefore joined in a kind of game to cloud the minds of outside observers.
Most hypocritical perhaps was the attempt to make a devil out of Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi by characterizing him as the tool of the oppressors and an obstructionist in the transition to democracy. His anomalous situation in post-apartheid South Africa led to suggestions that he was an enemy of democracy, and the cause of dissension that led to violence in an attempt to disrupt the electoral process that black South Africans struggled for decades to achieve. Chairman of the Inkatha Freedom Party and chief minister of KwaZulu, this prince and descendant of Shaka Zulu was then cast in the role of villain and reactionary. But it was not always so.
ANC and the CP
The triumph of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress in South Africa was, for many years, viewed in certain circles as an extremely undesirable result. During the Cold War, the power of the South African Communist Party in the ANC made the ANC unacceptable as a holder of power in a post-apartheid South Africa. Yet, because apartheid and the white supremacist Nationalist Party were anathema to the rest of Africa, and because white racism fueled the sentiments for communism among the black majority in South Africa, a reliable black alternative to the ANC became essential. As Harry Rositzke, the Central Intelligence Agency station chief in New Delhi from 1957 to 1962, and coordinator of operations against Communist parties abroad from 1962 until his retirement from the CIA in 1970, wrote in 1977: "In Africa, an area of primitive, unstable states, Soviet influence is substantial in Somalia, Guinea, Nigeria, and Angola. The support of black independence movements against the Rhodesian and South African governments may extend that influence. The training of five thousand African students each year in the Soviet and East European universities is a direct investment in the future leadership of a largely illiterate continent." {1}
Noting the "Chinese competition the Soviets face in ... the South Africa liberation movements", Rositzke argued candidly for covert action in the Third World: "Do we try to make a deal with the leftists - covertly at least to start? Do we take any covert political action to ensure the continued supply of chrome from a black Rhodesia that threatens to boycott its sale to the United States if we do not withdraw our investments in South Africa? However unlikely these scenarios, we cannot forecast what will happen in the economic world to threaten our prosperity." {2}
These concerns led to a policy that did not distinguish between anti-communism and opposition to apartheid. Indeed, they became synonymous in South Africa as that policy came to a head in the Reagan administration. As Gregory Treverton has observed: "For the Reagan administration, the intended signal was anti-communism. For it, there was nothing incompatible about supporting anti-communism in Angola and anti-apartheid in South Africa." {3]
United States anti-apartheid policy was always primarily a tool of its anti-communist policy. And that anti-communist policy was directly related to the preservation of American "prosperity" and economic self-interest, as Rositzke explained. To this end, the CIA funneled money into Africa Bureau, a London-based anti-apartheid group headed by the Reverend Michael Scott, an Anglican priest dedicated to ameliorating the harsh apartheid policies of South Africa in South West Africa. Dan Schecter, Michael Ansara, and David Kolodney wrote in 1970, "The United States remains involved in channeling money to various factions within southern African liberation movements, hoping, of course, to mold them in pro-Western directions". {4}
Long before the Reagan administration, white liberals in the United States and South Africa understood the threat of communism in South Africa and took action, in concert with the CIA, to undermine that threat, even if this delayed, by necessity, the end of apartheid. And ultimately, Buthelezi became a key figure in that effort.
The leading American liberal politician to first become actively involved in the anti-apartheid movement was then United States Senator Hubert Humphrey (Democrat, Minnesota). In 1960, a press agency, International Features Service, was established, largely to disseminate the thoughts of Senator Humphrey to the people of the Third World, including Africa. International Features was quickly reorganized as a not-for-profit organization, Peace for Freedom, liberally supported with CIA funds through the International Development Foundation and the Price Fund. {5} Another organization launched with CIA assistance was the United States-South Africa Leadership Exchange Program (USSALEP) when the African-American Institute, a CIA conduit, agreed to add USSALEP to its existing projects. {6} A key functional area of USSALEP was, and is, "flexible independent exchanges, providing opportunities for leaders in any variety of fields to confer with colleagues". {7} In 1983, Harris Wofford, later a US Senator from Pennsylvania, and then, as now, a member of the management committee of USSALEP, stated that Buthelezi deserved support because he had stayed in South Africa, unlike leaders of the ANC, and had not engaged in violence. {8} Wofford made it very clear that he was speaking not only for himself, but for his organization. Wofford served as President Kennedy's special representative to Africa from 1962 to 1964 before he became associate director of the Peace Corps. The implication was clear: Buthelezi was with the West, but Mandela, who often espoused pro-South African Communist Party sentiments, was not. And a major non-governmental backer of USSALEP was AMAX, the American mining giant, on whose board have served former Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
The Lowenstein Intervention
In 1959, Allard Lowenstein, then a foreign policy aide to Senator Humphrey, traveled to South Africa and South West Africa to gather data on the effects of apartheid in both territories. During the course of this trip, Lowenstein was approached by the CIA in South Africa and requested to smuggle out of South Africa a "Cape colored" student, Hans Beukes, a member of the anti-SWAPO Herero tribe from Rehoboth, South West Africa. {9} Beukes would later be accused of subverting SWAPO when it expelled him in 1976. {10} Lowenstein would later write Brutal Mandate, a book on his South African experience. A leading American liberal who had served as president of the National Students Association and civil rights activist, Lowenstein was recruited to the CIA in 1962 as an expert on southern Africa. {11} From 1962 to 1967, Lowenstein traveled to that part of the continent and had contacts with various southern African personalities, both in Africa and the United States, providing the agency with his assessment of their political leanings, and their reliability.
The ANC had taken up armed struggle on 16 December 1961 with the founding by Nelson Mandela of Umkhonot We Sizwe, "Spear of the Nation", and with its Communist support, was becoming a threat. Mandela was a cult figure of the Left who had enormous appeal. Until his capture, his ability to elude the police had made him a folk hero. In the spring of 1962, Lowenstein was contacted by both the American Committee on Africa and the CIA-supported American Society for African Culture, which were joining forces for a demonstration and protest march on behalf of Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and the seven others who had been arrested by the South African police when the ANC underground headquarters was discovered. While the United States did not want Mandela in power, neither did it want him martyred. The arrested leaders were on trial and faced the possibility of the death penalty, which in South Africa was administered by hanging. Because of the organized pressure, Mandela and Sisulu were not executed but sentenced to life in prison, with Mandela remaining on Robben Island as the preeminent figure in the African National Congress. After the day to day operations of the ANC passed to Mandela's far less charismatic law partner, Oliver Tambo, who had fled to Zambia, the ANC was seemingly neutralized without the United States to blame.
Other Choices
The CIA was looking for alternatives to the ANC. To the ANC's left, the CIA directed money to the ultra-black nationalist Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) which had organized the demonstration, from which the ANC abstained, that led to the Sharpeville massacre in the spring of 1960. {12} As early as 1961, Mandela had discounted the Pan Africanist Congress because, he asserted, "there is no doubt in my mind that they preached an extreme form of racialism". {13} Mandela believed the abandonment of non-violence and the introduction of the use of force to be justified because, "[N]o leader is going out to say we want peaceful discussions because the government is making that kind of talk senseless. Instead of getting a favorable response, the government is more arrogant. The African reaction can only be a show of force." Notes of the secret interview given by Mandela to Patrick O'Donovan were provided to Allard Lowenstein in London by Mary Benson, an anti-apartheid activist. {14}
To rival Spear of the Nation, which had begun a campaign of sabotage against "the symbols of apartheid" by staging rocket attacks against police stations, the PAC launched Poqo, a mass movement modeled on the Mau Mau in Kenya. Claiming a membership of 150,000, it engaged in acts of terrorism. Although it never achieved the strength of the ANC, it did come back to haunt South African politics by initially refusing to take part in the first one-person, one-vote non-racial elections in the country's history. Having become the CIA's Frankenstein's monster, the Pan Africanist Congress ceased to be an acceptable alternative to Mandela and the ANC, but it continued to pose a sufficient threat to possibly disrupt the electoral process.
Throughout the 1960s, Lowenstein made considerable use of his expertise on revolutionary movements in southern Africa in ways that would have an important impact on US policy. From his vantage point in the intelligence community, he argued for an anti-Communist alternative on the Left, becoming a key figure, in the parlance of the agency, of the "good wing" of the CIA. As a CIA operative once described this element in the agency to Harris Wofford, "If you only knew what we're really doing, the liberals and the leftists, the democratic leftists, what we're supporting around the world, you'd see that we represented the 'good wing' in the CIA". {15} And in his pursuit of an anti-Communist left alternative in South Africa, while he acknowledged that the blacks had ample reason to resort to violence, Lowenstein faulted the ANC, as did the agency, on the grounds that it was engaging in armed struggle with support from the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, not to mention its alliance with the South African Communist Party. {16} In his 1966 swing through southern Africa, Lowenstein conferred with representatives of the ANC in Dar es Salaam, whose headquarters in which they met featured a large portrait of Mao Zedong. When Lowenstein asked them how he could be of help, the black South Africans told him that what they needed was money for arms. They were engaged in armed struggle and wanted weapons, not the limited support Lowenstein had provided in the past, and which China had eclipsed. At this point, Lowenstein concluded that the ANC was unreliable and uncontrollable and therefore totally unacceptable. {17} But as the entire Cold War liberal structure began to come apart during the Vietnam war, Lowenstein turned his efforts to getting rid of President Lyndon Johnson and to replacing him with Senator Robert F Kennedy (Democrat, New York) and to his own political career, winning election to Congress as a Democrat from New York in 1968. He would not return to the South African scene until the late1970s, when, following a stint as one of President Carter's ambassadors to the United Nations, he traveled extensively in southern Africa at the behest of the CIA and Harry Oppenheimer, scion of the South African DeBeers and Anglo-American gold mining and diamond empire. In the interim, the fruitless search for an alternative political group to the ANC continued as violence escalated in South Africa, and it become increasingly threatened by the possibility of a revolution led by the South African Communist Party and the ANC.
Zulu Rising
During this period the fortunes of Buthelezi began to rise. Although in the pay of the South African government as chief minister of the KwaZulu government, Buthelezi steadfastly refused to permit KwaZulu to be turned into a "homeland". To do so would have constituted an acceptance of the government's apartheid policies. This posture of at least nominal independence, as well as his identification with the mythic Zulu people led Buthelezi to be able to play both sides with consummate skill. He was never a sycophant to the National Party, which had formalized a system of total racial segregation, and which had controlled South Africa since 1948, when the old United Party of Jan Smuts had been defeated. Buthelezi appealed to those who never had any use for white liberals like Helen Suzman, whose Liberal party had been outlawed, and who maintained a life of luxury in the midst of a system she purported to detest. As the cast of "Wait A Minim", the South African musical comedy mocked, "the only thing the liberals hate more than apartheid is the blacks".
Buthelezi, highly intelligent and articulate, played the role of the radical conservative, to the increasing attention of the United States. Capable of appearing fiercely traditional in tribal dress one minute, and handsome and immaculate in a Saville Row suit the next, Buthelezi began to capture the imagination of the power brokers. He not only spoke all the languages of South Africa, he seemed to speak to the economic and political needs of the country, with its astonishing diversity, as well. There was a vacuum and he appeared to be the only player capable of filling it. With Buthelezi and his ideas for a federal republic of South Africa, investment would be safe, and whites and blacks could be placated. Even his appeal to royalty, his professed loyalty to the King of the Zulus, Goodwill Zwelethini (also his nephew), impressed whites who sought modest change in the context of stability, and blacks, for whom royalty had always held a certain attraction as a dimension of African pride. If a black African leader for South Africa could have been created by the Reagan administration, it would have been Buthelezi. With Ronald Reagan in the White House and William Casey at CIA, the "good wing" would be out and the hard line in. There was no such thing as a Left alternative to communism in this ideology, only a Right alternative that was indeed "right". Under Reagan, Buthelezi would fit the mold, as Jonas Savimbi did in Angola, where South Africa and the CIA together aided his efforts against the leftist government, with its pro-Soviet sympathies.
Indeed, conservatives worldwide began to support Buthelezi, with particular support coming, according to a former US "Africa hand", from Germany through such conservative semi-political foundations as the Adenauer Schiftung and the Ebert Schiftung, much in the manner that DCI Casey was able to get other countries such as Saudi Arabia to aid the contras in Nicaragua. {18} According to this source, Buthelezi had been promised a "Greater Natal" by hard-line apartheid Prime Minister P W Botha, who offered him the possibility of having white areas such as Durban in his power base. With such an increase in his domain, were an election to happen, he would be able to command at least the five percent that was ultimately established as a basis for a seat in the cabinet. Along with white representation in the cabinet, he would be a sufficient force to moderate the polices of a leftist government under Mandela, and block either nationalizations or confiscatory tax policies. {19} But before this scenario began to take hold, the liberals gave it one more shot to find an alternative to Mandela and the ANC who would not be so conservative as to alienate the majority of blacks, who might still turn to the far left. At this point in the 1970s, Allard Lowenstein once again entered the scene, with Buthelezi playing to both liberal and conservative factions.
According to South Africa expert Professor William Foltz of Yale University, Buthelezi was being "courted by South African big business and some American corporations" during the1970s. {20} He mentioned AMAX, the mining giant with extensive South African holdings that was also a USSALEP backer through its AMAX Foundation, as one of these. The effort to approach Buthelezi, Foltz explains, was led not by American business interests, but by the liberal part of South African industry, particularly Harry Oppenheimer, whose Ernest Oppenheimer Memorial Trust, the charitable arm of Anglo-American, was also backing USSALEP; Helen Suzman; and Clive Menell, chair of Anglovaal Holdings, Ltd, a mining giant. Menell lives across the street from Oppenheimer in South Africa, and entertained Buthelezi in his home in the presence of Professor Foltz. Foltz explains that Buthelezi's refusal to let KwaZulu be a homeland made him attractive to the Oppenheimer crowd, as he could not be seen as a tool of apartheid. Although highly ambitious and sensitive to slights, real or apparent, Buthelezi was regarded by his advocates as a "reasonable and interesting alternative, at least a serious player". So Wofford was right. USSALEP, launched with the CIA's help and passed along to power South African and American corporate interests, could proclaim by 1980 that it "receives no funding, direct or indirect, from the United States, South Africa, or any other government", was now behind Buthelezi, seeing nowhere else to go.
Lowenstein Redux
By the mid 1970s, the exploitation of uranium in South West Africa had made South Africa's role there a major international issue. The large block of nonwhite Third World countries pressed for South West Africa's independence. In April 1975, Allard Lowenstein attended a key symposium on "The Outlook for Southern Africa", which was backed by the Johnson Foundation. Funded by USSALEP and the Johnson and Johnson pharmaceutical company, the meeting was held at the Johnson Wingspread conference facility in Wisconsin. The symposium explored ways to prevent the worst from happening from the point of view of the American, South Africa, and British companies that invested heavily there. South Africa was described as "the Saudi Arabia of minerals", and South West Africa had once again become vitally important to the West because of Britain's dependence upon it for uranium. {21} Rio Tinto Zinc, a multinational mining company based in Britain, was exploiting the Rossing mine, the world's largest single source of uranium.
Lowenstein's presentation at the Wingspread symposium was a classic "good wing" analysis. Will we identify with the oppressed people, including those of South Africa? Because Africans were finding that the only way to produce change was through violence, this was playing "into the hands of the Soviet Union and China", who were providing money and training which were, in fact, producing results. Lowenstein asked the rhetorical question and tried to answer it: "Can we influence Africans to accommodate their demands in less violent ways? Only if we pressure for the necessary reforms at an acceptable pace. This means finding ways for South Africa to get out of Namibia and Rhodesia, to permit Black regimes to develop in both states. Instead of 'buffer states' there might emerge on the border of South Africa the appearance of privileged sanctuaries so that the pressure for change within South Africa would be stepped up. As the international dimensions proceed, they are the priority; the domestic ones should follow. Eventually, changes within South Africa will have to occur. If they do not come nonviolently and in a rapid, evolutionary way, they will be forced with sabotage, violence and warfare." {22}
At the United Nations, he clashed with US Ambassador Andrew Young over US policy in Zimbabwe/Rhodesia. Lowenstein was strongly opposed to Robert Mugabe and wanted a role for white liberals. He also visited South Africa where he held lengthy meetings with young Afrikaner Nationalists. After his UN service, Lowenstein came back in from the cold. His involvement with the powerful white liberals of South Africa and his relationship with Frank Carlucci, appointed deputy director of the CIA by President Carter (and who had been stationed in South Africa when Lowenstein traveled there in 1959), enabled him to continue his work in southern Africa in the summer of 1979.
This vitally important trip was financed by Anglo-American, which paid Lowenstein $7,000 for his services, $1,000 to his aide, Mark Childress, and $1,000 to Lowenstein's secretary. Provided for the summer's expedition were a comfortable house in Johannesburg, with recreational facilities and domestic servants, and full transportation, including return air fares on the Concorde for Lowenstein, Lowenstein's three children and Childress. All of this was arranged by Hank Slack, the American Director of Anglo-American and the former son-in-law of Harry Oppenheimer. {23} Lowenstein was working closely with Deputy CIA Director Carlucci, who stated categorically that "Lowenstein would report to me". {24} And there was much to report.
Lowenstein first consulted with Theo-Ben Gurirab of SWAPO, at SWAPO headquarters in New York City, then departed for South Africa. There he held meetings with Buthelezi, Harry Oppenheimer, Helen Suzman, South African Foreign Minister Pik Botha, and P W Botha, the South African Prime Minister. He also met with Mandela, still incarcerated on Robben Island. {25} Richard Moose, Carter's Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, told Sam Adams, formerly of CIA, that Lowenstein was talking to "a lot of opposition groups". {26} What Lowenstein was doing was laying the groundwork for a flexible American policy in South Africa, in alliance with the wealthy South African white liberals and the "verlicht" Afrikaner Nationalists, to dismantle the structure of apartheid without Marxist revolution. Lowenstein's role in this venture was cut short when he was shot to death in 1980 by Dennis Sweeney, a former recruit in the civil rights movement in Mississippi, but the legacy of his involvement remained a potent one. Carlucci, who admired Lowenstein and was greatly influenced by him, shared Lowenstein's assessment that the problems of South Africa could be "worked out". {27} And Buthelezi had good reason to believe that he was, at the very least, part of the solution and not the problem.
US Aid
With the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980, United States and South African intelligence (BOSS, the South African CIA) increased cooperation on behalf of Jonas Savimbi in Angola. The CIA authorized $15 million for Savimbi's UNITA. {28} In South Africa, with German money coming to him, Buthelezi was fast becoming the darling of American conservatives, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan's Ambassador to the United Nations, as a "sound anti-Communist alternative". {29} The Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal took up his cause. But, according to Professor Foltz, there was a significant split in the Reagan administration. Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Chester Crocker, was "opposed to Buthelezi" and "playing a much more complicated game". {30} Foltz explains that Crocker thought it wise "not to see any single person as the answer". {31} Foltz also credits the British Ambassador to South Africa at that time, Sir Robin Renwick, as being "highly skillful" in his efforts to prevent violence and bring about a peaceful solution in South Africa. (Renwick is generally acknowledged with having obtained Mandela's release from prison, a task made easier by the fact that his government had not imposed sanctions on South Africa, thereby giving it some leverage with the white regime in Pretoria.) But he argues that the "whole situation was sliding rapidly" and that the "logic" of the Reagan administration's policy was "coming apart". {32}
The support of American industrial interests for Buthelezi began to diminish when it appeared that he might not be able to deliver in the face of enormous public support for Mandela. The final push, Foltz explains, was the 1986 US sanctions legislation, which altered the situation irrevocably. Now a legend among American blacks as a symbol of the triumph through struggle over apartheid, Nelson Mandela could no longer be shunted aside. The ANC had become the ultimate force in South Africa, and Buthelezi, with his base limited to the Zulus, was without a national organization capable of overcoming it. But, with financial support still coming to him from Germany, Buthelezi was, according to Foltz, able to retain the services of the powerful Washington public relations firm, Black, Manafort. Buthelezi and his people continued to use the rhetoric of the Cold War, "not about the ANC but the ANC and the Communists". {33} But the mining companies were no longer interested and Buthelezi's support was limited to "the fast buck people in Natal". {34} And while Buthelezi might, at one point, have been able to get the five percent needed for a cabinet position, the "old Africa hand" argued (incorrectly, it turned out) that Buthelezi would be "hard pressed" to carry the Zulu vote. Because the young Zulus are now more urban than rural, and identify increasingly with the ANC, he maintained, Buthelezi's power base was substantially eroded, notwithstanding continued German support and support from private American conservative groups. {35} Foltz puts it more forcefully: "He [Buthelezi] is playing a destructive and scandalous role now". {36} But who was actually paying for that role and, in effect, funding the bloodbath that lasted until Inkatha reentered the elections?
Reenter the United States-South Africa Leadership Exchange Program (USSALEP), by now no longer stating that it does not receive funds from any government directly or indirectly, but indicating overtly that it is funded, in part, by the United States Agency for International Development (AID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). In its 1992 Program Update, in a short note entitled "Transition to Democracy Project", USSALEP proclaims:
"The $8,000,000 cooperative agreement, under which subgrants of $4.8 million for the African National Congress (ANC) and $2.6 million for the Inkatha Freedom Party was to be disbursed by September 30 1992, was extended for an additional fifteen months in order to utilize the full amount obligated by USAID. The purpose of the project is to build administration capacity within the ANC and the IFP organizations to enable them to participate more effectively in the negotiations leading to a new constitution and democratic government. Due to the very stringent disbursement conditions (which, for example, eliminated the category of salaries as a permissible expenditure category under the original budgets), coupled with administrative/absorptive capacity limitations of the sub-grantees, only approximately 45 percent of the $7.4 million could be expended during the originally scheduled, thirteen-month project life.
"The monies disbursed to date have been used to: (i) acquire or rent office space to house central and regional staff, (ii) purchase and install computer hardware and software and train personnel needed to establish effective management information systems, and (iii) pay for sundry travel, consulting and workshop expenses relating to the above and to the formulation of policy options and negotiation positions.
"USAID and USSALEP are presently in discussion with the subgrantees to identify new areas of expenditure not previously included in their budget proposals. Among those being considered is the critical one encompassing peace initiatives." {37}
Hired as project manager of the Transition to Democracy Project was Stanley Kahn, a South African sociology professor on the faculty of both the universities of Witwatersr and and Cape Town. Kahn had served as executive director of the Funda Centre in Diepkloof, Soweto and was the recipient of a USSALEP Alan Pifer Fellowship to visit the United States to "survey the contribution of community colleges to adult education". {38} Kahn was later promoted to Director of USSALEP South Africa.
Kahn may be a fine fellow, but it still sounds a lot like "walking around money". And if salaries were being paid to ANC and Inkatha, who was getting the money? Mandela? Buthelezi? And if these groups were getting the money, who decided that more than twice as much should go to the ANC as to Inkatha? Notably, Harris Wofford continued to serve on the Board and Council of USSALEP, which dispensed the funds from the AID budget that Wofford voted for as a senator. His past legal practice has involved major clients in Africa. Apart from this seeming conflict of interest, American taxpayers should be concerned that their money was being used to influence the outcome of an election in a foreign country, however overt this funding might now be. Most of the old players are still there: Harry Oppenheimer, who funds USSALEP through the Anglo-American & DeBeers Chairman's Fund; Clive Menell, chairman of Anglovaal Holdings, Ltd (contributor and Board and Council member), and an old Buthelezi backer; and Hank Slack, now president and CEO of MINORCO in London (contributor and Board and Council member), as well as all the major industrial concerns, American, international and South African, that control the vast mining interests of South Africa and the rest of its economy. The result of all of this funding of the competing parties? R W Johnson, a native of South Africa and a fellow in politics at Magdalen College, Oxford, on leave from Oxford to write about current South Africa and also to serve as national co-director of the Launching Democracy project, a public information service for all South African political parties, sponsored by the Institute for Multi-Party Democracy (one wonders about the source of its funding), observed:
"Some of the killing is political: currently the largest set of victims are Inkatha officials killed by the ANC, though the most publicized recent killing was that of Chris Hani, the SACP (Communist) leader, by the white Right. The Azanian People's Liberation Army, the armed wing of the Pan Africanist Congress, carries out anti-white atrocities from time to time, and, of course, Inkatha takes its vengeance on the ANC with fair regularity." {39}
As the whites were panicking, a state of emergency was declared in KwaZulu because of the inability of Mandela, Buthelezi, King Goodwill Zwelethini, and de Klerk to come to an agreement on how to resolve the impasse and get Inkatha back into the election process. {40} Buthelezi denounced what he described as "a lengthy Machiavellian manipulation commenced, right at the start of our negotiations, with attempts to marginalize our Inkatha Freedom Party". {41} If he was referring to the inequitable distribution of the US AID money between the ANC and Inkatha, he certainly made up the difference from the Germans. And how effective giving money to the ANC will be in wooing it from its South African Communist Party ally remains to be seen. Mandela insists the ANC is not Communist, but that it remains loyal to its oldest ally and friend. {42} Moreover,the relisting as a USSALEP sponsor of the African American Institute, a CIA conduit in the past that helped launch USSALEP, also means that CIA money still, in all probability, flows covertly to certain organizations in South Africa. The most likely candidate for US assistance was the CIA's old client, the Pan Africanist Congress (whose overt support the ANC would never accept), to keep it in the electoral process and then accept the results. But the amount of money given to the Pan Africanist Congress has surely been miniscule, given its lack of a function at this point of history. The purpose was not to get it votes, but to keep it quiet.
Educating Voters
After the supposed failure of former Secretary of State Henry A Kissinger (now an international business consultant) and former British Foreign Minister Lord Carrington (who has served on the board of Rio Tinto Zinc, which controls the Rossing uranium mine in Namibia) to bring Buthelezi into the elections, all seemed to be lost. {43} But an amazing last minute reprieve was finally achieved, and the elections went forward in the midst of bombings by white extremists. Helping the Independent Election Commission to supervise them to make sure they were "fair" was the South African Fair Elections Fund (SAFE), funded largely by American interests and headed up by the liberal Kennedy loyalist, Theodore Sorensen, who had $7 million at his disposal for "voter education". According to Ian Williams of the New York Observer, "many of those involved in SAFE haven't concealed their hopes for an ANC landslide". {44} And while Williams reported AID's funding of both the ANC and Inkatha, he neglected to mention USSALEP, the e'minence grise of the whole sordid business. But even with AID funding much of the election, and SAFE providing additional assistance to assure the right kind of acceptable "left" victory, Ronald Brown, President Bill Clinton's man at the Department of Commerce, announced $140 million in aid to South Africa.
A good portion of this will find its way into the pockets of North Carolina academics and their institutions, Duke, Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State. They are participating in the $350 million South African research and manufacturing center to be built in Muizenberg, a suburb of Cape Town. The project has the backing of the ANC. {45} This may help explain why conservative, anti-Communist Senator Jesse Helms (Republican, North Carolina) has failed to denounce the US AID funding of the Communist-backed ANC - he makes an unlikely pair with Harris Wofford. Actually, the only institution that should cry fraud is North Carolina's predominantly black university, Northern Carolina A&T, Jesse Jackson's alma mater, which has mysteriously been excluded from the AID boondoggle.
The ANC and Buthelezi both shouted "fraud" as the election came to a close. The one party that began to pick up surprising support in the election's final hours was the old bastion of white supremacy, the National Party. It appealed to the "colored" vote, those of mixed race who tend to be better educated and own property, and to conservative blacks. F W de Klerk, holding black babies, managed to remind South Africans of every color that "majority rule" on the African continent can be less than paradise. Rwanda, Somalia, Angola, Zaire, and the Sudan are shattering reminders of the chaos so often associated with post-colonial "liberation". He managed to do the impossible: prevent the ANC from getting the two thirds seats in parliament it needed to ram through an economic agenda that is supported by the South African Communist Party. In four years, de Klerk's party will be in a position to form a coalition with Inkatha, not unlike the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance in Namibia (formed with Allard Lowenstein's support and assistance), which also managed to prevent the prevailing revolutionary group, SWAPO, from getting the two thirds it needed to nationalize the mineral wealth.
Once again, white American liberals have failed to appreciate the innate conservatism of some black Africans, and their willingness to work with whites, even their former oppressors, out of fear that they might lose their property to a "revolutionary" regime, even one financed by the US government and supported by Jesse Helms and Harris Wofford, the "Odd Couple" of American politics. If a post-Mandela ANC splits apart, as some South Africans have predicted, and with the South African Communist Party marginalized, a National/Inkatha Party could well become a real force in South Africa. There is a certain logic to this; the Boers and the Zulus have always had a common enemy: the British and their English-speaking South African allies in the mining industries. But the Boers and Zulus, both pro-business, pose no threat to the great companies and families that have controlled the South African economy since the Boer war.
Mandela's Democratic Moves
Meanwhile, Nelson Mandela has made all the right noises, from the point of view of his American supporters. He pledged not to confiscate the property of whites and not to tax in a way that will discourage foreign investment and profit. He also made it clear that he will not tolerate disorder; after the election he urged everyone to go back to work and back to school. Mandela did not spend all those years in prison to preside over a country in chaos and anarchy. Like Buthelezi, who is actually a close friend of his, Mandela is a descendant of African royalty. If the ANC and Inkatha have accepted US dollars, as they have, from the Americans who caused the perpetuation of apartheid for Cold War reasons, there is more than enough irony in this to justify their actions. Mandela has started to resemble his predecessor in African liberation, Jomo Kenyatta. Kenyatta had been jailed for a very long time on charges of being a Mau Mau terrorist, and then was released in time to stop a violent revolution. Kenyatta suppressed his opposition and allowed the whites to keep control over the Kenyan economy. But Alec Erwin, a white Communist ANC candidate, declared that there "was nothing sacrosanct" about limiting the budget deficit to six percent of the GNP, as the IMF had required the ANC to pledge prior to granting a loan. If the ANC could stop mentioning this IMF requirement as part of the ANC's program, clearly more was necessary to make sure the worst did not happen. {46}
The Voters' Choice
The election results, which all the parties long ago accepted as "free and fair", produced some surprises, with the ANC polling 62.5 percent, less than the 67 percent required for control over the constitution, but more than enough to control patronage and twelve cabinet seats. De Klerk and the National Party (NP), which won control of the Western Cape, got over twenty percent, enough votes to allow de Klerk to be one of the two executive vice presidents and to gain four cabinet seats. The NP probably got a higher percentage of the black vote than did the Pan Africanist Congress, a relic of Cold War history, which received scant support in the election. Also disappearing into oblivion was the Democratic Party (DP),which was nothing more than the reconstituted old Liberal Party that Allard Lowenstein had backed. Once banned by the primitive white racist South African government, and later reinvented as the Progressive Party with the help of Harry Oppenheimer, the DP was basically the personal vehicle of Helen Suzman, who spent as much effort fighting the ANC as she did apartheid.
Mandela indicated that he would consider offering cabinet posts to representatives of parties which polled less than the required five percent, a carrot to the Pan Africanist Congress if they agreed to behave themselves. Inkatha received over ten percent, enough to put Buthelezi in the cabinet and give Inkatha a total of four cabinet seats - a result his critics said was impossible. His total was augmented, and de Klerk's reduced, by the fact that some white Afrikaners voted for Buthelezi on the national level and the NP on the provincial level to bolster black opposition to the ANC. The white separatist Freedom Front ended up with about three percent, indicating that the white racist call for a boycott of the elections was only marginally successful. Together, these three provided an opposition bloc of over one-third of the voters, not counting those who boycotted the election. {47} Buthelezi, whose Inkatha also carried KwaZulu/Natal, which his critics claimed he would never be able to do, summed up: "I'm grateful that up to now, in spite of all the skullduggery and the cheating, so far it has not flared up into any conflict or violence". {48}
And it is not likely to. Buthelezi is now the Home Minister, which puts him in charge of internal affairs and makes him the boss of Sidney Mufamadi, the black chief of police who is also a member of the central committee of the South African Communist Party. The late Joe Slovo, South African Communist Party chairman, was head of Housing and Welfare before his death. Joe Modise, the black commander of Spear of the Nation, is Minister of Defense (albeit assisted by the existing chief of staff, General Georg Meyring, a white Afrikaner, who remained in his post); after the change in government Derek Keyes, de Klerk's white Afrikaner Minister of Finance continued to run the economy from the same position. Mandela's selection of the ANC's Thabo Mbeki as the other executive vice president left the able Cyril Ramaphosa out of the cabinet and the government entirely, although he remains as the chairman of the ANC, in which capacity he is in charge of drafting the new constitution. Mandela's incredible balancing act made it possible, overall, for there to be something for almost everyone, at which the CIA probably heaved a considerable sigh of relief. {49} With the Cold War over, the view seems to be who cares if a couple of Communists clank around in the South African government as long as things are basically under control?
A Carat a Day ...
The Goldsmith Commission, which had investigated the role of the police in the violence prior to the elections, subsequently looked ahead to 1999, when the "real" elections will take place. There will be a need for new leaders who comprehend the serious economic problems of the country, as perceived by the International Monetary Fund. USSALEP no doubt stands ready to provide these leaders. The only question is whether the United States government will continue to finance their campaigns.
But while the pundits debate the first year of the Mandela era, DeBeers continues to control eighty percent of the world's diamond trade, "with fifty percent of these diamonds by value coming from the company's own mines in South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia". {50} Jonathan M E Oppenheimer, Harry Oppenheimer's grandson, the son of Nicholas F Oppenheimer of Johannesburg, deputy chairman of the great mining giants, the Anglo-American Group and DeBeers Consolidated Mines, Ltd, the latter founded by Cecil Rhodes with the backing of the Rothschilds, represents the next generation of Oppenheimers as he continues his work as a management trainee at N M Rothschild & Sons in London. {51} Politicians may come and go, but as the DeBeers ad claims on television, "a diamond is forever".
Funny Peculiar Postscript
Subsequently, reports came of widespread election fraud in KwaZulu Natal where Inkatha won its "victory". In some areas, more votes were counted than the census recorded people living there. Nevertheless, the ANC did not seriously challenge the results. Key ANC candidates who were not elected on the national or provincial levels were rewarded with big jobs in either Mandela's government in Pretoria or in the Inkatha-dominated government of KwaZulu/Natal. Reporting for Newsday from South Africa in May 1994, Dele Olojede wrote:
"[T]he great South African political settlement is fait accompli. Mandela is in Pretoria, where Buthelezi will serve as his home affairs minister in charge of federal relations with provinces. In the Natal provincial capital of Pietermaritzburg Friday night, Inkatha Chairman Frank Mdlalose was duly sworn in as premier at the inaugural session of the provincial legislature. His candidacy was unopposed. The ANC accepted three of ten positions in Mdlalose's cabinet. And when Zulu King Goodwill Zwelethini swept into the chambers, the ANC bench jumped up along with everyone else to shout, in salute, 'Wena ndlovu!' ('You're the elephant')"
Or the donkey.
Richard Daley, the legendary major of Chicago, would have approved totally. That AID money wasn't wasted at all. King Goodwill expressed confidence that, now, peace would surely reign in "my kingdom". {52}
References
1. Rositzke, Harry, The CIA's Secret Operations - Espionage, Counterespionage and Covert Action (New York, Readers Digest Press), 1977, page 254.
2. Rositzke, supra, at 256, 266.
3. Treverton, Gregory F, Covert Action: The Limits of Intervention in the Postwar World (New York, Basic Books), 1987, page 220.
4. Schecter, Dan, Ansara, Michael, and Kolodney, David, (African Research Group), "The CIA as an Equal Opportunity Employer", in Dirty Work 2, The CIA in Africa, Ellen Ray, William Schaap, Karl Van Meter, Louis Wolf, editors (Secaucus, New Jersey, Lyle Stuart, 2nd printing, 1980), page 51; first published in Ramparts in 1970 and referring to The Politics of Unity by I Wallerstein.
5. Schecter, Ansara, and Kolodney, supra.
6. Schecter, Ansara, and Kolodney, supra.
7. "The USSALEP Story 1958-1980".
8. Interview with Harris Wofford, 18 May 1983.
9. My sources for this were: Tom Gervasi, who served as a counterintelligence officer assigned to the Army Security Agency and the author of Arsenal of Democracy I (New York, Grove, 1978), and Arsenal of Democracy II (New York, Grove, 1981), and who was writing a history of the CIA at the time of his death, allegedly from lead poisoning from handling toy soldiers he collected; Sam Adams, who served with the CIA in the Southern Africa Branch, DDI, at the time Allard Lowenstein worked for it,and then switched to the Southeast Asia Branch, and who was writing a history of the role of the CIA in Vietnam at the time of his untimely death from an alleged heart attack. Gervasi's book was never published, while Adams's unfinished manuscript was finally published in 1994, years after his death denied him the opportunity to both complete it and defend it against his critics. The book has so far attracted little attention, but it was reviewed in this journal by Richard R Valcourt: see "Vietnam's Curious Numbers", International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol 7, No 2, Summer, 1994, pages 235-240. Adams was at my house in Bridgehampton for dinner not long before his death. He was in excellent health. See Sam Adams, War of Numbers (Steerforth Press, South Royalton, Vermont, 1994). See also William Chafe, Never Stop Running: Allard Lowenstein and the Struggle to Save American Liberalism (New York, Basic Books, 1993), note 13, page 494: "It is noteworthy that the NSA's international vice-president, who was working for the CIA, once again asked Lowenstein to do some student government chores while in South Africa". Chafe does not elaborate further, but because Lowenstein attended the Congress of the National Union of South African Students while in South Africa during the trip and had kept up his ties to the CIA-backed US National Student Association, the smuggling out of Beukes would constitute such a "chore".
10. Interview with then SWAPO Representative to the United Nations, Theo-Ben Gurirab, 5 May 1983. Curiously, Gurirab, whom I interviewed at SWAPO's headquarters in New York and a close advisor to Sam Nujoma, the SWAPO leader and currently Namibia's head of government, referred to William F Buckley Jr as one of his closest friends in New York. Buckley has acknowledged serving in the CIA.
11. Gervasi and Adams, note 9, supra, were my sources for this. This is confirmed by a document in Lowenstein's CIA file which I obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. Document No 10, dated 19 February 1962, a memorandum addressed to the Chief of Personnel, Security Division, OS, from the Chief of the Contact Division, OO, states: "It is requested that priority security checks be procured on Subject as described in the attachment. Our deadline is 23 February 1962 for approval to contact Subject on an ad hoc basis. Subject reportedly has stated that he had done some work for CIA. If he were used in a [whited out] capacity, then this is an indiscretion regarding which our field representative would like to know something about the background before contact is made." Other portions of the document are whited out. This document has been confirmed to me by two former CIA station chiefs (Moscow and Saigon) as a "recruitment document". The "work" for the CIA to which Lowenstein was referring is clearly the smuggling of Hans Beukes out of South Africa. As the former Moscow station chief explained to me, Lowenstein was not a CIA "agent", which is a term of art referring usually to foreigners under contract with the agency for specific periods of time and for specific purposes, but rather a "consultant" to be used on an "ad hoc" basis. Such people, I was told by the former Moscow station chief, are generally older than the normal recruits to the agency. Lowenstein's situation at the time of his recruitment was that he was in his thirties, an academic who taught courses on the politics of southern Africa. Academics in such situations have been routinely recruited to the CIA. While such persons can be used as analysts, the former Moscow station chief explained, they can also perform "operations", as Lowenstein did, including the providing of funds to political organizations. Ironically, while the CIA was recruiting Lowenstein, the FBI, on 29 March 1962, concluded that Lowenstein had never been connected to the CIA, noting that as late as 9 January 1961, the CIA had advised the FBI that Lowenstein never had a relationship with the intelligence agency. Evidently,the FBI checked no further after that date, as Chafe indicates when he concludes, "None of this evidence is definitive". Chafe, supra. Further, in a letter dated 23 January 1985 to Bancroft Littlefield, a former Lowenstein aide who had married Lowenstein's ex-wife after she had divorced Lowenstein, Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said: "Based on representations made to me, I can say that Mr Lowenstein was never an agent (italics added) of the CIA". Chafe, supra, note 20, page 509. To Chafe, this is also not conclusive.
As explained, Lowenstein was not a CIA agent and was not recruited as one. He was recruited as an expert consultant. When I requesteda copy of the letter from the CIA to Hamilton, Thomas K Latimer, Staff Director of the US House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, wrote on 5 August 1985: "Mr Hamilton has asked that I respond to your letter of 30 July 1985 regarding certain correspondence to this committee from Mr Briggs of the Central Intelligence Agency. The correspondence you referred to is classified and therefore cannot be released. I regret that we cannot be of assistance to you in this matter." They are clearly hiding something. Further, the exchange between the CIA and the FBI is an example of the ongoing war between those two agencies over turf and budget.
12. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), whose executive board was taken over by the AFL-CIO, gave the money for the establishment of The Federation of Free African Trade Unions (FOFA-TUSA) in 1959, which was intimately connected with the PAC. Barry Cohen, "The CIA and the African Trade Unions", AFRICA magazine, September 1976, Dirty Work 2, supra, page 77. Jay Lovestone, who served as the Director of the Department of International Affairs for the AFL-CIO, "was one of the Central Intelligence Agency's most important men". Ioan Davies, African Trade Unions (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1966), page 201. A former member of the Communist Party, USA., Lovestone, who was actually expelled from the Party, waged the Cold War from his vantage point in the American labor movement. In "Fight US Subversion of Trade Union Movement in Africa!" B S Nyameko directly accused the CIA of creating the Pan Africanist Congress to undermine the Communist-backed African National Congress. He wrote: "Throughout Africa labour organizations are infiltrated by CIA agents posing as private individuals or under nonofficial cover, as employees in private companies or as US Embassy staff in the Information Department and Labour Attache' men succeeded in establishing the PAC in 1959 to disrupt our ANC". The African Communist, No 87, Fourth Quarter, 1981, pages 56-57.
13. O'Donovan, Patrick, secret interview with Nelson Mandela, 30 May 1961. It is widely believed that the CIA fingered Mandela to the South African police, which would have been an inside job, almost certainly one of the white liberals pretending to be a supporter. Lowenstein was privy to the secret interview and may well have participated in the fingering of Mandela.
14. Cummings, Richard, The Pied Piper: Allard K Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream (New York, Grove, 1985), page 136.
15. Interview with Harris Wofford, supra. Other CIA "good wingers" of that generation included the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr (See Coffin, Once To Every Man: Atheneum, 1977); author and naturalist Peter Matthiessen, for whom the Paris Review was his cover and who, according to James Linville, the Managing Editor of The Paris Review, is "haunted by the CIA". Conversation with James Linville, Oxford, MS, April 1993, at the 40th anniversary celebration of The Paris Review (The New York Times first reported Matthiessen's CIA employment); Gloria Steinem, who worked for three years for the Independent Research Service, an organization totally supported by the CIA and whose purpose was to disrupt Communist youth festivals. This was first disclosed by Ramparts and later reported in The New York Times in 1967. See Press Release, 9 May 1975, Redstockings of the Women's Liberation Movement; letter from Jane Barry of Redstockings, 19 February 1987, and ultra liberal author/activist Robert Sam Anson (Interview with Robert Sam Anson, May 1985). The theoretical intellect behind "good wing" ideology in the CIA was Harry Rositzke, who argued that democracy and capitalism were not necessarily synonymous and that the United States should support progressive social democratic or democratic socialist approaches in critical countries. See Rositzke, supra, page 268.
16. See Allard Lowenstein and John Marcum, "Force: Its Thrust and Prognosis", in South Africa in Transition (New York, Praeger, 1966): "In the absence of internal collapse in Portugal and of external intervention in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, the period of violent upheaval may be prolonged. Neither collapse nor intervention now appears likely, and the legacy of European settlement in southern Africa may consequently be hatred and destruction of catastrophic proportions. This prospect will not dissuade Africans from force. It will be recalled that Americans fought an extended War for Independence that was prompted by grievances that look paltry compared to those now present in southern Africa." Praeger, the publisher of the paper, which was given at a conference at Howard University in 1963 sponsored by the American Society of African Culture, a CIA front, was later revealed by Ramparts, to have had a CIA affiliation.
17. Interview with Hal Minus, Lowenstein aide on 1966 trip, March 1981.
18. Telephone interview, 5 April 1994.
19. Paul Taylor of The Washington Post has provided an excellent overview of the South African scene prior to the elections in "Outlook", Washington Post, 3 April 1994.
20. Telephone interview with Professor William Foltz, 4 April 1994.
21. "South Africa: Policy Alternatives for the United States", Report of a Wingspread Conference convened by the Johnson Foundation, April 1975, Racine, Wisconsin. Others in attendance were George Hauser of the American Committee on Africa; Africanist Gwendolen Carter; and Donald F McHenry of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace and later Andrew Young's deputy and then replacement at the United Nations in the Carter administration. See also Alun Robert, The Rossing File (London, Namibia Support Committee, CANUC, 1980).
22. Wingspread Report, supra.
23. Letter to Hank Slack from Ernest Wentzel, 12 June 1979; telephone interview with Ernest Wentzel, Johannesburg, 9 August 1983.
24. Interview with Frank Carlucci, 19 July 1983.
25. Memo by Mark Childress, undated.
26. Moose quoted by Adams, telephone conversation with Adams, 1982.
27. Interview with Carlucci.
28. See Treverton, Covert Action, supra, at pages 220-221.
29. Interview with Professor William Foltz, supra.
30. Foltz, supra
31. Foltz, supra. See, generally, Chester Crocker's memoir, High Noon In Southern Africa (New York, W W Norton, 1992).
32. Foltz, supra
33. Foltz, supra.
34. Foltz, supra.
35. Interview, supra.
36. Foltz, supra.
37. USSALEP 1992 Program Update, Vol 1, No 1,January
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