Khampepe commission to embark on a long, dark journey

My best barroom boast is that I once shut down both houses of parliament in the world’s largest democracy, India, as MPs threw chairs and punches at each other in anger at my allegations of corruption in South Africa’s deal to sell their country heavy sniper rifles.

With the Khampepe commission into delays in investigation and prosecution of Truth & Reconciliation Commission (TRC) cases set to begin on November 26, the journalistic injunction to “tell no lies, claim no easy victories” came to my mind.

Back in 2003, the Indian military put out a tender for the supply of anti-matériel rifles (AMRs), but India’s parliament had outlawed the use of middlemen. Yet documents showed that South African state arms firm Denel had paid $3.8m to a company called Varas Associates of the Isle of Man, including for “fees for consulting and technical services as per agreement” for “project — AM2 & AM3”, which a Denel whistleblower told me was an AMR contract.

Varas had allegedly illegally secured secret minutes of the Indian government’s price negotiating committee (PNC), enabling Denel to know what price the PNC would settle for. This gave the South Africans an unfair and illicit advantage in tendering for the contract. Varas was registered as an outfit that put shoes on horses — and it had galloped off with the loot.

Outrage over my story caused the speakers to shut down both houses of the Indian parliament in 2005. But in 2014, after an eight-year investigation, the Indian Central Bureau of Investigation closed the file on the AMR case with no prosecutions having resulted, claiming that corruption could not be proven. My “easy victory” evaporated.

So it is with some trepidation that I approach two interlinked matters playing out in South Africa now: the Khampepe commission and the R167m damages suit by families of victims of apartheid that led to President Cyril Ramaphosa instituting the commission in the first place.

And the reason for my caution is that an even longer investigation of mine partly triggered both.

It all goes back to March 1999, when the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) proffered a lengthy charge sheet against Wouter Basson, who from 1981 to 1992 had been the director of Project Coast, the apartheid military’s ultrasecret chemical and biological warfare project which, among other things, weaponised CR “firegas” for use against anti-apartheid demonstrators.

A single charge alleged that from 1979 to 1987 Basson and twelve other men, including the founder of Special Forces, the “Recces”, Fritz Loots, had conspired to murder about 200 members of the South West Africa People’s Organisation (Swapo), as well as some members of the South African Defence Force (SADF) as it was thought they constituted a security risk.

What intrigued me, as a student of Latin American history, was that the Swapo and SADF people alleged to have been murdered were dumped in the oceans from light aircraft so as to make them “disappear” completely, as had been practised from 1976 to 1983 by the Argentine military junta, a close ally of the South African regime.

I was startled, unaware that there had been any secret negotiations between the ANC and the apartheid generals

Though the Basson trial judge later dismissed the “Swapo 200” charge as invalid because the killings had occurred outside South African territory, he heard evidence about the death flights and ultimately ruled that under what the SADF called Operation Dual they had indeed occurred.

I wrote some newspaper stories about the trial and did some preliminary investigations into the men involved in the death flights, but many were still dangerously engaged in military or mercenary activities, so I let the death flights investigation lie fallow for ages.

Then I was awarded a grant to write a book on the topic; strangely, in the intervening years, no-one else had. I decoded the death flight pilots’ logbooks and I traced the primary aircraft allegedly used to drop bodies into the oceans, an innocent-looking six-seater civilian Piper Seneca II, by 2019 owned by an unsuspecting woman who ran an East Rand flying school.

Eventually I tracked down and interviewed the primary killer, former senior staff officer for counterintelligence at Recce headquarters Johan Theron. In an openly recorded face-to-face interview on November 19 2019 he admitted to me his leading role in the death flights, claiming that the death drops had been his idea and had not been inspired by his Argentine counterparts, and that while he could not remember the total, he had personally killed and caused the disappearance of “hundreds”.

By my conservative estimate, given the size of the plane, the regularity of death flights of about one every six weeks and a median number of two bodies to make the arduously long flight from Lanseria worthwhile, Theron murdered about 420 people, an astonishing total.

The book I was writing amounted to a very detailed military small-unit study of D40, the ultrasecret unit run by Recce headquarters, which ran Operation Dual and which was later restructured as Barnacle and in 1986 absorbed into the notorious Civil Co-operation Bureau.

To round out the tale of what happened to the men responsible for such a huge, unprosecuted war crime, I approached former chief of the SADF Constand Viljoen to ask him what he thought about there having been almost no prosecutions following the dark revelations of the TRC.

I was aware that the apartheid generals had been keen at the time of the TRC to secure a blanket amnesty for all their men and other security force members as well as for former liberation movement fighters because they had achieved such a deal in the then South West Africa in February 1990 before it gained independence as Namibia.

Unfortunately, by the time of my approach to Viljoen he was suffering from dementia and was unable to speak to me (he died several months later), but his “gatekeeper”, Hennie Roux, when looking at my questions for Viljoen, said: “Oh, you mean the secret negotiations with the ANC?”

I was startled, unaware that there had been any secret negotiations between the ANC and the apartheid generals. These generals were organised under a “contact bureau” to co-ordinate their responses to the TRC. Roux put me on to Dirk Marais, the contact bureau’s head.

Marais told me that president Nelson Mandela had asked his deputy, Thabo Mbeki, to approach Viljoen to initiate talks between a select group of ANC cabinet members and the contact bureau with the view of preventing prosecutions on either side flowing from the TRC.

Documents provided by Marais, the SADF convener of the talks, show that from 1998 until 2003 the cabinet ministers and the generals met cordially over whisky to discuss how to sabotage the TRC. The documents were backed up by interviews with Viljoen and the convener of the talks on the ANC’s side, Namibian businessman Jürgen Kögl. The interviews were conducted by German lawyer Ole Bubenzer and appeared in a 2009 book on the South African transition.

Astonishingly, when the generals walked away on February 17 2003, having not secured their blanket amnesty, the ANC created an additional amnesty process of plea bargaining behind closed doors for perpetrators. This benefited former law & order minister Adriaan Vlok and former police commissioner Johan van der Merwe, who had conspired to murder Rev Frank Chikane. The process was later struck down by the courts as illegal, but the ANC then allegedly interfered with the NPA to prevent further prosecutions.

That all made it into my book Death Flight: Apartheid’s Secret Doctrine of Disappearance. It was published during Covid in 2020, when bookstores were shuttered, so reaction to it was a slow-burning fuse that ignited only in January this year with the constitutional damages suit that propelled Ramaphosa to appoint the Khampepe commission. Both Bubenzer and I are scheduled to testify.

Meanwhile, it is worth recalling that at the heart of both the commission and the lawsuit are scores of elderly victims of apartheid who, under the tirelessly cheerful guidance of activist Nomarussia Bonase, have slept on the pavements outside the Constitutional Court in inclement weather for two years demanding justice — and that the same court ruled in September 2005 that the death flight charges against Basson are still valid.