Zuma and the ‘CIA agent’ who never was

SA-born André Pienaar has been much maligned in the country of his birth. He’s been called an evil foreign agent by former president Jacob Zuma, and been vilified by journalists as a conniving intelligence operator.

He quotes US statesman Franklin D Roosevelt when asked how he feels about this. "Judge me by my enemies," he says, "not my friends."

Pienaar is the founder and managing partner of C5 Capital, an international investment group specialising in technology. He’s a major player in cybersecurity, and in the space and nuclear power industries.

He leads the Limitless Space Institute and is on the boards of several cybersecurity companies; he’s on the advisory council of the US Institute of Peace; and he’s served on the president’s council of the transnational nonprofit, International Crisis Group.

The son of an Afrikaner dominee, Pienaar is also one of the most connected South Africans abroad. He counts among his network former US and UK secretaries of defence Jim Mattis and Liam Fox, senior members of the Tory establishment, and Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos (Pienaar’s wife, Teresa Carlson, is a former vice-president of Amazon Web Services’ worldwide public sector business).

He’s also connected to senior members of the British royal family (he and Carlson were guests at Prince William and Kate Middleton’s 2011 wedding). And the couple recently featured on the cover of Washington Life magazine.

It’s not quite the picture Noseweek once painted — of a "mysterious and some say dangerous freelance intelligence operator". In other reports, he was bizarrely named as the man who released the secret Zuma "spy tapes", and was described as a supporter of Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma.

With the release of the spy tape transcripts in 2014, he found himself labelled a "private intelligence operative close to [former president] Thabo Mbeki".

Pienaar’s name has featured, too, in Zuma’s long-running corruption trial, with the former president’s legal team repeatedly alleging that he was a CIA agent who conspired against Zuma. In their view, this is one of the reasons the case against Zuma should be dropped.

Most recently, in his plea to have prosecutor Billy Downer removed from the case, Zuma claimed Pienaar’s code name was "Luciano" and that former Scorpions boss Leonard McCarthy had "received gifts" from Pienaar while leading the crime-busting unit.

Pienaar tells his story slowly and patiently. After graduating from the then University of Port Elizabeth with a degree in law, he studied strategic studies at the University of Wales. There, he was recruited by international corporate investigations and risk consulting firm Kroll.

At the time, Visa International had commissioned Kroll to investigate rampant credit card fraud in SA in the period following the democratic transition. As Pienaar tells it, "everyone remembered I was from SA, so as a 26-year-old boy I was dispatched to my home country".

Once back on SA soil, he met then president Nelson Mandela and deputy president Mbeki, who agreed on the importance of the investigation, and asked Visa to share the final report with them.

The conclusion to that investigation was that "organised crime [in SA] was on steroids", he says.

As a result, Mandela asked Pienaar to brief his cabinet security cluster: Sydney Mufamadi (safety & security), Joe Nhlanhla (intelligence), Dullah Omar (justice) and Ronnie Kasrils (defence). Mandela and Mbeki then asked Kroll to assist with "capacity building" to fight organised crime.

"They said: ‘We want you to find the best, most experienced law enforcement officers, prosecutors and intelligence officers around the world and to bring them to SA to train ANC figures in key positions in law enforcement and intelligence, and then [train] a group of middle managers.’"

In Pienaar’s view, Mandela chose Kroll to lead the rollout because the ANC government wanted to "control the process" — something that might not have been possible had a foreign government or agency been asked to do it.

Still, Pienaar says he recruited the "very best" people in the UK and the US: seasoned investigators, prosecutors and intelligence operators. All the security cluster ministers signed the agreement and guidelines for the project, and it was managed by an interdepartmental committee, with the involvement of the relevant directors-general.

In all, 30 senior managers and about 60 middle managers were initially trained.

Mandela was very proud of the project, says Pienaar, and said there should be publicity around it. SA’s Sunday Times and the UK’s Financial Times subsequently described the project, reporting that senior former CIA and MI6 officers had also taken part in the training.

From there, Pienaar was part of a team that set up a standalone specialist law enforcement unit, staffed by the newly trained operatives, to fight organised crime and corruption. Once signed into law, the Directorate of Special Operations, or Scorpions, was born.

Though based in London, Pienaar remained an adviser to the Scorpions until 2004. He also worked with the governments of Kenya and Ghana to trace stolen assets, and he investigated the international assets of Unita for the UN Security Council, which wanted to apply sanctions to the rebel Angolan movement.

So what were Pienaar’s links to Scorpions head McCarthy? And where does "Luciano" come into the picture?

"Luciano", as Pienaar tells it, was simply a joke between friends.

McCarthy had been among the senior trainees in the group Pienaar had established. Both Afrikaans speaking, the two men and their families had become friends.

In the period just before the ANC’s 2007 Polokwane conference, where Zuma was elected party leader, Pienaar had received a text message from McCarthy. At the time, the Scorpions boss was going through a "hectic time". (Pienaar was aware of two attempts on his life that year.)

"It was a cry of anguish," he says of the text message. "It was late night or early morning. I knew the perils of being an anti-corruption investigator and I seriously worried that Leonard was going to be assassinated."

Pienaar responded with two text messages. The first was a Bible verse, Mark 12:17: "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s."

McCarthy was a devout Christian and Pienaar says he knew he would understand it.

The second, a Latin phrase, said one should always put the safety of one’s family first.

When McCarthy responded, he called Pienaar "Luciano".

The three (intercepted) text messages are the sum total of the "evidence" used by Zuma and others that Pienaar was a spy who had colluded with McCarthy, he says.

In reality, it was simply evidence of McCarthy’s "impish sense of humour".

"This was just a joke," he explains — a reference to an earlier outing in London, when Pienaar had taken McCarthy to dinner at Luciano — a restaurant at St James, near Buckingham Palace. McCarthy had loved the experience.

"The Luciano thing was just Leonard humour. I’ve never had a code name in my life and I never communicated with him in code because I never had any kind of relationship with him other than being a declared and very public adviser to the Scorpions and a personal friend," he says.

"And, of course, I never worked for the CIA in my life — that’s just nonsense."

And he never gave McCarthy any gifts, he adds. (McCarthy was later appointed as top anti-corruption official at the World Bank.)

In any event, Pienaar says Zuma, as deputy president of SA between 1999 and 2005, knew exactly who he was, how he became involved and what he was up to — the two men had met several times, once even at Zuma’s residence.

And, importantly, the arms deal scandal was not revealed by the Scorpions — it was exposed in a dossier Patricia de Lille handed to the Special Investigations Unit, and in an audit report by consulting group Arthur Andersen.

Still, the accusations against him — and the CIA label in particular — have cost him dearly and endangered his family.

"I endure it because, like the Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl said, I have purpose; I have a strong sense of purpose in life — purpose makes suffering bearable," he says.

"I feel like Winston Churchill, who said: ‘You have enemies? Good, it means you have stood up for something sometimes in your life.’"

When Kroll was sold in 2004, Pienaar joined forces with the wealthy Fleming family — relatives of banking pioneer Robert Fleming and James Bond creator Ian Fleming — to form risk analysis company G3.

He later sold the firm to Swedish technology investment firm Kinnevik and founded C5, which has offices in London, Washington DC and Luxembourg.

"We’re a specialist venture capitalist firm investing in cybersecurity and space, and the combination of the two has led us to invest in advanced nuclear and clean energy," he explains.

He is also involved in Axiom Space, a Houston space infrastructure developer, as well as X-energy, a private nuclear reactor and fuel design engineering company.

At X-energy, Pienaar is excited to be working with the SA nuclear scientists who developed the pebble-bed nuclear reactor, a project that was shut down in 2010. He wants to bring the technology back to the country, building "small modular nuclear reactors that you can put on the back of a truck or train that you can deploy anywhere, providing stable, clean, efficient energy".

The US government has invested $1.2bn in the technology.

Pienaar credits his friendship with the Fleming family and his long association with the late Maj-Gen Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor — the sixth duke of Westminster, whose family owned a farm in SA and who had a great love for the country — for his wide social and business networks.

Pienaar has worked with Prince Charles and his two sons on several conservation and public health projects. He is a trustee of the David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation in the UK and a director of the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children.

After three decades abroad, he’s still fluent in Afrikaans. "I read a lot of Afrikaans," he says (he’s a subscriber to FM sister publication Vryeweekblad), "and I still pray and swear in Afrikaans."

He remains bullish about SA, with its "truly remarkable people" — the country’s greatest strength, he says.

"But we need to deliver human safety, clean water and energy. And we should stop fixating on the government to deliver everything. I believe in ‘we, the people’."

Du Preez is the publisher of vryeweekblad.com. The full interview with Pienaar will be published on that platform