against the SSA, the police's crime intelligence unit and the Defence Force's defence intelligence division. The IGI must also monitor their compliance with the Constitution, especially section 198, which states that national security must “reflect the resolve of South Africans, as individuals and as a nation, to live as equals, to live in peace and harmony, to be free from fear and want and to seek a better life”.
The choice of IGIs since 1994 has not evoked any confidence in the office. Faith Radebe, appointed in April 2010, was a former spook herself. A trained lawyer, she was also a special projects manager at the NIA. This alone should have disqualified her from the job.
A glance at the IGI's website is indicative of the dismal state of affairs during Radebe's reign. She hadn't released or declassified a single report after her appointment in 2010. In fact, the last declassified report on the website dated to March 2006. The last speech of Radebe was posted on the website in August 2010 and the last press release in April 2010, when she was sworn in. Radebe's term expired in March 2015 and her successor was only appointed at the end of 2016. For almost two years there was no oversight over the intelligence services and the IGI's office barely functioned. It meant in practice that the country's intelligence agencies accounted to no one.
IGI legal adviser Advocate Jay Govender, who was one of the candidates for IG after Radebe left, admitted at the parliamentary hearings that the office “was clearly not without its problems” and was operational only “to a certain extent”. Her colleague, Mampogoane Nchabeleng‚ who also sat on the executive committee‚ reported that they had been “managing the office as a collective” but could not say what they had been doing in the past year.
Setlhomamaru Dintwe, an associate professor of forensics at the University of South Africa, was appointed as IGI in March 2017. Five months later, the IGI website still stated that the process of appointing someone was under way. Dintwe said during his interview that the “role of the oversight officer is that you have to become a snake that eats the other snakes. That is the role of the inspector general of intelligence.”
Security and intelligence expert Professor Laurie Nathan commented to Daily Maverick that the IG has the potential for great oversight because he or she is not answerable to the minister or the intelligence services. They can walk into any building and open any file or attach any computer. It is a criminal offence not to comply. There is incredible power in the position but it has unfortunately been squandered over the years. Said Nathan: “We have no idea what they do. The IG has no sense of accountability to Parliament or the people. It is every bit as secret as intelligence and is in fact in thrall of secrecy.”
During the writing of this book, I sat down with a top-level intelligence guru who has intimate knowledge of the major role players in this saga: Jacob Zuma, Siyabonga Cwele and Arthur Fraser. “Did you really think that anything was ever going to happen to Arthur?” he said to me. “Did you think that JZ was going to sacrifice him? No way! There is something that you must understand about the president: it is all about how useful you are to him. And Arthur is very useful. I think he was always going to be JZ's intelligence chief, and PAN was just a klein fokôppie [little fuck-up] that had to be handled.”
He reckoned that initially Cwele had no idea about the relationship between Zuma and Fraser, which dated back to the “Spy Tapes” saga. That was why he spurred on his investigators to sniff out the culpable and bring them to book. He then lost his appetite because he was instructed “to make a plan”.
As my source said: “Fraser went to Zuma and said, ‘Sir, there is big trouble here; lots of secret things are going to be compromised.' Zuma instructed Cwele to look after Fraser. A strategy was devised to circumvent other law enforcement agencies and to deliver the findings of Engelke and Meiring to Faith Radebe, who they knew would kill everything.”
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As Zuma's first term ended in 2014, none of his original justice and security appointees remained in their jobs. Zuma made two loyal lieutenants, Bheki Cele and Menzi Simelane, national police commissioner and national director of public prosecutions, respectively. They were both controversial, Cele because of his “shoot-to-kill” policy and Simelane because his evidence before the Ginwala inquiry was branded “contradictory and without basis in fact or in law”.
It didn't take long for both to become toast. The Constitutional Court found that Zuma didn't apply his mind when he decided Simelane was “fit and proper” and declared his appointment invalid. A board of inquiry found Cele unfit for office and recommended his firing after he became embroiled in a R1.7 billion police lease deals scandal. Zuma's choice as head of the Special Investigating Unit, Willem Heath, was also forced to resign.
Zuma's selection of ministers didn't do much better. Justice minister Jeff Radebe was a mere onlooker at the destruction of the NPA, police minister Nathi Mthethwa was exposed as a beneficiary of a dodgy crime intelligence slush fund, and Cwele oversaw a divided and fragmented intelligence structure.
As political challenges against Zuma intensified, he obviously felt the need for new blood and in May 2014 announced a cabinet reshuffle. He demoted Siyabonga Cwele to the telecommunications portfolio and elevated a Mpumalanga departmental head, David Mahlobo, to take over one of the most crucial cabinet positions: that of state security minister.
Nobody outside the province had ever heard of Mahlobo, a 40-something-year-old trained biochemist with no intelligence experience. It later turned out that he loves “regime change” conspiracies and Thai pedicures.
Shortly after his appointment, IGI head Faith Radebe handed him her PAN investigation report. It inexplicably took her almost three years to produce her findings. I was told that one of the reasons why her investigation took so long was that the agency asked for more time to find the required documentation, invoices, contracts and authorisations. I have little doubt that much of it was manufactured in the Musanda war rooms.
I have never seen the report, but the SSA claimed that it exonerated Fraser and his cronies of wrongdoing. Your guess is as good as mine as to how the spy boss managed to wriggle himself out of the problem of having had a secret server in his house, explained the employment of family members as agents, and justified a host of unlawful contracts, claims, appointments and payments that carried his signature.
By the time Radebe handed her report to Mahlobo, the only other law enforcement agency that had the potential to upset the apple cart, SARS, had already been successfully dealt with.
Towards the beginning of 2012, the IGI's Jay Govender made an appointment with the head of tax and customs investigations at the revenue service, Gene Ravele. She explained to him that since the IG was conducting her own investigation, all other law enforcers should put their inquisitions on hold. Convinced that the SSA and the IGI were on top of their investigation, Ravele relented and the SARS audit was put on ice. Govender left with much of the SARS evidence under her arm.
At the end of 2014, the Sunday Times exposed the existence of a so-called rogue unit in SARS – the very unit that was targeting organised criminals and big-time tax evaders and money launderers. A few months later, many of SARS's most successful executives and managers were either suspended or resigned. Among them was Gene Ravele, who resigned in May 2015.
The campaign against the SARS “rogue unit” was driven by elements in the SSA, and you will read much more about it later in this book. Suffice it to say for now that the stories in the Sunday Times were bullshit, but they were integral to the destruction of the most effective law enforcement organisation in the country.
There was no rogue unit and the campaign was unleashed to stop SARS from investigating Jacob Zuma and his cronies, among others. I have little doubt that SARS's new rulers would have ensured that the audit profiles that Ravele's investigators had compiled against Arthur Fraser, John Galloway, Prince Makhwathana and several others were erased from the SARS mainframe.
* * *
Several PAN agents took the SSA to court for dishonouring the contracts and agreements that Fraser and his managers had entered into with them. One of them was John Galloway, the former NIA employee who formed a security company to supply equipment to PAN. According to the court papers, Galloway had to install sophisticated