Blacks Caught Between Police and Apartheid Foes : S. Africa Informers: A Dangerous Game

Robert Dube, a militant student leader from Soweto, the black ghetto outside Johannesburg, was at his rhetorical best as he addressed an anti-apartheid rally of more than 20,000 in Bonn, attacking the “racist regime” in South Africa.

“I want to tell P. W. Botha that his time is finished,” Dube said, denouncing the South African president to the cheers of the West German demonstrators. “It’s our time now. . . . Our freedom is at our fingertips. Forward with the struggle of the people!”

Dube, a leader in the Soweto Youth Congress and an underground member of the outlawed African National Congress, was feted in the West German capital in September, 1985, and later by anti-apartheid groups and politicians in London as one of the “young lions” who were going to bring down South Africa’s system of racial separation and minority white rule.

But Dube was a phony.

Recruited as an informer by the South African police, Dube over a period of four years infiltrated not only the Soweto Youth Congress and the now-banned Congress of South African Students but also the ANC underground here. His deception was so successful that he was under consideration for promotion into the leadership of the ANC Youth League when he was uncovered by ANC security officials last year.

“I gave many speeches, but I never believed a word of what I said,” Dube, now 24, recalled in an interview arranged by the African National Congress outside South Africa. “All the time, I was playing a role, and I had to play it for the maximum effect if I was to succeed.”

Although one of the more successful agents, Dube is just one of scores of police informers that the African National Congress has caught infiltrating its ranks in recent years, according to ANC officials. They describe the hidden world of government spies and their own counterintelligence as “one of the hottest battlefronts in our war against apartheid.”

The South African security forces make no secret of their extensive use of political informers--”we would be crazy not to use as many as we can recruit,” a senior police officer commented--and many have testified for the prosecution at recent trials of anti-apartheid activists and ANC guerrillas.

But the full scope and activities of the police agents emerged for the first time in a series of interviews with six informers, all apprehended by ANC security officers, who told how they had lived double, triple and even quadruple lives of deception, of being trapped between the state and their own communities and often their own families, of their fear of exposure and the death that this might bring and, for some, of their eventual remorse over “working for the enemy.”

Family Ties Damaged

“What have you done?” Dube’s father asked him when he learned that his son, unable to find work after failing his last year at high school, had gone to work for the police. “Don’t you know you are doing a dirty job? Don’t you realize how people will look upon you? The way you have taken is really dangerous.”

When Dube replied that he had already gone too far to quit, his mother said, “It’s up to you, but I’m washing my hands of you.”

“The danger was constant,” said Charles Mabasa, 25, who infiltrated the black-consciousness Azanian Students Movement, helping to organize its Soweto branch, and who later succeeded in joining the ANC underground on police instructions.

“When I went on missions to the ANC outside the country, I was very aware of the dangers if they caught me. I was also aware of the dangers of stopping, of withdrawing, because the police might kill me. . . . And I knew that if I were found out at home, I might get a ‘tire’ from the people.”

Targets for Retribution

Suspected police informers have been frequent targets for retribution in the black community in the past two and a half years of political violence. Many of the more than 250 people burned to death, often with a flaming tire (“the necklace”) around their heads, were believed to be police agents.

“There are constant police efforts to infiltrate people not only into the ANC but virtually all the democratic organizations, trade unions, church groups, student groups, civic associations and probably even women’s sewing circles inside the country,” an ANC official who deals with security matters said, asking not to be quoted by name.

“Some of these are just informers, gathering intelligence, but others rise in the organizations, become officials of them, and then are in a position to subvert them. . . . They also send us killers, trained assassins and saboteurs, whose missions are to do as much damage in any way they can.”

Extensive Infiltration

So extensive is the infiltration, according to Dube, Mabasa and other informers apprehended by the African National Congress, that police agents themselves have established ANC cells in the country, “recruited” other informers into the ANC, smuggled in arms intended for ANC use, helped to organize anti-apartheid groups and black labor unions and have sometimes been elected to leadership positions in those organizations.

Vusi Gqoba, 31, of Kagiso, a black township northwest of Johannesburg, was the national organizer of the Congress of South African Students, known as COSAS, and in touch with the ANC when he was recruited by police as an informer in 1982 while detained without charge for the fourth time under the security laws.

“I had been beaten and tortured with electric shocks,” Gqoba recalled. “I had serious personal problems and I was weak psychologically. They offered to stop torturing me, to provide me with money and to protect me. . . . I took their offer without knowing the result. They made me confess most of the things I knew. Then I was theirs.”

Paid $250 a Month

Gqoba, who said he was paid the equivalent of $250 a month, an average salary for most blacks, was assigned the task not only of reporting on the group’s activities but also of using his position to get close to Winnie Mandela, the anti-apartheid activist and wife of imprisoned ANC leader Nelson Mandela.

“They didn’t want me to reduce my activities in COSAS, but actually to become even more effective, so I would have a really strong position in the COSAS leadership,” Gqoba said of his police “handlers.”

“They really pushed me to be close to Winnie, to get more information on her, to be of whatever help I could, to carry messages for her. They even said that I should make love to her daughter Zinzi, but I didn’t.”

Altogether, six members of the COSAS national leadership, including its president at one point, were paid police informers, according to ANC officials, who said there is probably not a single anti-apartheid group that has not been infiltrated at some level.

Key Groups Infiltrated

The former police agents, several of whom have now joined the ANC, told of their success at infiltrating affiliates of the United Democratic Front, the country’s main anti-apartheid coalition, the rival Azanian People’s Organization, labor unions such as the Black Allied Workers Union and Health Workers Assn., church groups like the Young Christian Workers and the ANC and its military wing, Spear of the Nation, both in South Africa and in such neighboring countries as Botswana, Zimbabwe, Swaziland and Zambia.

Five of those interviewed said they worked for Lt. Willem Coetzee, a member of the security police based in Soweto, suggesting that perhaps a dozen similar networks are operating in other centers around the country.

Most of the information they provided, the informers said, dealt with the groups’ anti-apartheid activities, their internal organization and their contacts with the African National Congress, particularly the ANC underground in South Africa.

The six informers’ accounts were verified by independent sources, largely in the groups they had infiltrated, and by friends and family here and abroad. South African police headquarters in Pretoria was asked to comment, but a spokesman said time was needed to study the allegations.

No Evidence on Allegations

The story of a seventh person presented by the ANC, however, did not check out in any respect. Samuel Litsoane, 26, a schoolteacher, said he had been given the mission of assassinating top ANC leaders and poisoning guerrillas training at ANC camps in Angola. He alleged that, after killing a friend in a fight, he had been recruited as an agent and trained in firearms, knife-fighting and the use of poison as well as intelligence skills.

He said he had killed a student leader and burned his body, to prove his commitment to his mission. No evidence could be found to support any of his allegations, and ANC officials, who had said his confession had been drawn out in a year of interrogation, said later they were perplexed about why he would lie.

The informers, who were given code names and identification numbers by the police but received little training, were instructed to be active in their groups and to rise as high as possible. Other police agents often eased their way, introducing them as politically committed activists or arranging for them to move into key leadership posts. The ultimate goal was usually penetration of the ANC itself.

“In the ANC, we get them in waves,” Thabo Mbeki, the information director of the African National Congress, said. “The police tactics seem to be to recruit a hundred and hope that two or three make it. Most are amateurs, without any real training, and we discover them rather quickly. To the police, they seem to be just cannon fodder.”

Screened by Security Agents

Most informers are discovered when they are screened by ANC security on leaving the country, but others, operating inside South Africa, are found through counterintelligence work and lured to ANC headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia, on the pretext of an important meeting, a new assignment or a promotion.

The police also try to infiltrate agents as “sleepers” within the ANC, expecting to activate them when they have been promoted to key posts, according to Mbeki, who recounted efforts to place two trained journalists in his department in the hope they could play influential roles in the future.

One of the highest agents discovered by the ANC, Mbeki said, was about to be appointed education director of the ANC-affiliated South African Congress of Trade Unions when he cracked under the strain and exposed his role after more than seven years of undercover work.

Some of the informers said they were forced to work for the police, either after being tortured or to avoid prosecution, but several said they were recruited after applying to join the police force. All said they were paid, sometimes relatively small sums for traveling expenses or as “pocket money,” but later monthly salaries.

Informers Infiltrated

The police provided some informers with regular jobs, cars, houses and, in the case of a woman, two men as lovers, who she discovered were also informers and paid for their efforts.

Once they started to work for the police, they found it almost impossible to quit, the informers said. On the one hand, they feared the African National Congress and the violent retribution that militants in the community might take, but on the other, they feared the police even more.

Zanele Miya, 25, recruited while she was the girlfriend of an ANC aide in Swaziland, said her police case officer told her that if she confessed her cooperation to the ANC or tried to run away, he would disclose the full extent of the information she had given the police and the ANC would then kill her.

“They were quite capable of killing traitors, he said, and they would consider me a traitor,” Miya related.

Accused of Executions

The South African police have repeatedly accused the ANC of executing traitors and spies, and in December the police named 28, including Vusi Gqoba, who they said had been killed. But ANC officials maintain that executions have been carried out in what they said were “only the rarest of cases” when those involved were hardened killers.

The ANC’s disciplinary code, which establishes a criminal justice system within the organization, does provide for the death penalty for “grave crimes against the struggle,” including infiltration, espionage and collaboration. But it also stresses the need for understanding the reasons for the crimes and for leniency where a person was forced to cooperate, has confessed the crime and repented.

The ANC arranged the interviews in part to counter government allegations that it deals harshly with informers and in part to appeal to them to stop “working for the enemy.” All of those interviewed, including three still detained and being interrogated, said they had not been maltreated, and several said they had either joined the ANC or wanted to do so.

The remorse of several of the informers appeared to be genuine.

“As a Christian, I feel I committed a sin,” Gqoba said. “I believed in our struggle, but then I assisted the police. That troubled my conscience.