[Here is a tiny glimpse into South Africa’s high tech spies.

I have written in the past about my own experiences on the extensive Internet spying done by the South African Government – having personally experienced its power. I am probably more spied on than I can imagine… I’ve just been lucky, in odd instances, to stumble upon one or two items proving that my email is being intercepted within hours of me writing it.

I imagine, every morning, certain officials in South Africa, in the ANC HQ and also in various Government Departments, probably receive details of emails I wrote the previous day – either posts I put on my website, or emails to friends. I have no doubt that my most private and personal correspondence has been read by these jerkoffs. There is no doubt in my mind that this is happening. I wonder how many people it takes to spy on me??? I wonder if there are “Jan Lamprecht” files and dossiers, and team meetings of: “What to do with that loud-mouthed racist bastard!!” Damned bastard… How can we shut him up without anyone noticing?? I wonder if someone has said at those meetings: “Wouldn’t it be too cool if we could just murder him? … Dibs on cutting his throat – slowly!!!!” … “Hey… I know some guys in a gang… Can’t we just get them to rob him and in the process knock him off… make it look like he is an unlucky victim of crime??” … I wonder how many such fun discussions they’ve had… a sort of: What we’d like to do when we catch the bugger…

I’m sure my very powerful enemies will find a creative way of ruining my life when I become too much of a nuisance for them… Unless they try to arrest me on some fake charges? One never knows what they may think up next… Jan]

From The Star (SA), 22 January 2005.

How SA spies on ‘friendly’ nations
By Michael Schmidt

Tucked into a low range of hills east of Pretoria, and bristling with radar dishes, lies a modern complex where visitors are not allowed to take their cellphones. Named Musanda (“lookout point”), it is the home of the most covert and least known of South Africa’s four state intelligence services – the SA Secret Service (Sass). This service inadvertently drew the spotlight to itself this week when it was revealed that early last month one of its field agents was arrested in Zimbabwe for allegedly recruiting five high-ranking Zimbabweans – including Zanu PF security director Kenneth Karidza – to pass sensitive party information to South Africa. Siyabonga Cwele, who chairs the Joint Standing Committee on Intelligence (JSCI), which has parliamentary oversight of all four intelligence agencies, said yesterday that the committee was waiting for the authorities to establish whether the arrested agent was indeed working for Sass. “We don’t get involved in matters of [intelligence] collection unless there is an obvious breach of the law – of international law or of human rights law,” Cwele said. “If an agent breaches the rules of diplomacy, then they get expelled, but if they breach the [host country’s] internal law, they may have to be arrested.”

Despite poker-faced denials by such leaders as ANC secretary-general Kgalema Motlanthe that diplomatic ties between the countries would not be disrupted by the arrest of the Sass agent, political analyst Chris Maroleng of the Institute for Security Studies said the incident had “serious implications” for South Africa’s strategy of clandestine engagement with Zanu PF progressives to ensure a smooth succession to President Robert Mugabe. But senior South African intelligence sources say the role played in the alleged spy ring by the Sass agent, who is accused of having paid one suspect – Zanu PF central committee member Philip Chiyangwa – up to US$10 000 (R60 000) for information, amounted to normal practice in the intelligence “game”. With a budget allocation for the 2005-06 financial year of R554,5-million, Sass fields an undisclosed number of intelligence officers across the globe. The senior officers, usually stationed at SA diplomatic missions, are given discreet accreditation by their host nations and assigned to liaise with friendly governments on issues affecting mutual security. Sass collects economic as well as political and counter-intelligence information.

But a former director-general of the agency, Mike Louw, has told this newspaper that, while accredited officers operate with the permission of their host nations, Sass operates a network of unaccredited clandestine field agents – in effect, a parallel chain of command – even within “friendly” nations whose policies could directly affect South African interests. Zimbabwe was a case in point, Louw said. “Declared officers stationed with embassies … are the official line of communication between the services … but then you get a few agents in the field and that is something that is never agreed on [by the a host nation],” Louw said. “To a dyed-in-the-wool intelligence agent, there is no such thing as a friendly nation, although there may be some you have more in common with … I’d be very much surprised if the CIO [Zimbabwe’s Central Intelligence Organisation, which arrested the Sass agent] does not have agents and sources in South Africa.” Professor Gavin Cawthra, director of the Centre for Defence and Security Management at Wits University, said it was interesting that Zimbabwe had chosen to expose the matter. “Everyone knows this game goes on and it’s done as much with regard to friendly as unfriendly countries because a lot of it these days is trade-related,” Cawthra said, adding that “these things are usually swept under the carpet, with the person who is detected quietly asked to leave the country”. Maroleng said the arrests were likely to be part of the current purge of Zanu PF progressives and that the Sass agent whose role had been exposed had remained unnamed because he or she was not the CIO’s primary target. He said that such activities could properly be considered “espionage” only when the intentions behind them were hostile to the host state. But this was not the case with Zimbabwe as South Africa merely needed good inside information on the country’s internal dynamics. He said the very seniority of the Zanu PF members supposed to have been recruited as sources indicated a Sass strategy that was “very risky – but not stupid”.

Sass was established in 1995, in tandem with the internal National Intelligence Agency (NIA), with which it shares the Musanda complex east of Pretoria. The two bodies amalgamated the old apartheid external espionage service and the intelligence services of the ANC, PAC, Transkei, Bophuthatswana and Venda. Both agencies were founded in what the first published Sass annual report last year described as “politically turbulent” times when “the security situation was volatile” because of resistance to transformation among the old security Establishment. This resistance was defeated by a mix of factors: retrenchment packages in 1995 and 1997 for the recalcitrant old guard; a series of new acts establishing civilian oversight of the intelligence community; and a new esprit de corps forged between agents at the SA National Academy of Intelligence (Sanai), founded at Mafikeng in 2003. Eventually, NIA felt bullish enough to set up its own website and take the unprecedented step of running a television advertisement proclaiming that South Africans had NIA to thank for “another ordinary day” because of its role in defusing taxi violence and terrorism in the Western Cape.

Now Sass itself has gone online, proclaiming its mandate publicly for the first time – “to gather intelligence on foreign threats to the security and interests of the country and its people” by “placing accredited operatives in foreign countries”. No mention was or is made of covert, unaccredited operatives. “Sass receives reports from all over the world through a secure communications system on a 24-hour basis,” the annual report continues. Foremost among Sass’s clients are the Presidency and the Intelligence Minister, Ronnie Kasrils, but departments such as foreign affairs and trade and industry are also numbered among them. The service receives its instructions from cabinet via an interdepartmental group of international relations, peace and security specialists. That group feeds analyses to the National Intelligence Co-ordinating Committee (Nicoc), which unites all four intelligence services – Sass, NIA, SAPS Crime Intelligence and SANDF Defence Intelligence – and sends “national intelligence estimates” to the Presidency and cabinet which use them to inform their decisions. Paul Swart, the Democratic Alliance’s sole representative on the JSCI, said the unacknowledged mess created by the arrest of the Sass agent in Zimbabwe would probably be dealt with through diplomacy. “We expect to be briefed on this incident two Wednesdays from now, but we are not informed on day-to-day operational stuff and only get involved if there is a deviation [by Sass] from its legislative mandate,” Swart said. That mandate, Wits professor Cawthra pointed out, has few statutory limitations on activities outside the country, other than to uphold South Africa’s own constitutional principles – to the extent that the realpolitik of espionage allows.