Apartheid’s friends: The rise and fall of South Africa’s secret service
James Sanders
London: John Murray, 2006, £11.99, p/b
This is a tremendously impressive piece of work; and it’s big: 395 pages of text, another 100 pages of notes and sources and a decent index. I imagine that most of it will be new to most Lobster readers, as it was to me. There is a section early on covering BOSS in Britain in the 1960s and 70s, which was familiar to me having researched this in the 1980s; and it is a very good account, well worth a look for anyone interested in the parapolitics of the period in this country. But after that we are off into largely new areas, as Sanders takes us through the political, military and intelligence history of South Africa, through the fall of the apartheid regime and up to 2005. There are occasional familiar episodes – the South African involvement in Angola, for example; the Rhodesia story; and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the revelations which emerged from that about spying, chemical and biological weapons experiments, and the brutal counter-insurgency campaigns waged by South Africa’s military. But huge chunks of this will be new to anyone who has not been reading the South African press for the last 30 years. To my knowledge no-one has ever tried to bring all this material together before.
And don’t be misled by the title: this is much more than an account of the South African intelligence and security agencies. Indeed, in some ways for the general reader, that will be the least interesting strand in the book. For, although the names of the main personnel and those of the agencies will be unfamiliar, the internecine squabbling, empire-building and general bureaucratic nonsense these agencies engaged in will be familiar to anyone who has knowledge of their British or American equivalents.