Читать книгу The ANC Spy Bible - Moe Shaik - Страница 8

Our unit successfully infiltrated Ebrahim into the country and for six months managed to keep his presence a secret. His mission had been highly successful and now the time had come to get him back across the border so that he could report to the ANC leadership. He was excited, adamant that the conditions for insurrection were developing.

‘What I need to do,’ he told us, ‘is convince the ANC that it has to intensify the armed struggle to capture this growing revolutionary mood.’

It was heady stuff.

Part of Ebrahim’s six-month mission had included liaison with an European couple, Klaas de Jonge and Hélène Pastoors.

Klaas was a child of World War Two. He had grown up in the Netherlands while it was occupied by the Nazis. He detested fascism, dictatorship, bullies and wilful neutrality which he saw as cowardice. In his early thirties he had taken to the streets of Europe to protest various global injustices, especially the French occupation of Algeria and America’s war in Vietnam.

When, in the early 1980s, his partner, Hélène, a Belgium citizen, decided to work in Mozambique, he went with her. They both wanted to help in the reconstruction of that country after its bitter war of independence. In this, they were part of a progressive movement forming all over Europe: revolutionary internationalists inspired by Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and Karl Marx.

In Mozambique the couple were faced with the devastation wreaked by Renamo, an armed resistance movement formed in opposition to the popular Frelimo-led government. Renamo – an acronym derived from the Portuguese name for the organisation, Resistência Nacional Moçambicana – was initially sponsored by the Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organisation and later by apartheid’s armed forces. The insurgency of Renamo radically affected the stability of the nascent independent country. Tens of thousands of people were killed and almost a million Mozambicans were displaced. People abandoned the killing fields of the northern areas, leading to the over-population of the urban centres, especially in Maputo.

Witnessing Renamo’s atrocities led Hélène and Klaas to the ANC. They reasoned that peace in Mozambique could only occur if apartheid was defeated so the fight against apartheid became their war, their purpose. Recruited into the special operations division of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the ANC’s military wing, they were trained in the storage and movement of arms into South Africa.

Being white foreigners, they could easily move across the region’s borders without much scrutiny. They were soon skilled and valuable operatives who went undetected for years while they conducted reconnaissance of targets for MK. They also smuggled weapons into the country and were part of significant military operations against strategic apartheid targets.

In 1985, under instructions from MK they settled in South Africa. However, they lived separately and developed different cover stories. After a few months and unbeknown to either of them they were placed under surveillance – which included tapping their telephones – by the Security Branch. Very soon their days as arms smugglers were numbered when a Security Branch team unearthed a cache that contained limpet mines, hand grenades and about a dozen AK-47s. Everything was photographed. Their luck had run out. And so had Ebrahim’s when he was photographed at Johannesburg airport talking to Hélène.

Of course, we knew nothing of this. We thought we were in the clear. Underground. Undercover.

In his final briefing to Yunis and me, Ebrahim sketched out the plans for his return to Swaziland. As with his entry, our unit was responsible for his exfiltration. Yunis deployed me along with another from MJK, Shirish Soni, to get Ebrahim across the border. Shirish had been with us for about a year. Extremely resourceful in logistics, he worked as a clothing designer and manufacturer. This was perfect cover as he frequently visited his clients in Ermelo, a conservative Afrikaner town close to the border with Swaziland.

It was at the Ermelo Inn that Ebrahim chose to meet Hélène prior to the planned border crossing. She was to give him the final details. Ebrahim had made it clear that, in keeping with the rules of secrecy, he would be the contact between the units.

It was a cold evening on the Highveld. We were given the go-ahead to proceed to the drop-off spot. I was driving, Shirish sat in the front, Ebrahim in the back, staring out of the window, lost in his thoughts. I looked at him intermittently in the rearview mirror, wondering if he was thinking about the long walk to Swaziland on this freezing night. The car’s heater was at maximum and the dry warm air made us drowsy, yet our anxiety kept us alert.

In front of us was an incline, and beyond that, the road sloped down to the border post. At the top of the hill we saw a military roadblock not a hundred metres ahead. Stopping or turning back would have aroused suspicion. I had no choice but to keep on.

‘Shit!’ Ebrahim exclaimed. ‘It was not here two hours ago when reconnaissance was done on the route.’

‘We stick to our legend,’ said Shirish. ‘We say we are lost and trying to find our way to Ermelo.’

To me he said, ‘You and I give our real names, to avoid any suspicion. Besides the car is hired under my company’s name, they can easily check.’

I agreed, concentrating on the postures of the military personnel in front of me. They looked relaxed huddling around a fire they had made to keep themselves warm. It was surely a routine checkpoint. I relaxed a little.

Our interaction with the soldiers went the way we’d anticipated. Our names were recorded along with the car’s registration number. We were permitted to proceed, the officer in charge giving us directions back to Ermelo: turn left at the next T-junction and follow the road signs. We knew the T-junction; it was where we had to drop Ebrahim. Turning right would have taken us to the border post.

As we neared the junction, in the rearview mirror I saw two cars pull up at the roadblock.

Apprehension ran through me. ‘Guys, I think we’re being followed,’ I said. ‘Two cars have stopped at the roadblock. If they turn left then we have a tail on us.’

‘Abort the mission,’ said Ebrahim. ‘Head back as fast as you can to the Ermelo Inn. The other unit is staying there overnight. I need to inform them that the mission is aborted.’

I kept focused on the rearview mirror, my heart pounding. Maybe I was wrong. But no, the two cars turned left. My stomach tightened.

The drive back to the Ermelo Inn was tense. We were silent, each of us playing out various scenarios, too fraught to vocalise them. Perhaps I was wrong about the cars, but we couldn’t take any chances.

‘Ebrahim,’ I said eventually. ‘Something’s wrong here.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘what are you thinking?’

‘The roadblock was arranged to get our names and the car registration. I’m sure that it’s the cops following us.’

‘I don’t know. You may be right. The more worrying thing is there was no sign at the T-junction that would indicate that the guide to take me across was there. That concerns me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The guide was to leave a Coke can under the T-junction signpost. That would have told me he was in the vicinity waiting for me.’

‘Do you think he’s late?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ came Ebrahim’s slow response.

‘There are too many strange things here,’ Shirish chipped in. ‘I agree that something is wrong.’

I latched onto Shirish’s support. ‘After you’ve briefed the unit at the hotel we should get back to Durban as quickly as possible, Ebrahim. We can reassess the situation and plan your exit from there. We shouldn’t take any more chances.’

The firmness in my tone must have taken Ebrahim by surprise because he hesitated. Then he said, ‘Alright, we go back to Durban tonight. I will inform everyone.’

Shirish and I waited in the car park while Ebrahim briefed Hélène about the aborted trip. Little did we know that in the next room the Security Branch had electronic listening devices monitoring their conversation.

The outcome of this was that the Security Branch decided to arrest us. Also, one of their highly placed sources in Swaziland had identified the man in the photograph talking to Hélène as Ebrahim Ismail Ebrahim, a leading member of the ANC Swaziland Political Military Committee. The order was given to arrest us that night. Ebrahim had to be captured. Now luck had run out for all of us.