Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 10, 1990 TAG: 9006100074
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Cox News Service
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
But now, with Mandela en route here to a hero's welcome, a former U.S. official has revealed that he has known of the CIA role since Mandela was seized by agents of the South African police special branch on Aug. 5, 1962.
The former official, now retired, told the Cox Newspapers that within hours after Mandela's arrest Paul Eckel, then a senior CIA operative, walked into his office and said approximately these words: "We have turned Mandela over to the South African security branch. We gave them every detail, what he would be wearing, the time of day, just where he would be. They have picked him up. It is one of our greatest coups."
With Mandela out of prison, the retired official decided there is no longer a valid reason for secrecy. He called the American role in the affair "one of the most shameful, utterly horrid" byproducts of the Cold War struggle between Moscow and Washington for influence in the Third World.
Mandela, now 71, arrives in the United States June 20 as part of an international tour to bolster the anti-apartheid movement. The deputy ANC president, widely regarded as the world's pre-eminent political prisoner when he finally was released in February, is due to be honored by a ticker tape parade on Broadway and to address a joint session of Congress.
Such honors would have been unimaginable three decades ago when Cold War fears still dictated Washington political life.
That summer in 1962, the Kennedy administration began receiving the first reports of Soviet weapons being infiltrated into Cuba - a development that in a few months would put President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev "eyeball to eyeball" on the edge of nuclear war.
Across the ocean in Johannesburg, the CIA's covert branch saw the African National Congress as a threat to the stability of a friendly South African government. At the time, that government not only had just signed a military cooperation agreement with the United States but also served as an important source of uranium.
Five years earlier, the American Embassy in Pretoria had cabled Washington that South Africa's black educated elite was "psychologically susceptible to the extremes of Black Nationalism or Communism," and had influence "extending beyond the borders of South Africa into and among the Native leadership of other African countries." A bitter, open conflict pitting these blacks against whites in South Africa "could become a cardinal threat to American security," the cable warned.
Interviews in the United States and in South Africa portrayed a CIA covert branch in Johannesburg that by 1962 devoted more money and expertise to penetrating the African National Congress than did the fledgling intelligence service of the South African government.
In an interview last week at his avocado farm in the Eastern Transvaal region, retired South African intelligence operative Gerard Ludi recalled: "South Africa had recently withdrawn from the British Commonwealth, and we had lost our support from MI-5 and MI-6 [the British intelligence agencies]. At that time, we never had the funds. So we didn't have a proper intelligence department. There were only about three of us in 1962. But the CIA at that time was flush with funds. They helped us a lot."
Ludi disclosed that at the time of Mandela's arrest, the CIA was running a highly successful "deep cover" agent in the inner circle of the ANC branch in Durban. That agent provided his American case officer with an ongoing account of ANC activities there. He said that case officer was his longtime friend Millard Shirley, whom he identified as the CIA's chief undercover agent in Southern Africa.
"Millard was very proud of that operation, he told me that later," Ludi said.
Asked about the tip to South African authorities, CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said: "Our policy is not to comment on such allegations." Nor, he said, will the agency either confirm or deny employment or association with the CIA or discuss any allegations about its intelligence activities.
by CNB