This handsome trilogy of diplomatic memoirs is a revealing account of the fateful years from Hendrik Verwoerd to Nelson Mandela as seen by South Africa’s representatives abroad. The diplomats tell their stories in racy anecdotal style and, at the same time, offer some startling new insights into events at the top.
We are given glimpses of diplomatic life abroad in the apartheid era and see how professionalism, patriotism and conscience were sometimes in conflict when distressing events in South Africa were dictating political discourse.
There was not much point in trying to justify what was happening. Very often the best diplomats could do was to explain the historical background and engage some measure of sympathy for white South Africa’s dilemma, emphasising positive developments when they could.
We are taken in these three volumes from Sharpeville in 1960 to the youth uprising of 1976, through to the state of emergency in the 1980s, and are given graphic accounts of the reaction around the world.
Chris van Melle Kamp, who was at the UN in 1984, says his contact with diplomats brought home to him “how deeply colleagues in other missions were revolted by apartheid”.
There are arresting accounts by diplomats of life at the shadowy interface between diplomacy and intelligence.
Roland Darroll, information counsellor at Rome, was offered considerable sums of money for classified information to be passed on to a contact at the British Embassy in Pretoria. Darroll consulted the counter-intelligence department of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) and was asked to play along with his contact, a member of MI5.
Darroll did as he was asked by Neil Barnard and his men. Yet he did not relish life as a double agent and was relieved when the then NIA closed down the operation when they were satisfied that they had found out as much as they could about the clandestine British intelligence network in South Africa.
There were also occasions when FBI agents sought to penetrate the South African Embassy in Washington DC. Steve McQueen, who served there in the 1980s, recalls that he was approached by the “NIA guy” at the embassy, who was presumably there under diplomatic cover, and asked for assistance.
It appeared that a woman official at the embassy, a foreign assistant, had been approached by the FBI to verify the embassy’s door codes and had been promised US citizenship in return, along with money.
What happened next reads like a chapter from an espionage thriller.
When the NIA had gathered enough evidence of the FBI’s ploy, President FW de Klerk was able to to secure an apology from the US government.
In the course of this operation, a “mole” was discovered on the embassy staff.
We are told in these pages how the irascible and temperamental PW Botha, successively minister of defence, prime minister and executive president, presided over a mutually distrustful relationship between South Africa’s diplomats and the Defence Force.
At the height of the torrid “total onslaught” era in the mid-1980s, the diplomats became reluctant participants in the national security system, as ambassador Werner Scholtz records.
His colleague, Piet Viljoen, found himself co-opted as secretary of Botha’s all-powerful State Security Council (SCC) and he soon discovered that the country was being run by the securocrats.
“PW met his securocrats before the meetings and made all important policy decisions, which were then rubber-stamped by the SCC, which was usurping the role of the cabinet itself.”
Tom Wheeler, who had served in Washington and other world capitals, was also co-opted and attended meetings of the SCC’s working committee.
On one occasion a suggestion by the civilian intelligence chiefs that South West Africa/Namibia be given independence was summarily shot down by the SADF, then deeply embroiled in the “Border” war.
The military were far less enlightened than the Department of Foreign Affairs or the civilian intelligence chiefs, according to Wheeler. “I was no match for the hard-liners round the table.”
The most striking example of the destructive role of the security establishment in undermining Pik Botha and sabotaging his efforts to initiate negotiations came in May 1986 when a delegation of the Commonwealth visited the ANC in London and then set up a line of communication with the Department of Foreign Affairs.
The Eminent Persons Group, as it was known, was successful in mediating between the ANC and the South African government, represented by Pik Botha and some other ministers.
They produced a negotiating concept which embodied all the elements that formed the basis of the negotiated settlement four years later.
The final meeting with the Eminent Persons Group was scheduled for Monday, May 19, 1986. Pik Botha was expecting to get final approval for a negotiating formula. On the night before the meeting the SADF bombed ANC targets in three capitals of neighbouring Commonwealth countries, deliberately wrecking a most promising initiative.
Ambassador Carl von Hirschberg recalls: “A huge opportunity to end the violence in the country… was simply thrown out of the window by the president and a few cohorts.”
Pik Botha notes that this was the greatest disappointment of his career. “It could have saved South Africa a lot of pain and agony.”
It was not until FW de Klerk succeeded PW Botha that the SCC was scrapped and the cabinet restored to its rightful place in the government of the country.
There is much more in this trilogy which readers will find engrossing. There is the brilliant diplomacy of Neil van Heerden, Carl von Hirschberg and their colleagues, for example, in bringing the “Border War” to an end.
Readers will find it best to read selected areas of interest. The editorial method has been to give the writers their head and the result, if sometimes long-winded, is a significant addition to our understanding of the past. - Gerald Shaw