TRC Final Report

Volume 1

Chapter 8

Subsection 7

Government civilian intelligence bodies

55 The joint investigative team responsible for this investigation worked from August 1997 to March 1998. Excellent support was received from the NIA and the SASS.

56 The Bureau of State Security (BOSS) was established in 1968. Its functions were taken over by the Department of National Security in 1978 and by the NIS in 1980. Three of the former ‘homelands’ - Transkei, Venda and Bophuthatswana - established civilian intelligence services. As explained later in this chapter, the KwaZulu Intelligence Service was a NIS project that was terminated in 1991. From 1 January 1995, the four remaining services were amalgamated, together with the intelligence structures of the liberation movements, to form the NIA and the SASS.

57 For obvious reasons, the management of records in the NIS was tightly controlled. Comprehensive directives covered paper-based, microfilm and electronic systems, as well as the management responsibilities of head office and regional structures. NIS top management assumed that the records and records systems fell outside the ambit of the Archives Act. The first formal contact between NIS and SAS took place only in 1991 at the time of the controversy surrounding the destruction of the sound recording of the meeting between Nelson Mandela and PW Botha. Thereafter top management explicitly adopted the position that NIS records were exempt from the Act’s operation. This position was defined by the two 1991 state legal opinions discussed earlier in this chapter.

58 Acting independently of the Archives Act, the regular, routine destruction of NIS records began at least as early as 1982.¹⁹ On 1 December 1982, top management adopted a set of guidelines (Directive 0/01) which authorised divisional heads and regional representatives to destroy records no longer of security relevance on an annual basis. However, in 1990 it was decided to replace this system with a far more rigorous re-evaluation process to be managed by an inter-divisional Standing Re-evaluation Committee. Guidelines were given to the Committee in October 1991. These required the destruction of paper-based records unless there were very good reasons for their retention. ‘Security relevant’ records were to be kept on microfilm or in electronic form, where they were most secure and easier to destroy or erase quickly. Continued retention was to be reviewed on an annual basis. In addition, documentation of covert operations was to be categorised according to sensitivity and security relevance criteria, with references to the most sensitive documentation to be removed from the electronic information retrieval system. None of this documentation was to be kept for longer than six years.

59 The new records management policy outlined above had not taken into account Treasury requirements for the management of financial records. In 1992, after conferring with the Auditor-General and the Director of Archives, the NIS Director-General requested ministerial approval for the destruction of financial authorisations, vouchers and related documentation. As indicated earlier, the Minister of Justice and National Intelligence, Mr Kobie Coetsee gave his approval on 3 July 1992.

60 Implementation of the policy gained momentum in 1992, but reached its most intense levels in 1993. At this time mass destruction of records took place, embracing all media and all structures. In a six to eight month period in 1993, NIS headquarters alone destroyed approximately forty four tons of paper-based and microfilm records, utilising the Pretoria Iscor furnace and the Kliprivier facility outside Johannesburg. The evidence suggests that many operatives took the opportunity to ‘clean up’ their offices, irrespective of the guidelines. Systematic destruction exercises continued until late in 1994. Many of the surviving minutes of chief directorate, directorate and divisional meetings and most administrative records covering the period 1989 - 1994 were destroyed at this late stage. It is unclear whether a position, adopted by the Heads of Civilian Services (HOCS)²⁰ in about September 1994, that all record destruction should cease, was fully complied with. What is clear, however, is that, throughout the phase of systematic destruction, NIS’s own requirements for the preparation of destruction certificates were seldom complied with.

61 The result of the destruction was a massive purging of the NIS’s corporate memory. This was supplemented by the unauthorised ad hoc removal of documents by individuals for their own purposes. Any attempt to quantify this phenomenon was beyond the resources of the joint investigative team. Very little pre-1990 material survives in the paper-based, microfilm and electronic systems. The one seemingly intact series of records are the minutes of senior management meetings for the period 1980 - 1994. Other documentation from the period 1990 - 1994 was substantially sanitised.

62 It is clear that the main purpose of purging the records of the NIS was to deny a new government access to records documenting state action against the opponents of apartheid. Subsidiary aims, outlined in NIS top management elaborative outlines issued in 1992, included the protection of sources and the sanitisation of the image of both government and the NIS in a new political environment (see appendices B and C).

63 Crucial to a complete picture of record destruction is the fact that, in addition to its own records, the NIS was the custodian of documentation generated by the NSMS, including the State Security Council and its numerous sub-structures. On 29 November 1991, when the system was being dismantled, a circular was sent to all government departments requiring them to transfer all State Security Council Secretariat records in their custody to the NIS. The stated purpose of the exercise was to enable the Security Secretariat to assemble a complete set of all such records. Interviewed in the course of the investigation into the civilian intelligence bodies, Mr Johan Mostert, who was head of the Security Secretariat in 1993, reiterated the position he took in the public debate at the time, insisting that a full set of such documentation had been kept by the NIS. Indeed, he subsequently provided the Commission with a sworn affidavit to this effect. When the extant records were transferred from the former NIS offices into the custody of SAS in March and April 1995, however, it became clear that this was not the case. The transferred records covered the period 1979 - 1989, but contained numerous and substantial gaps²¹. According to Mr AP Stemmet, who was a senior official in the State Security Council Secretariat and responsible for the management of these records between 1980 and 1990, the gaps were primarily the result of routine destruction exercises undertaken throughout the 1980s. The suspicion remains, however, that the 1991 exercise was designed to secure not the preservation but the destruction of certain records.²² Supplementary documentation transferred to the National Archives by Mr Mostert in December 1997 (covering the period 1990-1994) contained similar gaps.

64 During 1995, the remaining former ‘homelands’ intelligence services were integrated into the new civilian intelligence services. It seems that, before then, very little records destruction had taken place. However, between April and October 1995, a NIA Chief Directorate Research and Analysis Co-ordinating Committee subjected some of the records inherited from these services to a thorough re-evaluation process. Working both on-site and with records that had been transferred to NIA headquarters, the Committee was mandated to identify for preservation records of value to the NIA, from both an operational and an historical perspective. Committee members estimated that about 5 per cent of the records evaluated were identified for preservation. On-site inspection by the joint investigative team suggests that a far smaller percentage was preserved, with almost nothing pre-dating 1990, and that in practice the sole criterion for preservation seems to have been security relevance. The remaining documents were subsequently destroyed: the last destruction exercise took place as late as November 1996. These destruction exercises defied the moratoria on the destruction of state records introduced in 1995 by both NICOC and Cabinet. However, after completion of the re-evaluation process, large volumes of additional records from the offices of all three former services were secured at NIA headquarters. The periods covered by these records are as follows: Bophuthatswana Intelligence Service (1973 - 1995), Bophuthatswana National Security Council (1987 - 1994), Transkei Intelligence Service (1969 - 1994) and Venda Intelligence Service (1979 - 1994).

65 The KwaZulu Intelligence Service (KWAZINT) was unique in that it was a NIS special project (code named Aalbessie) fully funded by the NIS. KWAZINT existed between 1986 and 1991, when NIS terminated it. It included the NIS and KwaZulu government officials and all project records were either sent to or managed by the NIS. As far as the joint investigative team could determine, none of these records has survived. For this account of KWAZINT’s existence, the joint team relied on the testimony (both written and verbal) of ex-KWAZINT operatives.