The former head of the apartheid National Intelligence Service (NIS), Dr Niël Barnard, who died after a long illness on Monday, has taken to his grave many secrets of the fight against the liberation movements — and of the hotly contested transition to democracy.
Though deeply implicated in some of the most notorious decisions of the State Security Council (SSC), which sat at the pinnacle of the security apparatus, Barnard often struck an independent posture that would wind up pitting his NIS against other arms of service, especially the military.
Born on June 14 1949, in Otjiwarango in then South West Africa, Lukas Daniel “Niël” Barnard served in the local Commandos militia, then as a captain in the reservist Citizen Force. Graduating from the University of the Free State with a politics and history PhD in 1975 and becoming an assistant professor in political science by 1978, he seemed set for an ordinary academic career.
But then the Byzantine world of apartheid intelligence dominated by the Bureau of State Security (Boss) under Gen “Lang Hendrik” van den Bergh imploded with the Info Scandal: a secret slush-fund of about R85m used to set up The Citizen newspaper and to buy influence in Western and African capitals without parliament knowing.
With Boss having acted as the scheme’s banker, Van den Bergh’s agency was tarnished, and Prime Minister BJ Voster’s government fell. Vorster’s replacement, former defence minister PW Botha, though also involved in the scandal, needed to clean house and in November 1979 tapped 30-year-old Barnard, to the latter’s surprise, as the deputy chief of a reorganised intelligence service.
Peter Younghusband of Newsweek described the new appointee as “a wrathful rhetorician and passionate believer in the righteous use of force. His writing is peppered with biblical allusions to ‘the sword of God’ and he strongly favours the use of swaardmagsanksie — the sword-power sanction”.
In 1980, the new agency adopted the NIS title with Barnard as its director-general, and embarked on a radically different trajectory to that of its predecessor, according to Barnard’s 2015 memoir, Secret Revolution. As Younghusband noted, “Barnard is not all bullets and bombast. While he bluntly advocates a ‘mailed fist’ approach to SA’s problems with state security and terrorism, he also cautions politicians that the final solution cannot be a military one.”
Herein lies the deep contradiction of his career.
While Boss had been fixated on the concept of “state security”, which meant defending the state against its citizens, Barnard claimed he argued instead for a “national security” stance that involved forging a multiracial nation; this, he argued, set SA inexorably on the path to democracy.
Yet at the time, the country was entering its most violent phase of the resistance to apartheid, and of the state’s brutally uncompromising response. As NIS chief, Barnard was in the eye of the cyclone.
PW Botha’s rise had seen the transfer of the civilian CSIR-directed nuclear weapons programme, Project Kerktoring, to the SA Defence Force as Project Chalet. Sent to the US to study nuclear technology, Barnard became a firm advocate of the apartheid state’s nuclear posture that by 1986 allowed for the tactical use of battlefield nukes, and which produced six viable warheads by 1989.
As a core member of the SSC, Barnard also sat in on key decisions by the securocrat elite, such as the SSC meeting of March 19 1984 at which the “removal” of activists Matthew Goniwe and Fort Calata (murdered the following June) was decided. He was also at the February 13 1986 meeting of the SSC working group that agreed on establishing a clandestine “Third Force” to combat opponents.
Secret minutes show Barnard argued against the majority who called for the establishment of a paramilitary force to buttress Inkatha, highlighting the “political risks”. He later explained at his Truth Commission amnesty hearing that such a unit “would lead to a further increase of the military conflict in Natal and the result would be more loss of lives”.
But he was only able to extract a compromise that the unit’s operations had to be cleared at the highest level, and Operation Marion was set up to train 200 Inkatha members in the Caprivi Strip; it would be responsible for the 1987 KwaMakutha Massacre, among other atrocities.
And in March 1986, the Third Force plan became a reality when the military Barnacle and security police “Vlakplaas” death-squad entities were combined with NIS, military intelligence and other elements to form the notorious Civil Co-operation Bureau (CCB).
Barnard had chaired the SSC’s Co-ordinating Intelligence Committee (KIK) from early 1981; it collated intel-gathering between the relevant agencies, and in September 1986, KIK created the interdepartmental Counter-Revolutionary Intelligence Task-team (Trewits) that included NIS agents, security police and military intelligence agents tasked with identifying targets for “elimination”.
Ultra-secretly, the NIS under Barnard ran its own units with offensive functions, while the NIS had also tentatively initiated sotto voce negotiations with the ANC in exile in Geneva in 1984.
Former NIS Covert Operations agent Dr Anthony Turton identified these units as “a deep cover offensive unit known as O61/01 that ran active agents within the services of all Frontline States,” and separate “deep-cover offensive operations: K31 was responsible for Africa and K32 for the rest of the world. They focused mostly on [the] ANC/SACP/PAC presence but they also worked on other targets as deemed necessary…”. In addition, there was a K43 Special Operations section.
None of the agents of these units have ever been identified nor any of their clandestine operations revealed, but two unsolved killings abroad that might have been committed by K32 or K43 are the assassinations of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme on February 28 1986, and of ANC representative in France Dulcie September on March 29 1988.
Turton flatly denies this as “Barnard was risk-averse in the extreme” and the killings “posed a direct risk to ongoing operations being run by NIS”.
What we do know is that Barnard also attended meetings with the military brass, such as one with Gen Constand Viljoen that planned the June 14 1985 raid on ANC safe houses in Gaborone, Botswana that killed 14 people.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission later rejected “the standpoint of former NIS Director Gen Niël Barnard and other former NIS operatives who have denied involvement and/or knowledge that intelligence gathered was put to operational uses that included elimination”. It thus declared Barnard and the securocrat inner circle “accountable for the extrajudicial killing of political opponents”.
Yet Turton described Barnard as “a brilliant strategist and negotiator. He was hard to read because he had a poker face ... he had a tendency to look over your head when speaking to you, so it was unnerving.”
In his book on the apartheid intelligence services, James Sanders says the austere academic also had the disconcerting habit of tearing the filters off his cigarettes when smoking.
US African Affairs diplomat Chester Crocker found him “extremely reserved, even cold”, though Barnard, on a US visit later, “acknowledged the extreme constipation of Afrikaner politics, where change was equated with weakness, [and] welcomed our suggestions.”
Turton enumerates his late boss’s achievements as professionalising the intelligence-sharing and analytical capabilities of the NIS; forging reciprocal relations with foreign agencies that boosted NIS counter-espionage and electronic intercept capabilities; Operation Flair, which stabilised plummeting investor confidence in the 1980s; and meeting late Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev to enable democratic transition.
Barnard would go on to start his celebrated series of hush-hush talks with a jailed Nelson Mandela in March 1988, which laid the groundwork for the negotiations process, with Barnard and his deputies’ (Mike Louw and Maritz Spaarwater) opening parlay with the ANC and SACP in Switzerland in September and October 1989. But Barnard often found the NIS at odds with elements of the SADF and former CCB that worked hard at destabilisation. The NIS even ran at least one field operation against Special Forces.
Intelligence historian Henning van Aswegen said: “Barnard was a transformational figure in SA intelligence history. From 1980 to Codesa in 1992, the NIS’s formidable National Intelligence Estimate... blueprinted a negotiated political settlement in SA ... Barnard then became a member of the government’s three-man negotiating team at Codesa.”
Barnard headed the first Western Cape provincial government in 1994. He died aged 75 after a long battle with cancer at Gansbaai in the Western Cape, and is survived by his wife Engela, two sons and five grandchildren.
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