South African president abolishes security ministry, assumes control of spy agencies

August 9, 2021 by Leave a comment

Cyril Ramaphosa

IN A SURPRISE ANNOUNCEMENT last week, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa abolished the country’s Department of State Security and assumed direct control over its spy agencies. The unexpected move was part of an extensive government reshuffle, meant to address the security shortcomings exposed by last month’s riots, which marked the worst political unrest in the country’s post-apartheid history.

Nearly 330 people died, thousands were injured, and thousands of businesses were looted in July, when extensive violent protests erupted in the provinces of KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng. The riots lasted several days following the jailing of Ramaphosa’s predecessor, Jacob Zuma, for contempt of court. Zuma was facing a high-profile trial for 16 counts of corruption, racketeering, fraud, and money laundering.

In a televised announcement aired live on Thursday, Ramaphosa said he would terminate the post of security minister and abolish the Department of State Security. Instead, the country’s domestic and external intelligence agencies will from now on operate under the office of the presidency and at times report directly to the president. In this way, Ramaphosa aims to assume “political responsibility” for, as well as oversight of, intelligence programs and activities.

In explaining his decision, Ramaphosa said that the South African intelligence agencies had been “found wanting in several respects” during last month’s riots. From now on, instead of a security minister, the work of South African spy agencies will be supervised by the new Minister in the Presidency, Mondli Gungubele. His two deputies, Zizi Kodwa and Pinky Kekana, who were also appointed on Thursday, will share the task of supervising the agencies. According to Ramaphosa, the reform will “ensure that the country’s domestic and foreign intelligence services [will] more effectively enable the president to exercise his responsibility to safeguard the security and integrity of the nation”.

Speaking on South African television on Saturday, Ronnie Kasrils, South Africa’s former Minister of Intelligence Services under President Thabo Mbeki, said he supported the move. He added that the country’s leadership had received “poor service” from the intelligence community, especially from the State Security Agency (SSA), during last month’s riots. Kasrils noted that “the centralization of SSA was a good move” because it reflects “best general practice internationally”.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 09 August 2021 | Permalink

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News you may have missed #909 – Insurgency edition

June 28, 2020 by Leave a comment

Al-Hawl refugee camp• South African intelligence concerned about spread of insurgency in Mozambique. This is the first public expression of concern from the South African government that the violence in neighboring Mozambique could spread. Previously, the South African Parliament was informed the matter was only to be discussed behind closed doors. Earlier in June, the South African military reportedly participated in Operation COPPER, in support of the Mozambican Defense Force.

• US intelligence says Russia offered Afghans Bounties to kill US troops. American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops — amid the peace talks to end the long-running war there, according to officials briefed on the matter. The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said.

• Analysis: The security risk posed by ISIS women smuggling their way out of camp Hol. While a debate rages in Europe over whether or not ISIS women and their children can be repatriated to their European home countries, some women have been taking things into their own hands and returning via illegal smuggling networks, creating new and serious security issues with which European officials must now grapple.

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South African probe into murder of Rwandan ex-spy chief unearths new evidence

January 25, 2019 by Leave a comment

Patrick KaregeyaA public inquest into the 2014 killing of a Rwandan dissident and former spy chief, who had been given political asylum in South Africa, has unearthed evidence showing that South African authorities believed the killers had close links to the government of Rwanda. It also appears that the South Africans chose not to prosecute the killers in order to protect their diplomatic ties with the Rwandan government. Patrick Karegeya was a leading member of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), the armed wing of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which was founded in 1987 in Uganda by Rwandan Tutsi refugees. In 1994, the RPA, led by Paul Kagame, took control of Rwanda, thus putting an end to the genocide of up to a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Soon afterwards Karegeya was named Director General of External Intelligence in the RPA, which was renamed to Rwandan Defense Forces.

In 2004 however, after falling out with Kagame, who had become President of Rwanda in 2000, Karegeya was arrested, stripped of his rank of colonel, and served 18 months in prison for “insubordination and desertion”. He fled the country in 2007 and received political asylum in South Africa. In 2011, the Rwandan government issued an international arrest warrant for Karegeya, but South Africa refused to extradite him. His body was discovered on December 31, 2014, in a room at the Michelangelo Towers Hotel in Sandton, an affluent suburb of Johannesburg. He was 53.

Earlier this month, in response to pressures from Karegeya’s family and human rights groups, the government of South Africa began a formal inquest into the murder, in anticipation of launching a possible court case. Earlier this week, the magistrate in charge of the inquest, Mashiane Mathopa, made public a previously secret letter from the South African prosecutor’s office about Karegeya’s murder. In the letter, dated June 5, 2018, explains the prosecutor’s decision to “decline at this stage” to prosecute the murder. The decision rests on two arguments. The first argument is that the four men who were believed to have killed Karegeya had already “left South Africa and returned to Rwanda”. The second argument is that there were “close links […] between the suspects and the current Rwandan government”.

On Monday, Mathopa suggested that the South African authorities may have decided not to investigate Karegeya’s murder in order to “help repair” South Africa’s bilateral relations with Rwanda. He then halted the inquest and gave police officials two weeks to “explain their failure to prosecute” Karegeya’s alleged murderers. He also requested detailed information about the “steps, if any, [that] have been taken to arrest the four suspects […], since their whereabouts and their identity are known” to the authorities. Supporters of the inquest said earlier this week that Mathopa could potentially order a trial of the case, which might lead to a formal request made by South Africa for Rwanda to extradite the four men implicated in the case.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 25 January 2019 | Permalink

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South Africa to probe mysterious death of former Rwandan spy chief

November 2, 2018 by 3 Comments

Patrick KaregeyaSouth Africa is preparing to launch an official inquest into the mysterious death of the former director of Rwanda’s external intelligence agency, who was found dead in a luxury South African hotel four years ago. The body of Patrick Karegeya, 53, was discovered on December 31, 2014, in a room at the Michelangelo Towers Hotel in Sandton, an affluent suburb of Johannesburg. Karegeya was a leading member of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), the armed wing of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which was founded in 1987 in Uganda by Rwandan Tutsi refugees. In 1994, the RPA, led by Paul Kagame, took control of Rwanda, thus putting an end to the genocide of up to a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Soon afterwards Karegeya was named Director General of External Intelligence in the RPA, which was renamed to Rwandan Defense Forces.

In 2004 however, after falling out with Kagame, who had become President of Rwanda in 2000, Karegeya was arrested, stripped of his rank of colonel, and served 18 months in prison for “insubordination and desertion”. He fled the country in 2007 and received political asylum in South Africa. The Rwandan government later claimed that Karegeya had been a double spy for South Africa. In 2010, Karegeya teamed up with General Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, who used to head the Rwandan Army, and had also escaped to South Africa after falling out with President Kagame. The two formed a new Rwandan opposition party in exile, called the Rwanda National Congress. The response from the government in Kigali was to try Karegeya and Nyamwasa in absentia in a military court. They were both sentenced to lengthy prison terms for “promoting ethnic divisions” in the country. In 2011, the Rwandan government issued international arrest warrants for the two former military men, but South Africa refused to extradite them.

When Karegeya was found dead in his hotel room, his neck was abnormally swollen and showed signs of strangulation; a rope and a bloodied towel were found tucked inside the hotel room’s safe, according to media reports. Nobody has ever been tried for Karegeya’s murder. On Wednesday, however, French news agency Agence France Presse (AFP) said that the government of South Africa will be launching a formal investigation into Karegeya’s killing in a matter of months. The news agency said it had spoken to “a South African court official […] who did not have permission to speak to the media”. The official told AFP that the probe is “not a trial, it’s a formal inquest”, which may eventually lead to a court case. The inquest will be officially launched on January 16, 2019, said the anonymous official.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 02 November 2018 | Permalink

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British police arrest man over mystery killing of Seychelles leader in 1985

August 2, 2018 by Leave a comment

Gérard HoarauA man has been arrested by British counter-terrorism police in Northern Ireland, reportedly in connection with the assassination of a Seychelles exiled political leader in London in 1985. No-one has ever been charged with the murder of Gérard Hoarau, who was gunned down with a Sterling submachine gun in Edgware, London, on November 29, 1985. At the time of his killing, the 35-year-old Hoarau led the Mouvement Pour La Resistance (MPR), which was outlawed by the Seychelles government but was supported by Western governments and their allies in Africa. The reason was that the MPR challenged the president of the Seychelles, France-Albert René, leader of the leftwing Seychelles People’s United Party —known today as the Seychelles People’s United Party. The British-educated René assumed the presidency via a coup d’etat in 1977, which was supported by neighboring Tanzania, and remained in power in the island-country until 2004.

Despite proclaiming that he espoused a “moderate socialist ideology”, his critics —including Hoarau— accused him of being a secret admirer of Cuban-style communism and called for his removal from office. In 1979, Hoarau was one of several critics of René who were ordered to leave the Seychelles under threat of imprisonment. He initially found refuge in South Africa. But in 1981, the Seychelles security forces foiled an armed invasion by South African-supported mercenaries, which aimed to depose René. The mercenaries —most of them South African Special Forces veterans, former Rhodesian soldiers, Belgian veterans of the Congo Crisis, and American Vietnam War veterans— were led by British-Irish mercenary Thomas Michael “Mad Mike” Hoare. The group of over 50 armed men was intercepted at the Seychelles International Airport in Mahé and managed to escape only after taking hostages and hijacking an Air India passenger airplane that happened to be at the airport. However, they left behind five mercenaries, including at least one officer of South Africa’s National Intelligence Service.

In 1982, South Africa struck a deal with the Seychelles for the release of the captured mercenaries. In return, it promised to stop sheltering René’s opponents, including Hoarau. The latter was thus forced out of South Africa and sought refuge in London, England, where he was assassinated three years later. At the time of Hoarau’s killing, there was strong suspicion that the government of the Seychelles was directly involved in his assassination. There were also reports in the British press that a British hitman may have been hired to assassinate Hoarau. But despite several arrests in connection with the case, no-one was ever charged with the Seychellois exiled leader’s assassination. This, however, may soon change. In 2016, the British Metropolitan police re-opened the case and, according to a police press statement “established fresh lines of inquiry”. On Thursday, a 77-year-old man was reportedly arrested in Antrim town, Northern Ireland, by officers of the Metropolitan Police and the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The man, who has not been named, was transported to London for questioning “on suspicion of conspiracy to murder”. A police spokesman said on Thursday that the man had not previously been arrested as part of the Hoarau murder investigation.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 02 August 2018 | Permalink

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South African spy agency can’t account for over $100 million in expenses

September 18, 2017 by 2 Comments

National Treasury of South AfricaSouth Africa’s National Treasury threatened to terminate all funding for covert operations last year, after the country’s spy agency refused to account for tens of millions of dollars in expenses, saying the money had been put to “secret use”. An investigation by two leading South African news outlets, the Afrikaans-language weekly newspaper Rapport and the English-language online news portal News24, has revealed the existence of a major bureaucratic spat between the National Treasury and the State Security Agency (SSA), the country’s primary civilian intelligence organization.

The investigation cited “seven independent sources” with direct involvement and knowledge of the National Treasury and the South African intelligence services. According to the report, National Treasury officials contacted the SSA last year, demanding to know how it used 1.5 billion rand (approximately US $114 million) that it took from government coffers between 2012 and 2016. But the spy agency refused to provide a detailed answer, and said instead that most of the money had been used to fund unspecified “secret operations”, and that its use was therefore classified.

However, the SSA did not realize that National Treasury officials have the same level of security clearance as senior SSA officials, said sources. Consequently, a Treasury probe was launched by Treasury investigators with access to SSA’s activities. The probe uncovered several instances of irregular expenditures and serious mismanagement, said the report. There were repeated instances when funds assigned to non-covert operations were “inexplicably moved to the covert fund” and SSA officials were unable to explain why. There were also numerous cases of abuse of procurement procedures. One source told the News24/Rapport team that “Treasury officials kept asking [SSA officials] how they tender for goods and services, and they kept saying that they can’t tell us, because it is classified information”. At that point, the National Treasury threatened to terminate all funding for intelligence operations unless answers were provided by the SSA leadership. After a series of frantic and tense negotiations, the SSA agreed to change its procurement practices and “at least submit [to National Treasury] a list of suppliers so that there could be a degree of oversight”.

The SSA’s reputation has not emerged unscathed from the broader crisis that has been plaguing South African politics in recent years. In 2014, the Johannesburg-based newspaper City Press alleged that the SSA maintained a secret unit used to target domestic political opponents of South African President Jacob Zuma. The paper also said that senior SSA official Thulani Dhlomo, a close ally of President Zuma, had been placed at the head of the secret unit in 2012. Another leading Johannesburg-based newspaper, The Mail & Guardian, repeated these claims earlier this month.

► Author: Ian Allen | Date: 18 September 2017 | Permalink

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CIA tip led to Mandela’s fateful 1962 arrest, claims US ex-diplomat

May 16, 2016 by Leave a comment

MandelaThe arrest of Nelson Mandela in 1962, which led to his 28-year incarceration, came after a tip from the United States Central Intelligence Agency, according to an American diplomat who was in South Africa at the time. At the time of his arrest, Mandela was the head of uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), an organization he founded in 1961 to operate as the armed wing of the anti-apartheid African National Congress (ANC). But the white minority government of South Africa accused Mandela of being a terrorist and an agent of the Soviet Union. The US-Soviet rivalry of that era meant that the ANC and its leader had few supporters in America during the early stages of the Cold War.

Mandela was arrested on August 5, 1962 in the KwaZulu-Natal town of Howick by members of the South African Police. He was pretending to be the chauffeur of Cecil Williams, a white member of the ANC who was riding in the back seat of the car that Mandela was driving that night. The details of what led to Mandela’s arrest have always been mysterious, and the ANC has long suspected that the MK leader was betrayed by informants placed within the organization by the apartheid government. But an article in the London-based Sunday Times has said that it was the CIA that tipped off the South Africans about Mandela’s whereabouts that night. The claim is based on an interview with Donald Rickard, an American diplomat —now dead— who was serving as Washington’s vice-consul in Durban at the time of Mandela’s arrest. Some believe that Rickard was actually a CIA officer posing as a diplomat until his retirement from the service in 1978, and he himself never denied it.

Two weeks before he died, Rickard gave an interview to British filmmaker John Irvin, who was filming for his latest documentary, entitled Mandela’s Gun, about Mandela’s role in the MK. According to The Times, the former US diplomat told Irvin that in the early 1960s Mandela was “the most dangerous communist anywhere outside the USSR”. This is despite Mandela’s repeated denials that he had ever been a member or sympathizer of the South African Communist Party, which at the time was actively supporting the ANC. Rickard allegedly told Irvin: “I found out when [Mandela] was coming down and how he was coming […]. That’s where I was involved and that’s’ where Mandela was caught”. In his interview, Rickard insisted that Mandela was “completely under the control of the Soviet Union [and effectively] a toy for the communists”. Moreover, he said the CIA believed that he was planning to organize the large Indian population of Natal Province and incite them into an uprising led by communists, which, according to Rickard, could have prompted an armed Soviet invasion of South Africa. The former diplomat is quoted as telling Irvin: “We were teetering on the brink here and it had to be stopped, which meant Mandela had to be stopped. And I put a stop to it”.

Following his arrest, Mandela served nearly 30 years in prison on terrorism charges, until his eventual release in 1990. In 1994, he was elected as South Africa’s first black president, a post he held until his retirement in 1999. The US, which officially designated Mandela a terrorist in the 1980s under the administration of US President Ronald Reagan, kept the ANC leader on its terrorism watch list until 2008.

The US government has refused comment on Rickard’s claims.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 16 May 2016 | Permalink

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Dead body found on plane carrying millions in cash in Zimbabwe

February 16, 2016 by 1 Comment

HarareAn American-registered airplane carrying large quantities of cash on behalf of a South African bank was impounded by authorities in Zimbabwe after a dead body was found on board. Zimbabwean media said police was notified after human blood was seen dripping from the plane’s cargo area during an emergency refueling stop. Authorities said the plane belonged to Western Global Airlines, a Florida-based transportation company that specializes in chartering flights to Africa. Its crew includes at least two Americans, a Pakistani and a South African citizen.

According to officials in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, the cargo plane had been traveling from Germany to South Africa when it made an emergency request to land at the Harare International Airport. An earlier request by the crew to land in neighboring Mozambique had been turned down. But after refueling the plane, attendants at Harare airport noticed that there was blood dripping from the plane’s cargo area. When they opened the door, they discovered “a suspended body in the plane”, said The Herald, one of Zimbabwe’s largest newspapers.

It was later established that the plane was carrying millions of South African rand on behalf of the South African Reserve Bank (SARB), which is the central bank of South Africa. An official at the bank said on Monday that SARB was “aware of an aircraft carrying a SARB consignment that stopped in Harare and was detained”, but gave no further information. The Zimbabwe Civil Aviation Authority said the matter had been forwarded for investigation to police authorities. The ambassador of South Africa to Zimbabwe, Vusi Mavimbela said media reports about the incident were accurate, but refused to provide details, saying the matter was under investigation.

The last time authorities in Zimbabwe impounded a foreign-owned airplane was in 2004, when a Boeing 727 registered in South Africa was found to contain several tons of weapons and 64 troops. The troops, who were mercenaries from several countries, including South Africa, Britain and Armenia, were on their way to Equatorial Guinea to stage a military coup in return for a share in profits from the country’s lucrative oil sector.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 16 February 2016 | Permalink

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Was China behind mystery raids on South African nuclear facilities?

March 4, 2015 by 2 Comments

Pelindaba Nuclear Research CenterBy JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org
China is believed to be the culprit of a mysterious armed raid that took place at a South African nuclear facility in 2007, which has puzzled security experts for years, according to classified documents leaked to the media. The raid took place on November 8, 2007, at the Pelindaba Nuclear Research Center, located outside Johannesburg. That evening, two groups of armed assailants, later described by authorities as “technically sophisticated criminals”, skillfully deactivated numerous layers of physical security around the facility, including a 10,000-volt electrical perimeter fence. They entered the grounds of the nuclear station and fired at an off-duty night guard who saw them and tried to raise the alarm as he was leaving his post. The injured guard managed to summon a police team patrolling nearby, but by the time it arrived the assailants had managed to escape carrying with them a laptop computer stolen from the research facility’s control room. They were never caught despite an extensive investigation by South African authorities.

In the weeks following the raid, South African officials publicly dismissed the incident as the work of small-time criminals. Abdul Minty, the South African representative at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) described the raid as a “failed burglary”, while the Nuclear Energy Corporation of South Africa, which owns the Pelindaba facility, said the incident had been simply “a piece of random criminality”. One theory, which was especially popular in American media circles, was that the raid had been conducted by a terrorist group, or by an organized criminal gang employed by a terrorist group, aimed at acquiring nuclear material or designs that would enable them to build a nuclear weapon.

However, television channel Al Jazeera said recently that it had seen a copy of a secret intelligence briefing prepared by South African intelligence, in which it is stated with certainty that the 2007 raid on Pelindaba was ordered by the Chinese government. The Qatar-based news channel said the briefing related to counterespionage and was prepared in 2009. It said that the government of China had dispatched the sophisticated assailants’ team that raided the nuclear facility, and that the operation was part of an effort to steal sensitive technology that would give Beijing an advantage in building a state-of-the-art nuclear power plant as part of its Chinergy project. Chinergy is a massive collaborative effort by the Chinese government and the country’s private sector to reduce China’s reliance on coal and oil by building dozens of nuclear power plants across the country. There was no immediate comment by the Chinese and South African governments.

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Did South African spy services kill Swedish prime minister in 1986?

July 29, 2014 by 2 Comments

Olof PalmeBy JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org
The usually tranquil waters of Swedish national politics were stirred violently on February 28, 1986, when the country’s Prime Minister, Olof Palme, was shot dead. He was walking home from the cinema with his wife when he was gunned down by a single assassin who shot him from behind in Stockholm’s central street of Sveavägen. Following the 1988 acquittal of Christer Pettersson, who had been initially convicted of the assassination, several theories have been floating around, but the crime remains unsolved to this day. Now the BBC has aired an investigation into the incident, which revisits what some say is the most credible theory behind the killing: that Palme was targeted by the government of apartheid-era South Africa because of his strong support for the African National Congress (ANC). Palme was among the leading figures of the left wing in Sweden’s Social Democratic Party. He had served as Prime Minister from 1969 to 1976, and was reelected in 1982 on a left-wing program of “revolutionary reform” that included expanding the role of the trade unions and increasing progressive taxation rates. He was also a strong international opponent of South Africa’s apartheid system and under his leadership Sweden became the most ardent supporter of the ANC. By the mid-1980s, the country was providing nearly half of the ANC’s political funding. Swedish authorities viewed South African intelligence, especially the apartheid system’s State Security Bureau (BOSS), as the primary suspect in Palme’s assassination. In 2010, Tommy Lindström, former Director of the Swedish Police Service (Rikskriminalpolisen), said he was certain of the South African government’s complicity in Palme’s murder. After the end of apartheid, several South African former security officials said elements within the country’s intelligence services had authorized the assassination of the Swedish leader. But investigations by Swedish authorities remain inconclusive. Now the BBC’s security correspondent, Gordon Corera, has produced an investigation into the claims of South African complicity behind Palme’s murder. The investigation was aired on Monday by Document, an investigative program on BBC’s Radio 4 station. It is based on nearly 30 boxes of documents on the Palme assassination, found in the personal archive of the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson. Though known today primarily for his Millennium series, Larsson worked for most of his professional life as an investigative journalist specializing on the activities of the Swedish far-right. One of the documents in Larsson’s archive mentions Bertil Wedin, an anti-communist Swedish journalist, as “the middle man in the assassination” of Palme. Correra talks to several sources, including British investigative journalist Duncan Campbell, who in 1988 alleged that the British security services had been aware of plots by Pretoria to kill Palme. Read more of this post

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FBI kept tabs on Mandela’s first-ever visit to the US, files show

June 2, 2014 by Leave a comment

Nelson MandelaBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org
The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation has released for the first time some of its internal files on the late South African leader Nelson Mandela. Among other things, the documents reveal that the Bureau closely monitored Mandela’s first ever visit to the United States in 1990. The legendary black campaigner arrived in the United States in June of that year, just four months following his release from prison after 27 years of captivity. The FBI documents include a redacted memorandum from the Bureau’s field office in Atlanta, Georgia, addressed to William Sessions, who was the FBI’s Director at the time. The memorandum notes that the Bureau had been able to recruit an informant inside, or closely affiliated with, Mandela’s inner circle. The source had provided his FBI handlers with a detailed itinerary of Mandela’s 11-day US tour. The memorandum stresses that the “confidential source” was “newly opened” and thus his or her “reliability [was] not yet established”. But Mandela’s travel itinerary, which had apparently been planned by a member of staff in the office of Coretta Scott King, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow, was carefully dissected by the FBI. The documents show that the Bureau’s principal concern was safeguarding the life of the South African political leader, who had received countless death threats in the days prior to his arrival. According to the declassified files, the threats originated from various racist skinhead and neo-Nazi groups, the Ku Klux Klan, as well as a host of white supremacist organizations. But alongside its concern about “terrorist activity being directed” at the civil rights campaigner, the Bureau was obligated to monitor his activities on US soil because at that time Washington still designated the African National Congress, which Mandela led, as a “foreign terrorist organization”. The designation was finally lifted in 2008. Read more of this post

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Exiled Rwandan ex-spymaster found murdered in South Africa

January 6, 2014 by Leave a comment

Patrick KaregeyaBy JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org
The former head of Rwanda’s external intelligence agency, who had been branded an ‘enemy of the state’ by the Rwandan government, was murdered last week in South Africa. Police in Johannesburg said the body of Patrick Karegeya, 53, was found in a room at the luxury Michelangelo Towers Hotel, where he had gone to meet a fellow Rwandan. His neck was abnormally swollen and showed signs of strangulation; a rope and a bloodied towel were found tucked inside the hotel room’s safe. Karegeya was a leading member of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), the armed wing of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which was founded in 1987 in Uganda by Rwandan Tutsi refugees. In 1994, the RPA, led by Paul Kagame, took control of Rwanda, thus ending the genocide of up to a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus, which had taken place earlier that year. Soon afterwards, Karegeya was named Director General of External Intelligence in the RPA, which was renamed to Rwandan Defense Forces. In 2004 however, after falling out with Kagame, who had become President of Rwanda in 2000, Karegeya was arrested, stripped of his rank of colonel, and served 18 months in prison for “insubordination and desertion”. He fled the country in 2007 and received political asylum in South Africa. The Rwandan government later claimed that Karegeya had been a double spy for South Africa. In 2010, Karegeya teamed up with General Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, who used to head the Rwandan Army, and had also escaped to South Africa after falling out with President Kagame. The two formed a new Rwandan opposition party in-exile, called the Rwanda National Congress. The response from the government in Kigali was to try Karegeya and Nyamwasa in absentia in a military court. They were both sentenced to lengthy prison terms for “promoting ethnic divisions” in the country. In 2011, the Rwandan government issued international arrest warrants for the two former military men, but South Africa refused to extradite them. Since then, General Nyamwasa has survived two assassination attempts against him in South Africa. The BBC notes that other former allies of President Kagame, who have received political asylum in the West, have been warned by Western intelligence agencies that their lives may be in danger. Read more of this post

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South African intel officials faked threats to increase spy budget

June 15, 2012 by 2 Comments

ANC centenary celebrationsBy JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The tendency of some spy agencies to overstate security threats in order to secure governmental funds is hardly novel. But officials in the South African Secret Service appear to have gone a step further: they allegedly paid some of their informants to make bogus threats against the government, in order to prompt an increase in counterterrorist funding. According to Pretoria News, which is owned by The Independent, South Africa’s largest newspaper consortium, the bogus threats were aimed at creating “a false impression of imminent, unprecedented attacks on black people and African National Congress (ANC) members”. The ultimate goal of the perpetrators, says the paper, was to benefit personally from an increase in counterterrorist funding, which is said to run at around R600 million (US$72 million) per year. The plan was carefully designed to coincide with the run-up to the ANC’s centennial celebrations, which took place in January of this year. In one case, an informant was paid by Secret Service officials to record a video message threatening an uprising by whites against the country’s black-majority government, unless the latter put an end to the occupation of white-owned farmland by landless peasants. One video, which made “chilling threats” against black Africans and members of the ANC, was made publicly available on YouTube, causing widespread concern and prompting the government to beef up security measures around ANC facilities in several areas of the country. The threats also led to an extensive government investigation. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #637

November 28, 2011 by 1 Comment

Dmitri Bystrolyotov

D.A. Bystrolyotov

►►South African spy boss to quit. Director General of the State Security Agency Jeff Maqetuka, who has been entangled in a never-ending war with Minister Siyabonga Cwele, is expected to step down this week, according to South Africa’s Sunday Independent. The paper claims that that plans are afoot to expedite Maqetuka’s departure from the country’s intelligence infrastructure by placing him on summer leave and then making sure he would not return to work in 2012.
►►Slovakian defense minister resigns over wiretap scandal. The interception of journalists’ telephone calls by the Slovakian Defense Ministry’s counterintelligence arm has cost the country’s Defense Minister, Lubomír Galko, his job. The scandal involved Slovakia’s Military Defense Intelligence (VOS). It has also emerged that the VOS operation involved wiretapping of the head of TV news channel TA3 and two senior Defense Ministry employees, according to leaked documents obtained by Slovak media outlets.
►►Book on Soviet spy Dmitri Bystrolyotov. Excerpt from Emil Draitser’s book Stalin’s Romeo Spy: The Remarkable Rise and Fall of the KGB Most Daring Operative (Northwestern University Press, 2010), about one of the 20th century’s most outstanding undercover operatives. Bystrolyotov acted in Western Europe in the interwar period, recruiting and running several important agents in Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy.

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News you may have missed #635

November 23, 2011 by Leave a comment

Vitaly Shlykov

Vitaly Shlykov

►►UK to support Colombia’s new intelligence agency. The UK has announced that it will provide help and advice on the implementation of Colombia’s new national intelligence agency. Colombian President, Juan Manuel Santos, along with National Security Adviser, Sergio Jaramillo, met with the director of Britain’s secret service MI6 to exchange experiences in intelligence to implement the new National Intelligence Agency of Colombia (ANIC). ANIC is supposed to replace the DAS, Colombia’s disgraced intelligence agency, which has been stigmatized by colluding with paramilitary groups and spying on union leaders, journalists and opposition politicians.
►►US intelligence to train analysts with videogames. The US intelligence community’s research group, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA), has handed over $10.5 million to Raytheon BBN Technologies to start work on the Sirius program. The initiative aims to create a series of so-called “serious games” that would help intelligence analysts improve their objectivity and reasoned judgment when confronted with complex or culturally foreign scenarios.
►►Soviet spy who spent years in Swiss prison dies at 77. Vitaly Shlykov served for 30 years in the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian General Staff, known as GRU. During his career, he made frequent trips to the West on a false American passport. One of his duties was to maintain contacts with Dieter Felix Gerhardt, a senior officer of the South African Navy who was working as a Soviet spy. In 1983, Shlykov was arrested in Zurich while carrying about $100,000 in cash to hand over to Gerhardt’s wife. Soviet intelligence was unaware that Gerhardt and his wife had been arrested a few weeks earlier and had told interrogators about the meeting in Switzerland.

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