Special Hearings — Media Hearings — UNKNOWN

VIC MCPHERSON: I will start from the beginning again.  During the period 1989 to 1990, I was Unit Commander of covert strategic communication of the South African Police and it formed part of the Security Branch of the South African Police.	In terms of the subpoena served on me the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is particularly interested in this period from 1989 to 1990, during which I was Chief of Strategic Communication of the South African Police, as far as covert operations were concerned.	In order to understand this concept of strategic communication, I would like to give you a definition.  I must say this definition sounds very complicated in isolation, but it took us about a week to formulate it.  It reads as follows:  	It is the planned, coordinated carrying out of the deed and or the presentation of a message by means of communication instruments in order to influence attitudes, values and life views of individuals or to create a particular attitude or maintain an attitude, or to neutralise enemy propaganda or to utilise it to one's own advantage and to pursue national objectives and achieve these.I think we can understand STRATCOM easier if we think of psychological warfare as a concept.  It is carried out by other countries, like the Republic of China for example, Taiwan, they refer to political warfare.  In Europe they refer to psychological warfare.	In the USA they call it civic action.  And in the former Soviet Union, they called it active measures.	STRATCOM was a covert operation, in other words it was done in secret, rather than overtly, in other words, in the open.  To clarify STRATCOM as operated by the South African Police and to place it in perspective within the structures, it operated under the National Management System.  And this came into operation,  1 August 1985.	The Strategic Communication branch controlled and coordinated all STRATCOM operations on a national level and under the Secretariat of the National Security Council.  Each department such as the South African Police, operated within its own line functions to operate STRATCOM.  The way in which permission was achieved for STRATCOM was to submit a motivated memorandum of the particular operation which you wish to implement to your relevant Minister, during these times.	It was Minister Vlok and if authorised by him, it was submitted to the Strategic Communications branch after which it was registered on a national level as a project under the State Security Services.	It was also a requirement that all these projects of ours, of all departments involved in STRATCOM, were to be submitted to the State President annually and thus on 21 December 1989, I made a submission to State President F.W. de Klerk and some of his Cabinet Ministers and to the DG's of the relevant departments involved in STRATCOM operations.	The aim of appearing there was first to achieve permission, firstly a judgement by the State President whether this was in line with policy and secondly to gain access to the funds, secret or special funds, which were allocated for this purpose.	The amount allocated for the financial year 1989/1990 for the South African Police budget, amounted to R4,5 million and you as the TRC, with the interest in the media, will be interested to know that we used about I would say less than R50 000-00 for the operation within the media.	We cannot doubt that the Republic of South Africa, was a target of revolutionary warfare and the concept of war during that period and today still, was not limited to an armed conflict where only military means were involved.  Today we refer to concepts such as political warfare, economic warfare, psychological warfare.	The African National Congress by means of its armed wing, Umkhonto weSizwe, declared war against South Africa and I would like to just briefly state that after the second World War, the concept of war was broadened dramatically from pure military action to a much more multi-dimensional form of warfare and a much more total strategy.	To return to the media, if you were to ask me why the Police became involved in this aspect of society, during the 1980's and 1990's we experienced that the ANC and also other opposition groups launched an attack, a venomous attack on the South African Police as such.  They doubted the credibility of the South African Police, they brought it into disrepute.	And in that light we registered an operation around the media and this operation had various objectives.  The first of which was to get involved in image building and communicating this image of the South African Police, that was to counter-act the negative image created by the opposition and held up to society.	It was also important to change this perception.  A second objective was to counter-act, to have the successes of the Security Branch placed in the media.  A third objective was to counter-act enemy propaganda and to give prominence to attacks against the community in the newspapers.	How did we go about this?  We firstly recruited journalists who supported our cause and thus created a network by means of which we could place prominent articles and carry into effect these objectives which had been defined beforehand.	This would lead to these Organisations and individuals being discredited, uncovering negative aspects regarding these Organisations, corruption in their ranks and it would attempt to gain, to destroy public sympathy with these Organisations.	The theme of these articles, the presentations were always a counter-revolutionary message against violence and it addressed peace in the country.	I myself as Superintendent McPherson, in the course of years, created and built up a network of media contacts.  These journalists fell into various categories.  There were policemen who had infiltrated Organisations and established themselves as journalists.  I had paid agents.  There were also basic informants.  I had many people whom I knew and friends and then there were journalists who were helping us without them even realising that.	There was a total of about 40 journalists whom I regarded as my contacts.  If I were to reduce them to essentials, I would say two were police members, four were paid journalists, four were informants whom I paid upon occasions and ten were friends and then twenty were used without their knowing it.	They were involved with the media and I will mention them not necessarily in order of importance.  Sunday Times, Pretoria News, Rapport, SABC TV, SABC radio, Beeld, Citizen, the Star, Citizen, SAPA, Reuter, BBC News, Huisgenoot, Rooi Rose, Republican Press and Insig.	What I would like to state is that some of these journalists still have prominent positions in the media world, and some of those who have left are still in good positions.	Countless operations were launched via the media over the years and it is difficult for me to remember all of these.  I can refer you to six instances in brief.

MR LEWIN: Yes, please.