Amnesty Hearings — Cape Town — 2000-09-27

LEON A MAREE: Okay, Lema was established before I was given Natal.  That was in January of 1989, I think, so that was established first and then Capall was established after that.

MR LAX: So when were you given KwaZulu Natal?

LEON A MAREE: I'm not sure.  I'm not sure, Sir.

MR LAX: Well then how do you know Lema was established?

LEON A MAREE: Well, as soon as I got out, Lema was established first of all, myself for a blue plan and the reason why I opened up Capall was when I was given Natal, I had to move away from Jo'burg, that's why I opened a second company.

CHAIRPERSON: Mr Kahanovitz.

MR KAHANOVITZ: Do I understand - let me rather ask you the question this way.  Did you recruit any unaware members in the province of Natal?

LEON A MAREE: No, I didn't.

MR KAHANOVITZ: Did you conduct any red plan activities on behalf of the CCB in the Province of Natal?

LEON A MAREE: No, I didn't.

MR KAHANOVITZ: So the long and the short of it is that your evidence is that you did nothing for the CCB in the province of Natal?

LEON A MAREE: I did not operations for the CCB, no.

MR KAHANOVITZ: Now the purpose of the blue plan was to provide a cover for your red plan activities?

LEON A MAREE: Yes.

MR KAHANOVITZ: And the bottom line is you established the cover but you never used that cover in order to engage in offensive activities in the province of Natal, that's your evidence?

LEON A MAREE: Well the evidence, it hasn't been established, I was busy establishing it.  I was in the process of doing a good cover up.

MR KAHANOVITZ: Alright.  And you don't find it at all strange that at no stage during that period Staal Burger came to you and said look, jobs A, B and C need to be carried out in Natal, please take the necessary steps?

LEON A MAREE: No.

MR KAHANOVITZ: That's not strange?

LEON A MAREE: Not at all.

MR KAHANOVITZ: And on the other hand, Mr Burger is quite happy for you to be establishing blue plans in several other parts of the world.

LEON A MAREE: Yes.

MR KAHANOVITZ: But it seems that you were performing tasks in just about everywhere else in the world, except for Natal.

LEON A MAREE: Well this might be so, I was establishing blue plans, which I was given instructions to do and I did that.

MR KAHANOVITZ: You appear to have been the CCB's first multi-national operative.  Now just to deal with your amnesty application, if we can go to page 20 of bundle A
paragraph B at the top of the page of paragraph 8, it's the same question I put to various other of the operatives who used the same form, you say you were in Special Forces from 1988 through to 1991.

LEON A MAREE: That's correct.

MR KAHANOVITZ: But your evidence has in fact been that you left Special Forces in order to become part of the CCB.

LEON A MAREE: No, it wasn't my evidence at all.

MR KAHANOVITZ: Well, what is your understanding?  Weren't you told that you must uncouple yourself from the SADF?

LEON A MAREE: No, I'm the wrong witness.  I'm a policeman, not the SADF.

MR KAHANOVITZ: I'm not going to go through this.  I'll leave this for argument.  Now the date that you give on that page for the Evans incident, March 1989, now is that when you were instructed to establish his address?

LEON A MAREE: I can't remember off-hand but I'm taking it according to this ...(intervention)

MR KAHANOVITZ: No, I'm not asking you according to, I'm asking why you put the date of March 1989 there, what the relevance is?

LEON A MAREE: I presume at that stage it was fresh in my mind.  I could recall that.

MR KAHANOVITZ: Alright.

LEON A MAREE: That must have been the information that I gave the attorney too when he asked me.

MR KAHANOVITZ: I take it from your evidence that at that time the CCB didn't have a single unaware operative that was available to it in the whole of Johannesburg, because you said you couldn't find anybody whom you could send to try and establish Mr Evans' physical address.

LEON A MAREE: I didn't have anyone.  I don't know about the other operatives there, I didn't have one.

MR KAHANOVITZ: But why can't you just go and find yourself a criminal like Mr van Zyl and ask him to find out where Mr Evans lives?  I don't understand the problem.

LEON A MAREE: People worked differently.  That's not my method of working.

CHAIRPERSON: Sorry, just on this.  You were a policeman for many years, Murder and Robbery, to establish the address of a person who is not on the run, who is unaware that somebody is trying to find his address, who goes to work to and from his home every day, got no reason to hide, what's the difficulty with that?  Couldn't you have just phoned up a friend or contact to say look, give me this guy's address, or just establish it yourself with ease, especially with your police background?

LEON A MAREE: I could do that but I would have to compromise myself by letting the people know where I was and get somebody from the police they would want to know what am I trying to do.  So the whole idea that I thought I was trying to do is not compromise myself and I did use a telephone and try, so nobody could trace it, do inquiries by telephone.

CHAIRPERSON: Did you look in the phone book for his address?

LEON A MAREE: He wasn't there.

CHAIRPERSON: He wasn't there.  You looked?

LEON A MAREE: Yes.

CHAIRPERSON: Mr Kahanovitz.

MR KAHANOVITZ: I thought Mr Lax had a question.  Alright page - by the way, what do you do for a living at the moment?

LEON A MAREE: I'm a farmer.

MR KAHANOVITZ: What happened to these companies that were established?

LEON A MAREE: I still have them.

MR KAHANOVITZ: How are they doing?

LEON A MAREE: Very well.

MR KAHANOVITZ: Page 23 of bundle A, you're asked to say on whose orders you carried out these tasks.  You mention the name of Staal Burger and you mention the name of Joe Verster.

LEON A MAREE: Yes Sir.

MR KAHANOVITZ: But you don't mention the name of Gen Webb, why is that so?

LEON A MAREE: I didn't receive orders from Gen Webb, I got them from, some from Joe Verster and some from Staal Burger.

MR KAHANOVITZ: Alright.  Let's go to the body of your application.  Now I've read this application, well it's very short, I read it carefully, there's no mention in here of the fact that you were responsible for the province of Natal, do you agree with me?

LEON A MAREE: I do.

MR KAHANOVITZ: Any particular reason why you left that out?

LEON A MAREE: Didn't do anything wrong in Natal.

MR KAHANOVITZ: Because you did nothing there?

LEON A MAREE: Yes.

MR KAHANOVITZ: Alright.  Nothing wrong there.  Were you ever asked to account to the Government or the State for the income of profits derived from businesses which were set up with CCB money?

LEON A MAREE: No, I wasn't.

MR KAHANOVITZ: Would you care to make an estimate of the extent to which you have financially benefited?

LEON A MAREE: With the initial input from the Defence Force?

MR KAHANOVITZ: Well let's take a yard stick, by the end of 1990, approximately a year, a year and a half, maybe two years, depending on which date which company was established, how much money did you manage to make from these various companies that you'd established?

LEON A MAREE: I used the money from Lema to finance the other two companies and I didn't draw a salary, because I drew other people in without involving the Defence Force, the company paid for their salaries then and this was on the course which Mr Verster set out, this was the way it should actually operate so you don't draw money from the Government, the company must run itself.

MR KAHANOVITZ: Alright.  So at the end of 1990, how many companies did you have operating?

LEON A MAREE: Three.

MR KAHANOVITZ: Three.  What approximately was the total turnover of those three companies?

LEON A MAREE: In 1990?

MR KAHANOVITZ: Yes.

LEON A MAREE: I'm going to have to guess here, I honestly don't know.

MR KAHANOVITZ: Yes.

LEON A MAREE: Maybe R500 000.