Special Hearings — Mandela United Football Club Hearings — 1998-01-28

LODEWYK DE JAGER: I think that is a question that his handler could have answered.  I wouldn't know whether he actually confessed that to his handler, but one also has to bear in mind sir, with all due respect, that when one approaches a person or when one recruits a person, you don't really go into total depth I am speaking about those days, on things that you don't possibly know about.
 The matter of the hijacking is news to me and I think, I don't think Fanie would have been aware of that.

MR SEMENYA: I am trying to test the reliability which you would place on an informer.  It is the critical aspect about the information given by informers?

LODEWYK DE JAGER: And that is why I said earlier on that intelligence and or information received from a source, we usually tried to double check and triple check it from other sources as well, in order to make sure that it was not disinformation or that it was worthless.

MR SEMENYA: No further questions, thank you.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you Mr Semenya.  Mr Du Plessis?

MR DU PLESSIS: Thank you Mr Chairman, just one or two questions.  Mr de Jager, do you agree that the actions of the Security Branch were aimed at internal security and not the investigation of purely criminal events?

LODEWYK DE JAGER: Yes.  I agree, that is our task definition.

MR DU PLESSIS: In other words the Security Police would not have a docket on somebody who had committed criminal offences?

LODEWYK DE JAGER: No, they wouldn't, except if a person from Murder and Robbery for instance came to tell us that maybe, ask us for our informants, whether or informants had perhaps got information, but generally it wasn't our task definition.

MR DU PLESSIS: In other words if Mrs Mandela was doing criminal deeds with her soccer club, you wouldn't have been involved?

LODEWYK DE JAGER: No, not necessarily.  But in retrospect that is speculation.

MR DU PLESSIS: But you would have been able to get such information from your informers and from your tapping and bugging?

LODEWYK DE JAGER: Yes.  I think from time to time maybe we would.

MR DU PLESSIS: Would you have passed that on to purely criminal departments?

LODEWYK DE JAGER: Yes, I think so.  But we must also bear in mind that our colleagues in the other branches for instance if we got the information from telephone tapping, we would have expected them to use it with great circumspection not to endanger the, to jeopardise the operation.  In retrospect one can debate a lot about it.

MR DU PLESSIS: Mr de Jager, one gets the impression from the interrogation and everyone who had to do with this whole case, that the Security Branch in fact was almost full time busy to investigate Mrs Mandela?  Give us an idea of other things that you were involved in in light of the broad picture?

LODEWYK DE JAGER: In that time, Mrs Mandela would have been one of various suspects.  The organisations to which she possibly belonged were also suspect.
 We had a lot of pressure at that stage because of a joint management system etc, to find people who would qualify for detention etc.  Fanie in all probability would also hypothetically have done physical monitoring of situations such as Regina Mundi, etc.  
 We also had many other tasks, combining also the national intelligence service among others.  So we had many other tasks apart from information gathering and this often really did great damage to our information gathering process.

MR DU PLESSIS: In other words Mrs Mandela was not purely your most important object of investigation?

LODEWYK DE JAGER: No, on the contrary, there are people who are now in Parliament who were under surveillance at that stage.
It is so that most of the suspects of that time, worked by day in Johannesburg and lived in Soweto at night.
 There was a much broader field than the suspects mentioned.

MR VALLY: Mr de Jager, these transcripts of the telephone conversations, what did you do with them, where are they now?

LODEWYK DE JAGER: The usual procedure was those that were deemed to be necessary to be discussed at the morning conference, was thereafter in all probability placed in the relevant file or down to an individual in a sub-section who might have pertinently dealt with the matter like that.
 Then they would be filed and as far as I know, I left Soweto in 1988, I don't know whether they are still on file or whether they might in terms of archive instructions or laws, been shredded or whatever.

MR VALLY: For us to find them at the Soweto Security Branch Head Office or archives or whatever, where would we look?  Would there be a file saying Mrs Winnie Mandela?

LODEWYK DE JAGER: It would either be her or it would be, I am sure ANC files don't exist any more and if a Winnie Mandela file exists, you might find it in there.

MR VALLY: Thank you Mr de Jager.

CHAIRPERSON: There is a strong possibility of course that some of those files were destroyed.

LODEWYK DE JAGER: It has come to my attention in the media that certain files had been destroyed sir.

CHAIRPERSON: A great number.  Dr Randera?

DR RANDERA: Mr de Jager, two questions.  One specific - you mentioned that Sergeant Pretorius was the handler of Jerry Richardson.  If my memory serves me well, that happened some time in August or September of that year?

LODEWYK DE JAGER: It was late 1988 sir.

DR RANDERA: Jerry Richardson was arrested at the time and then he was subsequently released after a month.  I presume he continued being an informer, who was the handler of Jerry Richardson after that?

LODEWYK DE JAGER: Without wanting to seem uncooperative, I think that is a question that Louis Watermeyer can answer, I really don't have the details sir.  My apologies on that, but I don't know.

DR RANDERA: Mr de Jager my second question is really related to something that you said early on, which is when you made the point that perhaps the public at large gave the Security Branch much more credit than what you were actually able to achieve in relationship to one of the questions that your reputation was much stronger than what actually happened on the ground, because of the work, and clearly if one looks at what happened in the 1980's particularly, you must have been overstretched, but yet you had this reputation throughout the country.
 Now we are clear that the reputation of the Security Branch was not only in Soweto, but it prevailed right through the country.  Can you perhaps comment on that as to how that came about?  I really want to understand that in terms of helping us for the future, because I don't really want to see this happen again?

LODEWYK DE JAGER: Mr Chairman, I think that can be seen in the context of the many successful prosecutions of cadres and of other persons that were not necessarily cadres but for other let's call it politically related crimes.  I think it can be seen due to that and those cases were normally stretched over some time.
 They were given prominence and I think that might be the main reason why people think that we did have abilities which we not always had.  I don't know if that answers your question.

CHAIRPERSON: Mr Kemp?  Mr de Jager, before I ask you to stand down, just for your information.  You have referred to the impossibility of having 24 hour surveillance on anyone, let alone one person.

LODEWYK DE JAGER: Yes sir.

CHAIRPERSON: It was not the TRC or any outside person, but Paul Erasmus who gave evidence before this Commission.

LODEWYK DE JAGER: I read that.

CHAIRPERSON: And so clearly your evidence contradicts his.  Secondly, you say you knew him very well.  He also stated under oath that so important was Mrs Madikizela-Mandela that there was a special plot if you like, yes, to sow disinformation concerning her, and he gave a number of examples where he himself was directly involved and he seemed to think that she was much, much more important than you have made out.  How do you clarify that?