Special Hearings — Media Hearings — UNKNOWN

JOHN HORAK: Yes, certainly.  They were agents, informers, sources and people best described as sleepers in the papers.  An agent was a professional police officer, he had a job to do.  It is like being transferred to anywhere else.	Informers were people who gave information either voluntarily or were recruited in some way.  These informers, one should categorise because they fell in different categories.  At any given stage in my time serving on the newspaper, half the people were pro the establishment and the other half were anti the establishment.	South Africa had a very peculiar situation and there were basically two English language newspaper companies and two Afrikaans companies.	And journalists were in a fix.  If the one didn't like them, they could go to the other one, and that was about the end of their career.  And that is one of the reasons why they were lowly paid and not properly looked after.  So, you got journalists. 	Let me think of a particular individual because of liquor problems, had permanently been an informer, he was always short of money.  So he did it straight for money.	He was handled by Craig.  There was another man who was ideologically totally opposed to what the SAN group stood for.  But he rose through the ranks, he played games.	And all the time, he would try to undermine it, so he did it for ideological reasons.  There were other people and they were in the majority, believe me, who had come to the conclusion that to get on in the papers, you had to have a particular ideological leaning.	And they, I would give you two types here which is very important.  They would like to get at their colleagues in order to open opportunities for themselves.  And a great many of those people there were in all ranks and of all levels, who would simply to eliminate certain people, out of the promotion race, promotion stakes, would go with stories.  Or just to get at colleagues in fact.  They came two a penny, there were plenty of those people.	Then there were the people who came to me.  Now, they were people who believed that the struggle was wrong.  Who were opposed to policies like the Mail for instance, had at that time or the English language press in general, had rather.  	And they felt they wanted to do something.  But they didn't have the guts to approach the police or anybody openly.  Because of their status in the business world, because of their status within the press and then they would come to me and they would tell me a story.  Like when the Mail was going down, there was in the company a very senior man.  He was not a full Editor, but he was close to it.	He would call me to his office and say I think you people would like to know what is happening in the board room now.  I never asked it.  And then I would keep quiet, I would turn around and I would go back.  Tomorrow he would come to me, he would say were they interested in what was said in the board room yesterday, because there is this meeting now.  He was a very senior man.	And he is still very senior in this country not in newspapers any more.  There was that type of individual who went through as a liberal and described himself very proudly as a proud liberal.  I didn't give him the title, he gives it to himself.	Then you had sort of your sleeper type of operator.  Your sleeper type of operator was the person who knew things, you approached him or he was approached before or he came to light, but he didn't really want.  It is only when his conscience bothered him that he wanted to come out of something.	Now in this connection, there is only one journalist that ever, and I challenge anybody else to stand up to dispute this, that ever got into serious problems because of action I had, that I explained to you.	The, and I will give you this name now, I have apologised along the road to this individual.  On my desk, one day landed an envelope.  But by then these things happened fairly regularly.  I opened the envelope and there was in handwriting a lot of names.  It was a list of names, so I assumed it was from one of these people again and I handed over this letter.	Somebody took this letter, went through these names and eventually discovered that all the people on that list was receivers of the SA Communist.  A magazine at the time.  And that list is what landed Tony Holiday  in prison.  His name did not appear on that list, but that is how the thing was connected.	That somebody in the SAN group, it took me about three years of looking at people's handwriting, to see who did this and there was no indication, except for the names, why this list, but that is the list that led to him.	I was approached on the paper, now I just want to tell you, there were good informers and bad informers.  Now, I need to explain this.  Let me explain this to you this way.	There was a Nazi, there is still a very senior man in the Times Media Group at this moment.  He came to me and told me about a man called White.  It was round about 1980/1981, who was starting Nazi cells in Hillbrow and it was sort of, it became very militant.  A lot of newspapers wrote about him at that time, he made headlines at the time.	He was expelled subsequently from the country.  And he told me that he would very much like to do something about it.  I introduced that man to Brigadier Hennie Muller and as a result of that man's work, that fellow it was an Irish fellow, was forced out of the country and there were riots going on in the German Beer Hall in Kotze Street and all sorts of places.	That man did something which irrespective of which government was in power, he would still be listened to.  And in that respect, that is what I call a good informer.  And he is still in newspapers.	On that point, just to try and tie up this point, I just want to tell people and I can speak of authority here, because after the elections I was asked by the ANC to be one of the founder members of the new Secret Service, which I formed last year in January I was going to go to Moscow as the Deputy Ambassador.  Unfortunately I picked up health problems which I am suffering from, mainly a back problem.  Thank God, not a head problem.	And I couldn't take up this position.  There are today more people on the newspapers working as informers and as agents than under the old regime.  And in the SABC.  It is necessary.  A government that doesn't do it, wouldn't be doing its duty.	Because it is not spying on the paper, they are using those people and governments around the world - I could tell you that in 1970 I was in contact with an MI5 individual and by then more than three quarters of all foreign correspondents of Britain were in some way sponsored by the British Intelligence Services because it was so prohibitively expensive to put a man in the field.	If you get to things like telephone tapping today, it is far more.  The only reason being that today in Parliament you are told that there are only so many applications, but if you go to the Establishments' farm in the Pretoria district, from there in fact they've got apparatus today that you can listen into any phone call, anywhere in the world.  And I say anywhere in the world without going near the phone or without going near a post office.	The equipment has become more sophisticated.  So people that believe that is not going on today, one of the reasons why I couldn't mention names here, is that I know of people who worked in the old side and whom I am pretty sure, is still employed in the new side.	And it is against the law, it is a criminal act to identify them.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you Mr Horak.  I know that we can carry on, but we do have time constraints.  But just finally, can I just ask you during those years that you were active as an agent in the media, did this that is called almost infiltration, because you were on the English newspapers, did it apply to the Afrikaans newspapers as well?