Amnesty Hearings — Cape Town — UNKNOWN

MR BOOYENS: Let me put it in a different way.  Had it not been for the fact that there was a political - armed struggle against the National Party forces on the one hand and the ANC with their various military wings on the other side, I am talking about the security forces on the one hand and the Umkhonto people on the other side, as well as the armed cadres, if it had not been for this would this incident have taken place?

NICHOLAS JACOBUS JANSE VAN RENSBURG: No it would not.
	I can just mention that there was no personal feeling from my side against Mr Kondile.  The feeling was one of danger that he held to our country and our people and the fact that he was a trained man, he was an enemy and that is how I regarded him.  He was the enemy in the political sense of the word.

MR BOOYENS: Enemy of the country?

NICHOLAS JACOBUS JANSE VAN RENSBURG: That's correct.

MR BOOYENS: He was part of the enemy forces?

NICHOLAS JACOBUS JANSE VAN RENSBURG: That's correct.

MR BOOYENS: And you were part of the government forces?

NICHOLAS JACOBUS JANSE VAN RENSBURG: That's correct.

MR BOOYENS: As far as you are concerned personally was there any difference between if you were to be involved in a cross-border fight or if you had an arms cache somewhere that had been blown up where people had been killed, or whether you eliminated one of the enemy forces internally, is there any difference?

NICHOLAS JACOBUS JANSE VAN RENSBURG: No, because as I've already said the struggle for me had already come over across the borders of the Republic and the normal rules of policing could no longer have stopped us.

MR BOOYENS: What was the situation in the Eastern Cape in those days regarding the political and the security situation?

NICHOLAS JACOBUS JANSE VAN RENSBURG: At that stage it had already built-up, that there was large-scale boycotts, the schools - then it was this and then it was that, stayaway actions, different things that happened in order to make the country ungovernable, to overthrow the system, make it ungovernable, I think that this was taking place in a very high level in Port Elizabeth and it just intensified.

MR BOOYENS: We have already, thanks to my colleague Mr Jansen, heard that shortly before the death of Mr Kondile there was also an explosion in Port Elizabeth so that these bomb attacks had already taken place there?

NICHOLAS JACOBUS JANSE VAN RENSBURG: That's correct.

MR BOOYENS: Elsewhere as well - let's just make this clear.  In the Eastern Cape as well as on the border area there were bomb attacks?

NICHOLAS JACOBUS JANSE VAN RENSBURG: That's correct.

MR BOOYENS: Did normal policing still work, could you succeed in catching these people, all of them?

NICHOLAS JACOBUS JANSE VAN RENSBURG: No we could not, it was impossible to catch them all.  We could not catch them before they had done the damage.

MR BOOYENS: We were not all in the Intelligence community, just as an explanation I think a great deal of emphasis has been placed on the importance of an informer network, the whole clandestine policing is this usually just based on information that you obtained from people you have caught or from informers or perhaps from tapping telephones?

NICHOLAS JACOBUS JANSE VAN RENSBURG: That's correct.

MR BOOYENS: If you have to give an opinion let us suppose that your network was disclosed in Lesotho, how long, if ever, would it have taken you to establish a reasonable network in Lesotho again that could have given you the information you needed for your work?

NICHOLAS JACOBUS JANSE VAN RENSBURG: I would speak in terms of years.  It could not have been done within months.  I wonder if one would be able to do this in three years.

MR BOOYENS: And then one wouldn't even know whether you could replace all the sources.

NICHOLAS JACOBUS JANSE VAN RENSBURG: No it wouldn't have been accepted as such.

MR BOOYENS: Criticism has been levelled that you are an experienced policeman and Mr du Plessis has been criticised as having disclosed the identity of the principal agent to his source, Mr Kondile, was there anything abnormal in the fact that sources reported to a principal agent who in turn gave the information, or passed it on?

NICHOLAS JACOBUS JANSE VAN RENSBURG: No not at all.  In my time I made use of the same methods.  It is not so easy in a neighbouring state to obtain information of this nature, it is difficult.

MR BOOYENS: It seems to me as though there have been references to what one sees in espionage films and books about this kind of - the sophisticated men with hats and umbrellas and letters which are put down, does the real world of Intelligence-gathering work in this way, spy versus spy stories?

NICHOLAS JACOBUS JANSE VAN RENSBURG: Not in my career with this type of work.

MR BOOYENS: Reference is also made to the so-called de-briefing and then the final using of informers by a panel of experts, you heard what my colleague Mr Jansen suggested to Mr du Plessis, regardless what the books said did it work like this in practice?

NICHOLAS JACOBUS JANSE VAN RENSBURG: No I do not know which books refer to this ...(intervention)

MR BOOYENS: No I didn't say books, you didn't say books, I said so.

NICHOLAS JACOBUS JANSE VAN RENSBURG: No, it did not work in this way, not in practice.

MR BOOYENS: If you can just briefly tell us in general if for argument's sake you get a man who has been caught and you work with him and you decide that there's possible potential in order to use him as an informer, how would this have worked in practice?
In the first place is it not true that as few as possible people should know about the identity of an informer?

NICHOLAS JACOBUS JANSE VAN RENSBURG: Yes, as far as it's possible, that's the best to do it in this way.

MR BOOYENS: How many people in that case in your experience, how many people worked with a man to prepare him before he was thrown into the other side again to work as informer?

NICHOLAS JACOBUS JANSE VAN RENSBURG: The method that I used and which was used by most of our colleagues of which I am aware, normally not more than two people.

MR BOOYENS: And these two would then deal with him but with a foreign source he would have worked through an agent?

NICHOLAS JACOBUS JANSE VAN RENSBURG: Yes, if he was spying abroad then that's how it would have worked.

MR BOOYENS: Today 17 years later Mr van Rensburg, we are here, this is after a young man has been killed, how do you feel today about the struggle so long ago, how do you feel about what happened?

NICHOLAS JACOBUS JANSE VAN RENSBURG: At the stage when this incident took place I was a patriotic citizen, that's how I regarded myself.  At that stage I did what I felt that I couldn't allow a Communist dispensation to arise here.  This would have meant the end of me and of my children.  Now after all the years and the fights which have taken place, and people who have lost their lives ...(intervention)

MR BOOYENS: On both sides?