Special Hearings — Armed Forces Hearings — 1997-10-09

MR GOOSEN: Thank you.  You indicate that in respect of, if you like, a decision-making at a senior level whether Cabinet level or State Security Council, within the National Security Management System, that there was a tendency for people involved at that level to wish to remain at legal arms-length from the conduct of secret or covert counter-insurgency operations.  Now you were present earlier today when we engaged in a debate about the use of particular language in State Security Council documentation.  Now you did indicate that you hadn't, prior to being provided with this documentation on any previous occasion, see that or have access to that documentation, but the use of ambiguous language in the policy documentation of the State Security Council, words like "eliminate", "neutraliseer" and so on, you know which words I am referring to, in the context of the counter-revolutionary strategy, that the National Security Management system was also an embodiment of, how would you understand the use of that language?  What function would it play at that level?
 And as a second part of the question, how would you  understand that that terminology would be understood by the people who were responsible for executing the counter-revolutionary effort?

UNKNOWN: Mr Chairman firstly without going into semantics and I might be wrong, but I believe in all the time I was involved that the language used was perhaps deliberately vague or all-encompassing.  I will use the term all-encompassing rather than vague, so that it could perhaps mean this and it could in fact perhaps mean that, but what it definitely meant was that those problems must be eliminated or neutralised.  And the way in which those problems would be eliminated or neutralised was to a certain extent an operational decision which the politicians didn't want to specifically make.
 But a more important point perhaps that I'd like to make is that who wrote those documents?  Those documents were written by functionaries, by officers of the security forces.  They weren't written by politicians.  They were notes taken by State Security Council secretariat staffers, so government officials, some Police, some National Intelligence, some Foreign Affairs, these were written by State bureaucrats, by civil servants and were drafted for the politicians approval.  And again I must ask the same question that I asked about the deaths amongst liberation movement people, I must say that if I was a politician who read that document, and as I said I hadn't seen those ones, but that terminology was the same as a thousand other documents I've seen, if I didn't want it to mean "neutraliseer", "elimineer", "maak 'n plan" or whatever then I would have said to the man who was responsible for actually writing the minutes please change the minutes.  
 So - and if - the point I am trying to make might be a little esoteric but what I am saying is, if you allow a man who is now a civil servant and who is trained in a specific discipline and in most cases the civil servants charged with running those committees and writing those minutes were civil servants trained in war, not trained in diplomacy or other things, trained in war, and if you use that man with his academic and practical experience and training to write that document you must understand that the terminology that he uses and writes is coming from his experience and his world view.  And if you disagree, hopefully you understand what that world view is because that's why you employed him to do that specific job because he's an expert.  
 So I come back to the answer I gave to you about former President de Klerk, that if he didn't understand how those civil servants like myself were trained and thought then there was something terribly wrong in the system.  But I assumed the politicians and the political masters did understand, and I assumed that when I and others wrote the type of things we wrote that they understood what we meant when we wrote it.  So it's not only something - these words, these phrases didn't come out of the air, it wasn't some politician who thought them up first.  So the politicians should have questioned them and understood those phrases.

MR GOOSEN: Perhaps we can take that point a little bit further.  The use of that language, written and used by the functionaries as you described them, would you regard the use of that language as an element of the deniability, plausible deniability if you like that you referred to when you referred to the fact that the eleventh commandment, thou shalt not be found out or that you can conduct a covert operation and in the nature of the covert operation should not be traced back to the persons who were involved in it, would you regard that as an element of deniability?

UNKNOWN: Yes I think I would regard what I said, the deliberate all-encompassing nature of the words was to allow the overall authority and instruction to have been given for a range of possible counter-insurgency actions without anybody at the upper echelon, who actually was responsible then for that instruction, to have to believe or say that he or she had personal sort-of blood on their hands.  I don't even think it was only a way to avoid accountability.
 It was also - I mean for a tactical, for a cynical reason, it was also because when we talked about this level of counter-insurgency action we were starting to talk about some very nasty things, and a lot of people didn't want to talk about and be involved specifically in those things.  
 So it was a way to like fudge the issue and it gives people an easy way out, well we've basically authorised an all-encompassing State anti-insurgency programme, now we'll let the experts get on with doing it.  But the element is, did they understand the full arsenal of the weapons available to those experts or didn't they?  I believe they did.

MR GOOSEN: Would you have any specific instances where you would be able to indicate that politicians and persons functioning at the level of the State Security Council or the Cabinet at that level did in fact know exactly what was intended in a specific instance or not?

UNKNOWN: Not that springs to mind but I mean I am sure we - are you referring to something specific or...

MR GOOSEN: No the question was really you've indicated you accept, given the motivation that you've given, that politicians must have understood what the full arsenal of weapons were that were available.  The question was do you have any specific instances to which you could refer where you can indicate as a matter of fact, from your personal knowledge, that particular politicians did in fact know about particular actions that were conducted by the security forces or not?

UNKNOWN: Well the one specific instance which I don't want to go into would be a matter for which I've applied for amnesty, but cross-border raids would be another one where, while this was not - I mean they might be covert or they might in fact later on have been admitted as being South African actions. But I think the distinction we are trying to draw here is one between open shedding of blood or use of violence by the security forces in pursuit of the State's counter-insurgency aim and the secret use of violence or shedding of blood with the same objective.
 And I think on the second, on the latter, the very nature, the very covert nature of these activities was, as General Coetzee also said earlier, the watchword was need to know, and it wouldn't have been one - so only those specific people who needed to know, who needed to authorise an operation would be in the know about that operation, for example one of the acts for which I've applied for amnesty.