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Abstract
This study compares the American and South African security responses to perceived communist-inspired insurgencies—the American Indian Movement in the USA and the United Democratic Front/African National Congress in South Africa. In each instance, the governments employed third force techniques by utilizing surrogates, informants, provocateurs, and hit squads. As a result, these official entities became complicit in the criminal political violence that ravaged the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, KwaZulu-Natal, and the Rand townships between 1973 and 1994. This study also examines how investigative commissions in each country endeavored to expose official misconduct and hold these agencies accountable for their actions. Despite the differences in the scale of each insurgency as well as the overall purpose of each counterinsurgency campaign, this article finds common ground in the rationale, implementation, and effects of the security responses in each country.
Notes
1 Zimmerman, Airlift to Wounded Knee, 262. Zimmerman and his companions made a successful drop that morning, helping to prolong the occupation for an additional three weeks. For his efforts, Zimmerman was subsequently arrested by the FBI and charged with three separate federal felonies including “conspiracy to commit offenses against the United States.” The charges were later dropped.
2 Congress, Senate, Committee of the Judiciary, Revolutionary Activities Within the United States: The American Indian Movement, 94th Cong., 2nd sess., April 6, 1976, 2–4.
3 Quoted in Weir and Bergman, “The Killing of Anna Mae Aquash,” 51.
4 See Jeffery, People’s War: New Light on the Struggle for South Africa. According to Jeffery, the ANC’s goal was never to defeat South Africa’s security forces on the field of battle but to instead “generate a level of unrest, social turmoil, and economic malaise that in time would put enormous pressure on its adversaries to sue for peace.” (xxxiii–iv)
5 Cited in Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report (hereafter TRC Report), vol. 2, 273.
6 Ellis, “The Historical Significance of South Africa’s Third Force,” 263.
7 In addition to Ellis, the best analyzes of South Africa’s third force strategy during this period include Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State, chap. 3; Sanders, Apartheid’s Friends: The Rise and Fall of South Africa’s Secret Service, chap. 11; Van der Westhuizen, White Power and the Rise and Fall of the National Party, chaps. 4–5; and Minnaar, Liebenberg, and Schutte, eds, The Hidden Hand: Covert Operations in South Africa.
8 McKiernan, interview by author, June 28, 2008, Santa Barbara, California. Kevin McKiernan, a photojournalist and documentary filmmaker, covered Pine Ridge for National Public Radio from 1973 to 1976, and was present inside the village during most of the Wounded Knee siege in 1973.
9 Coetzee, “Vlakplaas and the Murder of Griffiths Mxenge,” in Minnaar et al., Hidden Hand, 176.
10 Cited in Ellis, “South Africa’s Third Force,” 268.
11 As a form of transitional justice, truth commissions have evolved since the 1970s with varying levels of success in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa. For South Africa, the Goldstone Commission’s fact-finding reports played an important role in the decision to establish a truth commission process beginning in 1995. For the background and analysis of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission see Desmond Tutu’s No Future Without Forgiveness in addition to: Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa, Boraine, A Country Unmasked, Gibson, Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation? and Wilson, Politics of Truth and Reconciliation.
12 See Carley, “Defining Forms of Successful State Repression of Social Movement Organizations: A Case Study of the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the AIM.”
13 Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution, 115.
14 Richard Slotkin explores the racially charged myth of the “Indian-hater” and “savage war” in American popular culture, which produced a logic that “traps [Americans] in cycles of violence and retribution without limit and beyond all reason.” See Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, 461–62.
15 Trimbach and Trimbach, American Indian Mafia: An FBI Agent’s True Story About Wounded Knee, Leonard Peltier, and the AIM, 13, 111.
16 Cited in Carley, “Defining Forms of Successful State Repression,” 174.
17 Ibid., 153.
18 See Miller, “‘Our Diplomatic Arm’: Intellectual Roots and Early Years of the International Indian Treaty Council” and Lightfoot, “Leading But Not Dominating: How the International Indian Treaty Council Helped Forge International Change at the United Nations.”
19 See Sparks, Tomorrow is Another Country: The Inside Story of South Africa’s Road to Change.
20 “COINTELPRO: The FBI’s Covert Action Programs Against American Citizens,” cited in http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/churchfinalreportlla.htm. For other perspectives on COINTELPRO see Jeffreys-Jones, The FBI: A History, Churchill and Vander Wall, eds., The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States; and Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the AIM.
21 Church Committee Report.
22 Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression, 39–53.
23 Church Committee Report.
24 Jeffreys-Jones, The FBI, 177.
25 Church Committee Report.
26 Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression, 99.
27 Frankel, Pretoria’s Praetorians: Civil-Military Relations in South Africa, 65.
28 Botha served as Defence Minister under Prime Minister John Vorster as well as Prime Minister and State President between 1978 and 1989.
29 Malan served as chief of the SADF and Defense Minister under Botha. In 1962–63, Malan studied counterinsurgency theory at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, site of the Command and General Staff College of the US Army.
30 Selfe, “The State Security Apparatus: Implications for Covert Operations,” 103–5. Also see Van der Westhuizen, White Power, chap. 3; and O’Meara, Forty Lost Years: The Apartheid State and the Politics of the National Party, 1948–1994, chap. 13. The security forces already had at their disposal a variety of laws, including the Internal Security Act and Public Safety Act, which provided them sweeping powers of arrest, detention, and banning.
31 The SSC, established by statute in 1972, became in effect, an inner Cabinet during P.W. Botha’s regime. Chaired by the Prime Minister and after 1984 the State President, the SSC consisted of all of the key leaders in security-related departments.
32 SWAPO, the South West African People’s Organization, launched a liberation struggle against South African forces in South-West Africa (Namibia) in 1966. On the utilization of askaris, see Gottschalk, “The Rise and Fall of Apartheid’s Death Squads, 1969–93,” 242.
33 The constitutional dispensation of 1983, which excluded the black majority from the national government, gave rise to an insurrection far more widespread than the Soweto uprising of 1976. The government responded with heightened repression, including a partial state of emergency in 1985 and a general state of emergency in 1986.
34 Vlakplaas is the name of a state-owned farm outside of Pretoria that served as the C1 base.
35 Ellis, “South Africa’s Third Force,” 269.
36 See TRC Report, vol. 2, chap. 2. In 1991 the CCB was officially disbanded, although its personnel were transferred to Military Intelligence’s Directorate of Covert Collection (DCC), another clandestine entity.
37 Ellis, “South Africa’s Third Force,” 278–79.
38 See Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee, chaps. 9–12.
39 Dewing, ed., The FBI Files on the AIM and Wounded Knee, vi.
40 Reinhardt, Ruling Pine Ridge: Oglala Lakota Politics from the IRA to Wounded Knee, chap. 1.
41 For probing analyzes of these issues see Reinhardt, Ruling Pine Ridge, Robertson, The Power of the Land: Identity, Ethnicity, and Class Among the Oglala Lakota, and Biolsi, Organizing the Lakota: The Political Economy of the New Deal on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations.
42 Quoted in Voices from Wounded Knee, 31.
43 See Hendricks, The Unquiet Grave: The FBI and the Struggle for the Soul of Indian Country, 49–51; and Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, 61.
44 McKiernan interview.
45 Senator James Eastland, who chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, alleged that AIM had ties to Cuba, China, and “a large number of left extremist organizations.” See Congress, Revolutionary Activities, 2–3.
46 “Military Involvement During the Wounded Knee Liberation,” Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee MSS (hereafter WKLDOC MSS), Box 44.
47 Frank D. Oblinger, “Concept of Federal Military Support of Wounded Knee Operations,” WKLDOC MSS, Box 44.
48 “Army Tested Secret Civil Disturbance Plan at Wounded Knee, Memos Show,” New York Times, December 2, 1975. In the aftermath of the Wounded Knee operation, the FBI issued a report highly critical of the Army’s restraining influence during the seventy-one-day siege. The report recommended that, in future, the FBI should ‘seize control quickly and take a definite, aggressive stand’ in paramilitary endeavors. See “The Special Use of Special Agents of the FBI in a Paramilitary Law Enforcement Operation in the Indian Country,” April 24, 1975, cited in Dewing, FBI Files, ix–xi.
49 TRC Report, vol. 3, 187.
50 During the apartheid era in South Africa, the National Party government devised a system of co-optive, indirect rule for the rural African homelands, passing the Bantu Authorities Act (1951) and the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act (1959). These laws separated the African population into eight ethnic units (later increased to ten). Under the provisions of apartheid legislation, Buthelezi emerged from tribal, to regional, and eventually to territorial authority as the chief minister of KwaZulu, the most fragmented and one of the most impoverished South African homelands, beginning in 1970. See Butler, Rotberg, and Adams, The Black Homelands of South Africa: The Political and Economic Development of Bophuthatswana and KwaZulu, 8–81.
51 Mare, Brothers Born of Warrior Blood: Politics and Ethnicity in South Africa, 60.
52 See Maylam, “The Historical Background to the Natal Violence,” 68–89.
53 TRC Report, vol. 3, 225. For a detailed analysis of Operation Marion, see Varney, “The Role of the Former State in Political Violence: Operation Marion;” “Report on Front Companies of the SADF and the Training by the SADF of Inkatha Supporters in the Caprivi in 1986,” Goldstone Commission Reports (hereafter GCR), June 1993, 12–13; and Sanders, Apartheid’s Friends, chap. 11.
54 Ellis, “South Africa’s Third Force,” 284.
55 Jeffery, The Natal Story: 16 Years of Conflict, 757.
56 Van der Westhuizen, White Power, 199. Van der Westhuizen points out that the spike in conflict following the ANC’s unbanning came only months after Buthelezi requested additional support from the security forces, including the formation of hit squads in KwaZulu; and Ibid
57 See Marks, The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa: Class, Nationalism, and The State in Twentieth Century Natal and Reinhardt, Ruling Pine Ridge.
58 Muldrow, “Monitoring of Events Related to the Shooting of Two FBI Agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation.”
59 Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression, 175. The Pine Ridge Reservation falls within the jurisdiction of the Rapid City FBI office.
60 By the mid-1970s, the per capita murder rate on Pine Ridge exceeded that of Detroit, America’s murder capital at the time, by eight times. With a population of 15,000, Pine Ridge Reservation witnessed approximately seventy murders in the mid-1970s. Almost all of the victims were Indians, and most of the crimes remained unresolved and uninvestigated. See Hendricks, Unquiet Grave, 170.
61 WKLDOC MSS, Box 46.
62 Crow Dog and Erdoes, Lakota Woman, 194.
63 Sayer, Ghost Dancing the Law: The Wounded Knee Trials, 45–7.
64 The FBI compiled more than 316,000 separate investigative file classifications on AIM members connected with the Wounded Knee siege and arrested 562 individuals. Eventually, 185 AIM members were indicted, many on multiple charges. Only fifteen convictions resulted. Ibid., 3.
65 In 1974, Colonel Volney Warner told a reporter from the Sioux Falls Argus Leader that ‘AIM’s most militant leaders and followers are under indictment, in jail or warrants are out for their arrest, but the government can win even if no one goes to prison’. Cited in Ibid., 228.
66 Ibid., 5.
67 Documented in WKLDOC MSS, Boxes 24, 46, and 82.
68 Sayer, Ghost Dancing the Law, 105.
69 Ibid., chaps. 3–7.
70 “Judge Nichol’s Statement of Dismissal,” WKLDOC MSS, Box 126.
71 Ibid.
72 Sayer, Ghost Dancing the Law, 207.
73 Weismann, “About that ‘Ambush’ at Wounded Knee,” 28–31.
74 Dewing, Wounded Knee II, 155.
75 Muldrow, “Monitoring Events.”
76 Matthiessen, Spirit of Crazy Horse, 338–47.
77 Quoted in Hendricks, Unquiet Grave, 266.
78 See Mathiessen, Spirit of Crazy Horse, chaps. 11–3.
79 Sparks, The Mind of South Africa, 360.
80 On 2 February 1990, De Klerk announced at the opening of Parliament the impending release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the ANC, PAC, and South African Communist Party. Mandela was released on 11 February 1990. In late 1990, multi-party negotiations commenced, culminating in a government of national unity in April 1994. See Sparks, Tomorrow is Another Country.
81 Amnesty International, South Africa: State of Fear: Security Force Complicity in Torture and Political Killings, 1990–1992, 12–7.
82 See the testimony of Joe Mamasela (who was paid handsomely by the SAP to dissemble), Craig Williams, and Eugene de Kock in Pauw, Into the Heart of Darkness: Confessions of Apartheid’s Assassins, 82, 86; and De Kock, A Long Night’s Damage: Working for the Apartheid State, 188.
83 De Kock, A Long Night’s Damage, 189.
84 Richard J. Goldstone served in South Africa’s most influential courts, including Judge of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court and Justice of the Constitutional Court. In addition, he served as chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
85 “Second Interim Report,” April 29, 1992, 5, GCR.
86 Goldstone, For Humanity: Reflections of a War Crimes Investigator, 26–34.
87 “Report on the Investigation Units of the Goldstone Commission,” November 26, 1993, GCR; and Goldstone, For Humanity, 32–40.
88 In a recent interview, Heslinga revealed that he played a double role during this period. According to Heslinga, Police generals ordered him to act as their informant on the Goldstone Commission’s activities. See Potgieter, Total Onslaught: Apartheid’s Dirty Tricks Exposed, 250–51.
89 Pretorius, interview by author, 22 February 2007, Pretoria, South Africa.
90 “Report into the Allegations Published by Vrye Weekblad: October 30, 1992,” May 27, 1993, GCR; and Goldstone, For Humanity, 40–5. In 1997, Barnard was imprisoned for life for the murder of anthropology lecturer David Webster.
91 See Sparks, Tomorrow is Another Country, chap. 13.
92 “Staff Paper Prepared for the Steyn Commission on Alleged Dangerous Activities of SADF Components,” December 1992. The author is indebted to Piers Pigou for sharing this report.
93 Goldstone, For Humanity, 46.
94 Ibid., 50–1; “Interim Report on Criminal Political Violence by Elements within the South African Police, the KwaZulu Police and the Inkatha Freedom Party,” March 18, 1994, 1–4, GCR. Klopper identified specifically three police generals who were involved—Krappies Englbrecht, Basie Smit, and Johan le Roux.
95 Goldstone, For Humanity, 50–2; and “Interim Report on Criminal Political Violence,” 4–9, GCR.
96 Goldstone, For Humanity, 53; and “Interim Report on Criminal Political Violence,” 4–32.
97 Goldstone, For Humanity, 53.
98 Ibid., 47.
99 Aquash, a Mi’ kmaq from Nova Scotia, participated in the Trail of Broken Treaties event in 1972 as well as the siege at Wounded Knee the following year. She earned great respect among the elders on Pine Ridge for her work in community development. Aquash was also subjected to intensive FBI surveillance after Banks dispatched her to the west coast in 1974 to revive AIM’s California chapter.
100 Hendricks, Unquiet Grave, 7.
101 Davey, “Member of Indian Movement Is Found Guilty in 1975 Killing.”
102 Unquiet Grave, 360.
103 Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane, 269.
104 Northcott, interview by author, May 8, 2007, St. Paul, Minnesota. Karen Northcott is a former investigator for WKLDOC.
105 The details of this beating may be found in WKLDOC MSS, Box 24.
106 Hendricks, Unquiet Grave, 267.
107 The Court of Claims also awarded the Sioux $40 million in 1989 in the 1868 treaty case. To date, Sioux tribal councils have rejected the money judgments, and the awards continue to reside in the Treasury accruing interest.
108 Lazarus, Black Hills White Justice: The Sioux Nation versus the United States 1,775 to the Present, 401. On the IITC see Lightfoot, “Leading But Not Dominating: How the International Indian Treaty Council Helped Forge International Change at the United Nations.”
109 Miller, “Our Diplomatic Arm,” and Lightfoot, “Leading But Not Dominating.”
110 Du Toit, interview by author, March 9, 2007, The Hague, The Netherlands. J. J. Du Toit is the former counsel and member of the staff of the Goldstone Commission.
111 Ellis, “South Africa’s Third Force,” 292.
112 Goldstone, For Humanity, 57.
113 Ellis, “South Africa’s Third Force,” 286. Cf. Jeffery, People’s War.
114 McKiernan interview. The Church Committee was one of several Senate committees during this period investigating the legality of domestic intelligence activities. The work of these committees culminated in the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in May 1977, which provided judicial and congressional oversight of the government’s covert surveillance operations. According to journalist Tim Weiner, passage of FISA meant that “the FBI’s ability to carry out secret intelligence operations was now governed by rules of law.” See Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI, 345.
115 Du Toit interview.