The President's Keepers. Jacques Pauw
Brezhnev with intercontinental ballistic missiles armed with nuclear heads that could obliterate the world. This was the core of Moscow and the square is surrounded by a series of concentric ring roads. It is almost as though power oozes from the Kremlin down the ring roads to every suburb in Moscow and beyond to every city, town and outpost in the Federation – as far as Vladivostok, nine time zones and 6,500 kilometres to the east. It is much quicker to fly from Johannesburg to Lagos than from Moscow to Vladivostok. I couldn't help thinking: can you imagine Jacob Zuma also ruling Nigeria, 4,600 kilometres to the north-west? The chaos and madness!
Every dynasty, order and ruler has added to the Kremlin. The grand dukes replaced the oak walls with a strong citadel of white limestone. The tsars imported Italian architects to reconstruct much of the Kremlin while Catherine the Great built a new palace. The communists destroyed a monastery, convent and cathedral and ultimately erected a mausoleum for Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Russian Communist Party, after his death in 1924. Lenin's head still rests softly on a black pillow, his waxy hair and neatly trimmed ginger beard coiffed into a sharp point. He's dead but not forgotten.
Today, communist austerity, ancient history, devout orthodoxy and Russia's new capitalist indulgence live side by side on Red Square. Under communist rule, there was nothing to buy; now everything is for sale. If there was ever a capitalist finger up Lenin's waxy ass, it was the opening of the ultra-luxurious GUM store on the eastern border of the square, just a stone's throw from the mausoleum. It has become a playground for the ultra-rich and hosts brands such as Louis Vuitton, Zara, Calvin Klein and Dior.
I stumbled and slid in the snow from bar to bar, where I ordered a vodka and started compiling lists of those that keep Jacob Zuma in power and out of prison. I also noted those that keep the family's purse bulging.
Whether you have to get to the top of the Kremlin or clamber up Jacob Zuma's slithery and gangrenous pole, politics is a messy business. Everyone on that pole, from the lowest to the highest, is vying for position and trying to hoist himself or herself a little higher. In the process they make deals, stab one another in the back, plot the downfall of rivals, create alliances and latch onto those who they think will move them up the pole.
There is only one certainty in life on JZ's pole: his survival is your survival and the fact that you are on the pole is only because he is at the top.
Two
Projects Vodka, Pack and Psycho
Two days after I arrived in Moscow, Paul Engelke agreed to see me. “Meet me at Arbatskaya station. It's close to Red Square. I will wait for you in the middle of the platform,” he said. It's near impossible to meet someone in a bar or restaurant because names are displayed in the Cyrillic alphabet and are impossible to decipher. When you ask for help, most people simply ignore you or shrug their shoulders.
Moscow metro stations are astonishing feats of engineering, construction and art. On the instructions of Joseph Stalin, their architects created a subterranean and opulent communist paradise. When I walked off the train, I was standing in one of the most beautiful of all Moscow metro stations: a baroque celebration of Stalinism with white arched ceilings, bronze chandeliers, ceramic bouquets of flowers, red marble decorations and glazed tiles.
I recognised Engelke from his Facebook profile picture, which shows him standing on Red Square. He stood a few metres away from me, glancing up and down the pinkish granite floor. Around seven million Muscovites use the metro every day – more than London and New York combined.
Engelke is a stocky man with genial features and a boyish expression. He rushed me out of Arbatskaya, across Red Square, past the GUM shopping palace and down a side street. Underfoot was slippery and I must have looked like a drunkard trying to skate for the first time. It's an art to negotiate the iced pavement and brown sludge, and Engelke had lived in Moscow for long enough to have mastered the art.
Minutes later we stopped at an underground bar and restaurant. Bouncers the size and shape of Lenin's mausoleum searched my bag before we were escorted downstairs. The restaurant was packed with Russia's new young and rich; brash and cocky, assured and refined. They were decked in designer attire from GUM and several had their own bodyguards scouring the establishment.
When communism died, it was replaced by something far more alluring: money. It is said that never had so much money flowed into a place in so short a time. This gave rise to the so-called oligarchs: businessmen, senior civil servants and army generals of the former Soviet republics who rapidly accumulated wealth during the era of Russian privatisation in the aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR in the 1990s. It looked as though it was their offspring that had gathered in the bar.
“Do you come here often?” I asked Engelke. A waitress with booty shorts that flaunted her endless legs drifted on high heels towards our table. She had a bottle of iced vodka in each hand.
“I've been here once to watch the rugby,” he said. “I think the owner is British and they show the rugby. But it's not really my kind of place.”
Fifty years old, Engelke was an advocate before joining the old South African Defence Force as a legal officer in 1992. He left ten years later as a colonel and the head of the School of Military Law. He was also a prosecutor at the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) before being recruited into the National Intelligence Agency (NIA).
He was initially an undercover agent and tasked to work on the Boeremag. This gang of Afrikaner separatist right-wingers had conspired to overthrow the ANC government and to reinstate a Boer-administered republic. Engelke was given a false identity and a cover as a member of an army commando (a Defence Force civil unit) who ostensibly had to investigate the high rate of farm murders. He soon made contact with Boeremag members and started gathering intelligence. He was in regular contact with former police death squad commander Colonel Eugene de Kock. After bombs exploded in Soweto in 2002, more than twenty right-wingers were arrested and charged with high treason and murder. More than a thousand kilograms of explosives were found in their possession.
Towards the end of 2015, Engelke left the State Security Agency (which is what the NIA became in 2009) as a senior law adviser. He had been offered a year-long contract to teach forensic law at the prestigious Moscow State University. He was getting divorced at the time and was looking for “something different”.
Engelke's sense of adventure had also paid off on a personal level: he was engaged to a Russian woman, about ten years younger and also recently divorced. He faced a most pressing predicament in that he had to ask for her hand. Her old man was a formidable retired army general in both the old and new Russia. I later met her; she was no “Russian bride” but educated and independent with an iron will. She spoke English fluently.
Engelke was hungry for news from home; about the dismal antics of the Springboks and whether Allister Coetzee was going to be sacked; the stellar performance of the Proteas against Australia; and the latest episode of state capture by Zuma and his cronies. He didn't know any other South Africans in Moscow and hadn't spoken Afrikaans in several months. He said he was homesick.
It was late at night and after several vodkas that I prodded Engelke about the SSA and Fraser. “With that man,” Engelke said and looked around him, “you don't mess. He's far too powerful.”
“Why is he so powerful?” I wanted to know.
“He's very close to Zuma,” said Engelke as he leaned forward and dropped his voice. “I've got two children back home. If I talk to you I might never see them again.”
“What can you tell me about him?”
“I have to be very careful. I'm bound by an oath of secrecy. I'm afraid I cannot say much.”
“I understand,” I said and put my hand in the air to signal to the high-heeled and leggy waitress. “Why don't we have another vodka and discuss this?”
* * *
Towards the end of 2009, internal State Security Agency (SSA) auditors descended on the Route 21 office complex near Irene, south of Pretoria. The NIA had just been restructured by security minister Siyabonga Cwele and was now known as the SSA. The target of the