The President's Keepers. Jacques Pauw
and his team confronted one manager after the other, most of them in the presence of their lawyers. The manager of PAN's operational coordination unit, Graham Engel, allegedly said to Engelke: “Somebody is going to get hurt here, and that one is not me. Do you know who you are dealing with? This goes right to the top.”
When Paul Engelke and Kobus Meiring handed their report to Njenje, they concluded that there was “wide-scale financial mismanagement, fruitless expenditure, nepotism and corruption”. In their view, there was sufficient proof to prosecute Manzini, Fraser, Makhwathana, Wallace, Engel and ten other managers and agents for a host of alleged crimes.
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Arthur Fraser was bulletproof. This was because he had probably saved Jacob Zuma from prosecution and thereby enabled the ANC leader to ascend to the highest office in the land. In the mid-2000s Zuma was fighting for his political survival and standing trial on 783 charges of fraud, racketeering and corruption. The case emanated from bribes that he had received from arms manufacturers during South Africa's controversial arms deal of the 1990s and 2000s. The money was paid to Zuma's financier and banker, Schabir Shaik, who in turn paid it over to JZ.
In 2005 Shaik was convicted of similar charges and sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment. This gave President Mbeki an excuse to fire Zuma as deputy president, thereby burying his ambitions for highest office. Zuma, in turn, was on his knees and holding on for dear life. The contest between the two was South Africa's Cold War: the political landscape was littered with skulduggery, hatchet jobs, sleights of hand and smear campaigns. Both sides were sneaking and snooping on one another.
In 1999 Mbeki and NPA boss Bulelani Ngcuka established a new, crack crime-fighting unit called the Directorate of Special Operations, widely known as the Scorpions, in the NPA. The Scorpions had to combat organised crime, taxi violence, politically motivated violence and drug-related crimes. There was from the outset bad blood and turf wars between the police and the Scorpions. The unit achieved a tremendous conviction rate but was accused of cherry-picking and pursuing only winnable cases. The Scorpions had a reputation for going after dodgy politicians and senior civil servants – like police commissioner Jackie Selebi and Jacob Zuma.
The Mbeki camp unleashed what should have been the killer blow. In May 2007, a top-secret report was leaked that purported to prove that Zuma's presidential ambitions were fuelled and funded by corrupt African leaders, among them Angola's Eduardo dos Santos and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi. Marked ‘top secret' and known as the Browse Mole report, it alleged that Zuma had travelled to Libya on at least three occasions to meet with senior Libyan figures. Browse Mole also alleged that the Zuma backers had met at the Great Lakes in April 2006 to discuss military intervention to unseat Thabo Mbeki. If true, the report implicated Zuma in treason.
Mbeki agreed to institute an investigation into the report and appointed Arthur Fraser, who was then operations head of the NIA. The Mail & Guardian said that Fraser's initial investigation into Browse Mole was widely regarded in the NPA as “flimsy and one-sided”, and one of its key conclusions, that a Scorpions special investigator was responsible for the leak, was never substantiated. A second probe by the Special Investigating Unit cleared the investigator.
Parliament's Joint Standing Committee on Intelligence found that the report was a hoax and drawn up by the Scorpions in a bid to discredit Zuma. The committee said it was “extremely inflammatory” and “very dangerous” for South Africa's national interests.
The revelations in the report had backfired. Jacob Zuma's political career was finally saved by the very report that was designed to destroy him. Zuma supporters argued that it was evident that there was a political conspiracy against him and therefore the charges against him were also fabricated. As Martin Plaut said in his book Who Rules South Africa?, it was proof that “somewhere in the bowels of the security apparatus, somebody was watching Zuma's back”.
That “somebody” could well have been Arthur Fraser. During Fraser's investigation into the Browse Mole report, the NIA tapped the phones of several high-ranking officials mentioned in the report, including those of Ngcuka and Leonard McCarthy, the Scorpions boss. On the tapes, they discussed when would be the most politically damaging time to charge Zuma. Fraser had unearthed what amounted to gold for Zuma.
What is astonishing about these recordings is that they were, according to the inspector-general of intelligence, legally made, but the intelligence minister knew nothing about them. Ronnie Kasrils said afterwards: “The NIA were obliged to report this to me as minister. They never did. I knew nothing about it.”
But the Zuma camp did know about the tapes. Enter Moe Shaik, a man who has been integral to getting Zuma off the hook and into the Union Buildings. Shaik has been many things: he served under Zuma as an underground MK operative, was an ANC negotiator during the talks of the early 1990s, an ambassador to Algeria, and an intelligence and foreign affairs ministerial adviser. When his brother Schabir went to prison, Moe took charge of his businesses.
Moe Shaik was involved in the Zuma camp's own dirty tricks campaign. Two weeks after the state had announced that the NPA was about to hurl Schabir Shaik before a judge, Moe Shaik identified prosecutions boss Bulelani Ngcuka as apartheid spy RS452. He later said he'd made the allegations in order “to defend the honour of the deputy president of this country” – Jacob Zuma.
Moe Shaik's revelations were later exposed as a smear campaign when Eastern Cape human rights lawyer Vanessa Brereton admitted that she was agent RS452. Shaik had, however, guaranteed himself a plum position in the future Zuma administration.
When Shaik heard that Fraser had stumbled upon evidence that could help Zuma in his corruption trial, he went to see him to persuade him to part with the tapes. The two already knew each other by then. Shaik, today an executive at the Development Bank of Southern Africa, confirmed the meeting with Fraser to me. I asked him what he told Fraser. This was his response: “I told him to do the right thing. I said to him that you are sitting on these things and that it is in the national interest.”
“And what did you tell him to do with it?”
“I told him to do the right thing and give the tapes to the National Prosecuting Authority.”
“And did he?”
“As far as I know, yes.”
There were two sets of tapes at the time: those of the police's crime intelligence unit and the NIA. I asked Shaik about the police spy tapes. “I don't know about the crime intelligence tapes. I don't think they were of good quality and NIA had more tapes.”
The NIA tapes reportedly found their way to the deputy national director of the NPA, Willie Hofmeyr, who was a key defender of the conspiracy theory and a central character in the decision to withdraw the charges against Zuma. Again, Fraser failed to inform the intelligence minister.
The Mail & Guardian said they had evidence that Fraser also handed tapes to Zuma's attorney, Michael Hulley, although he has denied the allegation. According to the newspaper: “Fraser did a political flip-flop and handed the NIA recordings to Zuma's legal team. We understand Fraser felt the need to ingratiate himself with the new administration of Zuma and handed the NIA tapes over.”
In April 2009, the new NPA boss Mokotedi Mpshe said the evidence on the tapes amounted to an “intolerable abuse” and abandoned the case against Zuma. Zuma's road to the presidency – barring a small legal predicament or two – was now paved in gold.
Three
The shadow state
Cabinet – and therefore Jacob Zuma – must have been informed about the PAN investigation. Paul Engelke saw security minister Siyabonga Cwele at least ten times during the two years that he investigated the PAN project. The minister was initially shocked and in disbelief and instructed the investigators to get to the bottom of the rot. At a meeting at OR Tambo International Airport in November 2010, Cwele agreed that the PAN matter should be referred to the relevant authorities for possible prosecution.
The investigators also made a presentation to the minister of justice, Jeff Radebe, in his office in Cape Town. Cwele