Intellegére 21 – Agent 1912.
Case Study Agent 1912; Henning van Aswegen
Abstract: Case Study Agent 1912, in the Series Intelligere, based on the book The Spymasters of South Africa.
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AGENT 1912 – The trade union leader with a hidden agenda
Copyright Nongqai Magazine Henning van Aswegen
In the mid-1980s, the British Government and its secret foreign intelligence services MI6/SIS, attempted to undermine and subvert the South Africa’s Government through brazen and sometimes successful espionage and double agent operations. These were the years of extensive economic and military sanctions against South Africa, the boycott of Outspan fruit and other South African products in Europe, sports boycotts, protest marches, and daily demonstrations in front of South African embassies abroad, especially in London and Washington DC.
South Africa’s intelligence services, starting with the Bureau for State Security (BfSS) and later the Department of National Security (DoNS) and its successor, the National Intelligence Service (NIS), have been gathering intelligence information in Britain since 1964, especially about perceived political opponents and adversaries. These opponents can be widely referred to as British anti-apartheid groups and exiled political movements, such as the African National Congress (ANC), South African Communist Party (SACP), Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), and the Southwest Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO). South Africa’s NIS, with its offices hidden deep in the South African embassy on Trafalgar Square in London, succeeded in infiltrating the ANC-SACP office in London through penetration and infiltration agents and indirectly the British Trades Union Congress (TUC). During the apartheid years, British trade unions were among the largest money suppliers to the ANC- SACP, and also ardent supporters of the international anti-apartheid movement.
Agent 1912 was a respected trade union leader who represented his own trade union on the central committee of the TUC, and held a position as regional organizer of the British Labor Party. The TUC is a federation of trade unions that was established in Britain in 1868 and by the end of the 1980s, 78 separate unions were affiliated to the TUC. During the years of apartheid, this trade union regularly made donations to the ANC, the SACP, South African labour unions and the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM). The TUC also campaigned for the imposition of sanctions against South Africa.
Because Agent 1912 came from the ranks of the British trade unions, anti-apartheid pressure groups accepted his bona fides unconditionally and did not suspect that he was a penetration agent of the NIS. As a respected member of the TUC’s executive committee, he attended meetings where financial donations to the ANC-SACP were authorised and methods were discussed to overthrow the South African government through violence. Among other things, the agent determined which organizations in South Africa received money from the British trade unions and the AAM and exactly how much.
Clandestine communication methodology
During monthly meetings with his handler, a member of the South African Embassy in London, Agent 1912 reported on the donations and provided information on the channels and methods used by the ANC-SACP to raise money to send underground members of Umkhonto we Sizwe. Clandestine communication techniques were therefore of the utmost importance to disguise the contact between 03/1912 and his handler. The agent handler (source handler) planned and worked out the details of his secret encounters with the agent, and the methods of communicating with him. Because this agent was so sensitively placed, every possible precaution was taken to prevent him from being compromised. The Embassy and its intelligence component knew that MI5 gathered information about every foreign embassy in London, the locations of cypher rooms, details about incoming and outgoing telephone lines and any satellite communications systems on the premises. So, information and about this and other sensitive agents were never written down or recorded, everything was done oral-verbally at locations outside of the Embassy, for example rugby games at Twickenham, where meetings and conversations were almost impossible to monitor.
Neither the ANC-SACP / TUC, nor the British domestic intelligence service MI5, realised that this trade union leader was indeed a spy for the NIS. Some of the information gathered by Agent 1912 were, for example, minutes of ANC-SACP meetings, documents on the British AMM’s strategy to undermine the South African government, correspondence between anti-apartheid and pressure groups working together, and agendas of meetings between these groups. Planned meetings between the TUC, the AAM and the ANC-SACP was an example of the kind of information that the South Africans were interested in, particularly how the British Labour Party and Trade Unions were funnelling money to the ANC-SACP. Glennys Kinnock, the wife of the leader of the Labour Party Member of Parliament Neil Kinnock, was ‘the brains behind the throne’ and an active member of the Anti-Apartheid Movement. Glennys Kinnock pushed the issue of South Africa and the anti-apartheid campaign within left-wing political groups in Britain and in the Labour Party. Kinnock had visited the ANC-SACP SOMAFCO school in Tanzania and as an open supporter of the ANC-SACP, became a regular speaker on anti-apartheid platforms. Kinnock and the Labour Party took political positions in opposition to NATO and Britain’s use of nuclear weapons in the event of war. On South Africa, Kinnock was heavily influenced by his wife and also Peter Hain (a vocal supporter of Kinnock). Chris Childs, who used to work full-time in the AAM offices, also worked as an assistant to Neil Kinnock. Kinnock became an MP in 1970 for Bedwellty and Islwyn, and later the leader of the British Labour Party. Agent 1912 also reported on the activities of Bob Hughes, a British Labour MP, who was the Chairman of the AAM and Richard Caborn MP, chairman of the Anti-Apartheid Group of the British Parliament.
This information was obtained and transferred to the NIS during clandestine personal meetings in and around London in the 1970s and 1980s.
Agent 1912 diligently made copies of all documents that crossed his desk and hid them on his person by taping big brown envelopes to this body, under his clothing. Every personal meeting between Agent 1912 and his handler, who was known to the agent under a false flag (a false name/identity), was arranged during a previous meeting so that there is no electronic contact between the two parties. Electronic communication methods such as phone calls, text messages and the like were avoided because they could be easily intercepted by MI5. It is very difficult for a counterespionage service to prove contact between an unfriendly intelligence service and an agent if there is no electronic communication between the parties involved. The counter-espionage service must in fact catch the agent and his handler in the act during a personal meeting to prove espionage. The NIS’s well-trained agent handlers therefore always arranged and series of sequential meetings, as well as relapse meetings and contact points, with the agent during previous personal meetings. If the agent or the handler for some reason could not make a personal meeting with a handler, a follow-up procedure would take effect and the agent and handler would then be at a different date and time at a meet substitute locality. Agent 1912 and similar penetration and infiltration agents handled by the London Regional Office of the NIS, usually met with handlers in hotel rooms in London’s western suburbs or environs. A pre-arranged clandestine meeting, for example, would take place on Wednesday 12 June at 12:00 in the Great Western Hotel. The agent would then log in to the agreed-upon hotel under a false name and pay cash for the room, because electronic fund transfers, travelers’ checks or credit card payments would be traced. The agent would then write a number on a small green or red sticker and paste the base of a toilet in the hotel lobby, for example toilet number two. This number on the sticker informed the handler in which room the agent was. If the number 96 was written on the sticker, the agent was in room 69) after which the meeting between the agent and handler would then take place there at the pre-arranged time.
According to AMM, Britain was the largest source of white immigrants to South Africa and Rhodesia in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1969, the British Trades Union Congress (TUC) adopted a resolution in which affiliated unions agreed to discourage their members from emigrating to South Africa and its neighbouring country, Rhodesia.
Counterespionage methods
The most important element of a successful clandestine personal encounter between Agent 03/1912 and his handler in London was the effective counterespionage and countersurveillance techniques used by both parties. Agent 03/1912 took the train from a suburb to London, as he usually would do on the days of the personal meetings, but unobtrusively alight at one of the intermediate stations, change trains (usually one traveling in the opposite direction) and repeat the procedure going in the opposite direction. After one or two stations, the agent got off the train again and took another train back to London, where he got off near the central bus terminal. He then used bus transportation, changed buses, got on and off escalators, used bathrooms to slip out the back door of a coffee shop and quickly turned around and only the approach the hotel where the meeting was to take place. The agent handler also followed several unorthodox countersurveillance routes, including by jogging or riding his mountain bike through narrow streets of London and under bridges. These methods and procedures worked best at night, especially since one or two of the NIS agent handlers were excellent cross-country and marathon runners.
Clandestine communication methods are only successful when electronic devices are not used, the best being one-time letter pads. The handler of Agent 03/1912 used cryptographic arithmetic to compile the one-time pads. Messages between the handler and agent were encrypted by assigning numbers to letters in groups of five and sending the sequences to the agent by way of a dead letter box near the Highgate Cemetery in London. The agent placed the covering pads, which were only used once before being burned, precisely over the sequences. He then added another set of five letter sequences, each equal to a letter value. The added numbers on the pad were equal to the letters and the messages from the handler was then in decrypted form.
The identity of agent 1912 was never disclosed. He now thoroughly enjoys his retirement in the British countryside, with fond memories of the days when he outwitted South Africa’s enemies by providing valuable intelligence to the NIS. His value and effectiveness as an agent lay in the accurate information he provided for eight years regarding the funding used for the violent overthrow of the South African government. He managed to identify the methods and routes used to funnel money from the British Trades Union Movement to the ANC-SACP and their underground networks within South Africa.
None of his colleagues in the British trade unions ever knew of Agent 1912’s real purpose and espionage role within their ranks.
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* Books on South African Intelligence Science and Espionage by Henning van Aswegen can be obtained from Imprimatur Publishers, Pretoria.
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DIE BURO
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Die Buro, verkrygbaar van Imprimatur Uitgewers, Pretoria.
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