Part 2 : How the CIA trapped Mandela
How the CIA trapped Mandela
For decades there had been whispers about how Mandela came to be caught while on the run in 1962. Who had betrayed him to the South African police? Piecing together the clues, James Sanders tracked down an elderly former CIA agent, who made a startling confession days before his death
Pagosa Springs is one of the most remote towns in America, a place of snow, dirt roads, thermal pools and few people in the high country of southern Colorado. In 1978 a washed-up CIA man called Donald Rickard took refuge there to review the wreckage of his clandestine career.
Nearly four decades later, in his late eighties and only a few days from death, Rickard at last revealed the secret he took to Pagosa Springs: the CIA’s role in the arrest and imprisonment of Nelson Mandela.
This secret is so explosive that even Mandela refused to address it when he emerged from prison as a hero after almost 28 years. But Rickard, shut away in his Rocky Mountains bolthole, knew the truth.
There have been more than 50 books on Mandela, at least half a dozen films and thousands of interviews. One might imagine that he was the most comprehensively examined political figure of modern times.
Donald Rickard describes his drunken boast — at a party thrown by the mercenary ‘Mad’ Mike Hoare — about his role in Mandela’s arrest as ‘the biggest mistake of my life’
But mysteries remain and the director John Irvin, working on a film about Mandela’s brief career as an armed rebel, has finally managed to solve the most intractable riddle by going to Pagosa Springs and coaxing Rickard to talk.
Unravelling it has been like a detective story that begins 10,000 miles away in Natal, South Africa’s east coast province, on a cool Sunday morning in August 1962.
It was during one of the most febrile episodes of the Cold War. The world was only two months away from the Cuban missile crisis when nuclear conflict seemed imminent.
South Africa, with its mineral riches, white supremacist government, armed resistance and active Communist party, was fertile ground for Moscow and a headache for the Kennedy administration in Washington.
Many white South Africans were terrified by horror stories emerging from Congo, which had plunged into anarchy after independence. Equally, the leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) were inspired by Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba.
Mandela was the newly created commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC’s armed wing — and, we now know, a member of the Communist party. He had recently returned from a secret mission that took him to Ethiopia, Morocco, Algeria and London during which, Irvin believes, he was tracked most of the way by either US or British intelligence.
He was “the Black Pimpernel”, South Africa’s most wanted man. Yet against the advice of his fellow ANC members, the 44-year-old Mandela drove to Durban in a new, conspicuous Austin Westminster car, disguised as the chauffeur of a flamboyant white theatre director — and Communist party member — called Cecil Williams, to report to the overall ANC leader, Chief Albert Luthuli.
On the way back to Johannesburg a week later on Sunday, August 5, he swapped places with Williams and, still wearing his chauffeur’s uniform, was sitting in the passenger seat when the car was stopped by police who had clearly been waiting for him.
“Nelson, why do you keep up this farce?” the warrant officer said as Mandela protested he was someone else. “You know I know who you are. We all know who you are.”
“Someone had tipped off the police about my whereabouts,” Mandela wrote in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. “They had known I was in Durban and that I would be returning to Johannesburg.” Who was it, he wondered. “Was it an informer in Durban? Someone from Johannesburg? Someone from the movement? Or even a friend or member of the family?”
Nelson Mandela visits Robben Island, where he was imprisoned for 18 of the
almost 28 years he was behind bars, in 1994. He was arrested in 1962 after
South African police were tipped off about his whereabouts
Some have long assumed that Mandela courted arrest. After half a lifetime of playing roles — the traditionalist, the lawyer, the intellectual, the husband and father, the show business figure, the lover, the nationalist, the communist, the athlete, the political theorist and the soldier — he was ready for the performance of his life as “the prisoner”.
He was jailed for life and for many years afterwards there were whispers about local informers but no public mention of foreign involvement in his capture.
By the mid-1980s, however, attitudes in Washington and Pretoria were changing. In July 1986, as a law to put sanctions on South Africa began its journey through the US Congress, a mysterious story appeared on page 11 of the Johannesburg newspaper The Star.
The report, sent from Paris but carrying no byline, claimed that, according to a “retired senior police officer”, Mandela had been betrayed by an American diplomat at the US consulate in Durban who was “the CIA operative for that region”.
It said that after Mandela’s arrest this unnamed diplomat had revealed his role while drunk at a party in the Durban apartment of “Mad” Mike Hoare, Africa’s best-known mercenary soldier. He had boasted that the ANC had trusted him, according to the story, and that he had traded information about Mandela with the head of the Natal police.
This was not all. According to The Star, one of the guests at the party had informed the South African authorities about the drunken boasts. The diplomat was “grilled by US officials and South African Special Branch detectives” before being sent back to Washington where “for many years he remained at an unimportant desk in the State Department and never contacted any of his Durban friends”.
Intriguing as it was, this report by an unnamed writer citing an unnamed police officer quoting an unnamed drunken diplomat on events long ago yielded no further leads. Four years later, however, after Mandela’s release from prison in 1990, a US newspaper, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, added another piece to the jigsaw. It reported that a “former intelligence official” had revealed that the CIA’s Pretoria station chief in 1962, Paul Eckel, had gloried in Mandela’s arrest.
‘Mad’ Mike HoareEckel was reported to have said: “We have turned Mandela over to the South African security branch. We gave them every detail, what he would be wearing, the time of day, just where he would be. They have picked him up. It is one of our greatest coups.” The newspaper also reported a claim that the CIA had a “deep cover” agent in the inner circle of the ANC branch in Durban.
When the newly released Mandela was asked about this, he told journalists: “Let bygones be bygones. Let’s forget about that, whether it is true or not.” He barely
addressed the subject in Long Walk to Freedom when it was published five years later.
Rickard’s name had emerged as the putative “unnamed diplomat”, so while working in 1997 as the researcher on Anthony Sampson’s authorised biography of Mandela I telephoned the former CIA man in Pagosa Springs. Rickard warned me that we would be “making a mistake” if we named him as “the man who shopped Mandela”.
Without fresh documentary evidence it was almost impossible to force the story forward until in December 2013, after Mandela’s death, I was approached by Irvin who asked me to reinvestigate.
In South Africa I picked up faint traces of Rickard’s posting 50 years earlier. I was surprised that a number of South Africans appeared genuinely concerned that new research might implicate the CIA. I was told that Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, had been asked by people close to Mandela to request information from the CIA on the Mandela story and received the response: “You don’t want to know.”
Rickard had left the CIA, aged 50, after what was described to me by a former station chief as the “bloodbath” of the mid-1970s when former spooks were quietly retired after congressional inquiries exposed crimes committed by agency employees. Among those forced out was James Jesus Angleton, the counterintelligence chief who, according to the veteran reporter Tom Mangold in his book Cold Warrior, was so close to South African security chiefs at the time that they wanted to offer him employment as a consultant.
Yet agency officials were keen to explain that CIA knowledge of South Africa had been minimal in the 1960s: “We were sent down there to try and be nice.” They portrayed Rickard as a fantasist and a fool. Former intelligence officers appeared to believe that he was not capable of engineering Mandela’s arrest. One told me there was “absolutely no corroborative evidence to support the theory” of CIA involvement, adding: “As they say here in the States, that dog won’t hunt.”
I needed to confront Rickard face to face. I flew to Denver and set out on the six-hour drive over treacherous, snow-clad mountains to Pagosa Springs — so treacherous that there is a country song about a truck losing its brakes on Wolf Creek Pass, the worst spot on the journey. The temperature was -29C, I was in a tiny hire car and I feared for my life.
I hoped to doorstep Rickard at his remote home but, in a semi-blizzard, that proved impossible. I telephoned him and he asked me to put all my questions in an email.When I telephoned again, he told me he wanted to help and offered to send clippings and documents.
He then asked: “How is Mike Hoare?” I told him that the former mercenary, now in his late nineties and still living in Durban, was believed to be senile.
I then zeroed in on the key question: “Did you ever meet Nelson Mandela?”
Rickard replied with a startling answer: “No and I didn’t want to meet him. Mandela was the most dangerous communist outside of the Soviet Union.”
He would say nothing more, but two months ago I returned to the United States with John Irvin’s film crew and producer and watched as John’s perseverance paid off. He made the treacherous journey over Wolf’s Creek and recorded a remarkable interview with Rickard.
Irvin, who had directed the iconic television series Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, starring Alec Guinness, and many other films in a long and successful career, “broke the ice by giving him a box set of Tinker Tailor, of which he was a big admirer, and we went on from there”.
Rickard, 88, said that Natal, which had a sizeable Indian community, was a “cauldron” in 1962. He had suggested to his agency superiors that “we should get more coverage on Mandela and Washington said: ‘Go for it’”.
He recalled: “Mandela was going to come down and incite the Indians and I found out when he was coming down and how he was coming, and he came
in a black limousine with a guy sitting in the back seat as the passenger and he was the driver. That’s where I was involved and that’s where Mandela was caught.”
Who had tipped him off? Rickard would only say that he had met “lots of people after dark in strange places and they would tell me things and that’s where I learnt he was coming down”.
He added vehemently: “Mandela was completely under the control of the Soviet Union. He was a toy of Moscow. He could have incited a war in South Africa, the United States would have to get involved, grudgingly, and things could have gone to hell.
“The Soviet Union would have done anything to get its hands on the mineral chest — anything — and [Nikita] Khrushchev [the Soviet leader] said: ‘When we get it we’ll dictate the terms of surrender for the West.’ We were teetering on the brink here and it had to be stopped, which meant Mandela had to be stopped. And I put a stop to it.”
Rickard described his boasting later at Hoare’s party as “the biggest mistake of my life. I was never promoted again after I came back from South Africa.”
The CIA, he indicated, had no objection to him turning in Mandela — but it could not forgive a drunken indiscretion: “They were embarrassed that I embarrassed them.”
Rickard died on March 30, two weeks after his meeting with Irvin. His story now needs to be addressed by the American authorities.
Even in the paranoia and fervour of the Cold War, CIA officers were not expected to intervene in local politics, get opposition leaders arrested or operate as some sort of parallel police force. Spies are supposed to gather information, develop sources and protect the interests of their countries of origin.
If Rickard had “gone rogue” in 1962, then why did he retain his employment with the CIA until 1978? If his actions were authorised from Washington, then the Mandela family and the South African people may feel they deserve some sort of explanation and apology.
John Irvin has recreated Nelson Mandela’s last six months of freedom in 1962 for his new film, Mandela’s Gun, which will be previewed at the Cannes film festival this week
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