‘Comrade Spy’ infiltrates Wits

Craig Williamson was described by his handlers as apartheid’s ‘superspy’. He boasted of infiltrating the KGB. He was involved in bombings, kidnappings and assassinations, including Ruth First’s. The ex-cop’s career as an undercover agent started when he registered at the University of the Witwatersrand and infiltrated the student left, writes Jonathan Ancer in his book ‘Spy’

In 1972, an overweight and bearded Williamson walked onto Wits campus, and enrolled to study law and politics. He had things  most  other first-years didn’t: a car, a steady stream of income, and a rank in the South African Police.

Williamson’s police masters told him to take it easy initially since there would inevitably be suspicion that because he had come from the police he might still be working for them. The plan was that his presence and his known police service record would divert attention from other police and government spies already on campus.

He was meant to be a lightning conductor, a spy term for someone whose task it is to draw the heat away from the real spies. These included Derek Brune, of Special Branch, and Paul Sarbutt and Arthur McGiven, both agents of BOSS, the state intelligence agency established in 1968 under the notorious General Hendrik van den Bergh.

Williamson’s orders were to get involved in student activities and see what happened. “Be patient,” his handler, Colonel Johann Coetzee, told him.

Williamson hadn’t told anybody he had been recruited into Special Branch’s Section 4. His mother and father were concerned at his behaviour since he had ostensibly left the police. He had grown his hair and had come into money, which he said he had won at the horse races.

Coetzee then met Herbert Williamson, told him that his son was a spy and reassured him that all was well. At the same time Williamson told his girlfriend, Ingrid Bacher, about his double life. She wasn’t shocked, having suspected that he was still involved in police work in some way.

In his first year at university, Williamson joined the Arts Faculty Council and began his climb through the student movement. In his second year he was elected to the Student Representative Council.

A quarter of that year’s SRC was made up of spies. Of the 16 members, Williamson, Sarbutt, McGiven and Brune were agents. In 1973 Williamson was also elected to the Wits chapter of Nusas, the national student union which was mainly represented on the English-speaking campuses of the country.

From the 1960s Nusas had become increasingly vocal in its opposition to apartheid, campaigning for “free education in a free society” and “the realisation of full human rights in South Africa”. In response, the state acted against a number of student leaders and in the 1970s, as student protests became more radical, attacked the organisation with renewed vigour.

From the moment Williamson arrived on campus, some student activists were concerned about his bona fides. Indeed, Williamson was just one of many students whose stories didn’t hold up. But it was difficult to prove that people were spies just as it was  difficult for people accused of being spies to prove that they weren’t. The truth is that no one knew for sure. It was an era of paranoia —  allegations flew about and some people were destroyed by them.

Spies on campus were a fact of life: activists knew they existed and had to live with them. As a result the Nusas leader Fink Haysom advised activists to “confide your inner political convictions only to your pillow ... and then only in the dark”.

In fact, accusing student activists of being spies was part of the Security Branch’s strategy to damage the student movement. The more the students pointed fingers at each other, the less effective they were at undermining the state. Besides, it also drew attention away from the actual agents.

Williamson had different versions of why he joined the police. Glenn Moss recalls Williamson telling him that he had failed matric and in a punitive measure his father sent him to the police force. Williamson told his “friend” and fellow activist Julian Sturgeon that he went into the police as part of his teenage rebellion against his parents and St John’s, which he described as a place for wimps.

“He said he’d fallen out with his father so decided to go to the opposite extreme and go hang out with Afrikaans people. That was his motivation to say, ‘Fuck the English’.  That’s how he explained his movement away from his well-to-do St John’s background and to the police.”

Williamson told Sturgeon that after being in the police he had seen the light and had come  back to his liberal sensibilities. Years later, in an interview with the ANC’s Robert McBride, Williamson explained that he did the maths and decided that doing four years in the police in one go was better than nine months followed by a monthly camp each year for the next decade in the army.

Williamson told his comrades that his time as a policeman had politicised him and shown him the evils of apartheid. When fellow students quizzed him about being a policeman, he’d say: “Those sons of bitches are bad. What do you expect me to do? You don’t know anything about it, you are just kids at varsity with theoretical knowledge. I’ve seen it in action. Have you arrested anybody for a pass offence?”

For Cedric de Beer, a St John’s old boy, Williamson’s transformation from right-wing school boy to raving liberal student was just a little too good to be true. After all, De Beer had been in the audience when Williamson gave a tub-thumping racist speech in the 1966 school election. 

De Beer remembers bumping into Williamson on campus and Williamson going out of his way to justify his behaviour during the election episode. He told De Beer that he wanted to be part of the event and as all the other parties were taken, “just for fun”  he picked the Republican Party.

Williamson had acted pre-emptively to try to squash De Beer’s suspicions, but it only made De Beer more suspicious. All the same, De Beer had no hard evidence that could prove Williamson was a spy. He was reasonably sure he needed to be careful about what he said when Williamson was around and decided to keep certain things from him, but at the same time he was working on Nusas campaigns with Williamson. Life carried on.

Despite the suspicions, Williamson was accepted into the student activist fold. While he provided information to Special Branch, there were no repercussions for the students or staff he was informing on. That was the difference between police and intelligence work —  the police wanted evidence, to make arrests and secure convictions, which was the last thing intelligence agents wanted. They sought information —  and the more credible Williamson was at Wits, the more information he could get.

One of the members of the Wits staff whom Williamson reported on was Randy Speer, an American lecturer in the Political Studies Department. Speer was considered so extreme that the Security Branch asked Williamson to keep an eye on him and find out if he was a member of the South African Communist Party.

Other academics and intellectual activists Williamson observed during his career as a student spy were the Natal University political philosopher, Rick Turner, who was assassinated, probably by the security forces, in 1978; Steve Biko, founding member and leader of the Black Consciousness Movement; and Cosmas Desmond, a Catholic priest who  actively opposed forced removals of black communities and whose exposé The Discarded People was banned by the government.

Williamson presented himself as political but not “politically political”. He didn’t join the student movement shouting communist slogans or trying to prove his radical credentials. Many left-wing activists at the time had pretensions to being Marxists, but not Williamson; he knew he would not be able to pull it off. He represented himself as someone who was sympathetic to left politics but was not interested in political theory. He liked to be part of the action and was prominent in student protests, vigils, demonstrations and marches. He once even pushed a security police officer down some stairs during a police raid on the Wits SRC offices.

An incident in 1973 was characteristic of his preferred role. In that year the police intervened at  an Anglo American mine on the Witwatersrand in response to a miners’ strike. When the police action was over, 11 miners were left dead. The next day Wits students marched from the campus over the Queen Elizabeth Bridge to Anglo American’s head office in Main Street in downtown Johannesburg in support of the miners. When the students arrived at the building the door was locked. Williamson launched his weight at the door, forcing it open. The students took occupation of the office. “We shall overcome,” they sang.

Williamson was particularly useful when right-wing students from the conservative Rand Afrikaans University came to attack Wits students protesting on Jan Smuts Avenue. There would be clashes between the two groups and Williamson would beat the RAU students with placard sticks.

Julian Sturgeon thought Williamson was a very useful warrior in the cause because he’d come from the other side and was now with “us”. He also recalls Williamson inciting the students to become more inflammatory. “He was an agent provocateur, working in the background to spread mayhem by throwing petrol on the fire. He then stepped back from being in direct control but he was always available,” says Sturgeon.

Williamson’s involvement in another prominent student protest is also instructive. On 27 October 1971 Ahmed Timol, who had been detained by the police under the Terrorism Act on charges of being a member of the ANC and SACP, fell to his death out of a window on the 10th floor of John Vorster Square in Johannesburg. Though there were strong suspicions about this act of defenestration, the police claimed he had committed suicide. In July 1972, soon after an official inquest found that no one was to blame for Timol’s death, Wits students gathered outside the campus to embark on a massive protest.

Special Branch monitored the event. They lined up on the pavement and on the island in the middle of Jan Smuts Avenue. Press photographs revealed later in court would show the Special Branch officers had batons up their sleeves. The students were given an order to disperse within three minutes. The police then charged the students, beating up a few and arresting about 50 of them, including Denis Beckett, later a prominent journalist, and Colin Lamont, who as a judge in 2016 put the Czech fugitive Radovan Krejcir behind bars for a long time.

Among the arrested students were Williamson and his sister Lisa-Jane.

Williamson’s masters had told him not to avoid being arrested. The officer who arrested him was not amused that an ex-colleague was involved in a demonstration. He chased Williamson across Wits campus, calling him a “bleddie verraaier bliksem” (a bloody betraying shit) and gave him a few heavy smacks with a baton.

Within a short space of time, Williamson had found his niche in student politics. Besides his prominent role in public protests, he understood finances and was administratively competent; he had organisational skills and could get things done. He was prepared to do the non-glamorous tasks that student activists weren’t interested in taking on: organising events, balancing the books, handing out flyers and putting up posters.

Williamson’s financial expertise and efficiency saw him being elected SRC treasurer in 1974. Later he played a similar role in Nusas and was widely credited with having nursed the national student body, which was on the brink of bankruptcy, back to financial health.

Williamson, it appears, had learned to balance the books by assisting in the Danish Confectionery, a cosy bun and coffee bakery in Smal Street in Johannesburg’s CBD, which was owned by his fiancée’s family.

On the face of it Ingrid Bacher, a slender brunette, was an asset to Williamson. She was refined and cerebral and had a level of sophistication he lacked. A microbiologist, she worked for the South African Institute for Medical Research in Braamfontein.

 In 1974 Williamson interrupted a Nusas leadership meeting to tell his comrades that he had got married, and handed round bottles of champagne. Glenn Moss, who was present, was surprised that Williamson hadn’t invited him or any of the other student leaders to the wedding. No doubt if they had, they would have been surprised to meet Johann Coetzee and other Special Branch officers who were present.

On this occasion Williamson made sure his cover was not blown. But there were times when he almost gave himself away. Williamson was a heavy drinker and, once at a Nusas party, for no reason that anyone could ever establish, he turned on Ian Kitai, a medical student on the SRC. He held him up against the wall and pushed, shoved and hit him. He also hurled racial epithets, calling him a “kaffirboetie”, a term completely unacceptable to the student left.

Williamson apologised to Kitai the next day, blaming his behaviour on the alcohol.

The incident with Kitai was not Williamson’s only close shave. When he began his spying career, the police gave him a clapped-out Volkswagen Beetle that had come from Germany, complete with left-hand drive. On the first day he drove it he pulled the sun visor down and out fell a police card, of the kind the police used to put in their windshield when they parked so that traffic officers wouldn’t give them a ticket.

On another occasion he was hosting a Nusas  meeting at his flat in Braamfontein and the Security Branch had sent a pair of bugging technicians to instal devices to record the meeting. The students arrived early and the technicians had to stay in the cupboard throughout the meeting.

CRAIG DODDS 

• This is an edited extract from 'Spy: Uncovering Craig Williamson' by Jonathan Ancer (Jacana Media, R260)