After her death, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela summoned the ghost of Stratcom, igniting a series of apartheid-style accusations and denunciations.
Stratcom was responsible for countless propaganda operations. For example, when ANC president Oliver Tambo embarked on a world tour in 1987 to drum up support for the liberation movement, apartheid spy Craig Williamson made sure that wherever Tambo spoke, a video was released to the media with footage of necklacings. The footage was accompanied by Madikizela-Mandela's quote that, "With our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country".
Launched in 1984 as a wing of the State Security Council, Stratcom, short for strategic communications, was essentially the apartheid government's Department of Dirty Tricks.
Former security police officer Paul Erasmus told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that there were two types of Stratcom - soft Stratcom and hard Stratcom. Both intended to break the enemy, physically and psychologically. Hard Stratcom was assassinations and bombs. Its "softer" sibling was covering activists' houses with graffiti, pouring paint remover on their cars, disrupting meetings with stink bombs and making threatening phone calls in the dead of night.According to a former security branch member, there was also a third type of Stratcom - psy-ops, putting a positive spin on apartheid.
Madikizela-Mandela's utterances in Winnie, the 2017 documentary rebroadcast shortly after she died, prompted fingers to be pointed at her opponents to discredit them and sow mistrust - exactly what Stratcom's objective was.
The EFF repeated the claims and condemned the "Stratcom journalists". The South African National Editors' Forum said it was dangerous to label people spies without evidence.
Ironically, two of the journalists named as Stratcom agents - Thandeka Gqubule and Anton Harber - had worked to expose Stratcom during the apartheid era.Then it was the turn of Independent Media chief Iqbal Survé to come out with all his Stratcom guns blazing. In a series of front-page reports in his newspaper titles, Survé, who compared himself to Madikizela-Mandela, claimed the journalists writing critically about his business scheme, Sagarmatha Technologies, were "Stratcom 2018".
These journalists were - and continue to be - respected figures in the media world, prompting Sanef to call Survé's campaign disgusting and a sad day for South African journalism.
There have been many sad days for South African journalism. Apartheid's numerous intelligence agencies had their eyes and ears on what was going on in newsrooms. Former Rand Daily Mail editor Benjamin Pogrund wrote in his book, War of Words: Memoir of a South African Journalist, that after someone said something rude about the Bureau for State Security in an editorial meeting, the person would look up at the ceiling and say: "Sorry about that, General."Pogrund said that when he told the general (BOSS head Hendrik van den Bergh) about the tradition, Van den Bergh gave him a thin smile and said: "It's not in the ceiling."
In addition to newsroom bugs, there were newsroom stooges.
In the Winnie documentary, Vic McPherson, a former Stratcom boss, admitted he had planted negative stories about Madikizela-Mandela.
McPherson boasted that he had had 40 journalists on his payroll. His allegations brought out more pointing fingers and a trending hashtag, #Stratcom40, with people demanding that McPherson name the reporters.
McPherson won't be naming names. He died last year, and even if he were alive he would keep schtum. Handlers and spy masters may never blow their agents' cover - it goes against espionage ethics (now there's an oxymoron).
Over the years a number of reporters have been exposed as spies. Gerard Ludi worked for the (old) New Age and the Rand Daily Mail before it was revealed that he was a policeman. Ludi had infiltrated the SACP and gave evidence against the party's leader, Bram Fischer.
John Horak spent 30 years in the newsroom trenches, working for the Rand Daily Mail, The Star and the Sunday Times. He left journalism in 1985 to work for the security police and defected to the ANC in the early 1990s, working for the National Intelligence Service until 1996. He died in a car crash in 2010."It was an accident accident; not a Stratcom accident," a former Special Branch officer was quick to tell me.
Then there was Craig Kotze, The Star's crime reporter from 1984 to 1990 with a moustache that had its own postal code. In a submission to the TRC, Kotze admitted that he had been an undercover police agent while working for the newspaper.
Another newsroom spy was British-born Gordon Winter, who came to South Africa in the 1950s and was recruited by BOSS in 1963. He worked for the Sunday Times and the pro-government Citizen before returning to the UK, where he wrote Inside BOSS: South Africa's Secret Police. He described himself as "Pretoria's number-one hatchet man; a character assassin".He wrote: "The unscrupulous journalist does not have to write deliberate lies. He can pervert the truth by concentrating on the negative and diminishing the positive."
His words came back to haunt him.
Winter, who is now apparently working on a book called A Rogue's Guide to Sex, was furious when the UK's Sunday Times published a story about him in 1997 titled Found: the agent who framed Hain. Winter launched a six-year campaign against the paper and the journalist but his efforts seem to have been in vain.
Let this be a warning to others planning to embark on misinformation exercises: indulging in Stratcom may lead to Stratkarma.
• Ancer is the author of 'Spy: Uncovering Craig Williamson'..