The Fascinatingly Unearthed McKenzie Affair

The Fascinatingly Unearthed McKenzie Affair

On 16 April 1987, Keith McKenzie arrived as a detainee in the African National Congress (ANC) detention camp in northern Angola, officially called the Morris Seabelo Rehabilitation Centre, or Camp 32, which was also known as “Quatro”.

On 3 January 1987, McKenzie was at his home in Eesterus, a township near Pretoria, when he received a call from Lester Dumakude of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) Special Operations Unit, requesting him to be present at a meeting in Botswana. The call was being recorded by the racist South African Police forces. After the call, the Security Branch Chief, General Johan van der Merwe, was briefed by Brigadier Wikus Loots, who informed him that Johannes “Victor” Mnisi, Ernest Lekoto “Oupa” Pule and Lester “Chris” Dumakude were important MK operatives heading the arms smuggling and terrorist infiltration activities of the ANC between South Africa and Botswana.

According to Loots, their agent McKenzie had received an instruction from MK to smuggle weapons and explosives into South Africa during the Easter weekend. For the upcoming mission, McKenzie was going to use his VW Kombi, for arms usually obtained from Mnisi, Dumakude and/or Pule, and this created an opportunity to eliminate the trio, especially Mnisi, who was also directly responsible for acts of terror, particularly the Pretoria Church Street bombing, in May 1983. General van der Merwe gave Brigadier Loots permission to proceed with the operation on condition that the apartheid South African Defence Force (SADF) was to control the process inside Botswana and that the deaths of civilians would be prevented.

On 28 March 1987, Moe Shaik received a security police file from his mole, codenamed “Nightingale”, in the Security Branch on Aboobaker Ismail. One of the documents in the file referred to source “NT395” who had infiltrated the Botswana Machinery and an incident in which he obtained a glass that “Rashid” (Aboobaker Ismail) had touched. The plan was to lure Rashid into a Combi rigged with explosives, which were then to be detonated.

On the morning of 29 March 1987, Rashid received a call from the Chief of Staff of MK, Joe Slovo, asking if he remembered an incident where he met someone in a Gaborone Oasis Motel, believed to be an enemy agent, and this person took the glass from which he was using back across the border in order to get his fingerprints. Rashid was able to remember the incident and the person, except the name, which involved a recruit whom he had reservations about, as he was too willing to take risks and eager to volunteer his services.

The reports in Moe Shaik’s possession revealed that Keith McKenzie or “NT395”, was the man involved in the incident Rashid was trying to recall. He had successfully infiltrated MK, being handled by Sergeant Eric Goosen and Lieutenant Willem Momberg of the Northern Transvaal division of the apartheid Security Branch. His willingness to take risks made him valuable to both MK and the apartheid security forces, with his loyalties being with the latter. The VW Kombi he operated had a secret compartment built into it to transport armaments and explosives. No one within the MK ranks had questioned his carpentry skills, to be able to build a secret compartment, which was actually undertaken by the apartheid Security Branch’s technical team.

The file provided by the “Nightingale” contained McKenzie’s details as well as his successful infiltration of the ANC in Botswana, where he was introduced to Rashid. He managed to slip a glass that Rashid had used into his jacket, which was taken back to Pretoria for fingerprint analysis. Rashid was considered to be high up in the ranks of the ANC and MK, and who would accordingly be a formidable target for the apartheid security forces.

Furthermore, in the Shaik’s “Nightingale” file, was McKenzie’s report about the postponement of the meeting in Botswana scheduled with MK’s Lester Dumakude for the end of March to 4 April 1987. This postponement suited Brigadier Wikus Loots of the apartheid Security Branch, as it gave him more time to work out his plan, which included the utilisation of McKenzie VW Kombi as a car bomb. Explosives were to be placed in the vehicle’s secret compartment, and these would be detonated by remote control when the meeting took place inside it, after McKenzie had left the vehicle to relieve himself.

McKenzie had arrived in Gaborone on Saturday 4 April 1987, as arranged, but instead of meeting at the Oasis Motel as usual, he was sent to another location north of Gaborone. This made the apartheid SADF Special Forces to lose track of the VW Kombi, and they waited at the Oasis Motel. After meeting with Dumakude and Pule, he was taken to meet Rashid in Francistown, which is 450 kilometres north of Gaborone. As they drove towards Francistown, McKenzie was offered plenty of beers and fell drunk. After having been plied with drinks, he was taken into Zambia, arriving on the morning of 5 April. After a few hours of interrogation by the MK Security Team, McKenzie admitted that he was working for the apartheid Security Branch.

Following his successful abduction, McKenzie was taken to Camp 32 in northern Angola. On 8 April 1987, Dumakude and Pule returned to Gaborone in his VW Kombi and parked it outside the house of an ANC supporter, a welfare worker, in a residential area. On 9 April 1987, an apartheid SADF Special Forces’ operative spotted the minibus in a residential area of Gaborone, which the apartheid Intelligence services believed was to be used by MK Special Operations Unit over the Easter weekend. By means of a remote-controlled device, the operative detonated explosives that had been attached to the vehicle.

The following day, the London’s “Guardian” newspaper reported that the Gaborone explosion had resulted in the death of a welfare worker, her son and an infant girl who was residing with them. The minibus used in the explosion was registered in the name of a married woman living in Eesterus, who mentioned that her husband sometimes used the vehicle to run a taxi service to Botswana. According to the lady, the husband went to Botswana on 4 April, and she had not heard from him since.

The McKenzie affair represented a major operational victory for MK following their penetration of the Security Branch through Moe Shaik’s mole in a counter-intelligence project codenamed “Operation Bible”. This operation began on 22 March 1986, when Moe Shaik was released from detention, following his arrest concerning the attempts to assist Ebrahim Ismail Ebrahim to escape the country, as the apartheid security net was closing down on him.

In fact, on 26 June 1985, Ebrahim had requested Shaik to use his MK Unit to serve as a decoy for him to escape. Moe Shaik was actually arrested on 29 June 1985, at the Highpoint Flats in Overport, Durban, when he and his brother Yunis were moving Ebrahim from one building to the other, which are close to each other. When Yunis went to Moe’s flat that day, he discovered that he had already been arrested.

Shortly after his release, on 22 March 1986, he met up with the apartheid security policeman, who was often present during the many rounds of severe torture that he received while he was in detention. The policeman handed him a folder, which he said was only available to him for two hours, and from which Moe made photocopies. Later on, Moe shared the contents of the file with Billy Nair, a former Robben Island prisoner, who was arrested on 6 July 1963, during the Sabotage Campaign, and served 20 years in prison, for being part of the MK Regional Command in Natal. Nair’s advice to Shaik was that he should take the file to London, where it could be confirmed to be true or a mere set-up.

This was the beginning of “Operation Bible”. Operation Bible became an African National Congress (ANC) intelligence project involving the running of an Afrikaner agent, nicknamed the “Nightingale”. The agent was recruited in 1986 from within the apartheid Security Branch of the South African Police Force. Moe Shaik automatically became the leader of this operation, and in 1987, it was endorsed by the leadership of the ANC in exile, including President Oliver Tambo and Jacob Zuma, who oversaw the project as Head of ANC Intelligence.

Following the abduction of Ebrahim Ismail Ebrahim from Swaziland into South Africa on 15 December 1986, the crackdown also continued within South Africa. When the apartheid security policemen arrived to arrest Moe and Yunis Shaik at their home, they couldn’t find them, as they were already tipped off by “Nightingale”. Again, on 28 March 1987, “Nightingale” gave Moe Shaik a police file on Aboobaker “Rashid” Ismail, which referred to a source “NT395”, who had infiltrated the Botswana Machinery.

In the file, reference was made to an incident in which “NT395” had obtained a glass that Rashid had touched, and from which fingerprints were subsequently taken. The file also referred to a plan to lure Rashid into a VW Kombi rigged with explosives, which were then to be detonated. When Rashid, who was in Botswana, was called by Joe Slovo in London, he warned him about an apartheid agent whom he shared a drink with in a hotel in Gaborone. When Rashid remembered the person, it was Keith McKenzie (aka “NT395”), who was on 5 April 1987 smuggled to Lusaka, and later to Camp 32, “Quatro” or Morris Seabelo Rehabilitation Centre, in Angola.

The explosive-ridden VW Kombi that was to be used by Rashid and his comrades, Johannes Mnisi, Ernest Pule and Lester Dumakude, over the 1987 Easter period, which was detonated by the apartheid SADF Special Forces’ expert, on 9 April 1987, was linked to McKenzie’s wife in Eersterus, Pretoria. The “Nightingale” was the source of the Security Branch files that Shaik used to set up Operation Bible, which improved the ANC’s counter-intelligence capacity and allowed the Movement to stay a step ahead of Security Branch raids and covert attacks on activists, saving countless lives and cementing Shaik’s relationship with Jacob Zuma, his boss in ANC intelligence.

By 1989, the project had effectively been merged into Operation Vula, and Shaik had been appointed Vula’s head of intelligence. According to Shaik, the project got its name from Tambo, who had said of certain reports from the “Nightingale” that “I believe they are as true as the Bible”.

Sources:
Wikipedia.
South African History Online (SAHO).
Moe Shaik, “The ANC Spy Bible: Surviving Across Enemy Lines”, Tafelberg, 2020.
Thula Simpson, “Umkhonto we Sizwe: The ANC’s Armed Struggle”, Penguin, 2016.
Gavin Evans, “ANC Spy Bible: a real-life South African thriller, but too much left unsaid”, The Conversation, 29 March 2020.
Paddy Harper, “Real-life spy drama reads like a novel”, Mail & Guardian, 28 February 2020.
Marianne Thamm, “A Nightingale Sang in CR Swart Square: Moe Shaik and the greatest story not yet told”, Daily Maverick, 19 February 2020.

Castro Khwela
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