At the Pretoria headquarters of the National Intelligence Service (NIS, formerly BOSS, the Bureau of State Security), Brigadier Igmar de Jongh, the head of the service, had told his staff that provided a skeleton crew for emergencies was on duty the remainder could leave their offices in the Burger Gebou at noon. He had also asked Colonel Whitley, the senior English-speaking officer in the force, to stay on duty throughout the New Year weekend.456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡzLggodbe0k
Whitley had no objections. He was living alone at the time since his English wife was spending the Christmas holidays with their two sons who were in boarding school in Britain. Though he worked very loyally for the NIS because he believed that it defended his homeland from the Red Menace, he did not see eye to eye with his Boer colleagues who believed it protected them from the Black Menace. In any case, he had little liking for the heavy drinking parties which his Afrikaans-speaking colleagues so enjoyed on such occasions as this New Year's Eve, and he had an ominous feeling that at least one clear head should be available, even if the next day, Friday, was a public holiday.
He had gone to bed about midnight in the little cell assigned to the duty officer, but was still reading his dog-eared copy of Franz Kafka's collected works when there was a knock on the door. A sergeant saluted and handed him an envelope marked "most immediate" in Afrikaans and English, which Whitley opened with a feeling of dread. It was a single sheet torn off the telex machine with no point of origin and no salutation, but timed a few minutes before.
It read: "To deprive our enemies in the West of their supplies of scarce minerals for use in their race war on Africa, we will today render useless the Niendorp mines, where most of the platinum, chrome and vanadium is mined. We do not want to spill blood, which is why we have chosen a holiday, but the necessary explosion may cause subsidence in some of the mining villages around. This is a warning to evacuate all, repeat all, personnel from the villages and camps around the mines and in the valleys. The explosion (which cannot now be altered or postpones) will take place about 3 a.m. Everyone should be out of the valley by 2: 30 a.m."
It was signed ANC/BH.
Whitley looked at the maps on the wall under the clock and saw that he had 75 minutes to get some 5,000 people down a winding narrow road to safety. He picked up the phone but no operator answered, so he moved to the one phone that had a direct line to the exchange and dialed the head of the service, Igmar de Jongh, at his home. After a minute of ringing he received a torrent of Afrikaans abuse and obscenities; de Jongh had clearly been sleeping it off. Whitley interrupted in English and immediately de Jongh pulled himself together and listened to what Whitley had to say.
"We must prevent it!" he ordered.
Whitley responded: "But first we must get the people out of the valley in case we cannot stop it."
"Get the whites out if you can, and let the kaffirs blow themselves up if they want to...."
"But Sir, there are 4,000 blacks in the camps."
"Let them fry! If we let them out they'll clutter up the roads so that our people can't get away."
There was a pause. "Do I have your permission to order a general evacuation, Sir?"
"Yes, I suppose so, but I'll hold you accountable for any white man who gets killed. And what are you going to do to stop the explosion?"
"It will need great skill, sir, if it's possible at all, so I'll call the chief engineer to see if we can get together a skilled team in time---they will, of course, be whites, and it will be very risky."
Another long pause before de Jongh spoke again: "Good, I'll talk to the engineer, he doesn't speak English. You, Whitley, get on with evacuating our people."
In the event the explosions took place at exactly 4 a.m. They shook the whole area like an earthquake; but these were deep mines and there was little subsidence, except at the entrance to the valley where the pillars of rock collapsed several minutes after the explosion, killing more than 100 of the black miners who were still running to escape. The whites in their cars and buses were all safe.
At breakfast time the Black Hand radio carried a perfectly audible recording of the conversation between de Jongh and Whitley. It even gave credit to Whitley for having saved some thousands of black lives which were at risk and compared him with "the murderous de Jongh." The radio then drew a comparison between de Johgh's cold-blooded attitude and the Black Hand's own careful warnings to blacks and whites. "Next time we shall not be so careful---or maybe we shall take more care of our own."
There followed one more warning to blacks and whites alike: "Let no one go into the mineworkings to try and repair the damage or to get out chrome, platinum or vanadium which has already been mined, washed and stored below ground. The miniaturized nuclear devices---designed for use in space---that we used were "dirty," leaving a radioactive deposit that will be lethal to anyone for at least 7 to 10 years."
After a pause to let this sink in to the minds of the jet engine and missile manufacturers, the ominous tones continued: "We have here in Africa plenty more of these nuclear explosives which we have brought in under the drunken noses of Brigadier de Jongh and his state security forces."
As he sat in his office listening to this broadcast Colonel Whitley could see the NIS officers filing up as red-eyed security officers nursing their hangover responded to the emergency call which he had sent out. When he caught sight of Kommandant Grobler, the officer in charge of internal security. Whitley told him that he had been on duty now for 20 hours and was going home. Grobler should take charge of the emergency operation until the Brigadier arrived. He then quietly put the letter of resignation which had written at 6 a.m. on de Jongh's desk and walked out of the Burger Gebou for good.
The South African Government, after a 3- hour meeting, decided that in view of the broadcast threats they must at least withdraw the majority of troops from the frontier for internal security duty. But to keep their borders inviolate they decided also publicly to warn all their neighbors that any intrusion would be met by all the resources at the Republic's disposal. "In view of the fact that we have already been attacked with nuclear weapons, we are prepared to use the nuclear arsenal at our command in retaliation against any further attack."
At the same time, urgent messages were sent to London and Washington pleading for open public support in this darkest hour for the RSA. Neither British nor American officials, who were the first to consider the plea, were in the least anxious to make any such gesture, but they were aware that the total collapse of white South Africa, which seemed a real possibility, would be a crippling blow strategically.
The Cabinet Defense Committee in London wrangled for some minutes over a further complication: Admiral Woodward, in command of the task force at Simonstown, had signaled the Admiralty that he could no longer be responsible for the safety of the fleet if he had to keep it bottled up in Simonstown. Even the most cursory intelligence reports of his shore patrols left him in no doubt that the port was wide open to infiltration. The civilian labor was volatile, sullen and owed his force no loyalty. Having taken on supplies and fuel he'd already put the fleet on alert and proposed to put to sea at once and stand off until the political picture in the Republic became clearer. Once at sea the task force would be in a state of readiness for whatever action ensued and have the necessary mobility to sail wherever it might be needed. Some ministers thought the Admiral was being unnecessarily twitchy, but no British Cabinet would dare to contradict the commander of a fleet when he demanded sea room.
But clearly the fleet's precipitate departure would be interpreted as desertion by the South African government unless Britain publicly explained the action. Just after noon in London---but still too early for full consultation with the US President in Camp David---PM Thatcher authorized Admiral Woodward to make a statement that the task force had nuclear capability and that while its use could only be authorized by the Prime Minister, he was putting to sea so as to be in readiness for such action as might be necessary, wherever it was needed.
On board the flagship HMS Hermes, even then edging away from the quay to the visible consternation of onlookers, the Admiral's crisp tones over the tannoy repeated the message from London. A veteran BBC reporter on board asked him just what was meant by "wherever it was needed."
He got the snobbish reply: "Well, I could be in Maputo tomorrow---or Lagos by Sunday."
In Washington, Secretary of State Shultz realized that South African was becoming too hot to handle and advised President Reagan to leave it in the hands of the British. But this was to reckon without the Navy Department. The US Navy was in the last stages of assembling, in great secrecy, a task force of its own. This had been an instinctive reaction to persistent and partially verified reports that preparations were underway in North Central Africa to establish a Libyan-controlled superstate. A cover story to conceal the US task force's real objectives would be invaluable to the US Navy now that it was reaching the point when crews and Marines in large numbers would be pouring into the Norfolk naval base in Virginia.
It was a simple matter for the Navy's public relations officers to feed a leak to the media that the US Navy was planning to send a task force to Ascension Island probably in support of the pro-US African nations of Ghana, Dahomey, Ivory Coast and Senegal, which were, they said, already under heavy attack by radical Islamic militants.
On Saturday morning in Johannesburg the black maintenance men from the gold mines went on strike, triggered by the Black Hand's broadcast of de Jongh's murderous conversation with Whitley. In a convoy of seized company buses they drove through the city streets, shouting and waving banners. Eventually, the riot police, who were taken completely unawares, managed to herd the blacks away from the city center, and well clear of the mining installations, for the police fully expected the mob to wreak havoc in their present angry mood.
By 11:30 a.m. the streets were back to their drowsy holiday calm under the blazing sun; and right along the gold reef the mines were empty of blacks.
At noon exactly the first tremors of what felt like an earthquake vibrated through the city. Pictures began to swing on walls, glasses crashed off tables, furniture tilted crazily; power lines snapped and crashed sparking into the streets. The electricity failed. Air conditioning systems moaned into silence and every TV screen went blank.
The quake had already lasted nearly one minute, an unheard of length of time to anyone who knew anything about earthquakes, but still the tremors rattled and shook the fabric of the city in an ear-splitting crescendo of destruction.
Most people in Johannesburg and its suburbs were totally cut off from their regular sources of information.....TV and radio, and most telephone lines were dead---and so had no clue as to what was happening. Afterwards, survivors said they had thought they were living through some great natural disaster. They had dismissed the idea of a nuclear explosion because they shared the common belief that The Bomb would come from the sky, accompanied by a flash "brighter than a thousand suns" and one big bang.
It was in fact a series of underground nuclear explosions lasting for about 30 minutes which wiped out South Africa's capacity to produce gold. Within 30 minutes these underground blasts had ripped right across the Transvaal gold reef from west to east, wrecking major areas of central Johannesburg and its satellite towns of Krugersdorp, Benoni, Brakpan, Springs and Nigel.
Destruction of the skyscraper city of Johannesburg was a macabre by-product of the demolition of the gold reef. But it was the visible fall of this thriving modern city which most shocked the TV audiences in the West, when they saw the videos and film after communications had been restored.
The mine explosions of the previous day had brought scores of television journalists from all over the world into Johannesburg. With their battery-pack portable cameras they defied the collapsing streets and buildings to record the devastation as it actually happened. One of the eyewitnesses of the devastation was the famous South African radio commentator Stef Skippy, whose agonized voice over remarkable camera shots was relayed throughout the Western world: "Imagine a city built on a honeycomb---that's Jo'burg. Beneath its streets, down to a depth of 1/2 a mile and sometimes to a full miles, are the shafts and tunnels of the gold reef. For eight years our human moles have excavated the supporting earth, bringing up the soil and piling it in giant dumps all over the city, leaving down below the honeycomb of shafts, tunnels and cross tunnels---precarious support for the skyscrapers even in normal times. Even before the terrible blasts down below, which pulverized the honeycomb and shook the city literally to pieces, we in Johannesburg were used to regular tremors caused by collapsing shafts, but when one mine after another exploded in its bowels the result up on the surface was appalling beyond description. It was worse, far worse than anything that Lot's wife ever saw in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah."
By early afternoon the South African government was aware that the mineral and mining base of the country's wealth had been destroyed.
At 2 p.m. martial law was proclaimed and the army stood to arms. In the next two hours a totally separate series of explosions above ground ripped the heart out of the white military machine. The first was a chain of blasts at army headquarters, Voortrekkerhoogte; the second was a massive single blast at Zwartkops Air Force headquarters; while the third blasted the naval headquarters at Silvermine and the dockyard at Simonstown, from which Britain's Admiral Woodward had evacuated his task force barely 6 hours earlier. Colonel Whitley, driving to Botswana, heard the announcement of this last raid on his car radio from the Black Hand clandestine broadcasts. He recognized the irony of the fact that it had clearly only been made possible by information supplied to the ANC via the Soviets' agent Asser Krieger, who had been commodore of the dockyard until his exposure in 1982.
At 5:00 p.m. a shattered Cabinet met again to review their options. They had none: there was nobody to surrender to, except perhaps a broadcasting voice; there was nothing left with which to fight. A few diehards, including MD Viljoen, talked of pulling the wagons around the laager but (contrary to PM Botha's blustery claim to the US President Reagan) the Afrikaners had no Masada tradition---Paul Kruger, the Father of the Volk, fled to Switzerland when defeated by the British, and is honored by his volk for doing so.
The gloomy debate ran on until two deafening explosions were heard relatively nearby---the first such incident in Pretoria itself. A few minutes later a message was brought in that the NIS HQ in the Burger Gebou had been bombed, killing all known occupants including Brigadier de Jongh; the other explosion had been the destruction of the Voortrekker Monument, one of the three major Afrikaner shrines.
It was this last psychological wound that caused the Cabinet to listen to those who counseled flight. Plans had long been prepared for a Boeing jumbo to carry the Cabinet and the Uitvorende Raad (executive council) of the Broederbond (the real establishment of Boer power) with their immediate families to South America. Transport Minister George Bartlett was authorized to bring the plans to readiness.
At this moment PM Botha announcement that just before the meeting he had received a call, from NHK; SCAN's Japanese associate, inviting him to put South Africa's case on worldwide TV; he had accepted and would appear with other world leaders on Sunday afternoon if the blackout permitted. The discussion then turned to what he would say.456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡXFfp6v0PNs
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There are two pendants to this tale of the slither and fall of the South African republic.
When the South African Airways jumbo jet carrying the cabinet made air-to-ground contact with the Argentine authorities, after crossing the South Atlantic, the pilot was very firmly told that no permission to land would be given by any authority in the region to aircraft from a country in alliance with the UK. In desperation, the South African pilot turned back and requested an emergency landing at the airport in Port Stanley, the Falkland Islands.
The other pendant came in the form of a cassette which Colonel Whitley retrieved from the inside of de Jongh's desk when he was brought back from Botswana by the new regime in what would now be known as The Socialist Republic of the Union of South Africa (under guard but still as a respected friend) to identify some material in the bombed NIS building. Whitley took the cassette back with him to his new home and had it transcribed and translated. It contained the regular secret recording of the day's conversations in de Jongh's office and concludes with the final minutes of his life.456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡOxZsg8QOOd
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de Jongh….any case it means we underestimated them, Grobler, and that we were victims of their own propaganda, like the story that only the trained ones coming in from outside were to be feared when the real enemy was inside the country all the time, under our noses, everywhere, five out of every six citizens, every black bastard in the country.....
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Grobler: With respect, Brigadier, not that much surely. Cooks, nannies, garden boys, millions without a political thought in their heads.....456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡpCHjYHJF7w
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de Jongh: Wrong, Grobler! Our biggest mistake! Not all terrorists, no. Not all activists, no. But political, everyone! Every last bloody one! You need only 1,000 terrorists if they have the support, actual or potential, of 25 million people. Any case, it's done. They could never have blown up all those targets without a lot of help, a lot of winks and nods and looking the other way and providing food and messages and information and even shelter.
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Grobler: But sir, we couldn't have foreseen all that. With tens of thousands of black miners going down into the shafts every day we couldn't watch every one of them every second of the day in every part of every tunnel....456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡQQtMFrgxRG
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de Jongh: Aaaah, man, we didn't have to do that! It was the checkpoints on the surface where we failed. How did we get those devices past the security guards? Think man. If those guards had done their job properly this wouldn't have happened. So the guards didn't do their job....why?
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Grobler: The guards? At the top?456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡUIDivGxKKv
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de Jongh: Yes, at the top. Why? I'll tell you why. Since all that total strategy stuff of Botha's beginning back in 1983 with so much white manpower committed to the borders and the military keypoints, most of the mineshaft trustee guards were black, no so?
Looked the other way at the right time for the right people, not so? And we swallowed all that business from Botha and Malan that carefully-screened blacks who were well-paid could be trusted because their high-grade salaries kept them on our side in their own interests! That makes me laugh now.456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡeN2qFkv00s
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Grobler: But sir, that doesn't explain the explosions at the Voortrekker Monument and the Koeberg reactor. All the guards at those places were white---Afrikaners, in fact.456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡIDqnEhJ4VQ
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de Jongh: Yes, but the devices used were those trannie-detonators---fit in the bloody nostril, plastic, screen-proof. And in each it was the bloody floorsweepers. You haven't seen the rush report yet, Grobler. Miss Vlok is typing some copies for you and McLean---you see, Grobler, we never thought our Afrikaner nation was endangered by the failure of our culture to provide white floorsweepers. We never got past the idea that kaffir work must be done by kaffirs even in a nuclear reactor or an Afrikaner monument.456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡJ5k4TnQDQx
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Grobler: Sir, in that case, I mean if that is the case and I'm not saying it's not. I'm just asking to understand, I saw that in that case surely every building in South Africa would be in danger. I mean, with respect, even this building of ours. And that surely isn't the case with this building. You will recall, sir, that I myself head all the security arrangements here, with regular checkings, and there's never a strange face in this building, not even for maintenance work. All our people in here have been with us for more than 10 years, and all the staff members are white.456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡtrFrFNUiCb
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de Jongh: Even the floor sweepers?456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡIdgN9E3Yu0
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Grobler: Well, no, naturally, Brigadier. But there you are talking of old Phillippus and Jengo , not your ordinary floorsweepers. Both with us for 15 years minimum, with regular clearance. Even their backgrounds---both grew up on your own father's farm at the Zoutpansberg, and now here they're like, well, almost of the family. Phillippus brought a Christmas present for my son last year and look how Jengo reported that communist talk in the township that time. No. Besides it's known that they work here with us and our strength is in their interests---they know what side their bread is buttered, sir!456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡsioJlajL4B
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de Jongh: What the English call cupboard love, Grobler. Take all the informers. Remember how many we had until the mid-70s? It was a god living for them up to then. Then suddenly it becomes bad news to be known as an informer in the township---what good is a high wage if you can't sleep; always scared of being bumped off? Also, suddenly they're no longer sure we are the winning side, and to save their own asses they start working for the other side. What the Portuguese found in Mozambique in 1973---suddenly the informers melt away, the rats leave the sinking ship.456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡXhv9VbS32t
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Grobler: Maybe, yes, with FRELIMO and so forth, and maybe also at Koeberg and the monuments, but not with the simple ones, the good old sorts. Old Phillippus, now. I passed him in the passage here on my way in, he showed me a children's reading primer, he's learning to read, can't even write his own name! What would he want with politics? I mean....456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡtpw2UFfm5m
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It is at this point that the recording stops, at the precise time of the first of the three explosions which destroyed much of the Burger Gebou building. The explosions were four seconds apart the only survivors were the two floorsweepers who had gone to buy their lunch sandwiches. 456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡOXxYbqfzkd
