An Obvious Plant: Craig Williamson’s Role in Sabotaging the Anti-Apartheid Struggle

Abstract

This article examines the career of the South African undercover agent Craig Williamson in the 1970s and 1980s, arguing that the violent acts of men like Williamson must be analysed in terms of the broader strategic aims of the Security Police in the maintenance of apartheid. This means, first, that we must look beyond the smokescreen of Williamson’s notoriety and begin to see Williamson as he was – an operative, working alongside many others, within a vast repressive apparatus. Second, we must analyse the entirety of Williamson’s career and not only the crimes for which he is most infamous. Most of Williamson’s career was spent not as a murderer but as an undercover agent, sabotaging the anti-apartheid struggle through the control and misappropriation of movement funds and through subtle interventions at the ideological level. Williamson’s contributions to counter-insurgency strategy and organisational sabotage are significant in and of themselves and must be analysed by scholars. In this vein, this article offers a glimpse into the parallel and overlapping worlds of the African National Congress (ANC) underground in Botswana and Craig Williamson’s time in Geneva working undercover as the deputy director of the International University Exchange Fund (IUEF).