Counter-Revolutionary Warfare: the Soweto Intelligence Unit and Southern Itineraries

Abstract

The Soweto Intelligence Unit (SIU) was a specialised security police unit responsible for recruiting deep-cover agents. Accounts to the Amnesty Committee of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) suggest that through the 1980s the SIU operated far beyond its Soweto base, extending its network into Botswana, Swaziland and other liberation movement bases. Membership included several police veterans of the South West Africa1 ‘border wars’, at least two Mozambicans who had previously been deployed to South West Africa, an askari2 abducted from Botswana, and a network of informers and deep-cover agents stretching from Soweto into several of the frontline states. The TRC was given accounts of numerous ‘false-flag’ operations, including bombings and other acts of sabotage ostensibly aimed at providing credibility for informers and undercover agents, as well as several cross-border operations against African National Congress (ANC) targets in the mid 1980s. Several of these were conducted jointly with a covert military unit of the South African Defence Force (SADF) that included ex-Rhodesian soldiers and intelligence personnel. The SIU thus provides a way of exploring the multiple intersections of regional struggles and modes of belonging: its theatre of war extended far beyond its local jurisdiction, crossing multiple physical and institutional borders. Its operatives dragged with them diverse histories and legacies, which in turn both shaped and blurred the boundaries of insurgency and counter-insurgency. These aspects arguably have wider implications for the national, and require us to rethink the frames through which we have come to understand the struggle for and against apartheid to have been waged. They also require us to think more carefully about the evidence, including that of the TRC, on which such frames rest.