Craig Michael Williamson (born 1949, Johannesburg), a former South African police major, was exposed as a spy in 1980, and was involved in a series of state-sponsored overseas bombings, burglaries, kidnappings, assassinations and propaganda during the apartheid era.
Contents |
In the late 1970s, Craig Williamson had inveigled Lars Eriksson, director of the International University Exchange Fund (IUEF) in Geneva, into employing him as deputy director and help in the award of IUEF scholarships to African students. He was thus able to infiltrate the banned African National Congress (ANC) and, at the same time, make high-level contacts in Sweden which provided most of the funding for the IUEF. Williamson's networking through prime minister Olof Palme's office in Stockholm put him in touch with a number of Palme's close associates including Pan Am Flight 103 victim, Bernt Carlsson, who had become secretary-general of the Socialist International in 1976 and was based in London until 1983.[1]
The same source accused Williamson of syphoning off IUEF funds to establish a dirty tricks operation in Pretoria known as "Long Reach" in order to target apartheid's opponents both in South Africa and abroad. This dirty tricks operation also involved arms trafficking.
Again using IUEF funds, Williamson set up the South African News Agency to recruit and use journalists for apartheid South African counter-intelligence purposes.[2]
In 1982, a burglary took place at the Pan Africanist Congress office in London. Two suspects were arrested. One of them, a Swedish journalist, Bertil Wedin, was eventually acquitted by an English court. Wedin admitted, however, that he was working for South African intelligence and that he had been recruited by Craig Williamson. The other suspect, SADF Sgt Joseph Klue had diplomatic immunity as a member of staff at the SA embassy in London and was ordered to leave the UK.
Williamson applied for amnesty in 1995 from SA's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) for bombing the London office of the ANC in March 1982. In the British House of Commons in June 1995, Peter Hain MP asked through the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard, that the British police should interview and consider extraditing Williamson to stand trial for the London bombing.[3] The Home Secretary turned down Hain's request. Amnesty was eventually granted by the TRC to Williamson and seven others on 15 October 1999.[4] Following the TRC hearing, South African lawyer Anton Alberts commented to the "woza" news agency: "If you look at the Lockerbie disaster - this is very similar. I think Britain would like to see these guys are prosecuted in England even though they get amnesty here."
In 1986, the ANC office in Stockholm was blown up. Williamson and Wedin were accused by a number of sources, but no charges were brought against them.
Williamson ordered the assassination of Ruth First, who was an exiled campaigner for the Anti-Apartheid Movement, close friend of Sweden's prime minister, Olof Palme, and the ANC author of a pioneering study of Namibia. She was also the wife of the South African Communist Party's leader, Joe Slovo. She was killed by a letter-bomb in Maputo, Mozambique on August 18, 1982.[5]
In January 1984, minutes of the apartheid State Security Council, chaired by President P. W. Botha, recorded Craig Williamson as plotting the overthrow of the government in Mozambique[6]
Williamson addressed a letter-bomb to exiled anti-apartheid activist, Marius Schoon, in Angola but killed Schoon's wife Jeanette and daughter Katryn on June 28, 1984. In June 2000, TRC amnesty for this killing and that of Ruth First was granted to Williamson[7]
Williamson was one of the main collaborators with Peter Worthington in the pro-apartheid video The ANC method - violence which was distributed by Citizens for foreign aid reform throughout Canada in 1988.
In the summer of 1988 the US-produced film Red Scorpion was made on location in South-West Africa (Namibia). South Africa helped finance the movie and the SADF provided trucks, equipment as well as extras. The action-packed movie was a sympathetic portrayal of an anti-communist guerrilla commander loosely based on Jonas Savimbi, the leader of UNITA – the Angolan rebel movement – supported by both Washington and Pretoria. The film's producer, Jack Abramoff, was also head of the International Freedom Foundation (IFF). Established in Washington in 1986 as a conservative think-tank, the IFF was in fact part of an elaborate intelligence gathering operation and, according to Craig Williamson, was designed to be an instrument for political warfare against apartheid's foes. South Africa spent up to $1.5million a year – until funding was withdrawn in 1992 – to underwrite Operation Babushka, the code-name by which the IFF project was known.
An article about the "enigma" Craig Williamson in the SA Sunday Times of September 20, 1998 entitled "The spy who never came in from the cold" concluded with the Williamson dictum:
In a television interview early in August 2001, Williamson told the BBC's Tim Sebastian that the actions he took during the apartheid era had to be seen against the background of the Cold War and were in support of the West. The NATO bombing of Belgrade in 1999, he said, killed far more civilians than his dirty tricks brigade ever did.[9]