Coetsee (assisted by his prisons management team) took the initiative to move Mandela into separate quarters in Pollsmoor Prison, away from his colleagues, thereby creating space for more uninhibited talks with government representatives, as well as the later decision to move home to a cottage in the grounds of Victor Verster Prison, a ‘halfway house between prison and freedom’. While this might have been with Botha’s knowledge – and could hardly have happened otherwise – it attests to the autonomy and room to manoeuvre that Coetsee had appropriated. And after those steps, there was no turning back.
Coetsee spoke to O’Malley (and perhaps Patti Waldmeir) more freely than to anyone else. At the same time, there is no record of him disclosing to anyone that he had created an extensive surveillance apparatus around Mandela, and monitored his conversations in prison for a number of years. This remained a secret until 2013 when, as recounted elsewhere in this volume, the historian Jan-Ad Stemmet opened the first of a stack of cardboard boxes containing Coetsee’s papers at the Archive for Contemporary Affairs (ARCA) at the University of the Free State.
As noted previously, monitoring conversations with at least some ‘security prisoners’ was standard practice. Moreover, in the light of Mandela’s unique and growing stature, a degree of additional surveillance could have been expected. But why the 913 file (Mandela’s real prison number) assumed such massive proportions, and what exactly Coetsee sought to achieve by building it, remains a mystery. Given this, the archive itself – with its startling revelations, unexplained gaps, and remaining mysteries – may well be Kobie Coetsee’s most fitting and lasting legacy.
Eavesdropping on Mandela
ALL MANDELA’S conversations were monitored – in other words, they took place in the presence of a warder, who made written notes. This was done on standard printed forms titled ‘The monitoring of conversations’ (Gespreksmonitering), but sometimes also on lined government-issue A4 paper. Indications are that this was standard practice, at least for certain categories of prisoners.
On Robben Island, visitors spoke to Mandela (and other prisoners) through a partition, and this regime also held sway at Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison. It was only in May 1984 that Mandela was allowed a ‘contact visit’ with his wife, Winnie Mandela, their eldest daughter, Zenani (Zeni), and one of his grandchildren, which meant they sat in a room with no partition, and he could embrace them for the first time. It can be assumed that visible monitoring continued.
In Mandela’s cottage at Victor Verster Prison, his conversations were monitored by a warden who sat in another room, out of sight of his visitors. This often seemed to be Major Charl Marais, who came to know Mandela and his responses to certain issues very well. (Indeed, towards the end of Mandela’s sojourn at Victor Verster, Marais skipped writing out certain passages, noting that Mandela’s views on these issues were ‘well-known’ or ‘had already been recorded’. As some transcripts show, Mandela also sometimes called him in during conversations with visitors to ask him to attend to some or other issue, such as the issuing of passports for family members and others.)
What was thoroughly unusual was that at least some of Mandela’s conversations were also recorded, and more completely transcribed. These were funnelled to Kobie Coetsee, who would decide whether or not to pass them on to the State President or other government role players. They provided Coetsee with an additional instrument for controlling the entire process surrounding Mandela – or at least the perception that he was doing so.
While, to the best of our knowledge, Mandela never said so in writing, indications are that – during his sojourn at Victor Verster at least – he knew his conversations were being recorded. On several occasions – faithfully reflected in the transcripts – he warned his visitors that they were ‘not alone’, and they would then start whispering. Sometimes, he switched on a noisy overhead fan, or tuned his radio to a music station. As a result, long and presumably vital passages in those conversations are not on record. Whether he ever used this knowledge to try to mislead his captors, or send them implicit messages, is not clear.
The transcripts begin in 1984 – two years after Mandela and his four fellow Rivonia trialists were moved from Robben Island to Pollsmoor Prison on the mainland. This helps to corroborate that, due to mounting international and domestic pressures, the situation surrounding Mandela – and the government’s strategic perception of it – had begun to change.
The cottage at Victor Verster Prison was particularly heavily bugged, and there were even bugs in the garden. At that stage, as the Coetsee archive reveals, Mandela was pursuing an extensive campaign to influence the views of other political prisoners, those who had just been released or were about to be released, as well as other internal (and, as it turns out, external) political leaders. Clearly, knowledge of what he was saying to them was meant to provide his captors with ongoing ‘feedback’ – information to be utilised for adjusting the continuing and increasingly pressured political process.
A mini-industry must have arisen around this activity. Transcribing taped conversations is tedious and time-consuming, and a number of prison staff must have been involved. Sometimes, when a particular conversation or meeting was thought to be politically critical, transcripts were called for and provided to Coetsee and other political role players within a day.
This helps to account for the uneven quality of the transcripts. Some were well recorded and transcribed. Others were poorly recorded, and transcribed by prison officials with a limited knowledge of English. Some deficient transcripts contain handwritten corrections, sometimes by more than one person. All these problems create layers of uncertainty that present the researcher with significant difficulties. Some sense can be discerned, but faithfully reproducing parts of these transcripts would simply have produced unreadable results. We therefore decided to provide edited versions of these transcripts, which we refer to as ‘plausible reconstructions’. Clearly, they cannot be taken as entirely faithful renditions. At the same time, though, we do believe they capture the gist of those conversations.
Sometimes, breaks occur in the transcripts when tapes are changed. One transcript of a conversation in the Victor Verster cottage mentions a tape being changed ‘on the Revox machine’ – a high-quality reel-to-reel tape recorder in use at the time. Presumably, other tape recorders were running as well, but the eavesdroppers seldom succeeded in constructing seamless records of the conversations. Of course, they could not ask their subjects to stop talking while the tapes were being changed.
At least one conversation with a group of visitors in the cottage at Victor Verster Prison was taped not only by the Department of Prisons but also by the National Intelligence Service (NIS). One file in the Coetsee archive contains two transcripts – a complete one by the Department of Prisons, and the other, selected pages from an NIS transcript which the prison officials identify and acknowledge.
This indicates that Mandela’s conversations – at least those in the cottage – were not only recorded by the prisons service, but also by NIS. Indeed, Niël Barnard, director-general of NIS at the time, confirms this in his book Secret Revolution: Memoirs of a Spy Boss (2015), and also claims that Mandela was well aware of it. (Barnard formed part of a secret government working group that held a series of discussions with Mandela from 1988 onwards about his political beliefs.) Yet Barnard’s account contains some anomalies. After briefly citing several conversations between Mandela and some of his visitors, he goes on to say:
‘How did we know what Mandela and his comrades told each other in the cottage at Victor Verster? Well, no intelligence service worth its salt will not record such vital historic conversations – especially if it formed part of those conversations. And no true freedom fighter – after all, Mandela was the founder of Umkhonto we Sizwe – would be so naïve as to think his conversations with a spy boss would not be recorded. Mandela was not born yesterday.’1
The clandestine recordings were an open secret,
