The psychiatrist known as ‘Dr Shock’

The Name of Aubrey Levin emerged during the health and human rights submission to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). This dealt primarily with the complicity of various elements of the medical profession in supporting and disguising the often nakedly brutish aspects of the maintenance of apartheid, within the military and police. The most widely known case was that of the doctors — Ivor Lang and Benjamin Tucker — who conspired with security police torturers in the case of the torture and murder of Steve Bantu Biko.

But there were many others, especially those medical practitioners who also operated as district surgeons and, in some cases, as active members of reservist security units. Some had retired by the new millennium, others were still in practice and one, involved in chemical and biological warfare research, had been appointed a professor at the University of Pretoria.

Like most of the judiciary, the medical professionals enjoyed high status under apartheid and continued to do so after the transition, although many were active and often enthusiastic collaborators or were horribly compromised. One such specialist was Jan Adriaan Plomp, professor of psychiatry. When the trade unionist and radical medical practitioner, Neil Aggett, died in detention in 1982, the police decided that it had to be shown that Aggett had committed suicide. Evidence given to the TRC was that Lieutenant S. P. Whitehead was ordered by a Brigadier Muller to gather evidence relating to the psychological make-up of Neil Aggett. This was to be done with the aim of proving that Aggett had suicidal tendencies. Muller stressed that it was important that it be shown that Aggett had committed suicide.

The state’s trump card was Professor Plomp who had never met Neil Aggett or his family or friends and had never even interviewed the police who had interrogated and tortured the anti-apartheid activist. But he had no problem in providing evidence of suicidal tendencies. He told the inquest into the death of Aggett:

‘Although Dr Aggett was brought up as an Anglican, there are indications that he did not keep to the church or religious connections from his early adult years. His journal shows that he was disillusioned with religion and, in his declaration to the security police, he mentions that he adheres to Marxism, an ideology which excludes religion. It must be mentioned here that loss of religious conviction and religious participation is one of the aspects of social isolation which is regarded by experts as one of the most significant in suicide.’

Such was the level of psychobabble put at the service of a murderous state and accepted as expert evidence by a compliant judiciary. But there were some practitioners who operated within the belly of the beast. These were the medical personnel, especially attached to the military, whose expertise was often used, abused and given full rein in the most distorted and damaging ways.

It was in this milieu that Aubrey Levin thrived. He was the psychiatrist who not only commanded the major psychiatric wing of the military hospital at Voortrekkerhoogte in Pretoria; he also rose to become the government’s head of mental health.

By the time the TRC came into being, Aubrey Levin, like a number of his colleagues, was already far away and long gone. He had migrated to Canada, to the city of Calgary in Alberta. Canada was also the destination of two medical practitioners who had worked with ‘Dr Death’, Wouter Basson, the man in charge of often bizarre chemical and biological warfare experiments. Levin was not connected with these. His field was psychiatry and his name emerged in relation to the ‘treatment’ and ‘cures’ offered to homosexual conscripts in the military. It was here that the pudgy, homophobic and proudly proclaimed extreme rightwinger, made his mark.

Hints of these surfaced at hearings of the TRC. But the commission decided not to pursue these or to subpoena Levin. It was left to a group of activists to follow up the allegations and to delve into the background, particularly into the psychiatric and surgical practices in the military. This included ‘gender reassignment’ surgery that had resulted in sometimes-horrific mutilations.

With backing from the Rowntree Trust, Mikki van Zyl, Jeanelle de Gruchy, Sheila Lapinsky, Simon Lewin and Graeme Reid started a major investigation. The Aversion Project looked into the human rights abuses of gays and lesbians in the apartheid military. This, in its turn, triggered further investigations by journalist Paul Kirk. These were published in August 2000 and resulted in the same tactic Levin had employed when his name emerged at the TRC: he threatened legal action.

Levin denied that he had taken part in any gender reassignment surgery — the surgical alteration of the genders of individuals. But he had never been accused of this. He was not a surgeon. The only allegation had been that he had referred military conscripts whom he could not ‘cure’ of homosexuality to the surgeons and their knives. That several of these difficult and dangerous operations were botched and others were left uncompleted was not a responsibility laid directly at the door of Levin. Possible knowledge of these ghastly practices most certainly is.

But there were many other accusations levelled at this son of the first Jewish member of the National Party. His family were perhaps unique as Jews who attempted to assimilate completely the Afrikaner nationalist ethos. Unlike other Jewish collaborators such as Percy Yutar, the state prosecutor of Nelson Mandela and the Rivonia trialists, the Levins did not align themselves primarily with the Jewish community or Zionist organisation. An uncle was the first Jewish NP member of parliament and young Aubrey apparently grew up as a perpetual outsider, pretending to be an insider in a party and regime riddled with anti-semitism.

Academic and far from the macho image to which he evidently aspired, Aubrey Levin played a prominent role in his local NP branch. He also tried to start a conservative student organisation while at university and, even before he qualified as a psychiatrist, manifested the homophobia for which he would become notorious. In 1968, as a general practitioner studying psychiatry, he wrote to parliament asking to be invited to speak on possible changes to the laws on homosexuality being contemplated at the time. He noted that in the course of his work he had ‘treated many homosexuals and lesbians and enjoyed some measure of success in therapy’. The therapy he referred to was the now widely discredited aversion therapy using electric shocks. Some colleagues called him ‘Dr Shock’.

On qualifying, he joined the army as a colonel, a fact that also raised eyebrows and caused comments to be made about political favouritism. He began practising in Ward 22 at the Voortrekkerhoogte military hospital near Pretoria. This was the ward set aside for the treatment of those classified ‘deviant’. The ‘deviant’ category in apartheid South Africa’s white military included not only male and female homosexuals but also heterosexual men who for pacifist or political reasons refused to undergo military training. Levin has admitted that he was in charge at Voortrekkerhoogte and that he used ‘aversion therapy’, including the use of ‘mild electric shocks’.

Individuals treated by him tell rather different tales. Only one of the people who, for a brief period, worked with him, has given evidence. A young psychologist intern, who adopted the name Trudi Grobler for her testimony, was so horrified by what she had seen that she reported what seemed to be blatant cases of abuse to her superiors and the University of Pretoria. She referred specifically to the case of a woman being ‘treated’ for lesbianism who had been so severely shocked that her shoes ‘flew off her feet’. The result was that Trudi Grobler was excluded from the psychiatric wing of the military hospital run by Aubrey Levin.

Levin’s ‘treatment’ of homosexuals, both male and female, comprised attaching electrodes to the arms of his subjects. These were connected to a machine operated by a dial calibrated from one to 10. In the case of suspected gay men, the subjects were shown black and white pictures of naked men and encouraged by Levin to fantasise about the pictures. They were then given increasingly painful shocks. This process was followed by showing the ‘patients’ Playboy centrefolds, which would be described in glowing terms by the psychiatrist, with no shocks administered. The same process, using pictures of women, counterposed with naked men, was employed with those women deemed to have lesbian tendencies.

Those individuals who made a public stand against the military at the time of conscription were also designated unstable and many were referred to Aubrey Levin. These were obviously not subjects for simple aversion therapy: they were reportedly the subjects for narco analysis. This involved the administration of drugs such as sodium pentathol — the so-called ‘truth’ drug — which totally lowered the inhibitions of the subjects to whom it was administered.

Levin admits to using narco analysis, but’only sparingly’ and in cases where patients ‘suffered severe post traumatic stress’. He implied that he had never used this therapy on people who were not severely disturbed. However, a military conscript referred to Levin when he refused to undergo military training, has given a starkly different story. He was regarded as a perfectly normal young man when he reported for military training and informed the authorities that, on principle, he could not serve in the apartheid forces. He was referred to the psychiatric unit and Aubrey Levin.

In an interview with me, he told how Levin had strapped him down and drip fed him some kind of drug that made him feel drowsy. He then apparently lost consciousness. It was only on the following day, again strapped down, with Levin standing over him, that he found out what had happened. Levin played back to him tape recordings of his uninhibited ravings, prompted by goading and questioning from the chubby psychiatrist. His innermost thoughts, fantasies and fears were laid bare and were mocked and teased by Levin. He heard himself eventually ‘howling like an animal’.

This process was repeated on several occasions. The victim was 18 at the time and neither his consent nor the consent of his parents was sought for the treatment he underwent. When he finally emerged from what he still describes as a nightmare, he suffered the same ‘disorientation’ mentioned by other Ward 22 patients. Years of therapy followed before he felt he had again achieved some degree of emotional stability. But although he went on to complete a doctorate at university and became a newspaper editor, the nightmare never disappeared.

These were serious allegations. They cried out to be investigated in depth. They never were. Just as the equally serious allegations against Levin of misconduct at the Fort England hospital near Grahamstown were not investigated. In many cases, however, these allegations of gross human rights abuse, amounted to the word of a patient, allegedly mentally unstable, against the word of a psychiatrist. But there were other staff present, people such as Trudi Grobler, whose evidence adds to a picture of depravity and barbarity, even torture, that makes a complete mockery of the Hippocratic oath of the medical profession.

There is also the very obvious evidence of the botched and half-completed operations undertaken by the military to ‘convert’ into the opposite gender those homosexuals deemed ‘incurable’. Agreement to undergo ‘conversion’ seems to have been the only way out of what was seen as the torture of aversion therapy.

At the very least Aubrey Levin should be able to point to those who undertook the surgery. He might also be able to explain to his former aversion therapy patients how it was that their memories of the intensity of the shocks was obviously exaggerated and why it was necessary for him to conduct the therapy in the first place.

The TRC never took advantage of the powers it had to delve into these allegations of abuse and gross impropriety. But then there were many areas that were opened up and, for one reason or another, were never examined by the TRC. Individuals, from lowly spies to assassins, blackmailers and the blackmailed, compromised teachers, judges, lawyers and civil servants — remained buried within the fabric of a society where many of those who manipulated them, and know and can use their secrets, also remain at large.

This was a reality that would come back to haunt the TRC — almost derailing this creature of compromise that, for all its many faults, at least revealed something of the hidden, horrifying past.

The survival of a ‘dirty tricks’ chief

Name: Horace William Doncaster, Major-General, Military Intelligence (rtd)

Date of birth: 09.02.1950; military number: 66339243E

Career soldier, 33 years service; promoted brigadier, 1993; major-general, 2000; given ‘employer-induced retrenchment package’ after publication of this investigation, November, 2001; retired, April, 2002.

Senior positions in and eventual director of MI ‘dirty tricks’ unit, Directorate of Covert Collection (DCC); handler of agents and operatives, commended for ‘intelligence’ work ‘in the bush’ in Namibia and Zimbabwe, for liaison work with police Special Branch and for the ‘development of a target policy on the ANC’.

Involved in planning and ordering cross-border raids. Never appeared before TRC. Never made amnesty application. Never gave any information. Retained Military Intelligence position under ANC government. Awarded good service medal 28 January 1998.

Horace William Doncaster is one of the great survivors from the ’sharp end’ of the repressive machinery of apartheid. His name is not widely known even within the military. For much of Horace William Doncaster’s career has been spent in the twilight world of military intelligence. In the year 2000 he was promoted from brigadier to the rank of general. Two years earlier, he was presented with a long-service medal by the then deputy defence minister, Ronnie Kasrils, a central committee member of the Communist Party. Kasrils remarked privately about Doncaster: ‘He is a professional. Before, he worked for them. Now, he works for us.’

Perhaps Horace William Doncaster is the epitome of the soldier-patriot motivated only by blind and dedicated service to whichever government is in power. Or he may be the true mercenary, interested only in ensuring his job and his pay. But he was also centrally involved in the bloodletting and terror of the apartheid years, including ’service on the border’. As such, he was given the opportunity to make a submission to the TRC, to clear away some of the murk of the past and to apologise for the slaughter and brutality carried out in the name of apartheid. Like so many others in the upper echelons, he chose to maintain his silence. He also chose to destroy and order the destruction of documentary evidence of that past. Many of his new, ANC, senior colleagues in Military Intelligence knew much, if anything about his earlier ‘work’.

The disappearance of the files, computer disks and equipment from the Directorate of Covert Collection (DCC), for example, was largely his responsibility. The evidence of most of the military’s ‘dirty tricks’ over the years vanished after Judge Richard Goldstone’s investigators blundered into the DCC headquarters near Pretoria in November 1992. In March of the following year, F. W. de Klerk hastily ordered the early retirement of 23 senior officers who had been too obviously compromised by so-called ‘third force’ actions. Goldstone’s inquiry had scored a significant blow. But the forced retirements amounted again to an attempt to slam the door on the past. Significantly, the Military Intelligence chief, General Stoffel van der Merwe, retained his post. Brigadier Doncaster took another career move upward: he became the director of DCC.

Doncaster was one of the relatively few ‘English’ conscripts who chose a career in the army. Less than three weeks after his nineteenth birthday, he was appointed a second lieutenant in the infantry corps. After further training he was sent in December 1969 for the first of several stints ‘on the border’. Between then and March 1973, he spent a total of nearly a year either based in Rundu on the Namibia/Angola border, at Katima Mulilo, across the Zambezi river from Zambia and at Chirundu near the eastern Zimbabwe/Zambia border. This was at a time when the South African military and police, often acting at cross purposes, were trying to destabilise Zambia, launching cross-border attacks and planting the land mines which, 30 years later, were still causing havoc.

What Doncaster did during those ‘border’ operations is not known, but whatever it was commended him to his superiors. He was later to be awarded the Pro Patria medal for this period and, in March of 1971, was promoted to full lieutenant. In June of that year he and another young infantry officer, W. E. Basson, were sent for ’special duty’ at army headquarters. Both Doncaster and Basson emerged as part of the Department of Military Intelligence (DMI). Nearly two weeks after this apparent graduation, Doncaster was posted to Chirundu in Zimbabwe where he spent 85 days and again attracted the praise of his superiors.

In March 1973, after returning from operations apparently in the Caprivi Strip of Namibia, Doncaster was reclassified as an intelligence officer and joined the Intelligence Corps. What he was then involved in for more than a year is a blank; but, once again, it was apparently extremely satisfactory as he was promoted to the rank of captain in May 1974. Shortly after, he took up a post as an instructor at the Military Intelligence college. Sometime in 1975, he was given at least one foreign posting. This may have been to an embassy, for additional training or to conduct a clandestine operation. Whatever he did must again have been highly satisfactory: by January 1978 he was a major and had been awarded the military bronze medal for good service, together with a military commendation certificate and the Pro Patria medal.

What Major Doncaster did between 1978 and 1980 also did his career prospects no harm. In 1979 he was awarded the military commendation medal and, on new year’s day, 1981, attained the rank of Commandant. His ‘hands on’ experience in Namibia also appears to have stood him in good stead: he was appointed at the same time as the second in command of the DMI ‘West Front’ at the highly secretive DCC. This meant helping to organise information gathering, agents and operatives in Namibia and Angola, deciding on targets in the region and planning the operations to eliminate, neutralise or otherwise deal with the targets. This appears to have been his real forte. His citation for the Southern Cross medal, awarded to him in 1983, makes it clear that he was a key figure in the total strategy being employed at the time. This strategy included the mass murder of suspected members of the Namibian independence movement, Swapo, and the disposal of their bodies at sea. By this time, Doncaster had become the senior staff officer in charge of the DMI ‘Home Front’ at the DCC.

Two of the operations with which he was directly involved and for which he received internal praise, were Skerwe and Vine. These were both attacks mounted on Maputo in Mozambique. Skerwe (Splinter) was the series of air strikes launched against what were assumed to be ANC houses in the Matola and Liberdade districts of the Mozambican capital. Doncaster and his unit apparently collected and collated the information sent in from agents in Maputo, selected the targets and decided how the operation was to proceed. According to their information, the only real threat to low-flying Impala aircraft was an anti-aircraft missile battery on the outskirts of the city. It, therefore, became a primary target.

Full details of the raid and its consequences were never released. It seems that between ten and 14 aircraft, armed with rockets, hit their targets shortly after dawn on 23 May 1983. Estimates of those killed ranged from three to 64, but were probably closer to the higher figure. Several houses used by ANC members were certainly demolished with a still unknown number of casualties, while a local creche and a jam factory were also destroyed.

Operation Vine involved a ‘recce’ seaborne landing in October 1983 on a beach outside Maputo. The target of the recce unit, defined by Doncaster and his DCC ‘desks’, was an office converted from former servants’ quarters on the roof of a four-storey apartment block near Maputo’s diplomatic sector. The office was an administration centre, which processed ANC members travelling in and out of South Africa. Military and security police spies reported that scrupulous records were kept in locked filing cabinets in the rooftop eyrie. In the apartment immediately beneath the office, lived six ANC members who worked in the building or elsewhere in Maputo. Mozambican officials occupied the other apartments.

The security establishment agreed that the files in the cabinets should be obtained. Doncaster and his ‘desks’ took on the task and developed an operational outline. It included a proposal to burgle the penthouse, escape with as many files as possible and leave behind incendiary charges, which would destroy the remaining documentation. In addition, Doncaster proposed developing special charges which could blast downwards through the reinforced concrete floor of the apartment block to kill the ANC members asleep below.

The operation was approved and a team of 11 recces, led by a captain, was selected. They trained for six weeks using mock-ups of the rooftop office and experimented with explosives on concrete pipes that were estimated to be the same thickness and consistency as the apartment building floor in Maputo. In the event, the recce squad could not get into the office. As ‘compensation’ they placed their explosive charges on the roof and detonated them by remote control as they headed back to the beach and their rendezvous with a ship lying offshore. The explosives tore three holes in the concrete roof and ripped apart the rooms below, killing and injuring the several occupants.

This was another success claimed by a security establishment, which praised Doncaster for his ‘competent leadership’. It had resulted in ‘the expertise, capacity and product of the Home Front desks’ rendering ‘one of the most important contributions to the combating of the enemies of the RSA’. But Doncaster was singled out in particular for his ability to work with the security police. This was seen as vital in the post-Simonstown council period which had devised the concept of a ‘total strategy’. For this strategy to be as effective as possible meant maximum co-operation and co-ordination between police and military units. Doncaster was a liaison officer with the police and this work, noted in his Southern Cross medal citation, ‘contributed to a better understanding between the two forces which, in turn, leads to greater effectiveness’.

Such good work earned a promotion to colonel in 1985 and the post of ‘Senior Staff Officer, Covert Collection, Division 1′. There was talk of perhaps a posting as a military attache. He certainly travelled to and spent time in countries such as Namibia, but seems to have retained his DCC post as the bloodletting and terror reached its gory peak. An internal appraisal in 1989 noted that he was responsible for building up the terrorism section of Military Intelligence. He was also apparently central to planning and developing an effective disinformation division. To what extent he was involved in the massive, combined military and police operation in Namibia in the run-up to the October 1989 election is still not known.

That month also saw the first cracks emerge in the wall of secrecy surrounding the police death squads as Butana Nofemela spoke out from his death row cell. This made the military ‘dirty tricks’ units all the more important; they might have to carry the day. Doncaster’s career continued to prosper. In 1991 he became chief of staff at ‘Central Collections’. At the same time, the former head of DCC, J. J. ‘Tolletjie’ Botha became chief of the ‘Central Collections Bureau’. In April 1993, Horace William Doncaster became a brigadier and the ‘Director of Covert Collection’. It was at this time that the greatest destruction of records, files and other documentation took place.

At this time too, Doncaster took over the handling of one of the DCC’s top spies and operatives, the military’s man in Maputo, the supposed shipping company agent Nigel Barnett. Doncaster remained his handler up until Barnett was arrested in Mozambique in March 1997. Military Intelligence had continued to pay this long-term spy up to February of that year. What he was doing, why he was doing it and how an apartheid-era operation continued to function in a friendly country after South Africa’s democratic transition remains a puzzle. Equally puzzling is how this trained killer and spy could walk free, apparently on bail for a serious offence that has never been scheduled to come to court.

Mister 200 per cent — the story of a killer spy

In the world of espionage where deceit and deception is a way of life, Nigel Barnett is an acknowledged master among that small band of human flotsam that constitute his peers. Among the tiny group aware of his existence and capabilities, he was known as ‘Mr 200 per cent’, one of that rare group who excel as both agents — spies — and operatives or ‘men of action’. Within Interpol, the international police agency, his names and background are known. The Swedish police certainly keep a file on the person whose last formal identity was Nigel Barnett. They have to, for Nigel Barnett (South African identity number 500630 5202006) remains a suspect in the 1986 murder of Swedish Prime Minister, Olaf Palme.

He may today no longer be using the name Nigel Barnett and may have dyed his dark brown hair, always parted on the left. Even the two identity card photographs that exist of Nigel Barnett and taken only two years apart, in 1990 and 1992, reveal totally different hairstyles and hair lengths and could, at first sight, seem to be different people. In another identity document, issued in 1981 in the name of Henry William Bacon, the photograph of the spy who was named Leon van der Westhuizen when he was born, shows the same man with a heavy, dark beard and moustache. Two years later, in October 1983, and as Nicho Esslin, he was clean shaven and with a rather shorter hairstyle than either of his photographs as Nigel Barnett.

All of the documents are genuine, three of them having been issued in South Africa and one by the South African trade mission in Mozambique. All of them were found in Nigel Barnett’s apartment in Maputo in 1997 by Mozambique police investigating a personal feud between what they thought were two businessmen. After 15 years living undetected as the top South African Military Intelligence agent in Mozambique, Nigel Barnett had become careless or, perhaps, arrogantly self confident. He became embroiled publicly in a personal row. This he decided to settle by paying some street urchins to set fire to his adversary’s yacht. The scheme backfired when the urchins were caught and identified him. When police raided his apartment they discovered enough material to reveal that Nigel Barnett was, at the very least, a spy.

In prison for a short period before being released to await the lengthy legal process for attempted arson, he was interviewed by Mozambican, South African and Swedish authorities. He could hardly deny his spying activities and quite readily confessed, but only to sending routine and mundane information about the port and its traffic to his handlers. He was even less forthcoming about the rest of his life and his background. He sketched a fairly pedestrian existence, at all times giving himself a generally passive, background role. The general outline does appear to have been fairly accurate, the detail not at all so.

For the life of Nigel Barnett/Henry Bacon/Nicho Esslin was anything but mundane. He was also far from being the passive professional voyeur or non-aggressive traffic policeman and navy diver he claimed once to have been. Born in Queenstown in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa on 29 May 1949, he was named Leon van der Westhuizen by his mother who put him up for adoption. A local couple, British-born Jeffrey Harold Walker Bacon and his Swedish missionary wife, Aina Amanda Eriksson, completed all the formalities and adopted the child as a younger brother for their son, Olaf, the survivor of twin boys born to Amanda Eriksson two years earlier. The new addition to the family was then registered as Henry William Bacon and, as such, went into the world.

He was a tall, strong and athletic boy who seems to have protected his older brother from ‘bacon and eggs’ teasing in their youth. School for both boys was at the prestigious Dale College in King Williams Town where Henry Bacon proved himself more on the sports field than in the classroom. When he was a lanky 15-year-old the woman he thought of as his biological mother died. He was very close to her and it was from her that he learned the Swedish which he still speaks. The death was a blow. An even bigger one was the discovery that Amanda Eriksson was not his mother; that he was adopted. When and how he discovered this is not known, but he seems to have broken off almost all contact with his brother and father while he was still in his teens.

Certainly he seems to have moved as far away from home as he could once he completed his schooling in 1967. Like other white youths of his age, he was conscripted into the army and, in June of 1969, joined the navy where he became a diver. A motorcycle accident in suburban Cape Town in 1971 seems to have put paid to this part of his career, but he had developed a taste for the armed services and a liking for danger. Rhodesia promised both with a bush war underway and a demand for trained soldiers. Henry William Bacon headed north and joined the British South African Police, the paramilitary regiment that proudly boasted the British Queen Mother as its colonel-in-chief.

Henry Bacon excelled. He was drafted into the Special Branch, the unit that specialised in information gathering, interrogation and ‘pseudo operations’. As such, he became accustomed to the use of disguise and false identity. Like others of the unit, he also ‘blacked up’ at times to get closer to guerrilla groups or to terrorise villagers in the name of the guerrillas. The BSAP Special Branch pioneered these operations in the Zimbabwe bush before the most brutal of the special forces, the Selous Scouts, made such practices their own. Literate, quick witted and athletic, Henry Bacon received training and practical experience as an agent and an operator. He extracted information by casual means and cruel; he eavesdropped, debriefed sources, wrote reports and killed. It was a time of secret cross-border raids, of sometimes terrible bloodshed, and often wholesale slaughter; a time when the social misfits who hacked off, dried and wore the ears of the killed as necklaces, were regarded merely as ‘hard men’. In this milieu, Henry Bacon thrived, was promoted and decorated. A citation for ‘gallantry’ issued on 5 October 1979 commends him for his conduct ‘whilst engaged in anti-terrorist operations’.

The operations to which this citation refers took place in the Lumgundi district near the northern town of Sinoia in late 1978 and, in particular, on 8 and 9 January 1979. Bacon’s commanding officer, Superintendent Nigel Seaward, recommended Bacon for the award, not just for the ‘specialised operations’ but also for his conspicuous dedication to duty. The 29-year-old Detective Section Officer not only built up a network of informers when he ran the Special Branch office at Sipolilo, he also took part in regular ‘clandestine operations’. Above all, he gained admiration for his dedication when, on two separate occasions, he volunteered to give up long-planned leave during which he hoped to marry and honeymoon in Sweden. After the second postponement, there seems to have been no further mention of marriage.

Also operating in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe at the time as part of a joint BOSS and South African National Intelligence Service unit was At Nel. As a colonel in charge of ‘East Front’ at the Directorate of Covert Collection, Nel was to become Bacon’s ‘operational handler’ for the best part of a decade until 1994. Given the small numbers and the closeness of the co-operation between the South African spy unit in Zimbabwe and the BSAP Special Branch, it is most likely that Nel and Bacon met in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe as minority rule crumbled. Bacon was obviously one of the bitter-enders who saw the last vicious fights to stave off the inevitable transition to democratic elections. Like thousands of others in his position, he also headed south as independence dawned in Zimbabwe. A highly trained spy and killer, he was just what apartheid South Africa wanted at the time. He had also apparently picked up some knowledge of Portuguese, possibly as a result of cross-border operations in Mozambique.

Although Bacon claimed only to have left Zimbabwe in 1981, it seems most probable that he returned to South Africa early in the previous year together with the special forces members who went to make up the apartheid state’s 6-Recce battalion. It is also possible that he was recruited just before Zimbabwe’s independence elections by Major Neil Kriel the Selous Scout who was the founder of what became known as the CCB, the military’s dirty tricks, assassination and mass murder squad. Kriel was sent into newly independent Zimbabwe by Brigadier ‘Tolletjie’ Botha to sign up as many of the ‘hard men’ he could find to serve the cause of the apartheid state. Some were to remain behind in Zimbabwe to provide information and, in some cases, to carry out assigned tasks. Most were to come south, either to be absorbed into the ‘recce’ groups or to serve in the CCB.

However he was recruited, Bacon’s range of special skills ensured that he was attached directly to the Military Intelligence directorate — the Directorate of Covert Collection — as an agent and operative. He reported ultimately to At Nel as the head of the East Front desk that was responsible for actions in and information from Mozambique. But he was also available for service in other areas and did travel, both within Africa and Europe. His very first operation appears to have been within months of returning to South Africa. He was sent into the Mozambique capital, Maputo to pinpoint, probably with the aid of established ‘Rhodesian’ informers in the Frelimo government’s security forces, the houses used by South African ANC personnel. This led to ‘Operation Beanbag’. The attack column drove into the Mozambique capital, Maputo, and attacked and destroyed three houses used by the ANC. The police provided the basic information about the houses to be attacked. SB Colonel Jac Buchner and Major Callie Steijn of Military Intelligence were responsible for overall planning. A former Rhodesian Special Air Services officer, Garth Barrett, was in command of the column. A DCC operative from Maputo, apparently Henry Bacon, drove into South Africa to give the final briefing to Barrett before the column moved into Mozambique and Maputo. There they attacked and destroyed the houses. Sixteen ANC members, a Portuguese electrical company engineer, Jose Ramos who happened to be driving by, and three Recces died in the raid. Two of the Recces, Robert Hutchinson and Ian Suttill, were British, all were SAS members who had fled independent Zimbabwe.

According to Nigel Barnett’s version of his life, he was, at the time, still leading a relatively quiet life in the Wankie district of Zimbabwe. It was only in the middle of 1981, that he left Zimbabwe and reapplied to join the South African Navy in Cape Town. He certainly did spend time in 1981 in the Navy. However, this appears to have been a period of reorientation, both to accustom him again to the workings of a port and to provide additional training. Some of this time was spent in Durban and, while at the Simonstown naval base near Cape Town, he appears to have worked with ‘Com Nav’ the naval communications division and to have been attached to security. His official designation was as an officer in the personnel section. However, he may have been able to travel abroad as part of the carefully arranged ‘deep cover’ prepared for him by Colonel At Nel. As Nigel Barnett, shipping agent, he did require some knowledge of several overseas ports, in particular, Hong Kong.

What he did and where he went is not known. All that is clear is that, in December 1982, he officially changed his surname from Bacon to Esslin having applied through the home affairs department under the Aliens Act. This name change was gazetted on 10 December and Bacon promptly resigned from the Navy. The sequence of name and job changes that began in December seems to have been co-ordinated by Colonel At Nel as part of the creation of a ‘legend’ for the man once known as Henry William Bacon.

So naval personnel officer Bacon who left Cape Town in December 1982, arrived in Durban in January 1983 as Nicho Esslin who had applied to join the Durban-based Polaris Shipping Company. This was one of the many ‘front’ companies set up by the security establishment over the years. They operated as legitimate companies, often made substantial profits, but were, above all else, security operations, providing everything from ‘cover’ for spies and assassins, to channels for smuggling arms, laundering money and financing bribes and destabilisation measures.

But Nicho Esslin was not given a job when he reported for duty to the Polaris office in Durban’s Cowey Road. Instead, under the name of Nigel Barnett, a name and identity selected by At Nel, he became a director of another front company, Lesotho Mountain Carriers (LMS), with offices in Maseru and Maputo. LMS was a subsidiary of Polaris. The shipping company was, in turn, owned by the main DCC front company, Pan African Investment Corporation, and acted as an agent for the Gold Star Shipping Line. Gold Star was a ‘front’ for one of the Israeli security agencies. Bacon/Esslin/Barnett was obviously being prepared for an important posting with the collaboration of Israeli intelligence.

Apart from a name on a single bank account in Durban, into which the DCC paid regular sums, Henry William Bacon had vanished. Anyone checking on him, might discover that he had legally changed his surname to Esslin. A dedicated researcher with contacts inside the home affairs department might also be able to discover that Bacon had become Nicho Esslin, with the same South African identity number 490529 5115 00 6. That Nicho Esslin’s identity book bearing this number had only been issued in October 1983, would indicate that Nicho Esslin still existed then.

Only Nicho Esslin effectively ceased to exist within two months of Bacon’s name change, although a bank safe deposit box was maintained under this name. From February, 1983, there was only Nigel Barnett, supposedly born in the then nominally independent ‘homeland’ of Transkei one day, one month and one year later than Bacon/Esslin and bearing the identity number 500630 5202 00 6. From that moment, all contact with family and former friends ceased. Nigel Barnett, a director of Lesotho Mountain Carriers, with no military history and a career in transport was on his way to becoming the ‘deep cover’ agent in Maputo.

According to Nigel Barnett’s claimed work history, he emigrated from South Africa to Hong Kong in 1982 where he worked for the Gold Star Line and was based in Kobe, Japan, Bangkok and Colombo. His permanent residence was said to be Hong Kong and he was said to have visited Beira and Maputo aboard a Gold Star ship in 1983. Since such history could be checked, it is probable that Barnett did, in fact spend time in the various Gold Star offices and did visit Mozambique. In prison in Mozambique in 1997, he admitted that he had travelled to Hong Kong in ‘early 1984’ to familiarise himself with the harbour and the Gold Star office. He had also spent ten days visiting other ports such as Kobe and Bangkok before being appointed as the agent for Gold Star in Maputo. At no time, he said, did he receive any training as a spy.

This was one of the many lies of a man whose entire life was a lie. Apart from his Rhodesia/Zimbabwe experiences, evidence exists that he attended an eight-week theoretical and practical intelligence course at the DCC headquarters in Pretoria between January and March of 1984, shortly before his long-term posting to Maputo. His brother thought he had been attached to naval security after his return from Zimbabwe and before he lost all contact.

Given only what is known of the man who became Nigel Barnett, it seems obvious that he was a highly trained spy and killer. He certainly also had a fascination with weapons and held at least four licenced firearms at the time of his arrest in 1997. These were a 10mm Glock pistol, a .22 calibre Astra pistol, and .308 Spandau Mauser rifle and his apparently favoured weapon, a .357 magnum revolver. The latter was the calibre and type of weapon which ended the life of Olaf Palme in a Stockholm street shortly before midnight on 30 January 1986. The weapon which killed Palme has never been found.

However, in Maputo, throughout the bloody years of destabilisation, Nigel Barnett appears to have operated mainly collecting, collating and sending information to his masters. Most of this was information about the ANC, on members, houses where they stayed, vehicles they used, who visited them and when. He provided ‘target’ information, including photographs and building plans. Whatever operations he was involved in outside of Mozambique may well have been in another guise so as not to endanger his spying function in Mozambique. He was, however, aware of various activities within the region, including the use of poison supplied by police scientist Lothar Neethling, for use against ANC members in Swaziland.

Barnett also named two spies in the ANC office, Francis Malaya and a man known only as ‘Monde’ who passed on information via a Mozambican citizen, Carlos Pinto, to Antonio Pombo, a former military liaison officer at the South African trade mission in Maputo who was based in the Swazi capital, Mbabane. Envelopes were carried to and from Maputo and Swaziland by Carlos Pinto. This was at the time when South African hit squads were bombing, killing and kidnapping real and imagined anti-apartheid activists in Swaziland. These actions, the TRC ruled, led to gross violations of human rights.

These facts alone — and most of them were made available to the TRC — should have ensured that serious attempts were made to bring Nigel Barnett before the TRC for questioning. Yet no attempt was made to do so. But he was interviewed in prison by a Swedish investigator attached to the TRC. However, there was no attempt made to subpoena Colonel At Nel or any of Barnett’s other named handlers. One of these was Jack Widowson, allegedly a member of Hendrik van den Bergh’s ‘Z’ squad and the police special task team. His name was also linked to the 1977 murders of Robert and Jean-Cora Smit. These the TRC found had been committed by members of the security forces. The deaths constituted a ‘gross violation of human rights’ for which there had been no amnesty applications. There was also no attempt to interview or investigate Widowson whose name appeared in the 1992 Steyn report as having been connected with ‘third force activities’. In the post-apartheid dispensation, Widowson became a member of the ANC government’s National Intelligence Agency.

But it is Nigel Barnett who remains of particular interest to the Swedish authorities. They are aware that elements in the apartheid security services had discussed the possible assassination of Olaf Palme. The Swedish prime minister was seen as a dangerous enemy. He had been instrumental in steering Sweden’s Social Democratic government into solid support for the ANC and, in the week before he died, had granted virtual diplomatic recognition to the liberation movement. There was considerable other circumstantial evidence as well which links South African security forces with at least plotting, and perhaps carrying out, the murder of Palme. South African security, for example, gathered regular reports on Palme’s activities from a Swedish agent. The agent was a medical doctor and academic who was recruited while working in South Africa.

The Swedish police are also aware that Barnett failed a polygraph (lie detector) test. This is no positive proof of any wrongdoing. However, in his various interviews with Mozambican, South African and Swedish authorities, he gave details of his various visits to Sweden. None of these coincided with the death of Olaf Palme. But he did mention that, on one visit, he walked through Stockholm at a time when there was a light dusting of snow on the ground. This casual comment resulted in the Swedish police checking the weather at the times Barnett admitted to having been in Sweden. On none of these occasions was there any snow on the ground. But, on the night that Olaf Palme was shot, the description of the weather and the streets of Stockholm matched.

Once again, this was not proof positive that Bacon/Esslin/Barnett had been in any way connected with the murder of the Swedish prime minister. But he had almost certainly been in Sweden on at least one other occasion which none of his various passports reflected. Interestingly, at the time of the assassination a new man had just taken over the ander lande (other countries) desk at the DCC. This was the unit responsible for clandestine activities across the world and its new commander was a long distance assassin with a reputation for trying to prove himself. However, Craig Michael Williamson, the letter bomb killer and London bomber, denied knowing anything about the killing of Olaf Palme or of the existence of Nigel Barnett.

The only link that emerged came from Eugene de Kock. He recalled being told by former security police ‘analyst’ and gun runner to Inkatha, Philip Powell, that two of Williamson’s close associates, Jonty and Cindy Leontsinis, knew who had carried out the Palme assassination. Jonty Leontsinis, a Johannesburg horticulturist who operated within security police and Military Intelligence fronts, was another friend from Williamson’s school days. Neither Jonty nor Cindy Leontsinis, who, in 2001, were living on their farm in KwaZulu-Natal and running a seed company, were ever investigated or interviewed by the TRC. Powell, although implicated in gun-running left for England to study for an MA degree at Warwick University.