March 13, 2025 • 48 mins
In the last episode, we looked at a strange series of rallies held in cities across the United States in 2012 - American neo-nazis were rallying in support of white South African Farmers. But how did they get that idea in their heads? The rallies were put on by a group called The South Africa Project, run by a woman I'd never heard of. Digging into this mysterious South African, I found a lot more than I bargained for - bombings and mercenaries and an international network of fascist terror.
Sources:
https://www.24sata.hr/news/hsp-as-prisegnuli-na-vjernost-domovini-i-donaldu-trumpu-513281#google_vignette
https://balkaninsight.com/2017/02/27/us-condemns-zagreb-neo-nazi-march-for-trump-02-27-2017/
https://www.icty.org/x/cases/naletilic_martinovic/cis/en/cis_naletilic_martinovic_en.pdf
https://archive.idavox.com/index.php/2012/09/24/the-aryan-nations-show-of-farce-in-dc/
https://time.com/3927339/dylann-roof-charleston-shooting-flags/
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,863800,00.html
https://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/amphtml/1981/0219/021960.html
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hate-watch/anti-genocide-protests-around-nation-were-organized-neo-nazis/
Visser, Myda. 1999. University of Pretoria. DIE IDEOLOGIESE GRONDSLAE EN ONlWIKKELING VAN DIE BLANKE FASCISTIESE BEWEGINGS IN SUID-AFRIKA, 1945-1995
Hill, Ray, and Andrew Bell. The Other Face of Terror: Inside Europe’s Neo-Nazi Network. Grafton, 1988.
https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/finalreport/volume%202.pdf
https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/june-16-soweto-youth-uprising
https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/apartheid-early-1980s
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Col Zone media, come with me for a moment. Back
to February of twenty seventeen. It was just weeks after
Donald Trump had been sworn in as president for his
first term. There was a lot of uncertainty, a lot
of fear. Millions of Americans marched in Washington, d C.
(00:26):
To protest his presidency in its first days. There was
still some hope in those early days that maybe he
hadn't meant most of what he'd said, maybe it was
campaign bluster, hot air and empty words. Within a week, though,
he'd signed an executive order banning travel to the United
(00:47):
States from predominantly Muslim countries, sparking a wave of protests
at airports and signaling that he intended to follow through
on his xenophobic, anti immigrant campaign promises. A month into
his pre tens of thousands of Americans in at least
fifty cities around the country rallied for a protest on
President's Day, calling it not my President's Day. But that
(01:12):
same week, half a world away, a very different march
was taking place in Zagreb's city center. A few dozen
men in black uniforms stood in formation, led by Drazen Klemenek,
leader of the Croatian Fascist Party HSP. They chanted the
slogans of the Eustasia, the Croatian fascist movement of the
(01:36):
nineteen thirties and forties. Alongside the Holocaust carried out by
Nazi Germany, the Ustasia had undertaken a genocide of their own,
operating their own concentration camps and slaughtering whole villages of Jews,
Roma and Serbs. As those marchers assembled in the city
square and the brass band finished playing, the men took
(01:57):
an oath of allegiance to their Croatian homeland and and
to Donald Trump. Most of those marchers had empty hands,
(02:28):
some held brass instruments, but at the front of the
column several marchers held flags, the Croatian flag, of course,
and an American flag to show their support for Donald Trump.
But one man at the very front of the line
was carrying the flag of the German Ultranationalist Party NPD.
(02:50):
The march's organizer, Drazen Klemenek, was arrested that day for
shouting zadom spremni, which is the Croatian equivalent of yelling
Siegheil in Germany, but when he did get a chance
to speak to the press, he explained the presence of
the German NPD flag. The man who'd been carrying it
(03:11):
was Alexander Nydeline, a representative from NPD, and he was
there to show his party's support for HSP. But that
march in February of twenty seventeen wasn't Alexander Nydline's first
visit to the Balkans. In nineteen ninety three, nyde Line
enlisted in the Convicts Battalion, a paramilitary unit of the
(03:34):
Croatian Defense Council made up of prisoners and foreign mercenaries.
Its leader was later convicted of crimes against humanity for
his actions during the Bosnian War. Nydeline didn't stay with
the unit for very long. In the years since, he's
taken issue with being called a mercenary, arguing that he
(03:54):
never actually got paid. Because just before Christmas of nineteen
ninety three and two other German mercenaries deserted from the
Convicts Battalion. They took as many guns as they could
carry and disappeared into the night. A few weeks later,
those German mercenaries and those stolen guns turned up seven
(04:16):
thousand miles away in South Africa. I'm Molly conger, and
this is weird little guys. This is a story about
(04:44):
Monica Stone. I think she may be our first weird
little guy who happens to be a woman. There was
Dallas Humber, I guess, the voice of Taragram, but she
wasn't the central character in that story, just the disembodied
voice urging young men to kill. Weird little guy is
(05:06):
a gender neutral term in my mind. I haven't been
avoiding telling the stories of women in the white power movement.
It's just that, for the most part, the very nature
of their beliefs kind of prevents women from taking center stage,
even in their own lives. But this this is a
story of a woman who has dedicated her life to
(05:29):
the cause, and in her case, the cause is apartheid.
Like all my stories, this is really only kind of
about one weird little guy. And this might be the
widest net I've ever cast trying to understand one person's life.
The story covers decades and spans continence. There are bombings
(05:52):
and shootouts and murders. There's international gun smuggling, mercenaries and
paramilitaries and war crimes, suessful assassinations and foiled terrorist plots.
Their trials and prison breaks, and crimes left unpunished, some
with extradition petitions left pending for decades with no hope
of justice. There are some familiar landmarks, names of people
(06:18):
and organizations I recognize, like David Duke and the Ku
Klux Klan and the Turner Diaries. But there are people
in groups in this story that were new to me,
characters we haven't met yet and may see again in
future episodes exploring these fascist friendships across borders. But at
its core, this is a story about Monica Stone. She
(06:42):
isn't in all the parts of the story playing out
all around her, but the context matters more than ever,
because this week we're going to dig into a weighty idea,
the fascist international. I haven't forgotten where we started. Maybe
you have. That's understandable. I left you hanging there for
(07:03):
a week while I recovered from a stomach virus. But
two weeks ago we were talking about white genocide. The
story began in Sacramento in twenty twelve. A group of
neo Nazi skinheads was rallying at the state capitol in
California to raise awareness of the plight of the white
South African farmer in that episode, I picked apart this myth,
(07:25):
the idea that white farmers are being slaughtered every day
in a post apartheid South Africa, that white South Africans
are in danger of being completely wiped out by a
white genocide. That idea has been quite popular among white
supremacists around the world for some time. Norwegian mass murderer
Anders Bravik devoted a few pages of his fifteen hundred
(07:48):
page manifesto to it. When Dylan Rufe murdered nine people
at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina in twenty fifteen,
his Facebook profile photo showed him at the camera in
a black jacket with two patches on the breast, the
flag of Rhodesia and the flag of apartheid South Africa.
(08:11):
I come across the idea pretty often in my work.
So many of my weird little guys are obsessed with
the idea of a fully segregated society and the state
violence against black people that comes with it. But that's
where the idea lived. It lived on stormfront and on
four Chan, and in manifestos and on Nazi podcasts. Those
(08:35):
rallies in twenty twelve were pretty unique. The public display
of the apartheid era South African flag at an American
political rally was unusual. It was unusual enough that it
was mentioned in news stories three years later when the
flag appeared again on Dylan Rufe's jacket. But like so
(08:57):
many once fringe ideas, it's part of the mainstream political discourse. Now.
I won't rechread all of that. We talked about it
in the last episode, but now the President of the
United States is repeating the talking points from the flyers
those skinheads printed out in twenty twelve, And I originally
set out to just talk about those rallies as a
(09:20):
sort of standalone story, this strange incident that seems to
have happened in total isolation. As far as I've been
able to find, the group behind it had never put
on a public event before, and aside from a poorly
attended follow up in DC later that same year, they
never did again. The website has been offline for years,
(09:41):
and there's hardly any mention of the group at all anywhere.
A lot of white supremacist groups are short lived, so
that's not really unusual, and this group, the South Africa Project,
was pretty obviously just two people running a side project
out of an Air Nations po box. But I can't
(10:03):
let anything go, so I started to dig, and it
became clear very quickly that there was a hell of
a lot more going on here than I thought. Back
in twenty twelve, when those rallies took place, both the
SPLC and the ADL had stories on their website explaining
(10:24):
that those events had been organized by American neo Nazis.
Both groups zeroed in on Morris Goulette, a longtime Arian
Nations member and the man who'd given comments to the
press as the organization's spokesman. Both outlets identified several local
organizers of those assorted rallies. The Golden State Skinheads hosted
(10:44):
in Sacramento. Billy Roper headlined the rally in Arkansas. Rallies
in Tennessee and Pennsylvania were hosted by members of Folksfront
and so on. But in one single line in a
blog post that isn't even on the ADL's website anymore,
the events are attributed to a woman named Monica Stone
(11:08):
in this passing mention crediting Stone with the idea for
the rallies. The post notes that she was a South
African immigrant and a longtime member of the Christian Defense League.
The CDL was a Christian identity group that grew out
of the same milieu as the Aryan Nations in the sixties,
but it never really achieved the same level of influence.
(11:32):
But that's all there is. Monica and Louisiana. Monica from
South Africa, Monica speaking at the Aryan Nations World Congress
about the need for international solidarity between American neo Nazis
and africanter nationalists. But Google gives you exactly nothing about
this woman before or after this brief moment in time
(11:56):
in twenty twelve. This point, I'm locked in. I have
to know more about this woman. How did she end
up in Mandeville, Louisiana, a town of just ten thousand
people that I've only heard of because it's where David
Duke lives. So I started with the information that I
(12:17):
have a name, hopefully it's her real name, a city,
and some potential known associates. If her longtime membership in
the Christian Defense League is the only notable fact about her,
maybe that means she was a very important member of
the group, And lucky for me, it turns out she
(12:39):
was the organization has or had, I guess, since it's defunct.
As far as I can tell, been run by a
man named Robert K. Warner since the seventies, and when
he took over, he moved its headquarters from California to
Louisiana to be closer to his friend David Duke, and
in addition into the Christian Defense League, Warner also ran
(13:02):
a Christian identity church called the New Christian Crusade Church.
Corporate filings for the church show Robert K. Warner as
an officer of the organization, which I expected, but in
twenty eleven he filed an amendment adding someone named Monica
Huggett as the church's chief financial officer, and he changed
(13:25):
the address on file to a residential address in Mandeville, Louisiana.
Property records for Saint Tammany Parish show that a mortgage
was taken out at that address by James Stone in
nineteen ninety two, but after he died, the property was
sold by his widow, and on the documents for the sale,
(13:46):
she's listed as Monica hugget Stone. And that's the kind
of concrete paper trail I love to see. There's no
doubt at all here that the Monica Stone behind those
twenty twelve rallies is the Monica Huggot who married James
Stone in two thousand and lived in Mandeville, Louisiana, two
(14:07):
miles away from David Duke. So now I have a
new name, Monica Huggot, and this is where I ran
into trouble. Almost immediately, everything is in Afrikaans. Most of
the English language material about someone named Monica Huggot is
(14:30):
about the renowned British conductor and baroque violinist. But that
is an entirely different person who I am almost one
hundred percent sure has never helped an Italian terrorist build
a bomb. Violinists have to be very careful with their hands,
you know. But they were a handful of extremely tantalizing
(14:51):
clues that convinced me to power through the agony of
trying to translate blurry old PDFs. One of the first
English Langua sources I found referring to a South African
named Monica Huggett is the final report of the South
African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission
(15:14):
was authorized by President Nelson Mandela in nineteen ninety five
and it was chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The body's
goal was exactly what it says in the name, to
find the truth about what happened under apartheid and try
to find a way to move forward as a nation.
The TRC had three central tasks to discover the causes
(15:38):
in nature of human rights violations in South Africa between
nineteen sixty and nineteen ninety four, to identify victims with
a goal of paying reparations, and to allow amnesty for
those who fully disclosed their involvement in politically motivated human
rights violations. This wasn't a tribunal, this was a restorative
(16:01):
justice process. They hoped to be able to provide amnesty
to people who were honest. Over the course of three years,
the Commission heard testimony from over twenty thousand people, both
victims and perpetrators. Monica Hugget did not, as far as
I can tell, ever, testify before the Commission, but her
(16:23):
name is in there. Specifically, it appears in Volume two,
the seven hundred page portion of the report dealing with
quote the Commission of gross violations of Human Rights, and
more specifically, it's in Chapter seven Political Violence in the
era of negotiations and transition. Under the subheading links with
(16:45):
international right wing groups, the report reads, the first link
between ultra right terrorism and foreign agencies came to light
in nineteen eighty two when mister Fabio Mariello, mister Massimobulo
and mister Uni Genio's office, all white foreign expatriates known
as the White Commando, were convicted of the nineteen seventy
(17:06):
nine bombing of the offices of prominent academic doctor Jan Lombard.
Originally mister KuPS Vermullen and Miss Monica Hugget, a foreign
right winger, were arrested with them, but Huggitt turned state
witness and Vermullin was released after a few days. Hugget's
name was subsequently linked to the shootout in March nineteen
ninety four between the South African police and three German
(17:27):
right wingers in the Donkerhook area. One German right winger,
mister Stephen Rayes, was arrested, mister Thomas Kuons was shot dead,
and a third, mister Horst Cleans, later arrested. A fourth,
mister Alexander Ndline, was later charged in the Cullen and
Magistrates Court for illegal possession of a firearm. And I
(17:48):
think you can see why I was willing to invest
the effort to find out more about this, because that's
a hell of a thing to find under the first
rock you turn over Italian terrorists bombing university offices in
Pretoria nineteen seventy nine, German mercenaries getting into a deadly
shootout with the police in nineteen ninety four, And there
(18:09):
she is right at the center of two separate acts
of pro apartheid terrorism fifteen years apart. Now there are
some problems here. First of all, her name is spelled wrong,
only a little wrong. It's missing one of the teas.
But Alexander Nydelin's name is spelled so incorrectly that you
(18:32):
couldn't find this by searching for his name. The report
calls him Alexander Niedneloin, which as far as I can tell,
is not anyone's name or a real German name at all.
And the bombing of Professor Lombard's offices at the University
of Pretoria happened in nineteen eighty, not nineteen seventy nine.
(18:53):
It also describes Monica Huggett as a quote foreign right winger,
which really threw me off at first. I've heard her talk.
She sounds South African, and she's even said in multiple
interviews that she was born and raised there. The confusion
in the report maybe because she had publicly identified herself
(19:14):
as a member of the American ku Klux Klan, and
that may have been interpreted as her being American, And
by the time the Commission was starting their work, she
had left South Africa and was living in the United States.
They never actually had a chance to speak to her.
I'm willing to cut them some slack on the details here.
(19:35):
They were close enough for government work, as my dad
used to say, and they had a lot of work
to do. But as my subsequent research shows, beyond a
shadow of it out, Monica Huggett was born and raised
South African. But keep those four Germans in the back
of your mind for now. We'll see them again. Alexander Nydeline,
(19:58):
you've already met the German NPD member swearing allegiance to
Donald Trump at a Croatian Nazi rally in twenty seventeen.
According to blurry old scans of arrest warrants from nineteen
ninety three, Stephen Rays and Thomas Kunst were the other
two German mercenaries he deserted with just before Christmas that year,
and just as an aside, I am admittedly not at
(20:21):
all an expert on the Bosnian War, so it took
me a minute to parse the letterhead on the warrants.
They were issued by the non existent country of the
Croatian Republic of Hertzeg Bosnia, which explains why Nydelein had
no problem re entering Croatia after fleeing as a fugitive
all those years ago, and the fourth man forced Glens
(20:46):
he still wanted for murder in Namibia. Early on in
my search for more information about this mysterious woman at
the center of these two terror plots carried out by
foreign neo Nazis, I found a master's thesis submitted by
Mada Visser to the University of Pretoria in nineteen ninety nine.
(21:07):
It's in Afrikaans but translated. The title is the Ideological
Foundations and Development of the White Fascist Movements in South
Africa nineteen forty five to nineteen ninety five. After some
truly agonizing trial and error trying to find a way
to translate a three hundred page PDF without paying for something.
(21:28):
The thesis was immensely useful, but every clue just raised
more questions, and I was running into dead end after
dead end trying to track down the primary sources in
the footnotes. I can find a lot of things, but
digitize archives of forty year old newspapers published in another
(21:49):
language in another country that might not even still exist
at all. For all I know, I came up empty,
and I was on the verge of total ners was
collapse at the idea that there is information out there
that is just not available to me. When I had
another idea and I found an unlikely ally the Central
(22:14):
Intelligence Agency, That's right. A special shout out this week
goes to the CIA, more specifically the Foreign Broadcast Information Service,
which was operated by the CIA until it was renamed
the Open Source Center in two thousand and five. Originally
called the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service, it was authorized in
(22:38):
nineteen forty one by President Roosevelt, and its original purpose
was to record, translate, transcribe, and analyze propaganda radio programs
produced by the Access Powers during the war. Over the years,
its mission grew to include peacetime operations, and they eventually
added television and print media into the mix, collecting and
(22:58):
translating news from around the world and disseminating reports for
use by intelligence agencies and diplomatic and military organizations. It's
basically just an international news aggregator for government employees. And look,
maybe all those old South African newspapers do exist somewhere.
(23:21):
I found one. Not the one I was looking for,
not one with real journalists and investigative reporting like I'd hoped. No,
the only paper I could find a large catalog of
digitized archives for was a paper called De Transfiller. It
was an African or nationalist newspaper. That paper once unsuccessfully
(23:42):
tried to sue another South African newspaper for calling them
Nazi propaganda, but it was such overt Nazi propaganda that
the judge dismissed the suit and ruled that the editor
of the Transfaller quote did make his newspaper a tool
of the Nazis in South Africa and he knew it
(24:02):
end quote. So the Transvaaler wasn't exactly the resource I
was hoping to find, But eventually I gave up trying
(24:24):
to find old South African newspapers and something that was
much easier to find were the unclassified daily reports from
the Sub Saharan office of the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service.
So just this once, I guess I will give a
reluctant nod to the CIA. So now I have some
(24:48):
contemporaneous reporting that has been translated into English by someone
who's presumably a professional and not a robot, and the
pieces are starting to come together. I can start to
see the picture here. This bombing campaign in nineteen eighty
is starting to come into focus. In August of nineteen eighty,
(25:08):
a newspaper editor in Pretoria received a letter on letter
head bearing a symbol remarkably similar to the cross emblem
used by the American Ku Klux Klan. A group calling
themselves the Vitt Commando or the White Commandos claimed responsibility
for the bombing of Professor Jon Lombard's office at the
(25:29):
University of Pretoria, and the group threatened further attacks, writing
that people and organizations working toward integration would be warned
first and then eliminated. The Vit Commando had formed just
a few months earlier in May or June of nineteen eighty.
Sources vary. Monica Huggett would later testify that she joined
(25:52):
the newly formed vit Commando after meeting Massimo Bolo at
a meeting in Pretoria in June of nineteen eighty, as
described in the memoirs of Ray Hill, a man who
ended his lengthy career as a fascist organizer by playing
informant for the anti fascist magazine Searchlight. The meeting was
a summit for leaders of the British fascist group National Front,
(26:13):
the africaner nationalist group AWB, the far right South African
Political Party HNP, and an Italian fascist group called Unido.
So even though her involvement with vit Commando is the
first time I can put her on paper involved in
a terrorist organization, it was obviously not her first introduction
(26:34):
to the idea. She had to have been deeply involved
with at least one of those fascist groups to have
even been in the room where Massimo Bolo invited her
to join his terrorist cell, and the group got started
right away. Just two months after forming the group, the
bombing of Lombard's office was already their third big public display.
(26:57):
They'd started a fire at a drive in theater and
fire bombed the Johannesburg headquarters of the Institute for Race
Relations in December. They claimed responsibility for the bombing of
Professor F. A. Merritz's office at the University of South Africa,
and they would carry out at least four more bombings
before members started getting arrested. The first four arrests came
(27:18):
in early February of nineteen eighty one a government employee
in Pretoria named W. G. Van Dyck, the director of
the South African National Front, Alan Fotheringham, an Italian fascist
named Massimo Bolo, and as the newspaper put it at
the time, mister Bolo's girlfriend, Miss m. Huggett of Kempton Park.
(27:43):
Now that's the only source I could find alleging a
romantic relationship between the pair. It never comes up again,
so I don't know. And in the weeks that followed,
police would arrest even more alleged members of the VIT
Commando Fabio Miriello, an Italian born African citizen who'd emigrated
four years earlier, kuz Vermulin, the leader of the World
(28:05):
Apartheid Movement, and an Italian immigrant named Eugenio Zoppis and
his wife Laura Zenenga. Those are all the names I
could find in most of my sources. I found a
few more names in an unlikely place. Documents released by
the Italian government as part of their investigation into the
(28:26):
Bologna massacre, a nineteen eighty bombing of a train station
in Italy willie you to have been the work of
fascist terrorists, do list several additional names of Italians who
were in South Africa at the time and believed to
have been involved with the VIT Commando. But there's no
mention of those extra Italians in the South African or
English language press, as far as I can find. As
(28:48):
a matter of fact, there's no mention of almost any
of those people. Ever. Again, only Mariello, Bolo and Zoppis
actually faced charges. Marieloni Bolo were charged with sabotage the
bombings and possession of a massive cache of weapons that
had been stolen from the South African Defense Force, including
(29:09):
fifty kilos of plastic explosives, sixty seven hand grenades, a
couple of land mines, eight rifles, four pistols, a machine gun,
and five thousand rounds of ammunition. When Bolo and Mariello
went to trial later that year, Monica Hugget testified against them.
In exchange, she wasn't charged, she admitted that she had
(29:31):
procured the bomb making manual for Bolo books that she'd
ordered from her clan contacts in the United States. I
was a little surprised to see a familiar title here.
One of the books she had sent to her from
America was called The poor Man's James Bond, which is
the same bomb making book that Dennis Mahon bought for
(29:51):
the ATF informant that he was in love with after
she expressed an interest in bomb making. What a Small World.
Huggett also testified that she'd accompanied Bulow to Professor Lombard's
office to scout out the best location to place the bomb.
She explained that Bulow's residence had become unsuitable as a
(30:12):
workspace after too many of his friends moved in, so
she rented a property under her own name that he
could use to work on his bombs. On the stand,
Huggitt explained that she's a political activist. She's a member
of the American ku Klux Klan and the Vit Commando.
Never intended to endanger any human lives now, for what
(30:36):
it's worth not to give this woman the benefit of
the doubt. But despite the repeated threats to follow up
with more violence, to take up arms, to commit actual
acts of violence against human beings. No one was ever
actually injured by a vit commando bomb. They went off
in empty offices. I think she may have been telling
(30:58):
the truth. They were warnings. Huggett told the court that
their goal was to wake people up to the dangers
of integration, to send a warning that more violence was
inevitable if this creeping, incremental progressive reform that people were
talking about were to actually happen. She swore the group
(31:19):
had no intention of actually hurting anyone or trying to
overthrow the government. By the end of nineteen eighty one,
Mussimobolo had been sentenced to fifty two years, though forty
two of those years would run concurrent with other portions
of the sentence, leaving him with just ten years to
actually serve, and Fabio Miriello was given nineteen years, but
(31:43):
same deal. It was effectively just five, but Bolo didn't
even serve those ten. He was released without any explanation
that I can find, after just four years in nineteen
eighty five, and immediately deported back to Italy. I'm not
entirely sure what became of Muriello, but Myightivisser's thesis says
he was known to have reconnected with Monica Huggett after
(32:06):
his release, and the pair both got involved with the
South African branch of the American Neo Nazi religion, the
Church of the Creator. As for Eugenio Zuppis, the young
Italian immigrant was charged only with the theft of the weapons.
He'd been the one to actually steal them from the
South African Defense Force, and he was also sentenced to
(32:27):
five years, and he appealed that sentence to the court.
So the following year, his lawyer was urging a judge
to consider the mitigating factors. He's so young. He's just
twenty three years old, and he was a brand new
immigrant at the time, and he didn't speak any English.
He'd been manipulated by the much older Fabio Muriello. His
(32:49):
lawyer went as far as to say that Eugenio Zuppas
had joined the VIT Commando entirely by accident, and he
had no idea of the true nature of the organization
until after he was arrested. The article about the dismissal
of his appeal only lays out what his attorney said,
it's not clear from the reporting I can find if
(33:09):
anyone contradicted those statements in court, because you might have guessed,
but it's not true. I mentioned earlier that the most
complete list of names of those Italian fascists who were
arrested in South Africa in connection to the vict Commando
bombings was buried somewhere in two thousand pages of documents
(33:32):
released by the Italian government related to the Bologna massacre.
In August of nineteen eighty, the same month that the
Vit Commando bombing started in South Africa, eighty five people
were killed when a bomb went off inside the Bologna
Central train station in Italy. It is, to some extent
(33:53):
kind of a mystery still. There were a number of
trials spanning over a decade, and several members of an
Italian and fascist group were convicted, but the group itself
never accepted responsibility for the bombing. It is perhaps in
some ways akin to the Oklahoma City bombing. Legally we
(34:15):
found the guy who did it, but there are a
lot of questions we're never going to get answers to,
and there are a lot of weird paths you could
let your mind go down trying to find them, so
without losing my sanity or dragging you into the incomprehensible depths.
Suffice it to say, Eugenio'suppus was not an innocent, confused
(34:35):
young man when he stole a small arsenal of weapons
for the vit Commando in nineteen eighty. In nineteen seventy six,
he was one of fifteen members of an Italian fascist
group who armed with clubs and chains, beat a young
communist organizer to death in a small town outside of Rome. And,
contrary to his lawyer's claims that he had by pure coincidence,
(34:59):
met and befriended a fellow Italian right after he moved
to South Africa, only to be manipulated by this new
friend into committee crimes. There is actually evidence that Zoppas
had been sent to South Africa specifically to meet with
Fabio Mariello. In the months before Zappas arrived in South Africa,
a member of Italy's Black Order wrote Mariello that he
(35:22):
was sending six members down very soon, with more to follow.
In nineteen eighty four, the newspaper of the Italian Communist
Party listed Zappas among the names of seventy six fascist
fugitives believed to have fled the country. Diplomatic records show
the Italian government was requesting his extradition from Paraguay by
(35:43):
nineteen eighty six, and I don't know what happened to
him after that. In what is becoming a constant refrain,
(36:05):
I do want to stress that I'm not an expert
in South African history. I'm not a scholar of the
apartheid era. I'm not a historian. Every week I have
to gain some new specialized knowledge to try to give
context to the story I'm trying to tell. And there's
only so much one person can sort out in a
couple of days. So bear with me, because I do
(36:26):
want to try to give some context here. This bit
commando bombing campaign in nineteen eighty didn't come out of nowhere.
When Monica Hugget testified against the men she'd helped carry
out those attacks, she said their goal had been to
demonstrate that many white South Africans were opposed to the
path of gradual concessions being made by the National Party,
(36:50):
and I was confused by that. It will be another
fifteen years before apartheid ended, and the National Party loved apartheid.
What is she talking about? Apartheid is inherently violent. It
is a form of violence in and of itself. There
is no peaceful or kind way to run an apartheid state.
(37:14):
There is no nonviolent ethno state, and that's obvious. But
the kinds of violence and the visibility of that violence
change from year to year. I don't mean to say
that things like the forced removal of Black Africans from
their homes and their lands are not violence. It is
(37:36):
every action carried out in service of implementing and maintaining
apartheid was an act of violence. But some years were
bloodier than others. And while the political movement to end
apartheid ebbed and flowed, two people have always and will
always resist injustice. But in nineteen when those bombs went off,
(38:03):
there was a growing awareness on all sides of the
issue that something was going to have to change. Whether
they liked it or not, The country was about to
experience some of the most violent years of apartheid. For
those committed to maintaining the status quo and holding on
to political power, that would mean making some targeted compromises
(38:28):
and more importantly, doubling down on state repression. The Soweto
uprising had made apartheid a PR problem. I think for
most people, dead school children is more than a PR problem,
but for the National Party, that's what it was. In
(38:49):
nineteen seventy six, thousands of students walked out of class
in protest of a nineteen seventy four law requiring the
use of Afrikaans in school. Students sang and held sign
as they marched, and they planned to rally at a
nearby stadium. Words spread to other nearby schools and students
poured out into the streets to join the march, and
(39:11):
when they heard the police had blocked their intended route,
one of the march organizers urged calm, telling the crowd,
brothers and sisters, I appeal to you, keep calm and cool.
We have just received a report that the police are coming.
Don't taunt them, don't do anything to them. Be cool
(39:31):
and calm. We are not fighting. And when they encountered
the police for the first time, for a moment it
seemed cooler heads had prevailed on all sides, but the
police weren't actually retreating. They were waiting for reinforcements, and
(39:53):
just half an hour later, the first tear gas canister
was fired into the crowd of children, and some of
them ran, but most of them stayed facing the police, unmoving.
According to several accounts, I found the children were singing
(40:15):
when the first shot was fired. The police opened fire
with live rounds on the crowd of children. One of
the first children to die that day was a twelve
year old boy named Hector Peterson. The photo of his tiny,
(40:37):
limp body in the arms of an older boy, with
Hector's sister running beside him, was seen around the world.
Black South African photojournalist sam and Zeema had captured the
true face of apartheid, and people were horrified. The violence
(40:57):
spread like wildfire, and the worst of it lasted for
three days. There was an explosion of internal resistance. White
university students marched against the killings, Black workers went on strike.
Riots broke out in black townships all over the country.
Buildings burned, and when the dust had settled, hundreds were dead.
(41:24):
The small reforms introduced in the late seventies had nothing
to do with the National Party softening its stance on apartheid,
but the apartheid regime saw some advantage to reducing international
criticism and disrupting black resistance. Amidst these tepid reforms, divisions grew.
(41:46):
Some white South Africans, who had seen those pictures of
children's corpses, now saw apartheid as what it was, a
true evil. Others were repulsed by the violence, but seemed
satisfied with the gestures toward reform. People like Monica Huggett,
were worried that these promised reforms, things like repealing the
(42:09):
ban on interracial relationships, would set the country on a
road to hell. In her testimony the trial for Mariello
and Bolo, she laid the blame on her Italian accomplices,
but made no apologies for her own motivation, saying, on
the stand, I was opposed to integration. I still am.
(42:32):
The week Mariello and Bulo were convicted, American newspapers carried
a four sentence wire story about the trial, noting that
it was South Africa's first ever prosecution of white terrorists.
How South Africa was entering its bloodiest decade of political violence.
Someone had finally gone to jail for pro apartheid terror.
(42:53):
But it's significant that they were only willing to prosecute
those Italian men. There's hardly any mention at all South
African woman who served as the point of contact for
these foreign terrorists. Many of the stories in South African
outlets stress heavily that the group was foreign in origin,
that its members were foreigners, that they didn't even speak Afrikaans,
(43:15):
that they had no connection to any South African political organizations.
But that assertion is complicated a little bit by an
anecdote from ray Hill's memoirs. On the first day of
the trial, as Below and Miriello entered the courtroom, a
man in the gallery stood and applauded for them. Natman
(43:37):
Pete Rudolph was a former police officer, and at the
time of the trial in nineteen eighty one, he was
a sitting member of the Pretorias City Council and a
member of the far right party HNP. He would eventually
leave party politics behind and form a white supremacist group
called the Order Bora Folk or the Order of the
(44:00):
Boer People. He borrowed the name from the plot of
the Turner Diaries. After Miriello and Bolo were convicted, the
VIC Commando ceased to exist. It was just one of
countless short lived right wing organizations in a shifting political landscape.
Groups formed and splintered and disappeared all the time. Sometimes
(44:25):
there was even doubt about the actual existence of some
group claiming credit for one attack or another, and a
lot of groups had significantly overlapping membership. But the end
of the vict Commendo was not the end of Monica
Huggett's involvement in pro apartheid violence, not by a long shot. Now,
in my timeline of events, I lose track of Monica
(44:48):
after nineteen eighty one. I can't say what she was
up to for most of the eighties, but by the
time I find her again in the record, she's a
high ranking member of the africaner nationalist neo Nazi organization
called the Africaner Veristanspavaging the Africaner Resistance Movement in English,
(45:08):
or just AWB for short. It was founded in nineteen
seventy three by Eugene terre Blanche, and the AWB wasn't
happy with apartheid. No, it wouldn't do at all. Apartheid
was too left wing, it was too liberal, and there
(45:30):
was too much risk to bore identity for them to
be living in proximity to black Africans, even under apartheid conditions.
They're secessionists, and they believe the only solution to the
problem is a pure white ethno state, a folkstot or
the white South African. It's a little bit baffling that
(45:52):
she was able to resume her activities retaining a fairly
high level of prestige and responsibility, particularly when it came
to her international contact after she, you know, turned state's
witness against Maryellow and Bolo. Surely everyone knew she'd sold
them out to save herself, but maybe her colleagues didn't
see it that way. Maybe she was important enough that
(46:16):
they were willing to make that sacrifice to keep her
on the outside doing whatever it was she was doing.
I had hope to get through the end of the
nineteen eighties in this episode, but I think we have
to leave it here. In the mid eighties, our Italian
mercenaries were in the wind after serving just a handful
(46:36):
of years buying bars. I can't find Monica no matter
how hard I squint at old TV news b roll
of South African Nazi rallies. But I think she's there somewhere.
And next week, before we rejoined Monica in her own story,
we'll pick up in nineteen eighty nine with one of
(46:57):
our German mercenaries. Five years before shooting out with the
cops just days before the nineteen ninety four South African election,
Horst Glen's was trying to prevent a different African nation
from holding its first democratic, multi racial elections. He failed
both times, but in nineteen eighty nine Klen's in his
(47:20):
South African Nazi terror Celle, took two lives in a
failed attempt to prevent Namibian independence. Weird Little Guys is
(47:41):
a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. Its research
written and recorded by me Molly Conker. Our executive producers
are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited
by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was
composed by Brad dickerd. You can email me at Weird
Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely
and I almost certainly won't answer it. It's nothing personal.
(48:04):
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
listeners on the Weird Little Guys subredd end. Just don't
post anything that's going to make you one of my
room guys.
Col Zone media, come with me for a moment. Back
to February of twenty seventeen. It was just weeks after
Donald Trump had been sworn in as president for his
first term. There was a lot of uncertainty, a lot
of fear. Millions of Americans marched in Washington, d C.
(00:26):
To protest his presidency in its first days. There was
still some hope in those early days that maybe he
hadn't meant most of what he'd said, maybe it was
campaign bluster, hot air and empty words. Within a week, though,
he'd signed an executive order banning travel to the United
(00:47):
States from predominantly Muslim countries, sparking a wave of protests
at airports and signaling that he intended to follow through
on his xenophobic, anti immigrant campaign promises. A month into
his pre tens of thousands of Americans in at least
fifty cities around the country rallied for a protest on
President's Day, calling it not my President's Day. But that
(01:12):
same week, half a world away, a very different march
was taking place in Zagreb's city center. A few dozen
men in black uniforms stood in formation, led by Drazen Klemenek,
leader of the Croatian Fascist Party HSP. They chanted the
slogans of the Eustasia, the Croatian fascist movement of the
(01:36):
nineteen thirties and forties. Alongside the Holocaust carried out by
Nazi Germany, the Ustasia had undertaken a genocide of their own,
operating their own concentration camps and slaughtering whole villages of Jews,
Roma and Serbs. As those marchers assembled in the city
square and the brass band finished playing, the men took
(01:57):
an oath of allegiance to their Croatian homeland and and
to Donald Trump. Most of those marchers had empty hands,
(02:28):
some held brass instruments, but at the front of the
column several marchers held flags, the Croatian flag, of course,
and an American flag to show their support for Donald Trump.
But one man at the very front of the line
was carrying the flag of the German Ultranationalist Party NPD.
(02:50):
The march's organizer, Drazen Klemenek, was arrested that day for
shouting zadom spremni, which is the Croatian equivalent of yelling
Siegheil in Germany, but when he did get a chance
to speak to the press, he explained the presence of
the German NPD flag. The man who'd been carrying it
(03:11):
was Alexander Nydeline, a representative from NPD, and he was
there to show his party's support for HSP. But that
march in February of twenty seventeen wasn't Alexander Nydline's first
visit to the Balkans. In nineteen ninety three, nyde Line
enlisted in the Convicts Battalion, a paramilitary unit of the
(03:34):
Croatian Defense Council made up of prisoners and foreign mercenaries.
Its leader was later convicted of crimes against humanity for
his actions during the Bosnian War. Nydeline didn't stay with
the unit for very long. In the years since, he's
taken issue with being called a mercenary, arguing that he
(03:54):
never actually got paid. Because just before Christmas of nineteen
ninety three and two other German mercenaries deserted from the
Convicts Battalion. They took as many guns as they could
carry and disappeared into the night. A few weeks later,
those German mercenaries and those stolen guns turned up seven
(04:16):
thousand miles away in South Africa. I'm Molly conger, and
this is weird little guys. This is a story about
(04:44):
Monica Stone. I think she may be our first weird
little guy who happens to be a woman. There was
Dallas Humber, I guess, the voice of Taragram, but she
wasn't the central character in that story, just the disembodied
voice urging young men to kill. Weird little guy is
(05:06):
a gender neutral term in my mind. I haven't been
avoiding telling the stories of women in the white power movement.
It's just that, for the most part, the very nature
of their beliefs kind of prevents women from taking center stage,
even in their own lives. But this this is a
story of a woman who has dedicated her life to
(05:29):
the cause, and in her case, the cause is apartheid.
Like all my stories, this is really only kind of
about one weird little guy. And this might be the
widest net I've ever cast trying to understand one person's life.
The story covers decades and spans continence. There are bombings
(05:52):
and shootouts and murders. There's international gun smuggling, mercenaries and
paramilitaries and war crimes, suessful assassinations and foiled terrorist plots.
Their trials and prison breaks, and crimes left unpunished, some
with extradition petitions left pending for decades with no hope
of justice. There are some familiar landmarks, names of people
(06:18):
and organizations I recognize, like David Duke and the Ku
Klux Klan and the Turner Diaries. But there are people
in groups in this story that were new to me,
characters we haven't met yet and may see again in
future episodes exploring these fascist friendships across borders. But at
its core, this is a story about Monica Stone. She
(06:42):
isn't in all the parts of the story playing out
all around her, but the context matters more than ever,
because this week we're going to dig into a weighty idea,
the fascist international. I haven't forgotten where we started. Maybe
you have. That's understandable. I left you hanging there for
(07:03):
a week while I recovered from a stomach virus. But
two weeks ago we were talking about white genocide. The
story began in Sacramento in twenty twelve. A group of
neo Nazi skinheads was rallying at the state capitol in
California to raise awareness of the plight of the white
South African farmer in that episode, I picked apart this myth,
(07:25):
the idea that white farmers are being slaughtered every day
in a post apartheid South Africa, that white South Africans
are in danger of being completely wiped out by a
white genocide. That idea has been quite popular among white
supremacists around the world for some time. Norwegian mass murderer
Anders Bravik devoted a few pages of his fifteen hundred
(07:48):
page manifesto to it. When Dylan Rufe murdered nine people
at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina in twenty fifteen,
his Facebook profile photo showed him at the camera in
a black jacket with two patches on the breast, the
flag of Rhodesia and the flag of apartheid South Africa.
(08:11):
I come across the idea pretty often in my work.
So many of my weird little guys are obsessed with
the idea of a fully segregated society and the state
violence against black people that comes with it. But that's
where the idea lived. It lived on stormfront and on
four Chan, and in manifestos and on Nazi podcasts. Those
(08:35):
rallies in twenty twelve were pretty unique. The public display
of the apartheid era South African flag at an American
political rally was unusual. It was unusual enough that it
was mentioned in news stories three years later when the
flag appeared again on Dylan Rufe's jacket. But like so
(08:57):
many once fringe ideas, it's part of the mainstream political discourse. Now.
I won't rechread all of that. We talked about it
in the last episode, but now the President of the
United States is repeating the talking points from the flyers
those skinheads printed out in twenty twelve, And I originally
set out to just talk about those rallies as a
(09:20):
sort of standalone story, this strange incident that seems to
have happened in total isolation. As far as I've been
able to find, the group behind it had never put
on a public event before, and aside from a poorly
attended follow up in DC later that same year, they
never did again. The website has been offline for years,
(09:41):
and there's hardly any mention of the group at all anywhere.
A lot of white supremacist groups are short lived, so
that's not really unusual, and this group, the South Africa Project,
was pretty obviously just two people running a side project
out of an Air Nations po box. But I can't
(10:03):
let anything go, so I started to dig, and it
became clear very quickly that there was a hell of
a lot more going on here than I thought. Back
in twenty twelve, when those rallies took place, both the
SPLC and the ADL had stories on their website explaining
(10:24):
that those events had been organized by American neo Nazis.
Both groups zeroed in on Morris Goulette, a longtime Arian
Nations member and the man who'd given comments to the
press as the organization's spokesman. Both outlets identified several local
organizers of those assorted rallies. The Golden State Skinheads hosted
(10:44):
in Sacramento. Billy Roper headlined the rally in Arkansas. Rallies
in Tennessee and Pennsylvania were hosted by members of Folksfront
and so on. But in one single line in a
blog post that isn't even on the ADL's website anymore,
the events are attributed to a woman named Monica Stone
(11:08):
in this passing mention crediting Stone with the idea for
the rallies. The post notes that she was a South
African immigrant and a longtime member of the Christian Defense League.
The CDL was a Christian identity group that grew out
of the same milieu as the Aryan Nations in the sixties,
but it never really achieved the same level of influence.
(11:32):
But that's all there is. Monica and Louisiana. Monica from
South Africa, Monica speaking at the Aryan Nations World Congress
about the need for international solidarity between American neo Nazis
and africanter nationalists. But Google gives you exactly nothing about
this woman before or after this brief moment in time
(11:56):
in twenty twelve. This point, I'm locked in. I have
to know more about this woman. How did she end
up in Mandeville, Louisiana, a town of just ten thousand
people that I've only heard of because it's where David
Duke lives. So I started with the information that I
(12:17):
have a name, hopefully it's her real name, a city,
and some potential known associates. If her longtime membership in
the Christian Defense League is the only notable fact about her,
maybe that means she was a very important member of
the group, And lucky for me, it turns out she
(12:39):
was the organization has or had, I guess, since it's defunct.
As far as I can tell, been run by a
man named Robert K. Warner since the seventies, and when
he took over, he moved its headquarters from California to
Louisiana to be closer to his friend David Duke, and
in addition into the Christian Defense League, Warner also ran
(13:02):
a Christian identity church called the New Christian Crusade Church.
Corporate filings for the church show Robert K. Warner as
an officer of the organization, which I expected, but in
twenty eleven he filed an amendment adding someone named Monica
Huggett as the church's chief financial officer, and he changed
(13:25):
the address on file to a residential address in Mandeville, Louisiana.
Property records for Saint Tammany Parish show that a mortgage
was taken out at that address by James Stone in
nineteen ninety two, but after he died, the property was
sold by his widow, and on the documents for the sale,
(13:46):
she's listed as Monica hugget Stone. And that's the kind
of concrete paper trail I love to see. There's no
doubt at all here that the Monica Stone behind those
twenty twelve rallies is the Monica Huggot who married James
Stone in two thousand and lived in Mandeville, Louisiana, two
(14:07):
miles away from David Duke. So now I have a
new name, Monica Huggot, and this is where I ran
into trouble. Almost immediately, everything is in Afrikaans. Most of
the English language material about someone named Monica Huggot is
(14:30):
about the renowned British conductor and baroque violinist. But that
is an entirely different person who I am almost one
hundred percent sure has never helped an Italian terrorist build
a bomb. Violinists have to be very careful with their hands,
you know. But they were a handful of extremely tantalizing
(14:51):
clues that convinced me to power through the agony of
trying to translate blurry old PDFs. One of the first
English Langua sources I found referring to a South African
named Monica Huggett is the final report of the South
African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission
(15:14):
was authorized by President Nelson Mandela in nineteen ninety five
and it was chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The body's
goal was exactly what it says in the name, to
find the truth about what happened under apartheid and try
to find a way to move forward as a nation.
The TRC had three central tasks to discover the causes
(15:38):
in nature of human rights violations in South Africa between
nineteen sixty and nineteen ninety four, to identify victims with
a goal of paying reparations, and to allow amnesty for
those who fully disclosed their involvement in politically motivated human
rights violations. This wasn't a tribunal, this was a restorative
(16:01):
justice process. They hoped to be able to provide amnesty
to people who were honest. Over the course of three years,
the Commission heard testimony from over twenty thousand people, both
victims and perpetrators. Monica Hugget did not, as far as
I can tell, ever, testify before the Commission, but her
(16:23):
name is in there. Specifically, it appears in Volume two,
the seven hundred page portion of the report dealing with
quote the Commission of gross violations of Human Rights, and
more specifically, it's in Chapter seven Political Violence in the
era of negotiations and transition. Under the subheading links with
(16:45):
international right wing groups, the report reads, the first link
between ultra right terrorism and foreign agencies came to light
in nineteen eighty two when mister Fabio Mariello, mister Massimobulo
and mister Uni Genio's office, all white foreign expatriates known
as the White Commando, were convicted of the nineteen seventy
(17:06):
nine bombing of the offices of prominent academic doctor Jan Lombard.
Originally mister KuPS Vermullen and Miss Monica Hugget, a foreign
right winger, were arrested with them, but Huggitt turned state
witness and Vermullin was released after a few days. Hugget's
name was subsequently linked to the shootout in March nineteen
ninety four between the South African police and three German
(17:27):
right wingers in the Donkerhook area. One German right winger,
mister Stephen Rayes, was arrested, mister Thomas Kuons was shot dead,
and a third, mister Horst Cleans, later arrested. A fourth,
mister Alexander Ndline, was later charged in the Cullen and
Magistrates Court for illegal possession of a firearm. And I
(17:48):
think you can see why I was willing to invest
the effort to find out more about this, because that's
a hell of a thing to find under the first
rock you turn over Italian terrorists bombing university offices in
Pretoria nineteen seventy nine, German mercenaries getting into a deadly
shootout with the police in nineteen ninety four, And there
(18:09):
she is right at the center of two separate acts
of pro apartheid terrorism fifteen years apart. Now there are
some problems here. First of all, her name is spelled wrong,
only a little wrong. It's missing one of the teas.
But Alexander Nydelin's name is spelled so incorrectly that you
(18:32):
couldn't find this by searching for his name. The report
calls him Alexander Niedneloin, which as far as I can tell,
is not anyone's name or a real German name at all.
And the bombing of Professor Lombard's offices at the University
of Pretoria happened in nineteen eighty, not nineteen seventy nine.
(18:53):
It also describes Monica Huggett as a quote foreign right winger,
which really threw me off at first. I've heard her talk.
She sounds South African, and she's even said in multiple
interviews that she was born and raised there. The confusion
in the report maybe because she had publicly identified herself
(19:14):
as a member of the American ku Klux Klan, and
that may have been interpreted as her being American, And
by the time the Commission was starting their work, she
had left South Africa and was living in the United States.
They never actually had a chance to speak to her.
I'm willing to cut them some slack on the details here.
(19:35):
They were close enough for government work, as my dad
used to say, and they had a lot of work
to do. But as my subsequent research shows, beyond a
shadow of it out, Monica Huggett was born and raised
South African. But keep those four Germans in the back
of your mind for now. We'll see them again. Alexander Nydeline,
(19:58):
you've already met the German NPD member swearing allegiance to
Donald Trump at a Croatian Nazi rally in twenty seventeen.
According to blurry old scans of arrest warrants from nineteen
ninety three, Stephen Rays and Thomas Kunst were the other
two German mercenaries he deserted with just before Christmas that year,
and just as an aside, I am admittedly not at
(20:21):
all an expert on the Bosnian War, so it took
me a minute to parse the letterhead on the warrants.
They were issued by the non existent country of the
Croatian Republic of Hertzeg Bosnia, which explains why Nydelein had
no problem re entering Croatia after fleeing as a fugitive
all those years ago, and the fourth man forced Glens
(20:46):
he still wanted for murder in Namibia. Early on in
my search for more information about this mysterious woman at
the center of these two terror plots carried out by
foreign neo Nazis, I found a master's thesis submitted by
Mada Visser to the University of Pretoria in nineteen ninety nine.
(21:07):
It's in Afrikaans but translated. The title is the Ideological
Foundations and Development of the White Fascist Movements in South
Africa nineteen forty five to nineteen ninety five. After some
truly agonizing trial and error trying to find a way
to translate a three hundred page PDF without paying for something.
(21:28):
The thesis was immensely useful, but every clue just raised
more questions, and I was running into dead end after
dead end trying to track down the primary sources in
the footnotes. I can find a lot of things, but
digitize archives of forty year old newspapers published in another
(21:49):
language in another country that might not even still exist
at all. For all I know, I came up empty,
and I was on the verge of total ners was
collapse at the idea that there is information out there
that is just not available to me. When I had
another idea and I found an unlikely ally the Central
(22:14):
Intelligence Agency, That's right. A special shout out this week
goes to the CIA, more specifically the Foreign Broadcast Information Service,
which was operated by the CIA until it was renamed
the Open Source Center in two thousand and five. Originally
called the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service, it was authorized in
(22:38):
nineteen forty one by President Roosevelt, and its original purpose
was to record, translate, transcribe, and analyze propaganda radio programs
produced by the Access Powers during the war. Over the years,
its mission grew to include peacetime operations, and they eventually
added television and print media into the mix, collecting and
(22:58):
translating news from around the world and disseminating reports for
use by intelligence agencies and diplomatic and military organizations. It's
basically just an international news aggregator for government employees. And look,
maybe all those old South African newspapers do exist somewhere.
(23:21):
I found one. Not the one I was looking for,
not one with real journalists and investigative reporting like I'd hoped. No,
the only paper I could find a large catalog of
digitized archives for was a paper called De Transfiller. It
was an African or nationalist newspaper. That paper once unsuccessfully
(23:42):
tried to sue another South African newspaper for calling them
Nazi propaganda, but it was such overt Nazi propaganda that
the judge dismissed the suit and ruled that the editor
of the Transfaller quote did make his newspaper a tool
of the Nazis in South Africa and he knew it
(24:02):
end quote. So the Transvaaler wasn't exactly the resource I
was hoping to find, But eventually I gave up trying
(24:24):
to find old South African newspapers and something that was
much easier to find were the unclassified daily reports from
the Sub Saharan office of the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service.
So just this once, I guess I will give a
reluctant nod to the CIA. So now I have some
(24:48):
contemporaneous reporting that has been translated into English by someone
who's presumably a professional and not a robot, and the
pieces are starting to come together. I can start to
see the picture here. This bombing campaign in nineteen eighty
is starting to come into focus. In August of nineteen eighty,
(25:08):
a newspaper editor in Pretoria received a letter on letter
head bearing a symbol remarkably similar to the cross emblem
used by the American Ku Klux Klan. A group calling
themselves the Vitt Commando or the White Commandos claimed responsibility
for the bombing of Professor Jon Lombard's office at the
(25:29):
University of Pretoria, and the group threatened further attacks, writing
that people and organizations working toward integration would be warned
first and then eliminated. The Vit Commando had formed just
a few months earlier in May or June of nineteen eighty.
Sources vary. Monica Huggett would later testify that she joined
(25:52):
the newly formed vit Commando after meeting Massimo Bolo at
a meeting in Pretoria in June of nineteen eighty, as
described in the memoirs of Ray Hill, a man who
ended his lengthy career as a fascist organizer by playing
informant for the anti fascist magazine Searchlight. The meeting was
a summit for leaders of the British fascist group National Front,
(26:13):
the africaner nationalist group AWB, the far right South African
Political Party HNP, and an Italian fascist group called Unido.
So even though her involvement with vit Commando is the
first time I can put her on paper involved in
a terrorist organization, it was obviously not her first introduction
(26:34):
to the idea. She had to have been deeply involved
with at least one of those fascist groups to have
even been in the room where Massimo Bolo invited her
to join his terrorist cell, and the group got started
right away. Just two months after forming the group, the
bombing of Lombard's office was already their third big public display.
(26:57):
They'd started a fire at a drive in theater and
fire bombed the Johannesburg headquarters of the Institute for Race
Relations in December. They claimed responsibility for the bombing of
Professor F. A. Merritz's office at the University of South Africa,
and they would carry out at least four more bombings
before members started getting arrested. The first four arrests came
(27:18):
in early February of nineteen eighty one a government employee
in Pretoria named W. G. Van Dyck, the director of
the South African National Front, Alan Fotheringham, an Italian fascist
named Massimo Bolo, and as the newspaper put it at
the time, mister Bolo's girlfriend, Miss m. Huggett of Kempton Park.
(27:43):
Now that's the only source I could find alleging a
romantic relationship between the pair. It never comes up again,
so I don't know. And in the weeks that followed,
police would arrest even more alleged members of the VIT
Commando Fabio Miriello, an Italian born African citizen who'd emigrated
four years earlier, kuz Vermulin, the leader of the World
(28:05):
Apartheid Movement, and an Italian immigrant named Eugenio Zoppis and
his wife Laura Zenenga. Those are all the names I
could find in most of my sources. I found a
few more names in an unlikely place. Documents released by
the Italian government as part of their investigation into the
(28:26):
Bologna massacre, a nineteen eighty bombing of a train station
in Italy willie you to have been the work of
fascist terrorists, do list several additional names of Italians who
were in South Africa at the time and believed to
have been involved with the VIT Commando. But there's no
mention of those extra Italians in the South African or
English language press, as far as I can find. As
(28:48):
a matter of fact, there's no mention of almost any
of those people. Ever. Again, only Mariello, Bolo and Zoppis
actually faced charges. Marieloni Bolo were charged with sabotage the
bombings and possession of a massive cache of weapons that
had been stolen from the South African Defense Force, including
(29:09):
fifty kilos of plastic explosives, sixty seven hand grenades, a
couple of land mines, eight rifles, four pistols, a machine gun,
and five thousand rounds of ammunition. When Bolo and Mariello
went to trial later that year, Monica Hugget testified against them.
In exchange, she wasn't charged, she admitted that she had
(29:31):
procured the bomb making manual for Bolo books that she'd
ordered from her clan contacts in the United States. I
was a little surprised to see a familiar title here.
One of the books she had sent to her from
America was called The poor Man's James Bond, which is
the same bomb making book that Dennis Mahon bought for
(29:51):
the ATF informant that he was in love with after
she expressed an interest in bomb making. What a Small World.
Huggett also testified that she'd accompanied Bulow to Professor Lombard's
office to scout out the best location to place the bomb.
She explained that Bulow's residence had become unsuitable as a
(30:12):
workspace after too many of his friends moved in, so
she rented a property under her own name that he
could use to work on his bombs. On the stand,
Huggitt explained that she's a political activist. She's a member
of the American ku Klux Klan and the Vit Commando.
Never intended to endanger any human lives now, for what
(30:36):
it's worth not to give this woman the benefit of
the doubt. But despite the repeated threats to follow up
with more violence, to take up arms, to commit actual
acts of violence against human beings. No one was ever
actually injured by a vit commando bomb. They went off
in empty offices. I think she may have been telling
(30:58):
the truth. They were warnings. Huggett told the court that
their goal was to wake people up to the dangers
of integration, to send a warning that more violence was
inevitable if this creeping, incremental progressive reform that people were
talking about were to actually happen. She swore the group
(31:19):
had no intention of actually hurting anyone or trying to
overthrow the government. By the end of nineteen eighty one,
Mussimobolo had been sentenced to fifty two years, though forty
two of those years would run concurrent with other portions
of the sentence, leaving him with just ten years to
actually serve, and Fabio Miriello was given nineteen years, but
(31:43):
same deal. It was effectively just five, but Bolo didn't
even serve those ten. He was released without any explanation
that I can find, after just four years in nineteen
eighty five, and immediately deported back to Italy. I'm not
entirely sure what became of Muriello, but Myightivisser's thesis says
he was known to have reconnected with Monica Huggett after
(32:06):
his release, and the pair both got involved with the
South African branch of the American Neo Nazi religion, the
Church of the Creator. As for Eugenio Zuppis, the young
Italian immigrant was charged only with the theft of the weapons.
He'd been the one to actually steal them from the
South African Defense Force, and he was also sentenced to
(32:27):
five years, and he appealed that sentence to the court.
So the following year, his lawyer was urging a judge
to consider the mitigating factors. He's so young. He's just
twenty three years old, and he was a brand new
immigrant at the time, and he didn't speak any English.
He'd been manipulated by the much older Fabio Muriello. His
(32:49):
lawyer went as far as to say that Eugenio Zuppas
had joined the VIT Commando entirely by accident, and he
had no idea of the true nature of the organization
until after he was arrested. The article about the dismissal
of his appeal only lays out what his attorney said,
it's not clear from the reporting I can find if
(33:09):
anyone contradicted those statements in court, because you might have guessed,
but it's not true. I mentioned earlier that the most
complete list of names of those Italian fascists who were
arrested in South Africa in connection to the vict Commando
bombings was buried somewhere in two thousand pages of documents
(33:32):
released by the Italian government related to the Bologna massacre.
In August of nineteen eighty, the same month that the
Vit Commando bombing started in South Africa, eighty five people
were killed when a bomb went off inside the Bologna
Central train station in Italy. It is, to some extent
(33:53):
kind of a mystery still. There were a number of
trials spanning over a decade, and several members of an
Italian and fascist group were convicted, but the group itself
never accepted responsibility for the bombing. It is perhaps in
some ways akin to the Oklahoma City bombing. Legally we
(34:15):
found the guy who did it, but there are a
lot of questions we're never going to get answers to,
and there are a lot of weird paths you could
let your mind go down trying to find them, so
without losing my sanity or dragging you into the incomprehensible depths.
Suffice it to say, Eugenio'suppus was not an innocent, confused
(34:35):
young man when he stole a small arsenal of weapons
for the vit Commando in nineteen eighty. In nineteen seventy six,
he was one of fifteen members of an Italian fascist
group who armed with clubs and chains, beat a young
communist organizer to death in a small town outside of Rome. And,
contrary to his lawyer's claims that he had by pure coincidence,
(34:59):
met and befriended a fellow Italian right after he moved
to South Africa, only to be manipulated by this new
friend into committee crimes. There is actually evidence that Zoppas
had been sent to South Africa specifically to meet with
Fabio Mariello. In the months before Zappas arrived in South Africa,
a member of Italy's Black Order wrote Mariello that he
(35:22):
was sending six members down very soon, with more to follow.
In nineteen eighty four, the newspaper of the Italian Communist
Party listed Zappas among the names of seventy six fascist
fugitives believed to have fled the country. Diplomatic records show
the Italian government was requesting his extradition from Paraguay by
(35:43):
nineteen eighty six, and I don't know what happened to
him after that. In what is becoming a constant refrain,
(36:05):
I do want to stress that I'm not an expert
in South African history. I'm not a scholar of the
apartheid era. I'm not a historian. Every week I have
to gain some new specialized knowledge to try to give
context to the story I'm trying to tell. And there's
only so much one person can sort out in a
couple of days. So bear with me, because I do
(36:26):
want to try to give some context here. This bit
commando bombing campaign in nineteen eighty didn't come out of nowhere.
When Monica Hugget testified against the men she'd helped carry
out those attacks, she said their goal had been to
demonstrate that many white South Africans were opposed to the
path of gradual concessions being made by the National Party,
(36:50):
and I was confused by that. It will be another
fifteen years before apartheid ended, and the National Party loved apartheid.
What is she talking about? Apartheid is inherently violent. It
is a form of violence in and of itself. There
is no peaceful or kind way to run an apartheid state.
(37:14):
There is no nonviolent ethno state, and that's obvious. But
the kinds of violence and the visibility of that violence
change from year to year. I don't mean to say
that things like the forced removal of Black Africans from
their homes and their lands are not violence. It is
(37:36):
every action carried out in service of implementing and maintaining
apartheid was an act of violence. But some years were
bloodier than others. And while the political movement to end
apartheid ebbed and flowed, two people have always and will
always resist injustice. But in nineteen when those bombs went off,
(38:03):
there was a growing awareness on all sides of the
issue that something was going to have to change. Whether
they liked it or not, The country was about to
experience some of the most violent years of apartheid. For
those committed to maintaining the status quo and holding on
to political power, that would mean making some targeted compromises
(38:28):
and more importantly, doubling down on state repression. The Soweto
uprising had made apartheid a PR problem. I think for
most people, dead school children is more than a PR problem,
but for the National Party, that's what it was. In
(38:49):
nineteen seventy six, thousands of students walked out of class
in protest of a nineteen seventy four law requiring the
use of Afrikaans in school. Students sang and held sign
as they marched, and they planned to rally at a
nearby stadium. Words spread to other nearby schools and students
poured out into the streets to join the march, and
(39:11):
when they heard the police had blocked their intended route,
one of the march organizers urged calm, telling the crowd,
brothers and sisters, I appeal to you, keep calm and cool.
We have just received a report that the police are coming.
Don't taunt them, don't do anything to them. Be cool
(39:31):
and calm. We are not fighting. And when they encountered
the police for the first time, for a moment it
seemed cooler heads had prevailed on all sides, but the
police weren't actually retreating. They were waiting for reinforcements, and
(39:53):
just half an hour later, the first tear gas canister
was fired into the crowd of children, and some of
them ran, but most of them stayed facing the police, unmoving.
According to several accounts, I found the children were singing
(40:15):
when the first shot was fired. The police opened fire
with live rounds on the crowd of children. One of
the first children to die that day was a twelve
year old boy named Hector Peterson. The photo of his tiny,
(40:37):
limp body in the arms of an older boy, with
Hector's sister running beside him, was seen around the world.
Black South African photojournalist sam and Zeema had captured the
true face of apartheid, and people were horrified. The violence
(40:57):
spread like wildfire, and the worst of it lasted for
three days. There was an explosion of internal resistance. White
university students marched against the killings, Black workers went on strike.
Riots broke out in black townships all over the country.
Buildings burned, and when the dust had settled, hundreds were dead.
(41:24):
The small reforms introduced in the late seventies had nothing
to do with the National Party softening its stance on apartheid,
but the apartheid regime saw some advantage to reducing international
criticism and disrupting black resistance. Amidst these tepid reforms, divisions grew.
(41:46):
Some white South Africans, who had seen those pictures of
children's corpses, now saw apartheid as what it was, a
true evil. Others were repulsed by the violence, but seemed
satisfied with the gestures toward reform. People like Monica Huggett,
were worried that these promised reforms, things like repealing the
(42:09):
ban on interracial relationships, would set the country on a
road to hell. In her testimony the trial for Mariello
and Bolo, she laid the blame on her Italian accomplices,
but made no apologies for her own motivation, saying, on
the stand, I was opposed to integration. I still am.
(42:32):
The week Mariello and Bulo were convicted, American newspapers carried
a four sentence wire story about the trial, noting that
it was South Africa's first ever prosecution of white terrorists.
How South Africa was entering its bloodiest decade of political violence.
Someone had finally gone to jail for pro apartheid terror.
(42:53):
But it's significant that they were only willing to prosecute
those Italian men. There's hardly any mention at all South
African woman who served as the point of contact for
these foreign terrorists. Many of the stories in South African
outlets stress heavily that the group was foreign in origin,
that its members were foreigners, that they didn't even speak Afrikaans,
(43:15):
that they had no connection to any South African political organizations.
But that assertion is complicated a little bit by an
anecdote from ray Hill's memoirs. On the first day of
the trial, as Below and Miriello entered the courtroom, a
man in the gallery stood and applauded for them. Natman
(43:37):
Pete Rudolph was a former police officer, and at the
time of the trial in nineteen eighty one, he was
a sitting member of the Pretorias City Council and a
member of the far right party HNP. He would eventually
leave party politics behind and form a white supremacist group
called the Order Bora Folk or the Order of the
(44:00):
Boer People. He borrowed the name from the plot of
the Turner Diaries. After Miriello and Bolo were convicted, the
VIC Commando ceased to exist. It was just one of
countless short lived right wing organizations in a shifting political landscape.
Groups formed and splintered and disappeared all the time. Sometimes
(44:25):
there was even doubt about the actual existence of some
group claiming credit for one attack or another, and a
lot of groups had significantly overlapping membership. But the end
of the vict Commendo was not the end of Monica
Huggett's involvement in pro apartheid violence, not by a long shot. Now,
in my timeline of events, I lose track of Monica
(44:48):
after nineteen eighty one. I can't say what she was
up to for most of the eighties, but by the
time I find her again in the record, she's a
high ranking member of the africaner nationalist neo Nazi organization
called the Africaner Veristanspavaging the Africaner Resistance Movement in English,
(45:08):
or just AWB for short. It was founded in nineteen
seventy three by Eugene terre Blanche, and the AWB wasn't
happy with apartheid. No, it wouldn't do at all. Apartheid
was too left wing, it was too liberal, and there
(45:30):
was too much risk to bore identity for them to
be living in proximity to black Africans, even under apartheid conditions.
They're secessionists, and they believe the only solution to the
problem is a pure white ethno state, a folkstot or
the white South African. It's a little bit baffling that
(45:52):
she was able to resume her activities retaining a fairly
high level of prestige and responsibility, particularly when it came
to her international contact after she, you know, turned state's
witness against Maryellow and Bolo. Surely everyone knew she'd sold
them out to save herself, but maybe her colleagues didn't
see it that way. Maybe she was important enough that
(46:16):
they were willing to make that sacrifice to keep her
on the outside doing whatever it was she was doing.
I had hope to get through the end of the
nineteen eighties in this episode, but I think we have
to leave it here. In the mid eighties, our Italian
mercenaries were in the wind after serving just a handful
(46:36):
of years buying bars. I can't find Monica no matter
how hard I squint at old TV news b roll
of South African Nazi rallies. But I think she's there somewhere.
And next week, before we rejoined Monica in her own story,
we'll pick up in nineteen eighty nine with one of
(46:57):
our German mercenaries. Five years before shooting out with the
cops just days before the nineteen ninety four South African election,
Horst Glen's was trying to prevent a different African nation
from holding its first democratic, multi racial elections. He failed
both times, but in nineteen eighty nine Klen's in his
(47:20):
South African Nazi terror Celle, took two lives in a
failed attempt to prevent Namibian independence. Weird Little Guys is
(47:41):
a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. Its research
written and recorded by me Molly Conker. Our executive producers
are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited
by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was
composed by Brad dickerd. You can email me at Weird
Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely
and I almost certainly won't answer it. It's nothing personal.
(48:04):
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
listeners on the Weird Little Guys subredd end. Just don't
post anything that's going to make you one of my
room guys.
Host
Molly Conger
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