CZM Rewind: The Whites' Last Stand & The Jamboree in Jamba

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hello everyone, Molly here, Welcome back to the third of
four installments of the holiday reruns here on Weird Little Guys.
Since Christmas and New Year's Day are both Thursdays this year,
I was going to have to run two reruns in
a row. So instead of picking two random reruns, I'm
using this opportunity to run my favorite mini series of

(00:30):
the year, the eight episodes I wrote back in the
spring about the international networks of writeing extremists who were
trying to hold on to apartheid.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
At South Africa.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
Last week, episodes one and two round Tuesday, and episodes
three and four ran on Thursday. That makes this episodes
five and six of the series. The episode The Whites
Last Stand originally aired on April third, and Jemboree and
Jamba came out a week later on April tenth. Listening

(01:01):
back to these episodes now, it's very funny that I
kept apologizing for how long the series was and promising
that it was almost over. I know you're listening for
the story and not my little personal asides, but they
do make for a strange sort of time capsule. I
was in a rush this week because I'd spent a
couple of days in court, and I realize now I

(01:24):
never did get back around to telling you about that trial,
But it was one of the trials in the Unite
the Right Torch March prosecutions that I was talking about
a few weeks ago. The episodes recently about Tyler Dykes
and Augustus and Victus, two of the other men charged
for that march, but that trial back in April was
for Vasilios Pistolis.

Speaker 3 (01:46):
I do still think we'll.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
Circle back around to that one of these days, but
for these next two episodes in this series, first, I
want to make a correction and an apology. In the
episode The Jamboree and Jamba, I used the term bushman
to refer to a member of the Komani clan of
the San people. I saw the term used a lot

(02:10):
in sources, and I believed it to be a catch
all term that referred to various cultures of hunter gatherer
people's indigenous to Southern Africa. It does mean that, but
it's widely considered to be derogatory, and I should have
read enough about the subject to know that before.

Speaker 3 (02:27):
I said it.

Speaker 2 (02:29):
It is the Dutch colonizer's word for those indigenous groups,
and it is not considered a respectful or appropriate term
to use in English today. Just because a lot of
people in my source material are using the word, does
it mean that I should say it? And considering the
kind of source material I'm used to working with, I
should have known better than to assume a white author

(02:50):
of material about indigenous African people was using a word
that I should repeat. I am genuinely sorry, and I
appreciate those of you who contacted me with additional reading
about the cultural context here. But aside from that, I
do have a couple of loose ends to revisit from
the White's last stand. In that episode, you'll hear about

(03:12):
a right wing extremist from Poland who shot and killed
Chris Hani, a black South African politician and anti apartheid activist.
In that episode, I chose a pronunciation of this Polish
name that seemed to be the one most commonly used
by South African news broadcasters, which of course upset listeners

(03:32):
with any knowledge of Polish. But I can't pronounce Polish
or Afrikaans, so I was never going to say it
in a way that made anyone happy. But whatever you
want to call him Yanushwalos was released on parole in
twenty twenty two, and he was deported back to Poland
in December of twenty twenty four. He is to this

(03:52):
day a popular symbol for white nationalist groups in Poland,
and if you listen to the last installment of this series,
you heard what I think is a pretty well supported
theory about how the German mercenaries at the heart of
this story connected how they were communicating in nineteen ninety
three before some of them left Bosnia.

Speaker 3 (04:13):
For South Africa.

Speaker 2 (04:15):
One of those mercenaries, Stefan Rai's, took leave from the
Convict's battalion in Bosnia in late nineteen ninety three and
traveled to Hamburg. I can't produce any proof that they met,
but I know Horse Cleans was in Hamburg at the
same time, and it seems very likely that that's where
they met up. That was in the episode, But what

(04:37):
it did not include in that episode is that Horst
Cleans also traveled to Munich during that same trip, and
South African authorities believe that while he was there, he
met with Colonel Eugene Decoq of the South African Police
Force DACOQ now known to have been deeply involved in
those government funded death squads, was in Munich on his

(05:00):
way to Bosnia. So maybe those German mercenaries in Bosnia
weren't getting their recruitment pitched third hand from Stephen Rays,
who got it from Horse Cleans, who got it from
Eugene to Cock. Maybe they got it from Eugene de
Cock directly. Hard to say, but it does raise a

(05:20):
lot more questions about the bullet that gets dug out
of a police officer in the episode You're About to Hear.
September twenty second, twenty twelve may have been the first
day of autumn, but it was a warm afternoon in Washington, DC.

(05:41):
A charter bus pulled to the curb at the edge
of Lincoln Park and its passengers piled out, all fourteen
of them. Most of the attendees of that day's rally
were dressed alike, black pants and a blue button up
shirt with a black tie, the uniform of the Arian nation.

(06:01):
They'd denounced the rally months ahead of time, giving DC
locals ample time to plan their counter protest. Hundreds of
people showed up to see what turned out to be
barely a dozen Neo Nazis. The tiny group marched the
mile and a half from the park to the Capital
Reflecting Pool, safely escorted by hundreds of police officers from

(06:24):
the DC Metropolitan Police, US Park Police, and the US
Capitol Police. Dozens of officers on bicycles and on horseback
flanked the little march, keeping counter protesters at bay. A
fee leanx of Capitol police in riot year marched alongside them,
far outnumbering the actual marchers. When they reached their destination,

(06:48):
they were escorted into a little pen surrounded by barricades,
with the Capitol building in the background, surrounded by angry

(07:24):
counter protesters and curious tourists. Rian Nations member Ryan Mullins
tried to address the crowd with a megaphone, but he
was almost completely drowned out by chance of Nazi scum.
If he did manage to give a speech about the
plight of the white South African farmer, it's almost certain

(07:44):
no one actually heard it. But just behind him the
rally goers were holding a banner that read stop White
Genocide in South Africa, and standing between the two nearly
identical bald men dressed all in black holding either end
of that banner was an old woman. She stood out

(08:05):
in the small crowd not only as the only woman,
but because she was wearing a neatly pressed khaki uniform.
It had been nearly twenty years since the fall of
the apartheid regime, and over a decade since she'd married
an American and moved to Louisiana, but it seems Monica

(08:26):
huggets Stone still had her Africaner Resistance Movement uniform in
the back.

Speaker 3 (08:31):
Of her closet.

Speaker 2 (08:35):
I'm Molly conger, this swear, little guys. We are nearing

(08:57):
the end of the story of Monica hugget Stone. Not
because I'm done digging. I could write half a dozen
more episodes, but because I think you'll start to get
restless if I keep trying to tell the same story
for months at a time. I know I keep saying this,
but it's always true. I really thought this was going

(09:19):
to be a two parter, starting with those rallies in
twenty twelve talking about the modern resurgence of the white
genocide conspiracy theory rhetoric couched in this concern for the
largely imaginary murders of South African farmers, and then just
a brief retrospective on the woman behind those rallies. I
could not possibly have predicted that there would be so

(09:41):
much international intrigue buried in her past. I certainly didn't
expect to spend the last month translating fifty year old
white supremacist newspapers from Afrikaans, or pouring over thirty year
old memos in Croatian tapped out on typewriters by dead
war criminals. I had no idea that a German neo

(10:02):
Nazi blew up a United Nations office in Namibia, or
that his South African accomplice still coaches rugby in Cambridgeshire
evading an international arrest warrant.

Speaker 3 (10:13):
How could I have known? But now we do.

Speaker 2 (10:18):
History is a strange and messy thing, and I suppose
it's only fair to give you a brief recap here
at the top before we start approaching the end. You
might need a reminder of where we've been. The first
episode in this series was about an event that took
place in February of twenty twelve, a dozen or so

(10:39):
rallies across the country that all took place on the
same day. Only the one in Sacramento was attended by
more than a handful of people, and it was the
only one that made it into the newspaper. It has
counter protesters from the nearby occupy encampment showed up to
heckle the Neo Nazis and ended up getting into a
bit of a scuffle with the police. In that episode,

(11:01):
I talked a bit about what the event claimed to
be doing, raising awareness about white genocide and South Africa, which,
if you don't remember the episode, is not a real thing.
It is not happening at all.

Speaker 3 (11:18):
But it is a.

Speaker 2 (11:18):
Conspiracy theory of some importance to white supremacists around the world,
and it was something of a fringe idea. But unfortunately
now the President of the United States has gotten hold
of it and decided that white South Africans qualify for
refugee resettlement in the United States. In the second episode,

(11:40):
the one I really thought was going to be the
end of the story, I only managed to get through
a single incident. The first time Monica Huggett's name showed
up in the historical record alongside a bombing in nineteen
eighty she was a member of a small African or
nationalist terrorist cell calling itself the vitt Commando or the

(12:02):
White Commandos. After a brief bombing campaign targeting anti apartheid
activists and academics, they were all arrested. Most of the
members of the VIT Commando turned out to be Italian fascists,
and Monica Hugget's charges were dropped after she testified against them.
In her testimony, she claimed to be a member of

(12:24):
the American Ku Klux Klan. She wasn't, even in the
next chapter of her own story. I lost track of
her for most of the nineteen eighties, but one of
the men who would be connected to her later on
had a very strange past of his own. In the
third episode of the series, we followed German neo Nazi

(12:46):
Horst Cleans and his South African accomplices. They carried out
an attack on a UN office in Namibia in nineteen
eighty nine, killing a security guard and later murdering a
police officer In their escape from custody, The men involved
in the attack fled back to South Africa, joining a
new africaner Neo Nazi organization called the Order Borofolk. After

(13:09):
another series of bombings and arrests, they all somehow ended
up no longer in jail. That group, the Order Borafolk
also pulled off a high profile heist of a massive
cache of weapons from a South African Air Force base.
Remember I asked you to keep those guns in the
back of your mind. One of them shows up again

(13:31):
in this story. And by this point we're up to
the early nineteen nineties and it's clear to everyone who
is paying attention that the apartheid regime is unsustainable. Multi
party negotiations had begun. The African National Congress and the
ruling National Party were slowly working their way through the

(13:53):
process of coming to an agreement about how the nation
would move forward. And as you might expect, most of
the characters in this story weren't ready to give up
the fight. And that's where our international network of mercenaries
comes in, the subject of last week's episode. In the

(14:15):
summer of nineteen ninety three, at an international fascist rally
in Belgium, leaders of European neo Nazi groups met to
discuss sending mercenaries to South Africa to cause chaos. A
date had been set for the election. They only had
a few months left to either overthrow the government and
cancel that election, or convince enough white South Africans to

(14:37):
secede and form their own white Ethno state, and in
that episode last week, I got a little lost sifting
through old documents from the Bosnian War, trying to nail
down exactly how our German mercenaries got from one conflict
to another. So that brings us all back up to speed.

(14:58):
More or less. I spent most of last week's episodes
sifting through the distant past, looking at the history of
the clan in South Africa and looking at distant places
tracing the paths of those mercenaries. But there is some
context at the heart of this story that we need
to sketch out before we move on, because, like I said,

(15:22):
the end of apartheid wasn't a single moment. There were
years of political negotiations before that election in April of
nineteen ninety four. The election of Nelson Mandela marked the
official end, but it had been all but over for months,
and the end had been in sight for nearly a year.

(15:43):
Here's AWB's leader Eugene terre Blanche offering his thoughts on
the negotiation process to a reporter in May of nineteen
ninety three.

Speaker 4 (15:54):
I believe that they can can negotiate before our five
and get it back and let them try by preparing
myself for the war.

Speaker 2 (16:08):
An increasingly desperate and fractured extreme right wing was doubling
down on violence, but the political process was proceeding without them,
and everything they did to try to stop that process
only seemed to accelerate it. On April tenth, nineteen ninety three,

(16:28):
the Saturday before Easter, Chris Hani was assassinated. Hani was
the General Secretary of the South African Communist Party and
the chief of staff of the a n c's armed wing,
Mukanto with Sizway. He was a beloved and immensely popular
leader within the African National Congress, particularly among young anti

(16:49):
apartheid activists. He'd given his bodyguard the day off, and
he was supposed to be at home. His killer hadn't
actually intended to carry out the plan that day. In particular,
he would later claim he'd only been in the area
conducting one last reconmission, but when he spotted Hani returning

(17:09):
home from buying a newspaper, accompanied only by his fifteen
year old daughter, he knew he'd never get a better shot.
As Hani stepped out of his car, the killer shouted
his name, and as Hani turned around, to see where
the voice had come from. His killer fired, hitting him
four times in the chest and head. The assassin was

(17:33):
arrested almost immediately. One of Hani's neighbors, a white woman,
called the police and was able to give them the
killer's license plate. When police found him that afternoon, the
murder weapon was still sitting on the back seat of
his car. By Monday, Eugene taire Blanche had publicly confirmed
that the killer, a Polish immigrant named Yanushwalus, had been

(17:56):
a member of the Africaner Resistance movement. Once in custody,
Walous confessed to a police officer he had incorrectly assumed
was a fellow traveler. There were plenty of police officers
who would have been on his side he murdered a
black communist, after all, but this turned out not to

(18:18):
be one of them. He told the officer that the
gun had been given to him by Clive Derby Lewis,
a sitting member of Parliament in the Conservative Party. It
had also been one of the guns the Ordoboro folk
had stolen from an Air Force base three years earlier.
When Walous's apartment was searched, officers found a printed list

(18:40):
of names given that Chris Hani's name was on that list,
and he'd just been shot to death. It appears to
have been a hit list, but Walous almost certainly didn't
write that list himself. It was mostly high profile political
figures like Nelson Mandela, Chris Hani, and Communist Party chair

(19:01):
Jo Slovo, but there were also the names of several journalists,
most of whom published only in Afrikaans, which Walouse could
not read. The same list of names was later found
in the personal papers of Clive Derby Lewis's wife, Gay
but white supremacist journalist Arthur Kemp would later testify that
he'd been the original author of the list. As far

(19:24):
as the official record goes, Kemp was not involved, he
was not charged, and he claimed he'd had no idea
the list would be used in any murders. Within hours
of Hani's murder, Nelson Mandela gave a televised address urging.

Speaker 1 (19:41):
Con Chris Haney chanponder the cause of peace, judging to
every corner of South Africa, calling for a spirit of
tolerance among all our people, a nation in mourning, how

(20:03):
our pain and anger is rare, Yet we must not
permit ourselves to be provoked by those who said to
deny us, they're very fatal. Chris Hanne gave his life.

Speaker 2 (20:17):
For Hani's murder didn't have the desired effect. It didn't
provoke violent reprisals from anti apartheid groups. It didn't disrupt
the ongoing negotiations. It didn't make the African National Congress
less willing to compromise during those negotiations. If anything, it

(20:40):
had the opposite effect. Mendela's public addresses in the days
that followed were calm, reasonable and committed to peace, and
the ruling National Party had nothing to celebrate in Hani's
death either. It only served to demonstrate the extreme right
wing's willingness to disrupt the process by any means necessary.

(21:01):
They understood that they were just as likely to find
themselves in a Nazi's crosshairs as the men on the
other side of the negotiating table. It wasn't long after
Hani's murder that it was announced that they'd set a
date the elections would go forward, taking place in April
of nineteen ninety four. In June of nineteen ninety three,

(21:38):
around the time the election date was announced, negotiations about
what that government would look like were still ongoing, and
they were held at the Kempton Park World Trade Center.
On June twenty fifth, nineteen ninety three, thousands of armed
africaner nationalists showed up outside the World Trade Center. A

(22:00):
newly formed africannor Folks Front, an umbrella organization of right
wing groups, staged a protest outside earlier in the morning,
grassing delegates as they arrived. As the day wore on,
the crowd began to grow restless, particularly among the ranks
of the AWB. On orders from Eugene Tareblanche, an AWB

(22:20):
member drove an armored car through the front of the
building and the crowd easily overcame the police and swarmed inside.

Speaker 5 (22:32):
All of a sudden, I saw the security people running out,
and I said, what's up, And they said they've broken
through and thy coming. And then my own security man
simply grabbed hold of me and ran.

Speaker 6 (22:55):
Pandemonium just broke out in the entire building. Many people
on the AMC side from the government side all huddled
into the government offices.

Speaker 2 (23:09):
Officials on both sides of the negotiating table fled, fearing
they'd be shot and killed by the armed men. For
two hours, the AWB occupied the World Trade Center smashing
windows and furniture. They took over the conference room where
the negotiations had been going on and spray painted separate
as slogans on the walls.

Speaker 3 (23:32):
Now, the only.

Speaker 2 (23:34):
Photos I have that I know are of Monica Huggett
were taken in twenty twelve, and she was nearly seventy
years old then, so it was impossible for me to
try to find her in old photos. But I do
know she was there. She said so herself in this

(23:54):
wistful reminiscence about that day in an interview she did
in twenty nineteen.

Speaker 7 (24:01):
They did the negotiations at the World Trade Center at
the airport in Jinaslook, it's not far from where I live,
and we went there one day when the awb AT
made a sort of a ponsard argon and went through
the glass, they really smashed the glass. Oh my goodness,

(24:24):
it just came down like diamonds. And then there we
were about maybe two thousand and three thousand people they're protesting.

Speaker 2 (24:35):
There's quite a bit of actual video of this event,
and it looks really familiar. It looks unsettlingly like footage
of the protesters storming the congressional chambers at the US
Capitol on January sixth, and I don't just mean visually,

(24:56):
although the visual similarities are striking, but there's that same
sort of unnerving mix of bloodlust and light hearted adventurism.
In both cases. There were reports of protesters pissing and
shitting on office furniture and on the floors. And some

(25:17):
of the protesters just look like they're along for the ride,
they're just enjoying the chaos. They're just smashing things and
wandering around. But there are also clear leaders and more
militant elements that are obviously focused on a mission. History
really does rhyme, I guess. But just like the assassination

(25:39):
of Chris Hani, this attempt to derail the negotiations backfired badly.
Here's a and C negotiator and present day South African
President Cyril Ramaposa in an interview in nineteen ninety five.

Speaker 6 (25:56):
I was able to discuss the events with some of
them National Party ministers, and they, in the end, I think,
drove them more and more away from having any form
of understanding or even sympathy with the right wingers.

Speaker 2 (26:17):
This kind of stunt only made the far right look
more unreasonable, more unstable, and less viable as any kind
of political partner. The adults were at the negotiating table,
and these hooligans were driving trucks through windows and pissing
on the floor. Any remaining hope of effectively disrupting the

(26:39):
political process was fading quickly, and while opinions on the
extreme right varied widely as to what the most effective
course of action might be, most extremists had their sights
set on a folk shot a white South African state.
If they couldn't stop what was coming for the nation

(26:59):
of Some Africa, they'd have to find a way to
secure a nation of their own, and to do that well,
they'd need an army. Something very strange happened in March
of nineteen ninety four, a white Africaner nationalist militia took

(27:20):
up arms to keep a black man in power.

Speaker 3 (27:25):
Let's back up for a second.

Speaker 2 (27:27):
This is a bit of history I was admittedly unfamiliar with,
so maybe you'd also benefit from a brief explanation of
apartheid South Africa's semi sovereign Bantustans. Under apartheid, South Africa
established what they called native reserves. These were territories set

(27:48):
aside for the forcible resettlement of black South Africans. They
were allegedly meant to be homelands for particular ethnic groups,
So the Bantustan of Quasulu was meant for the Zulu people,
Transkay and Siskey were for the Kosa people, Bothaotswana for

(28:09):
the Swana people, and so on.

Speaker 3 (28:13):
In practice, though, it.

Speaker 2 (28:14):
Was pretty arbitrary, and more importantly, they functioned to strip
black South Africans of their citizenship. Laws passed in the
nineteen seventies designated all black South Africans as citizens only
of their homeland, that is, the Bantustan they'd been assigned to,
and not a citizen of the country of South Africa.

(28:39):
Of the ten Bantustans, four were recognized as independent states
by the Government of South Africa. No one else in
the world recognized these as sovereign nations, but in nineteen
ninety four, Lucas Mangope was the president of Bofu Tatswana
and he wanted to remain the president after the upcoming elections, though,

(29:02):
all of the Bantustans would be reincorporated into South Africa
and all South Africans black and white, would be full
citizens of the nation of South Africa. Black South Africans
were preparing to cast their ballots in a national election
for the first time, and that would mean an end
to the Mangope presidency because his country wouldn't exist anymore.

(29:27):
In early March of nineteen ninety four, Mangope announced that
both with Tatswana were BOP for short. That's not just
me shortening it, that is apparently what people call it.
But he announced that Bob would not be participating in
the election at all. But with the potential disestablishment of
their country on the horizon, civil servants wanted assurances that

(29:52):
their pensions would be paid, and the president ignored them.
Strikes and civil unrest quickly devolved in to a bit
of a situation when the police joined the protest. This
is an incredibly strange bit of history, and I'm speeding
through it here because we've got other places to go today.

(30:15):
But if you're interested in a bit more about the
bouf U Tatswana crisis, the podcast Lions Led by Donkeys
did an episode about it in December of twenty twenty one,
and it's a fun listen. Mengobe was no stranger to unrest.
This wasn't even his first coup. He'd put down an

(30:36):
attempted coup in nineteen ninety, and he was briefly deposed
by his own military in nineteen eighty eight, but the
South African government intervened, sending in troops to restore him
to power. This time, though it wasn't the South African
government he turned to for help. It was a man
named Constant Villiun. Villiune had retired as a general nearly

(31:01):
a decade earlier, and in nineteen ninety three he and
three other retired generals formed the Africaner Folks Front, an
attempt to unite the disparate elements of the white extreme
right wing. As a former general, Villiune was confident that
if he ever went to war, a good chunk of
the military would follow him.

Speaker 8 (31:25):
I also had forces available, I would say from what
would split off from the Defense Force, Because had I
really taken a military action, there was a real danger
of polarization within the Defense Force. It would certainly have
been a substantial number of people that would have split
it from the Defense Force and would have joined me
in fighting for the liberation of the Africana people.

Speaker 2 (31:51):
By nineteen ninety four, vill June claimed to have over
fifty thousand men under his command, trained paramilitaries, military reservists,
and sympathetic members of the military who would follow his orders.

Speaker 3 (32:06):
It all sounds a.

Speaker 2 (32:07):
Bit odd, why would africaner nationalists lift a finger to
help any black person. But it's a little more complicated
than black and white. If Bob could successfully refuse to
participate in the election, maybe other Bantustans would follow suit,
making the election less legitimate and weakening the state. And

(32:32):
if this African or militia could keep Mangope in power,
they would have access to land and weapons in a
sovereign nation within South Africa's borders. It could be a
stronghold from which to launch more attacks. And perhaps they
hoped to eventually negotiate with Mangope for a bit of

(32:53):
land of their own within his territory so they could
start their own white ethno state. But perhaps most importantly,
Villiun was taking a calculated risk. If his Folks Front
militia came to Mangope's aid, the South African government might
send in the military to restore order.

Speaker 3 (33:15):
And there was a.

Speaker 2 (33:16):
Widespread belief on the right and a profound fear within
the government that the military would refuse those orders that
they would not fire on a white militia. If the
military were to refuse those orders, it would embold in
white right wingers around the country to take up arms.

(33:39):
After all, who was going to stop them? And if
the military refused orders to fire on his militia, villiun
could potentially take control of a significant portion of the military,
and maybe they could topple the entire government. Here is
South African Communist Party chair and a ands negotiator, Joe

(34:01):
Slovo describing that fear.

Speaker 9 (34:05):
Some of my colleagues and I feared very much that
the echelons of the army might see this as the
opportunity to try to prevent the transformation. We weren't certain
of the degree of loyalty that we could attract from
the upper echelons of the army.

Speaker 2 (34:30):
So in March of nineteen ninety four, the government took
a sort of wait and see approach to the whole
affair and bop. They couldn't risk a massed affection within
the military. And maybe things would have been different if
Eugene tare Blanche was more of a team player.

Speaker 3 (34:50):
We'll never know.

Speaker 2 (34:53):
When the dust finally settled, everyone else involved agreed that
no one had in Eugene terre Blanche to the Autogo Pey,
but the AWB refused to be left out, and they
showed up anyway. Terre Blanche had put out a call
to AWB members in an address on Radio Pretoria, that

(35:16):
pirate radio station where our German mercenaries had been assigned
card duty. On March eleventh, nineteen ninety four, Eugene terre
Blanche and a few hundred men under his command arrived
in Bob Jack Turner, leader of the soldiers loyal to Mangope,
did not want AWB there. Their reputation for uncontrollable racist

(35:39):
violence preceded them, and Turner was worried that the black
soldiers under his command would panic at the sight of
terre Blanche's neo Nazis. What they actually did, though, was mutiny.

Speaker 10 (35:55):
When my own troops heard that some of the weapons
were being earmarked for the Folks Front, they didn't like
it very much. In extual fact, they refused to load
any weapons onto vehicles and that that any of the
weapons were to be given to the folks flow.

Speaker 2 (36:19):
When the BOP soldiers saw AWB men were part of
the Folks front contingent, they refused. They refused to participate.
They wouldn't arm any of the white paramilitary men AWB
or otherwise, and maybe they would have happily collaborated with
just the folks front, But when AWB arrived, they no

(36:42):
longer made any distinction between the two. Anyone willing to
stand with AWB was just as bad as they were,
and the BOP soldiers wouldn't have any part in it.
When the soldiers threatened to attack the AWB men if
they didn't leave, terre Blanche's convoy begrudgingly packed up and

(37:03):
started to leave. On the way out of town, though,
they started shooting black civilians at random. As the convoy
rolled through a town, picking off passers by from their
car windows, an angry mob formed blocking their path. One
of the AWB vehicles fired into the crowd, and that

(37:26):
sent everyone running, and this was the last straw for
the police. These neo Nazis had felt quite brave when
they were shooting at unarmed civilians, but it was a
very different story when someone in an armored vehicle started
shooting back. Several people in the convoy were hit, but

(37:49):
they all managed to escape, except the last car. At
the very end of the line, the driver of a
blue Mercedes was shot and killed, leaving his passengers two
other AWB members stranded. The video of this moment is surreal.

(38:10):
I mean, it's bizarre that there's even video of this
moment to watch. And it shows three men in their
khaki uniforms and they've sort of spilled out of this
bloo Mercedes and they're lying on the ground and one
of them appears to be already dead, and the other
two are wounded, lying on the ground, surrounded by photojournalists

(38:34):
snapping Pictures's.

Speaker 8 (38:38):
Just get us some outplines, please, he's just wounded.

Speaker 11 (38:45):
Are you finished with your.

Speaker 10 (38:51):
We need the ambulance guy that's wounded.

Speaker 2 (38:57):
They're just lying there in the dirt, bleeding, and reporters
are asking them questions. One reporter asked them if they're
members of a w B, and one of the bleeding
men says yes, and then, with the journalist's cameras still rolling,

(39:18):
Abot police officer calmly walked over and shot all three
men at point blank range. That officer, un Vlamitza Bernstein Mignazzo,
would eventually be granted amnesty by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
When he appeared before the Commission in nineteen ninety eight,

(39:39):
Eugene Terreblanche himself cross examined him about the incident. After
some extensive back and forth, with terre Blanche really taking
advantage of this opportunity to spin his version of events,
Manatto again explained that he shot those men because he
had witnessed them shooting civilians, saying, quote, it was quite

(40:04):
clear that the killings were going to continue, and I
decided that rather than to leave those people to destroy
the black people who won't do me any good, but
the only alternative is to do away with them, and
that is exactly what I did. Within hours of the
shooting at the convoy, the BOP soldiers had run the

(40:25):
entire folks front out, and once all the white paramilitary
forces had withdrawn, the South African Defense Forces moved in
and the mutinying soldiers quickly surrendered and Mengobe was removed
from power. The government of Bofu Tatswana was dissolved by
the end of the day. The whole disastrous affair was

(40:48):
the end of Constant Villyun's dreams of a Boor folkstot
as the leader of the Afrikaner Folksfront. He'd been loudly
calling for a boycott of the elections. The day after
his troops were run out of Bob, he announced that
not only was he no longer opposing the election, he
had in fact decided to run in the election under

(41:10):
the banner of his newly formed Freedom Front Party, a
conservative party representing white interests. So this is the context
the subject of our story finds herself in Monica. Hugget
was hosting these German mercenaries in her home as a
part of this larger effort to disrupt the upcoming election,

(41:34):
and with the failure in Bob, the Folks Front not
only lost its leader when Villeyun abandoned the plan, but
they'd suffered a pretty serious blow to morale. Seeing your
brothers in arms shot like stray dogs in the street
on the evening news might lead you to ask yourself
some hard questions about your commitment and to the cause.

(41:58):
Those three AWB members were shot on March eleventh. On
March twelfth, Constantin Villyun announced that he was on board
with the elections and was in fact running for office,
and on Monday, March fourteenth, nineteen ninety four, three German
mercenaries opened fire on South African police officers in Tyerport,

(42:20):
outside of Pretoria. Exactly what happened is impossible to say.
Even reporting from the time just isn't consistent. Some reports
say police simply happened to notice several men in combat
fatigues in a car and tried to pull them over.

(42:41):
Other reports say the men intentionally led officers into a trap,
but either way, at some point those Germans started firing
their AK forty sevens at the two police officers, wounding
but not killing them. When the shooting stopped, police found
the body of Thomas Konst in the brush nearby. He

(43:04):
had a pair of night vision goggles on and several
hundred rounds of ammunitions trapped to his body. Stephen Rays
was apprehended alive. The third man, Horse Cleans, managed to
flee the scene, but he was arrested several days later,
along with a fourth mercenary, Alexander Nydline. That much we

(43:26):
know for sure, Thomas Coonst died, Stephen Rays was arrested
that night, and Klen's and Nydeline were picked up that weekend.
Everything else is a little bit Fuzzy. In the last episode,
I mentioned that Monica Huggett was in charge of picking
the mercenaries up from the airport. She was the first

(43:47):
point of contact for each batch of foreign fighters. When
Raised Nydeline and Coons arrived in South Africa in January
of nineteen ninety four, she set them up with their
first assignment, serving as armed guards for the right wing
pirate radio station Radio Pretorio. Now this is absolutely.

Speaker 3 (44:06):
Just me spitballing.

Speaker 2 (44:08):
I'm just guessing here, but I have to wonder if
this confrontation had something to do with the radio station. Remember,
this shootout is happening just days after the internationally televised
violence in bob and when Eugene terre Blanche was trying
to recruit ADVB members to go there in the first place,
he made the announcement on Radio Pretoria. The radio station

(44:33):
isn't mentioned in any of the reporting about the shootout,
but I wonder if this alleged trap they led police
into was connected to their job protecting the station, or
if police were patrolling the area near the station specifically
because of the recent events in Bop. Maybe they expected
tare Blanche to show back up and announce a new

(44:53):
hair brain scheme. An article published in a Berlin newspaper
that month, though, says that they'd grown bored of standing
around guarding the station and had struck off on their own.
Maybe they saw footage of civilians being shot by the
AWB convoy and instead of feeling disgusted, they felt left

(45:16):
out and they wanted to find their own adventure. I
guess we can't really know. I have a lot of
unanswered questions about this incident, but one of them stands
out above the rest. When doctors removed the bullets that
had struck those police officers, one of them didn't match.

(45:41):
It hadn't come from any of our German mercenaries. That
bullet had been fired by. Eugene d'coc. Decoc was a
death squad leader. He had been a colonel in the
South African Police Force, but he was relieved of duty
in nineteen ninety three as part of the National Party's
last ditch efforts at damage control after public revelations about

(46:04):
state sponsored terror. As the commander of the Counterinsurgency Unit
C ten, Decoq oversaw the kidnapping, torture and murder of
countless anti apartheid activists. Later testimony before the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission would connect Dacoq's C ten unit to the

(46:27):
violent attacks in Namibia in nineteen eighty nine, the ones
intended to undermine Namibian independence. After his bullet was discovered
inside that policeman in nineteen ninety four, a police spokesman said, quote,
he told investigators he was on a neighboring property when
he heard shooting. Fearing for his life, he fired in

(46:50):
the general direction of the muzzle fire. I know it's
a mess of a story, but that bit about Namibia
might be jumping out at you. Those violent attacks in
nineteen eighty nine intended to undermine Namibian independence. Two weeks
ago we discussed one of those attacks in great detail,

(47:11):
the murder of a UN security guard in aut Yo.
That operation was later revealed to have been funded by
the South African government, But one of the men who
actually threw a grenade at the UN office was German
mercenary horse to cleanse. So what are the odds that
two men who'd participated in the same state backed terrorism

(47:35):
in nineteen eighty nine would just completely accidentally cross paths
again five years later? While one of them was in
the middle of a shootout with the police. It's possible
that the answers are buried somewhere in the case file
for Decoc's later conviction for crimes against humanity, but a

(47:57):
quick search didn't seem promising a coincidence for the ages. Maybe,
but back to our Germans. A later report in Searchlight

(48:20):
magazine says that after they were arrested, one of the
Germans talked, telling police that it had been Monica Huggett
who'd introduced them to Klent's, and based on the timeline
of events and the fact that one of them was
already dead, it had to have been Stephen Ray's who
ratted Monica out. Nideline and Cleanse weren't taken into custody

(48:41):
until Sunday, and Monica had already been arrested by then.
When the next round of mercenaries arrived from Europe just
a few days after the shootout, there was no one
waiting for them at the airport. Ronald Douster, Ralph Morajaz,
and falk Zemeng waited at the airport for nearly an
hour before they tried calling the number they'd been given

(49:02):
by their European contacts at Monica Hugget's house. A woman
answered and told them she had no idea where Monica was,
but she gave them the address so they could take
a taxi and wait for her.

Speaker 7 (49:14):
There.

Speaker 2 (49:16):
They were sitting in Monica's living room when they found
out she'd been arrested on a weapons charge. So she
was certainly in police custody on March seventeenth, nineteen ninety four,
but she pretty quickly made bail. An Associated Press report
published a week after the incident quotes from a German
television news broadcast. I searched desperately for actual video of

(49:41):
this segment, but to no avail. I did find a
copy of the TV guide for ard that German TV
network for this date, March twenty second, nineteen ninety four,
But unfortunately, it does us absolutely no good to know
that this segment probably air after a German dubbed rerun

(50:02):
of the American police drama Lady Blue. But the AP
write up says an anonymous South African woman with knowledge
of the German mercenary cell appeared on the broadcast, and
the woman said that Horst Glens had stayed in her
home for some time and that the group he was

(50:22):
operating with had come to South Africa to assassinate Nelson Mandela.
Reporting from the same time period in the Johannesburg City
Press says that upon arrival in the country, the German
mercenary stay in a private home in Kempton Park, where
they were given money and documents before being dispatched to

(50:45):
their assignments. Given that we know for certain that Monica's
Kempton Park home was Douyster's destination, it seems likely that
she is this unnamed woman from Kempton Park. With the
election just weeks away, the plan was unraveling. Our Dutch mercenary,

(51:05):
Ronald Douster was unable to make contact with Monica Huggett.
He was redirected to a farm owned by another AWB member.
With his vast experience as a soldier for hire, he
was put to work teaching the group how to make
car bombs. In a later confession, Deyster explained that he
was quite good at making car bombs, having successfully detonated

(51:29):
several in Bosnia, but he found the whole operation here
just embarrassingly amateurish.

Speaker 12 (51:38):
He said.

Speaker 2 (51:38):
The people on the farm were ridiculous and pathetic and
that quote. The whole camp was in chaos. They couldn't
even source the materials he'd asked for to make nail bombs,
and the guy he was trying to explain car bombs
to didn't know anything about explosives.

Speaker 3 (51:58):
He was, of.

Speaker 2 (51:59):
Course personally and ideologically interested in participating in a white revolution,
but he was a career mercenary and his top priority
is always his own survival, and this obviously wasn't going
to work, so he went to the police. He was

(52:20):
willing to exchange information about this operation in exchange for
his own freedom, and when his information proved to be valuable,
he was hired by South African intelligence to assist them
in taking down the network. Searchlight Magazines nineteen ninety six
series of articles about this whole operation mentions only in

(52:41):
passing that Monica Huggett went right back to her old
ways after being released, placing more ads for soldiers in
Eastern European newspapers, But there's no date attached to that
in the article, because at some point she left. Sometime
in nineteen ninety four, Monica Huggett left South Africa. Nelson

(53:05):
Mandela was elected president in April, apartheid was over. The
Truth and Reconciliation Commission wouldn't be formed for another year
and a half, so there was no promise of amnesty
on the table.

Speaker 3 (53:18):
In nineteen ninety four.

Speaker 2 (53:21):
I don't know if she left to avoid prosecution, or
if she left because she couldn't bear the torment of
living in an integrated society, or for some other reason,
but she did leave.

Speaker 12 (53:39):
When I tried to go over to the United States
the first time, I had to go for three interviews,
and I even knew my mother was a farmer and
asked me when I go to the States for three months,
was going to take off the cows. They asked me
that the consul not yet, so eventually I'm not going

(54:02):
into detail, but anyway, I got the visa and I
went to the United States in nineteen ninety four. I
came back in ninety six, and then I got married
in two thousand to an American citizen, Jimstowne.

Speaker 2 (54:21):
I wish she would go into detail, how exactly did
she manage to spend two years in the United States
on a three month visa and why was she granted
a visa at all. Over the course of those three interviews.
Did they just talk about her mother's cows or did

(54:44):
they ask about the terrorism because they obviously knew some
information about her. If they knew about the cows, did
they ask her if she planned to visit the American
clansmen who'd sent her the bomb making manual the VIC
Commando had relied on when they made those that they
set off in Professor's offices in nineteen eighty Did they

(55:04):
ask her about the weapons charge she was still out
on bond for, or the dead mercenary who'd been staying
in her guest room. I really would love to know
how those interviews went, because somehow she gained legal entry
into the United States. She spent two years here on
that three month visa before returning to South Africa in

(55:26):
nineteen ninety six. In this hour of two thousand, she
married a retired sports broadcaster from Louisiana at a ceremony
in her hometown of Kempton Park, and the couple returned
to Mandeville, Louisiana together. I know I promised this story
was over, and it seems absolutely criminal of me to

(55:48):
stretch this out over so many episodes, But in my defense,
I did warn you that there might not be an
episode this week at all. I lost most of my
workdays this week cover a trial here in Charlottesville.

Speaker 3 (56:02):
I'll tell you about that soon.

Speaker 2 (56:03):
Too, But I don't want to rush the ending of
this story. I mean, I didn't even have time to
tell you about Monica's belief in the prophecies.

Speaker 3 (56:13):
Of a long dead boor mystic.

Speaker 2 (56:16):
And in the weeks I've spent putting this together, history
has marched on. It was the President's bizarre executive order
condemning South African land reform that sent me down this
path in the first place, and he's only doubled down
on his commitment to the white genocide conspiracy theory since then. No,

(56:37):
I think there is a whole episode's worth of story
left to tell. But if I've somehow misjudged how much
of the story is actually left, I can always feel
some time by reading you the absolutely dreadful poems written
by one of those mercenaries. A very strange meeting took

(57:13):
place in June of nineteen eighty five. This was long
before the days of email and video conferencing. If you
wanted to hammer out an agreement, you had to get
everyone in the same room perhaps you could invite everyone
to your office or rent a conference room at the Marriott,
But the attendees at this meeting would have had a

(57:36):
hard time booking flights to Washington, DC. So they settled
on something a little less orthodox, And they couldn't exactly
just call up the men on their invite list either.
The logistics were going to be a nightmare. Dana Rohrabacher,
President Ronald Reagan's speechwriter, personally flew to a safe house

(57:56):
into Gusagalpa to hand deliver an invitation to Ado Kallero,
leader of the Nicaraguan Contrast. Anti communist activist Jack Wheeler
was in touch with the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan and Laotian
rebel leader Pauka Here, and Grover Norquist had plenty of
contacts who could get him in touch with Jonas Savimbi,

(58:16):
leader of the Angolan Insurgent Force UNIDA. Given the guest list,
they had pretty limited options when it came to finding
a venue. State Department officials made calls. Only two governments
were willing to offer their public support for such a summit,

(58:37):
Israel and South Africa. Politically, that was a minefield, so
one of the attendees offered to host they could hold
the meeting at the UNITA base camp in the Angolan
town of Jamba. American Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs,
Chester Crocker arranged for the South African military to handle Sekis.

(59:02):
It was all coming together. With funding from the President
of Right Aid, Jack Abramoff was going to get the
world's leading anti communists into one room. I'm not sure
this meeting accomplished much in terms of advancing the Reagan doctrine.
But at that rebel base in southern Angola, Jack Abramoff

(59:23):
reconnected with an old friend, a South African military intelligence
operative he'd first met on a visit to Johannesburg in
nineteen eighty three, and while Oliver North met with armed
men in the sweltering heat, Abramoff was brainstorming his next
project and meeting with the man who would fund it.

(59:44):
Whether or not Jack Abramoff's strange summit had any impact
on the course of the Cold Wars a question for
someone else. I can only tell you about the time
the South African government secretly paid an ambitious young American
lobbyist to make one of the worst movies I've ever seen.

(01:00:05):
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys. This

(01:00:26):
is a side story. I really couldn't resist it. I
think you'll understand. I've been writing this story, this story
about Monica Huggett, about South Africa, about the Apartheid International.
I've been writing it for so long that I'm having
trouble letting it go, so I will try to wrap
it up next week. I know there are so many

(01:00:49):
other weird little guys I've promised to tell you about,
and we'll get to them, but I've invested so much
in this story that I want to make sure I
end it properly. And I could tell I just didn't
have that this week. I don't talk a lot about
my personal life in public online because as an expert

(01:01:09):
on weird Little Guys, I really hate to think about
them thinking about my personal life. But I guess I'm
going to have to let you all in on this
one eventually. Anyway, I'm actually getting married in a couple
of weeks, and it turns out that having a wedding
is kind of a whole ordeal. I'm not really the
arts and crafts type. I really would rather be watching

(01:01:31):
grainy videos of old Area Nations World Congress meetings than
making place cards and seating charts and trying to figure
out how to do floral arrangements.

Speaker 3 (01:01:42):
But here we are.

Speaker 2 (01:01:43):
Nevertheless, honestly, I'm really lucky that I have a job
where I can just follow my heart and let my
curiosity lead me wherever we happen to end up. Because
if I have to write a seven thousand word research
project every week, my heart's got.

Speaker 3 (01:01:59):
To be in it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:00):
And this week I could not resist the siren song
of a bad eighties action movie.

Speaker 3 (01:02:07):
It was just too.

Speaker 2 (01:02:08):
Weird to only mention in passing. It had to be
its own episode. Because as I was writing the conclusion
to this long, strange saga of Monica Huggetts Stone, I
had originally planned to devote just a little bit of
time to the political connections of the far right in
the United States and the pro apartheid activist.

Speaker 3 (01:02:28):
Movements in South Africa.

Speaker 2 (01:02:30):
But I was wrapping up my research connecting Monica to
David Duke's nineteen ninety six Senate run when I realized
I'd overlooked something massive.

Speaker 3 (01:02:42):
It wasn't just.

Speaker 2 (01:02:43):
The likes of David Duke, who were terribly interested in
the continuing success of apartheid. No, it wasn't just the
extreme fringes at all. There were large swaths of Reagan
Conservatives who were deeply embedded in this. The deeper I dug,
the more obvious it became that a lot of the

(01:03:03):
very big names in American conservative politics are tied up
in this story. Not with Monica, not directly, Like I said,
this is a side story. But in the nineteen eighties,
Sub Saharan Africa was a battleground in the Cold War,
and the South African government was a big player in

(01:03:24):
this perceived fight against Soviet influence on the continent. So
even as public discussed with apartheid complicated having open dealings
with the country, American conservatives saw South Africa as a
critical partner in the ideological struggle against communism. And we'll
get into some more about those connections in the next episode,

(01:03:46):
because they continue into present day politics. In the time
it's taken me to write these episodes, that situation has
continued to evolve, and there's certainly some strange connections to
the past. In the story of South African Ambassador Ibrahim
Razul's recent expulsion from the United States. But today we're
not talking about Ibrahim Razul. We're talking about Red Scorpion,

(01:04:12):
the nineteen eighty eight action movie starring Dolph Lundgren. I
guess we have to do a little background first. I'm
not too proud to admit that when I started poking
around the edges of this story, I only knew enough
about Jack Abramoff to tell you that's that lobbyist who
got into trouble when I was in high school, I think,

(01:04:36):
and we don't really have to get into the thing.
Abramoff is most famous for his two thousand and six
conviction for mail fraud, tax evasion, and conspiracy to bribe
public officials. He did a little time in federal prison
for crimes he committed in connection to his work as
a lobbyist for Native American tribes seeking to influence legislation
on gambling. That happened later in his life. But I

(01:04:59):
did to mention it because that's the only thing I
knew about him, And I just want to reassure you, yes,
that Jack Abramoff. And obviously you have to start somewhere
in politics. You don't just find yourself in the center
of a web of corruption. Involving multiple sitting congressmen right
out of the gate, and Abramoff got his start in

(01:05:20):
politics in college, working as a volunteer on Ronald Reagan's
nineteen eighty presidential campaign and serving as the chairman of
the Massachusetts Alliance of College Republicans. After graduation, he was
elected as the chair of the College Republican National Committee
with the help of a man who had become his
close friend and longtime collaborator, Rover Norquist. Together the pair

(01:05:43):
made it their mission to transform the College Republicans from
a resume padding social club into a vicious, militant political tool.
They pushed out the old car the men they considered wishy,
washy country clubbers, and they remade the organization into what
Abramoff called the sword and the Shield of the Reagan Revolution.

(01:06:07):
And he was a busy man in the early eighties.
In addition to his duties as the chair of the
College Republicans, he was the frontman of a group called
the USA Foundation, and that group mainly appears in a
couple of news stories in nineteen eighty four in connection
to a series of rallies that he organized celebrating the
anniversary of the US Invasion of Granada. And maybe it's

(01:06:32):
because the name is so generic, but it's hard to
find old news articles about the USA Foundation. They don't
really seem to have done much public facing work that
was perhaps by design. The foundation seems to have mostly
existed to raise money. Traditionally, the College Republicans had relied

(01:06:54):
almost exclusively on their Republican National Committee for their budget.

Speaker 3 (01:06:59):
But Abramoff had some thing bigger in mind.

Speaker 2 (01:07:02):
He wanted autonomy, and he wanted an immunity from the
nagging oversight of the old guard, so he made his
own money. I once again find myself appreciating the work
of an unsavory source. The archivists at the Liberty University
Jerry Folwell Library have done a really phenomenal job of

(01:07:25):
digitizing their collection of old documents related to the Conservative Caucus,
a lobbying group whose board Abramof served on. And one
of the documents in that collection is a memo that
Abramoff sent to a big donor listing off his accomplishments
as chair of the College Republicans in nineteen eighty four
in hopes of securing a big check, and he says

(01:07:47):
the USA Foundation, under his leadership had hosted a delegation
of South African student leaders on a trip to Washington
in January of nineteen eighty four, and at that meeting,
they'd made plans with those South Africa students from a
group called the Student's Moderate Alliance to co host an
international student conference later that year at a resort in

(01:08:09):
the South African Bantustan of both with the Swana. That
same archive contains a nineteen eighty four letter from one
of Abramoff's colleagues, a right wing think take veteran named
Amy Moritz, and it's a letter to William F.

Speaker 3 (01:08:23):
Buckley.

Speaker 2 (01:08:25):
And in that letter, Moritz openly admits to operating multiple
front groups, and then she opines on the effectiveness of
various other right wing groups operating around the country. And
one of the groups she offers an opinion on is
Abramoff's USA Foundation, and she describes it as operating out
of the Heritage Foundation, which is an intriguing aside that

(01:08:50):
I can't offer you any explanation for. But through his
USA Foundation, it seems that Abramoff had finally found a
way to pair his ideological inclinations with personal profit. The
USA Foundation took in hefty donations from corporations in exchange
for seking the College Republicans on student groups that were

(01:09:12):
bad for business. So landlords in San Francisco paid to
have student groups organizing for rent control pushed off California campuses.
Campbell's Soup paid them to undermine student support from migrant
farm workers unions. It was, I guess, another front group

(01:09:32):
with the added bonus of being able to solicit tax
exempt contributions which he could then use to fund the
political activities of the College Republicans. So these companies, they're
not just donating to some think tank, They're not donating
to awareness raising or policy papers.

Speaker 3 (01:09:51):
They're investing.

Speaker 2 (01:09:53):
They were buying fake grassroots organizing to compete in the
marketplace of ideas on their behalf. But Jack Abramoff wasn't
content to sit in Washington and hold fundraisers. He was,
after all, the sword and shield of the Reagan Revolution,
and in the early eighties that meant getting out there

(01:10:14):
and fighting Soviet influence wherever it existed or wherever it
was imagined to exist. For some conservatives, the growing bad
press about apartheid was just a highly effective KGB propaganda operation,
and so it was as chair of the College Republican
Committee that Jack Abramoff first visited South Africa in nineteen

(01:10:37):
eighty three. The trip was an effort to strengthen ties
between student groups internationally, and as part of that mission,
he met with Russell Kristel, the leader of a group
calling itself the Student's Moderate Alliance. It wouldn't be officially
revealed until nineteen ninety two, so nine years after this

(01:10:59):
meeting that the Student's Moderate Alliance had been entirely a
project of the South African Security Police designed to discredit
and disrupt student organizing by groups like the National Union
of South African Students or NUSAS, a primarily English speaking
anti apartheid group on university campuses. But even more than

(01:11:20):
a decade before the truth was exposed, student groups in
South Africa saw right through Russell Crystal. I found newspapers
and zines put out by college students dating as far
back as the organization's founding in nineteen eighty mocking the
obvious charade of this organization calling itself moderate. They immediately

(01:11:41):
spotted what was obvious National Party propaganda, old issues of
a NUSAS aligned student newspaper published by the South African
Students Press Union Don't Hold Back. A nineteen eighty issue
covering the student council election at the University of witwatersrund
and Johannesburg usually just shortened to Vits University, calls the

(01:12:03):
Student's Moderate Alliance a neo fascist group and it dismisses
them as joke candidates, although one of those joke candidates
did win, Russell Cristel's brother Lance. By nineteen eighty three,
the same paper reported that Russell Crystal, also a student
at Fitfadder's Front, had offered to help right wing student

(01:12:24):
groups at other schools pay the cost of printing their
anti NUSUS pamphlets. It was also widely believed that Cristel's
Student's Moderate Alliance was behind some mysterious pamphlets that had
been popping up at campuses all over the country. The
pamphlets were made to appear as though NUSUS had authored them.

(01:12:45):
They bore the organization's name at the bottom, and they
mimicked the style of real NUSIS flyers, but they misrepresented
the group's views and attempted to link the group to
illegal activity. They were such an obvious attempt to discredit
the group that the Vice chancellor at vis University issued
a statement that whoever had created the flyers quote does

(01:13:08):
not have the best interest of students or of the
country at heart. The university administration also noted that quote
the nature and country wide method of their distribution suggests
that the persons responsible for them command resources beyond those
typically available to student organizations. And throughout the nineteen eighties,

(01:13:33):
student newspapers in South Africa ran stories about the impossible
level of funding the Student's Moderate Alliance seemed to have
access to. They had unlimited numbers of these glossy, expensive looking,
professionally made pamphlets, and in one case there was even
proof that the pamphlets had been printed in a National

(01:13:53):
Party office. In nineteen eighty two, a student newspaper obtained
a sworn state from someone who had been detained under
Section twenty two. That's the provision that allowed for preventive
detention without charges, largely a tool used to harass and
intimidate anti apartheid activists, and on this particular occasion, this

(01:14:15):
detainee was taken up to the tenth floor of the
Johannesburg police station to be questioned. The tenth floor was
occupied by the security branch of the police, the police
who were tasked with intelligence gathering, handling informants, and running
death squads. And there on the tenth floor, this detainee

(01:14:37):
saw a familiar face. It was Russell Cristel, and this
worn statement read, in part quote I saw Crystal on
the tenth floor of John Forster Square. He was neither
handcuffed nor accompanied.

Speaker 3 (01:14:52):
By the security police.

Speaker 2 (01:14:54):
He appeared calm and under no duress. When his brother
Lands Crystal, was elected to the Vitt Student Council in
nineteen eighty, he refused to sign a statement that all
student representatives were asked to agree to that they would
not involve themselves in espionage on campus. Lance Cristal reportedly said, quote,

(01:15:17):
I do not want to be held responsible for any
patriotic urge that might occur during my term of office.
An official university inquiry from the mid eighties determined that
the Student's Moderate Alliance clearly had quote lavish funding from
anonymous sources. In addition to his Student's Moderate Alliance, Russell

(01:15:38):
Cristal also founded the National Students Federation. The Vitt student
newspaper sent a reporter to the group's conference in nineteen
eighty four. It was held at a luxury hotel in
downtown Johannesburg, with Little Finger sandwiches served on silver planters.
Russell Cristal was elected as the group's president and the

(01:15:58):
leader of the student's Moderate Alliance chapter at the University
of Cape Town, was elected to the group's executive board
and named its media officer. That student, a young Arthur
Kemp is someone whose name might sound familiar if you
listen carefully. He would later author the hit list found
in the Possession of Chris Hani's assassin in nineteen ninety three.

(01:16:22):
That student newspaper reporter in nineteen eighty four concluded the
article about the conference with a quote from a nusa's
student leader. They aren't just making wild accusations when they
speculate about possible state funding for crystal student groups. Just
a few years earlier, something called the Information Scandal had

(01:16:42):
broken and the government had been forced to admit to
the existence of something called Project Anne Marie, a year's
long propaganda campaign aimed at undermining anti apartheid activism at
home and anti apartheid opinion abroad. Four high rise thinking
government officials were forced to resign in disgrace, including Prime

(01:17:04):
Minister Forster. The Secretary of Information not only resigned but
fled the country, only to be extradited back from France
to face fraud charges. It turned out that throughout the seventies,
millions of dollars had been spent from the defense budget
to do, in part, exactly what these students feared was

(01:17:26):
happening again, form front groups to disseminate propaganda and disrupt
and discredit anti apartheid groups like NUSUS and so that
student organizer told the paper quote, while we would want
to shy away from individualizing political differences where the true

(01:17:47):
motives of people are being obscured, it has at times
been necessary to draw the links between such individuals and
the National Party and Security Police. We believe that the
NSF represents a growth attempt to stifle opposition to apartheid.
It would take almost a decade to get.

Speaker 3 (01:18:07):
The government to admit it. But she was right.

Speaker 2 (01:18:11):
Russell Crystal's National Student Federation and Student's Moderate Alliance were
both entirely the creation of the apartheid government.

Speaker 3 (01:18:24):
While I was.

Speaker 2 (01:18:25):
Researching this segment, I found a small collection of old
issues of the Student That Student newspaper at the University
of the Vittvadders run. It's such a fascinating window into
the past. It's just a college newspaper. It's written by
twenty year olds, and there are articles about how to
get more information about university sponsored insurance. There are articles

(01:18:48):
about the tennis team's latest matchups and reviews of David
Bowie albums and John Irving novels. There's gossip about student
groups and classified ads for bicycles and piano lessons. But
in those same pages, those same student journalists are writing
stories about the editor of another student paper disappearing at

(01:19:10):
the hands of the security police, held in detention without charges.
There are headlines like twentieth vis student detained and the
police won't say why and they don't know when they'll
be back. Mixed in with these write ups about student
theater productions that are images of riot police with dogs

(01:19:31):
and shotguns marching through campus. Anyway, all that to say,
it's possible that Jack Abramoff didn't know he was meeting
with a government funded front group led by an intelligence
asset when he visited Johannesburg in nineteen eighty three. Again,
the actual facts wouldn't come out until nineteen ninety two.

(01:19:53):
Maybe he didn't know. It was sort of an open secret, though,
and he would have been able to figure it out
had he spent five minutes doing his due diligence. But
if we take his word for it, he never had
any idea. It was obvious to those teenagers in Johannesburg
and to the university administrators. Crystal himself never refuted allegations

(01:20:16):
that he was connected to the security police, even allegations
that surfaced in nineteen eighty two. But maybe Abramoff never asked.
Maybe he's just an idiot. But despite his later insistence
to the contrary, there are some clues here that might
lead you to suspect that he did know. Not long

(01:20:41):
after returning from this trip, the National College Republican Committee
formally adopted a resolution pledging their support to the student's
Moderate alliance in their fight against communism. The resolution condemned
Soviet aggression and claimed that South Africa was plagued by
deliberate KGP propaganda, but it didn't actually mention apartheid at all.

(01:21:07):
When Abramoff gave a speech at the Republican National Convention
in August of nineteen eighty four. That was his parting
message that he's mobilizing college age voters to reelect Ronald
Reagan because America can only be free if Ronald Reagan
is free to fund the anti communist death squads.

Speaker 11 (01:21:27):
And any students know that support of anti Soviet freedom
fighters and victory over communism guarantees us security for our nation,
and so it is to our party that they come.
It is with us that they trust our dreams, and

(01:21:48):
it is in us that they place their hopes, and
so it is for them that we must win in November.
It is for them that we must re elect Ronald Reagan,
and it is for them that we must restore liberty
and righteousness throughout the world.

Speaker 7 (01:22:02):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:22:10):
By nineteen eighty five, Jack Abramoff had a new gig.
He was the executive director of Citizens for America, a
lobbying group funded by Write eight heir Lewis Lahirman. This
was very explicitly just a privately funded mouthpiece for Ronald Reagan.
Lahirman was the founder, funder, and leader of CFA, but

(01:22:34):
it hadn't actually been his idea. It was Reagan, mega
donor and producer of most of the world's instant mashed potatoes.
A man named Jack Hume who approached Reagan in nineteen
eighty three with the idea of forming a group that
could shape the public opinion in his favor. But they
needed the right man for the job. It was President

(01:22:56):
Reagan himself who called up Lherman and sold him on
the idea. Lehman later described the call saying, quote, our
first purpose is to induce a mutation in the climate
of opinion in America among opinion leaders. So about a
year and a half into the existence of CFA, Lehman

(01:23:16):
hired Jack Abramoff as its executive director, and in that role,
Jack Abramoff was meeting almost daily with Oliver North. You see,
Ronald Reagan very much wanted to fund the anti communist
forces in Nicaragua, but because of their horrific and ongoing

(01:23:37):
human rights abuses, Congress had passed a series of ever
tightening restrictions on the kind of US aid that they
could receive, and by nineteen eighty five, Ronald Reagan couldn't
legally send the contras any US money at all. So
they put their heads together and they found what they
thought was a creative little loophole Congress didn't actually say

(01:24:01):
that they couldn't send the Contrasts any money. They said
that they couldn't send them any US government money, money
that had been appropriated by Congress, money from the budget
of a US agency. There are other kinds of money,
and so the Reagan administration illegally sold weapons to Iran,

(01:24:23):
and they used that money, money that had never been
appropriated by Congress, to fund the contrast It's a lot
more complicated than that. Don't email me to explain it.
I know, I just don't want to write a thousand
words about the Iran contra affair. But I don't think
anyone wants to hear that anyway. So if this story

(01:24:43):
is new to you, all you need to know right
now is that Ronald Reagan was absolutely unwilling to let
Congress stand in the way of his desire to overthrow
the Nicaraguan government. And a lot of people eventually got
into some trouble when that loophole idea turned out to
be pretty illegal. And here's where we finally picked back

(01:25:06):
up with that strange story we opened with. As director
of the CFA, Abramoff convinced his boss, Lewis Lherman that
this summit of anti communist rebel leaders would be a
public relations victory for Ronald Reagan. Congress had just shut
down the last bit of USA to the Contras in Nicaragua,

(01:25:28):
and they'd soon be hearing a bill on aid to
Jonas Savimbi's United Forces in Angola. Reagan insisted that arming
what he called freedom fighters was actually self defense for
the United States. The idea is that these rebel groups
are fighting Soviet influence abroad, and that's a necessary thing
in these last days of the Cold War. So Abramov's

(01:25:51):
plan was to get them all in one room and
brainstorm a strategy for convincing the world that these notorious
human rights of users are in indeed Reagan's freedom fighters.
And that's how Jack Abramoff ended up on a South
African charter plane to Angola to spend four days in
a tent with Oliver North, Grover Norquist, and the leaders

(01:26:16):
of the Contras and the Mujahadeen. The whole affair sounds
like it would make for a darkly funny comedy, and
apparently someone did make a movie about Jack Abramoff in
twenty ten. It's called Casino Jack. I think Kevin Spacey
plays Jack Abramoff. I didn't watch it, but apparently there
is a scene in that movie depicting this event. On

(01:26:40):
their flight from Johannesburg to Angola, the plane they took
had to fly very low and changed course frequently to
avoid detection by the Cubans who were in Angola, and
this left the entire delegation.

Speaker 3 (01:26:52):
Just miserably airsick.

Speaker 2 (01:26:55):
There were several reporters along for the ride, and I
found multiple accounts that almost everyone on the plane spent
the entire flight taking turns vomiting in the plane's filthy toilet.
And after they landed on a makeshift airstrip somewhere in
the bush and southern Angola, they endured a two hour
car ride in old jeeps over unpaved rows before arriving

(01:27:16):
at the secret location of the United base camp. Jack
Abramoff later wrote that because he couldn't travel on the Sabbath,
he had actually departed for Jumba a day earlier than
the rest of the delegation, and so he wouldn't have
to travel alone. Adolfo Colero volunteered to go with him,
And that just seems so thoughtful, doesn't it. I'm sure

(01:27:39):
he was just being polite. He was just trying to
make a new friend. There's no source that indicates a
reporter was on that flight. I can't find anything written
about what they might have talked about, So we can
only guess what a rabid Reaganite and the leader of
the Nicaraguan contras might have talked during five hours alone

(01:28:02):
in May of nineteen eighty five. As bad as the
journey was, it wasn't much better after they'd arrived. This
was Jamba, not DC. There was no Ritz Carlton. There
was no plumbing, there was no air conditioning. They slept
on cots and thatched huts. The delegation from the Mujahadeen

(01:28:26):
was using Abdul Rahim Mardak's son as a translator, and
Abramoff would later claim that he seemed to be struggling,
often offering only a few words in translation for very
long statements. Write up in The New York Times says
the Laotian translator kept referring to their Angolan host, Jonas
Savimbi as mister Zimbabwe, and when the group's wealthy patron,

(01:28:50):
Lewis Lherman, presented these rebel leaders, each with their own
framed copy of the United States Constitution. They didn't even
tend to be impressed. When the group was sat down
to get to business, Lherman read them a letter from
Ronald Reagan appearing to endorse the summit, and it read,

(01:29:11):
in part, we have to be moved by the example
of men and women who struggle every day at great
personal risk, for rights that we have.

Speaker 3 (01:29:21):
Enjoyed since birth.

Speaker 2 (01:29:23):
Their goals are our goals. But in reading this letter aloud,
Lherman omitted a pretty important line. In the President's letter,
it wasn't addressed to this group. It was addressed to
Lahirman alone, and it was not intended to convey the
President's endorsement of or promised of aid to anyone there.

(01:29:49):
In Jack Abramoff's memoirs, though he claims quote.

Speaker 3 (01:29:53):
There wasn't a dry eye in the house.

Speaker 2 (01:29:55):
At the end of the letter, he goes on to say,
the words of Ronald Reagan meant the world to this group.
That particular characterization of this moment is notably absent from
every other account I read. One account published in the
Conservative Washington Examiner says there wasn't even enough food for

(01:30:18):
everyone there. Jack Abramoff keeps kosher so he packed an
entire suitcase with his own provisions for the trip, and
he departed from Angola a little bit early before the
event was entirely over, and The Washington Examiner reports that
as he's leaving, he's auctioning off his remaining cans of
tuna fish, reportedly for as much as twenty dollars a can.

(01:30:43):
Grover Norquis dubbed the event the Democratic International. The press
called it the Jamboree in Jamba, and the attendees signed
a pact that read, we free peoples fighting for our
national independence and human rights a dumbled at Jamba declare
our solidarity with all freedom movements in the world and

(01:31:04):
state our commitment to cooperate to liberate our nations from
these Soviet imperialists. In a later piece in Harper's Magazine,
columnist Thomas Frank called the declaration a bit of high
flown folderol written by Grover Norquist that aimed for solemnity
but sounded more like the work of a fifth grader
who'd been forced to memorize the Gettysburg Address and the

(01:31:25):
Declaration of Independence and has gotten them all jumbled up somehow,
I mean, honestly sick burn On, Grover Norquist. Padolfo Kolero,
the representative from the Contras, clarified to reporters that the
pact didn't call for any exchanges of troops or weapons.
It was kind of just vibes. When the American delegation

(01:31:49):
got home, Lewis Lherman discovered that Abramoff and Norquist had
been blowing through money with reckless abandon and they'd spent
nearly three million dollars out of the budget of Citizens
for America. Lhermann claims he fired them. Abramoff says he quit.
Who knows, But by the end of the summer of

(01:32:10):
nineteen eighty five, Jack Abramoff and Grover Norquist no longer
worked at Citizens for America But luckily for Abramoff, he'd
used his time in Angola to reconnect with an old friend.
That summit had also been attended by representatives from right
wing student groups from South Africa, led by none other
than Russell Crystal. Abramoff soon found himself as the head

(01:32:38):
of a newly founded DC based think tank called the
International Freedom Foundation.

Speaker 3 (01:32:45):
It has the same.

Speaker 2 (01:32:46):
Sort of nebulous, meaningless mission statement as any number of
think tanks they promoted freedom and democracy and the free market.
It looked like just another slick lobbying organization designed to
bring in high dollar donations for newsletters about the evils
of communism, and I guess that's kind of what it was,

(01:33:06):
except almost all of the money came directly from the
South African government. It was given the code name Project
pac Man by South African military intelligence, and Abramoff's new
think tank received one point five million dollars per year
every year from nineteen eighty six through nineteen ninety two

(01:33:26):
to fund Operation Babushka, the code name given to this
propaganda campaign aimed at undermining the African National Congress, shaping
international opinion about apartheid, and combating efforts by American politicians
to impose sanctions on South Africa. The truth didn't come

(01:33:47):
out until nineteen ninety five. That's when former South African
security policeman Paul Erasmus testified before the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission about the existence of the stratcom Unit short Forrategic Communications,
which I guess is kind of a cute name for
propaganda and disinformation. Erasmus admitted to his own role and

(01:34:08):
a year's long disinformation campaign smearing Winnie Mandela, and he's
spoken publicly over the years about the close relationships Traccom
had with US based Conservatives, people like Edwin Fulner, one
of the founders of the Heritage Foundation, and people like
prominent Council of Conservative Citizens member Robert Slim. Slim, interestingly enough,

(01:34:32):
is someone whose name I found twice, once in the
nineteen eighties when he was sending faxes to leaders of
the Conservative Caucus offering to set up meetings for them
with Eugene terre Blanche on their next trip to South Africa,
and then again in twenty twelve. His name comes up
in connection with Monica Stone's South Africa Project rallies. So

(01:34:56):
now I wonder how far back those two go. But
in nineteen ninety five, a spokesman for the South African
military did confirm in a statement that quote the International
Freedom Foundation was a former South African Defense Force project.
Former South African spy Craig Williamson explained to a reporter

(01:35:19):
in nineteen ninety five that the IFF was a tool
of political warfare meant to undermine the African National Congress,
but that they'd taken care to run the operation to
prevent the people they dealt with from realizing that quote.
They were involved with a foreign government. They ran their organization,

(01:35:40):
but we steered them. Craig Williamson is not a good man.
He personally murdered several prominent anti apartheid activists, and he
ordered the killings of many others. One bomb he sent
was meant for a married couple critical of the apartheid regime,

(01:36:01):
but it only did have the job. It killed Jeannette
Shun and her six year old daughter. Her husband, Marius Shun,
returned home to find their two year old son had
been alone in the house with their bodies for hours. No,
Craig Williamson is not an honorable man, but I do

(01:36:22):
think he's telling something close to the truth here. He
had to if he wanted amnesty for all those murders,
and he did have a rather astute observation about the
particular gullibility of American conservatives, saying to a reporter in
nineteen ninety five, we decided that the only level we

(01:36:42):
were going to be accepted was when it came to
the Soviets and their surrogates. So our strategy was to
paint the A and C as Communist surrogates. The more
we could present ourselves as anti communist, the more people
looked at us with respect. People you could hardly believe
cooperated with us politically. When it came to the Soviets,

(01:37:05):
all they had to do was slap anti communism on
the top of the page, and Republican leaders would sign
on to a project without any follow up questions. Senator
Jesse Helms served as chairman of the iff's advisory board,
but when this news came out, his spokesman claimed that
Helms had never even heard of such an organization and

(01:37:26):
certainly wasn't involved in it. Congressman Dan Burton led a
delegation to observe the nineteen eighty nine elections in Namibia,
and that trip was paid for by the IFF. Both
Burton and Congressman Robert Dornan frequently attended and spoke at
and wrote for IFF events in publications. They too, denied

(01:37:51):
having any idea that their tabs had been paid by
the South African government. Congressman Philip Crane served on the
organization's board for three years, but when the news broke
in nineteen ninety five, his spokesman claimed that he'd never
actually attended any meetings, And honestly, it is kind of

(01:38:13):
possible that those congressmen just never asked where the money
came from. Maybe they had a feeling they didn't want
to know the answer. They probably could have figured it
out if they tried. An article written in nineteen eighty
nine in Covert Affairs, a magazine founded by a former
CIA officer turned critic of the agency, noted that the

(01:38:34):
International Freedom Foundation managed to establish itself very quickly, and
in under two years. They were very clearly well funded
and had well established ties to both the international extreme
right wing and to the intelligence communities in multiple countries.
The group's support for both the South African government and

(01:38:57):
the Nicaraguan contras earned them the designation of quote an
organization to watch from the magazine's editors, And the author
is careful here. He doesn't make any outright allegations, but
the implication is very strong that this isn't a grass
roots organization.

Speaker 3 (01:39:18):
But maybe they didn't know.

Speaker 2 (01:39:20):
I can accept that that's possible, but Jack Abramoff would
also vehemently deny that he'd had any clue that money
wasn't clean, And I find that a lot harder to
believe Russell Kristel, the South African intelligence asset who'd helped
Abramov start the IFF in the first place, ran the

(01:39:41):
organization's branch office in Johannesburg, and Kristel would later admit
that the Johannesburg office was less of a branch and
more of a nerve center. It was really the center
of the operation, and he was the one deciding how
much money would get sent to DC, and sometimes when
the book keeping got a little sloppy, he would just

(01:40:01):
have the Military Intelligence Office make those wire transfers directly.
In nineteen eighty nine, the state of New York asked
the nonprofit to just provide an accountant statement that their
financial records were accurate. That's not terribly unusual for a
nonprofit bringing in a lot of money, but they couldn't

(01:40:22):
do it or wouldn't, and they were subsequently legally barred
from soliciting donations in the state of New York. Financial
records that were produced later show that in nineteen ninety two,
the organization's revenue dropped to half of the level in
prior years. That was not coincidentally the year that South

(01:40:44):
African President to Clerk ended funding for such programs as
a show of good faith during negotiations with the African
National Congress. The end of that official funding didn't end
the IFF right away. In nineteen ninety three, the IFF
commissioned a report that was designed to paint the ANC
as the true villains. You know, things are really almost

(01:41:07):
over in nineteen ninety three, the election is coming, Apartheid
is falling, but they commissioned this report to say, well,
aren't those the bad guys? Should we really be compromising
with these people who are doing these terrible things? And
the funding for that report was funneled through a slush
fund operated by Lucas Manngope the apartheid Collaboration as president

(01:41:31):
of the semi sovereign Bantustan of Bofu Tatswana. The IFF
would close its doors for good later that year. But
that's really quite enough about old memos buried in the
archives of conservative think tanks. I promised you I was
going to tell you about the nineteen eighty eight cinematic
abomination Red Scorpion to give you a brief idea of

(01:41:56):
what the movie is about. It's stars Dolph Lundgren as
a so IT Special Forces operative assigned to assassinate the
leader of an anti communist gorilla force in the fictional
African country of Mombaka, and the movie opens with Lundgren
called before this sinister cabal of communist military leaders from
Cuba and the Soviet Union, and they show him this

(01:42:18):
slide show of these evil freedom fighters. It's tonally very
odd because the movie is from the perspective of Dolph
Lundgren's character, a Soviet Special Forces soldier, and he is
a Communist, and he is our protagonist, and he is
going to kill these anti communists.

Speaker 3 (01:42:37):
But Abrarov has trouble sort of.

Speaker 2 (01:42:38):
Settling into a perspective because he's writing this derisively. It's
satirically right, because the anti communists are the heroes in
his world. So it's a little difficult to tell what
the movie is trying to achieve because he doesn't successfully
write satire. For much of the movie, Dulph Lunngren is

(01:42:59):
just of roaming the African bush dressed in a rather
striking manner. He's removed his outer shirt and he's ripped
his khaki pants into these tiny little shorts, and on
the surface level, this is just that sort of eighties
action movie aesthetic where you're seeing the sort of shining,
sweaty pecks of this enormous muscle man. But I think

(01:43:23):
there's more to this particular choice. We have this gigantic
blonde Swede, and he's been outfitted in what I have
to assume as a very intentional recreation of the iconic
uniform of the Selou Scouts, the notoriously brutal Rhodesian Special Forces.

(01:43:43):
And when I sat down to watch this movie, I
realized almost immediately that Abramov had based the film on
his own experience in Angola, just backwards right the men
he paid to write the actual screenplay based on his notes,
A man named arn Olsen, later said that Abramov explicitly

(01:44:04):
told him that Mambaka is supposed to be Angola, and
he'd written the character of the rebel leader Sundata to
represent Jonas Savimbi. So Abramoff obviously came up with the
plot of this movie in nineteen eighty five when he
met with those anti communist leaders. So he just took
that story and he inverted it.

Speaker 3 (01:44:27):
Because we know.

Speaker 2 (01:44:28):
Now for a fact that South African operatives assassinated leaders
of the Soviet supported Social Estate of the People's Republic
of Angola throughout that conflict. So he just took what
he knew and he reversed it to make the bad
guys in his mind the bad guys of his movie,
regardless of who the bad guy was in real life.

(01:44:51):
Some of the actions taken in the film by these
villainous Cuban soldiers are things that we know South African
special forces did in multiple content throughout the region. Russian
soldiers in the movie drop some sort of toxic chemical
from a plane on innocent civilians of Mombaka, and in
real life there were later revelations about something called Project

(01:45:14):
Coast South Africa's chemical and biological warfare program. There were
horrific tales of chemical agents being tested on detainees, specifically
detainees from the Ankle and conflict, and they use biological
weapons to wipe out villages in Mozambique, Angola, and Namibia
spanning years. But in the movie, these anti communist rebels

(01:45:39):
led by this Savimbi stand in are noble freedom fighters
and this Soviet killing machine has been sent to destroy them,
but he has second thoughts and etc. I don't know
why it's an hour and forty minutes long. There is
an extended sequence with no dialogue where a Kalahari bushman

(01:46:00):
is teaching Dolph Lundgren to hunt warthogs.

Speaker 3 (01:46:03):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:46:04):
I was kind of looking at my phone at that point.
Dolph Lunngren is basically just playing Ivan Drego again. He's
fresh off playing that Russian boxer in Rocky four. I
guess he's just kind of a one note guy. The
only interesting character in the whole movie is that Kalahari
bushman who rescues our protagonists from certain death in the desert.

(01:46:27):
He's played by a Rakhabstan, an elder in the Komani
clan of the San people. He was ninety five years
old when the movie was filmed, and I was kind
of curious about who they got to play this role,
and so I looked him up and Khobe's son's son
David would years later, after the fall of apartheid, successfully
win a legal battle for the return of their ancestral lands.

(01:46:50):
So the movie sucked, but at least it gave me
the opportunity to read a little bit about this rightful
restoration of the Komani lands, which are now protect did
as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is hard to
say exactly how Red Scorpion came to be. Abramof's version

(01:47:11):
of events doesn't pass the smell test. He was outraged
at the allegation that the South African government had played
any part in his movie, but Craig Williamson that South
African spy is on record claiming the film was absolutely
quote funded by our guys, and it would certainly be

(01:47:34):
hard to explain away everything about the film if that's
not true. Extras are played by South African soldiers. South
African military hardware is used for props. Vehicles with South
African military license plates were seen on set by cast
and crew and reporters. The South African military provided the

(01:47:57):
production with an old Soviet tank that they'd captured earlier
in the Angolan conflict, and South Africa allowed Abramoff to
film the entire movie in Namibia in nineteen eighty eight,
and nineteen eighty eight was the last year that the
South African military was actively occupying much of Namibia before

(01:48:18):
the UN arrived in nineteen eighty nine to facilitate the
ceasefire and the transition to Namibian independence. Carmen Argenziano, the
American actor cast as the Cuban colonel later told reporters
that actors knew during filming that most of the extras
in the movie were South African soldiers, and during filming

(01:48:39):
there were rumors on set that there was some kind
of intelligence operation. Argenziano called it very fishy. Quote We
heard that very right wing South African money was helping
fund the movie. It wasn't very clear. We were pretty
upset about the source of the money. We thought we
were misled. We were shocked that these brothers, who we

(01:49:02):
thought were showbiz liberals, Beverly Hill's Jewish kids were doing this.
Argenziano recounted one incident at the hotel where all the
actors were staying. Some black Namibian children were playing on
the escalator and the South African soldiers working for the
production were shouting racial slurs of the children, chasing them away.

(01:49:24):
Unnamed sources close to Abramoff told Ken Silverstein, writing for
Harper's in two thousand and six, quote, Yes, some people
were duped by the iff, but Jack wasn't one of them.
As chairman, he understood where the money was coming from.
He knew exactly who he was playing with. Another source

(01:49:46):
told Silverstein that Red Scorpion had absolutely been a propaganda project,
and Abramoff certainly knew it. Asked in nineteen eighty seven
by The New York Times if the film, which was
still in production at that point, was being financed by
the South African gouvern government, Abramoff gave the incredibly normal
sounding answer that he had raised the money from quote

(01:50:07):
normal film investors. In his own memoirs, Abramoff repeats his
claim that the film had been financed by private investors,
but the only investor he names is quoting from the book,
Robert Hall, a retired physician turned investor who owned a
vineyard on the cape of South Africa. And that's true.

(01:50:29):
Robert Hall was a retired doctor of sorts who was
now an investor of sorts, and did own a vineyard
on the cape of South Africa. That's true, But Abramoff
neglects to include that Robert Hall was actually an American
oral surgeon. He'd invented a variety of high speed drills
used in dental and orthopedic surgical procedures, but he fled

(01:50:53):
the United States in the late nineteen seventies to avoid
paying millions of dollars to the irs. It's a little
hard to google a generic sounding name like Robert Hall.
There are a lot of guys called Robert Hall who
might be a doctor and might live in South Africa.
But luckily for us this Robert Hall unsuccessfully sued a

(01:51:14):
South African magazine in the nineteen nineties. A judge in
the Cape of Good Hope ruled that the magazine had
in fact only been reporting the facts, not to faming Hall,
when they reported, among other things, that he'd pressured a
South African bank in nineteen eighty three to allow him
to engage in currency exchange transactions that would be illegal

(01:51:36):
for someone who is a permanent resident of South Africa,
and as part of his strategy to convince the bank
to let him keep doing these transactions, he told the
bank manager that he was a personal friend of President
Ronald Reagan. So yeah, just normal investors. He raised money
the normal way. Jeff Pandon, who worked under Abramoff at

(01:52:01):
the International Freedom Foundation, says that Abramoff hired Russell Kristel
as an executive producer on the film and Cristal in
addition to being a state intelligence asset running front groups
throughout the nineteen eighties was at this time serving on
President de Clerk's Presidential Council, and Abramoff absolutely would have

(01:52:22):
known that there's just no good faith explanation that can
possibly leave you believing that Jack Abramoff had no idea
that his movie was South African state propaganda. The film flopped.
Warner Brothers pulled out of the agreement to distribute it
after pressure from anti apartheid activists, led mainly by Tennis

(01:52:43):
Legend Arthur Ashe. Shooting delays left the movie wildly over budget,
and several actors claim they never got paid. The International
Freedom Foundation folded in nineteen ninety three when the South
African funding dried up, apartheid ended, and by nineteen ninety five,

(01:53:03):
Jack Abramoff was working as a lobbyist for the Mississippi
Band of Choctaw Indians, one of the clients that he
would eventually go to prison for defrauding out of millions
of dollars. And that, I guess is the story of
how apartheid funded a bad action movie and Jack Abramoff
ate cantuna at the Mujahideen and half the conservative think

(01:53:26):
tags in Washington, d C. Secretly collaborated with South African
military intelligence. Weird Little Guys is a production of Koso
Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me
Nelly Kunger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtermann and Robert Evans.

(01:53:51):
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can
email me at Weird Little Guys pots podcast at gmail
dot com.

Speaker 3 (01:54:02):
I will definitely.

Speaker 2 (01:54:03):
Read it, but I almost certainly will not answer it.

Speaker 3 (01:54:06):
It's nothing personal. I don't answer any of my emails.

Speaker 2 (01:54:10):
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post
anything that's going to make you one of my Weird
Little Guys

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