Special Report Transcript Episode 28, Section 7, Time 34:52

‘In fact matters didn’t end there. In fact, Hain and other anti-apartheid activists triggered off a worldwide vendetta against South African sportsmen’ // Well the sports boycott and my identification with organising it hit them so hard that some response was perhaps inevitable and so I got a letter bomb for example, sent by BOSS the old South African security agency in June 1972, which nearly blew me and my family and our virtual near neighbours out. But which fortunately had a technical fault and was defused by Scotland Yard’s bomb squad. Then of course came the mistaken identity case, so called when I was charged in the most bizarre terms with the theft of €490 of fivers from a branch of Barclays Bank that we previously demonstrated against, a few hundred yards from my home in Putney in south west London. I think there’s a lot of evidence now that the bank theft charge that was put upon me that I was framed up for that. I was eventually acquitted but there’s a lot of evidence that it was actually set up by BOSS, set up by the South Africans, that they used an agent to commit this theft who looked like me then flew him back out. And that they had the assistance of British Intelligence in doing that, and in helping to implicate me. There’s several bits of evidence that have come to light, both from the former South African BOSS operative Gordon Winter, from Peter Wright who ran a very right wing faction of MI5 British Intelligence, in the mid seventies and from Col Wallace who is a former British Intelligence officer. And I think this provides, the bank theft case provides a window into what BOSS and the South Africans in general were doing across the world, dirty tricks across the world. And although I don’t think it should be in any sense a priority for the Truth Commission, I do think it’s important for the new South Africa to come to terms with what the old South Africa was doing abroad: assassinating people, dirty tricks like were directed at me, the letter bomb, things like that. There were letter bombs sent to a lot of other people, Ruth First for instance was killed by one. And there were assassinations, Dulcie September, the ANC representative in Paris in 1988. And an assassination in London of a South African journalist, Keith Wallace in 1970 who worked for BOSS but was then wanting to expose and was killed by them before he could do so. // They ought to come forward. They ought to be called to the Commission, put it on record so the new South Africa knows what happened then and people apologise for it.

Notes: News bulletin; Demonstration, New Zealand 1981; Peter Hains

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