CZM Rewind: The Whites' Last Stand & The Jamboree in Jamba
Parts 5 & 6 of the South Africa arc. The Whites' Last Stand Original Air Date: 4.3.25 In the final days of apartheid, white extremists were getting desperate. That desperation contributed to one of the strangest political crises of the late 20th century. Sources: https://dcist.com/story/12/09/24/aryan-nations/ https://archive.idavox.com/index.php/2012/09/24/the-aryan-nations-show-of-farce-in-dc/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naRGivc7Ong Guelke, Adrian. “Political Violence and the South African Transition.” Irish Studies in International Affairs, vol. 4, 1993, pp. 59–68. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30001810. https://antifainfoblatt.de/aib24/suedafrika-machtkampf-krieg-auf-kleiner-flamme https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/white-supremacist-arthur-kemp-steps-leader-neo-nazi-group-national-alliance/ https://www.nytimes.com/1993/06/26/world/white-separatists-storm-south-african-negotiations.html?fbclid=IwAR2oDpPTYh0q173RdYwv5cox59uhpyHBrQdGfC65L22gY7pZAcwbArH8BkI https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/how-the-volk-myth-died-it-took-just-a-few-minutes-to-change-the-course-of-south-african-history-john-carlin-reports-from-mafikeng-1428703.html https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/amntrans/1998/98092123_mma_mmabath3.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20140503185912/http://www.berliner-zeitung.de/newsticker/rechte-in-suedafrika-rekrutieren-internationale-soeldner---politikermord-lautet-ein-auftrag-die-killer-kamen-von-der-reeperbahn,10917074,8820188.html https://www.nytimes.com/1994/03/13/world/a-homeland-s-agony.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2 https://mg.co.za/article/1994-06-17-foreign-hooligans-embarrass-awb/ https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/media%5C1997%5C9708/s970821c.htm https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/amntrans%5Cpta/2derby1.htm Death of Apartheid: The Whites’ Last Stand. (1995, May 28). Brian Lapping Associates. --- The Jamboree in Jamba This is the very strange story of the time Dolph Lundgren starred in a piece of apartheid propaganda. Sources: Bellant, Russ. Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party. South End Press, 1991. Abramoff, Jack. Capitol Punishment: The Hard Truth about Washington Corruption from America’s Most Notorious Lobbyist. WND Books, 2011. Easton, Nina. Gang of Five: Leaders at the Center of the Conservative Crusade. Simon & Schuster, 2000. Ivon, David. “Touting for South Africa: International Freedom Foundation.” Covert Action Information Bulletin, 1989. Blumenthal, Sidney (December 1983). "Let Lehrman Be Reagan". The New Republic. Cachalia, Firoz and Mervyn Shear. WITS: A University in the Apartheid Era. Wits University Press, 2022. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2025-02-13-apartheid-stratcom-agents-trump-edwin-feulner/ https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-11-13-atrocious-crimes-apartheid-hitmans-brutal-confessions-serve-as-a-warning-for-south-africans/ https://mg.co.za/article/2008-05-29-the-spy-who-lost-it/ https://mg.co.za/article/2001-03-23-the-height-of-hypocrisy/ https://disa.ukzn.ac.za/sites/default/files/pdf_files/SNSep83.pdf https://www.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/archive-files4/SNNov83.pdf https://www.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/archive-files4/SNOct80.pdf https://staging.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/archive-files3/pam19870826.026.009.583.pdf https://antifainfoblatt.de/aib24/suedafrika-machtkampf-krieg-auf-kleiner-flamme https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/48870988/volume-36-number-07-university-of-the-witwatersrand https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/38832258/volume-36-number-13 https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2004/06/293602.html?c=on https://www.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/archive-files2/pam19811200.026.009.580.pdf https://harpers.org/archive/2008/08/the-wrecking-crew/ https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/06/world/4-rebel-units-sign-anti-soviet-pact.html https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/10/world/reporter-s-notebook-angola-s-children-of-war.html https://web.archive.org/web/20060128022735/http://www.alternet.org/story/13134/ https://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZAWCHC/1996/3.pdf https://www.georgeherald.com/News/Article/Local-News/robert-hall-pioneer-in-medical-equipment-dies-20170711 https://mg.co.za/article/1996-04-04-noseweek-case-takes-a-new-turn/ https://www.nonproliferation.org/wp-content/uploads/npr/73gould.pdf https://www.salon.com/2005/08/17/abramoff_2/ https://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/09/movies/south-africa-helps-us-film-makers-in-namibia-with-troops-and-trucks.html https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/case-study/abramoff-lobbying-congressSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
I think what makes Gentleman's Cut different is me being a part of, you know, developing the profile of this beautiful finished product.
With every sip, you get a little something different.
Visit gentleman's cutbourbon.com or your nearest Total Wines or Besmo.
This message is intended for audiences 21 and older.
Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky.
For more on Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, please visit gentleman'scutbourbin.com.
Please enjoy responsibly.
I know he has a reputation, but it's going to catch up to him.
Gabe Ortiz is a cop.
His brother Larry, a mystery Gabe didn't want to solve until it was too late.
He was the head of this gang.
You're going to push the line for the cause.
Took us under his wing and showed us the game, as they call it.
When Larry's killed, Gabe must untangle a dangerous past, one that could destroy everything he thought he knew.
Listen to the Brothers Ortiz on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm investigative journalist Melissa Geltson.
My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
It doesn't matter how much I fight, doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this, it doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to what happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Who would you call if the unthinkable happened?
My sister was shot 22 times.
A police officer, right?
But what do you do when the monster is the man in blue?
This dude is the devil.
He hurts you.
This is the story of a detective who thought he was above the law until we came together to take him down.
I said, you're going to see my face till the day that you die.
I got you, I got you, I got you.
Listen to the girlfriend's Untouchable on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Allzone Media.
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 the year.
The eight episodes I wrote back in the spring about the international network's right-wing extremists who are trying to hold on to apartheid South Africa.
Last week, episodes one and two ran on 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 3rd, and Jamboree and Jamba came out a week later on April 10th.
Listening 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 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.
There were episodes recently about Tyler Dykes and Augustus Invictus, two of the other men charged for that march.
But that trial back in April was for Vassilios Bistolis.
I do still think we'll 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 in sources and I believed it to be a catch-all term that referred to various cultures of hunter-gatherer peoples 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 I said it.
It is the Dutch colonizers 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, doesn't 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 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 Whites Last Stand.
In that episode, you'll hear about 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 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, Janusz Wallus was released on parole in 2022, and he was deported back to Poland in December of 2024.
He is, to this 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 1993 before some of them left Bosnia for South Africa.
One of those mercenaries, Stefan Reyes, took leave from the convicts battalion in Bosnia in late 1993 and traveled to Hamburg.
I can't produce any proof that they met, but I know Horst Klenz 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 I did not include in that episode is that Horst Klenz also traveled to Munich during that same trip.
And South African authorities believe that while he was there, he met with Colonel Eugene De Kok of the South African Police Force.
Decock, now known to have been deeply involved in those government-funded death squads, was in Munich on his way to Bosnia.
So maybe those German mercenaries in Bosnia weren't getting their recruitment pitch third hand from Stephen Reyes, who got it from Horst Klenz, who got it from Eugene Decock.
Maybe they got it from Eugene Decock directly.
Hard to say.
but it does raise a lot more questions about the bullet that gets dug out of a police officer in the episode you're about to hear.
September 22nd, 2012.
May have been the first day of autumn, but it was a warm afternoon in Washington, D.C.
A charter bus pulled to the curb at the edge of Lincoln Park and its passengers piled out, all 14 of them.
Most of the attendees at that day's rally were dressed alike.
Black pants and a blue button-up shirt with a black tie.
The uniform of the Aryan nations.
They'd announced 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 Capitol Reflecting Pool, safely escorted by hundreds of police officers from the DC Metropolitan Police, U.S. Park Police, and the U.S. Capitol Police.
Dozens of officers on bicycles and on horseback flanked the little march, keeping counter-protesters at bay.
A phalanx of Capitol Police in riot gear marched alongside them, far outnumbering the actual marchers.
When they reached their destination, they were escorted into a little pen, surrounded by barricades, with the Capitol building in the background.
Nazi scum!
Surrounded by angry counter-protesters and curious tourists, Aryan Nations member Ryan Mullins tried to address the crowd with a megaphone.
But he was almost completely drowned out by chants of Nazi scum.
If he did manage to give a speech about the plight of the white South African farmer, it's almost certain no one actually heard it.
But just behind him, the rallygoers 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 in the small crowd, not only as the only woman, but because she was wearing a neatly pressed, khaki uniform.
It had been nearly 20 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 Huggett Stone still had her Afrikaner Resistance Movement uniform in the back of her closet.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guides.
We are nearing the end of the story of Monica Huggitstone.
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 to be a two-parter.
Starting with those rallies in 2012, 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 much international intrigue buried in her past.
I certainly didn't expect to spend the last month translating 50-year-old white supremacist newspapers from Afrikaans or pouring over 30-year-old memos in Croatian tapped out on typewriters by dead war criminals.
I had no idea that a German neo-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.
How could I have known?
But now we do.
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 2012.
A dozen or so 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.
Because 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, I talked a bit about what the event claimed to be doing.
Raising awareness about white genocide in South Africa.
Which, if you don't remember the episode, is not a real thing.
It is not happening at all.
But it is a 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 a hold of it and decided that white South Africans qualify for refugee resettlement in the United States.
In the second episode, 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 1980, she was a member of a small Afrikaner nationalist terrorist cell calling itself the Vit Commando, or the 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 Huggett's charges were dropped after she testified against them.
In her testimony, she claimed to be a member of 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 1980s.
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 Horst Klens and his South African accomplices.
They carried out an attack on a UN office in Namibia in 1989, 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 Afrikaner neo-Nazi organization called the Ordeborofolk.
After another series of bombings and arrests, they all somehow ended up no longer in jail.
That group, the Ordeborofolk, 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 in this story.
And by this point, we're up to the early 1990s.
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 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 summer of 1993, 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 secede and form their own white ethnostate.
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, more or less.
I spent most of last week's episode sifting through the distant past, looking at the history of the Klan 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, the end of apartheid wasn't a single moment.
There were years of political negotiations before that election in April of 1994.
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.
Here's AWB's leader, Eugene Terreblanche, offering his thoughts on the negotiation process to a reporter in May of 1993.
If they believe that they can negotiate for our fatherland and get him back from Let them try, I'm preparing myself for the war.
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 10th, 1993, 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 ANC's armed wing, McAnto Wasizwe.
He was a beloved and immensely popular leader within the African National Congress, particularly among young anti-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 recon mission.
But when he spotted Hani returning home from buying a newspaper, accompanied only by his 15-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 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 Terreblanche had publicly confirmed that the killer, a Polish immigrant named Janusz Wallouz, had been a member of the Afrikaner resistance movement.
Once in custody, Wallus 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 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 Ordoborofolk had stolen from an Air Force base three years earlier.
When Wallus's apartment was searched, officers found a printed list 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 Wallouse almost certainly didn't write that list himself.
It was mostly high-profile political figures like Nelson Mandela, Chris Hani, and Communist Party chair Joe Slovo.
But there were also the names of several journalists, most of whom published only in Afrikaans, which Wallus could not read.
The same list of names was later found in the personal papers of Clive Derby Lewis' wife, Gay.
But white supremacist journalist Arthur Kemp would later testify that he'd been the original author of the list.
As far 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 calm.
Chris Hani championed the cause of peace, trudging to every corner of South Africa, calling for a spirit of tolerance among all our people.
We are a nation in mourning.
Our pain and anger is real.
Yet we must not permit ourselves to be provoked by those who seek to deny us the very freedom Chris Hani gave his life 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 had the opposite effect.
Mandela'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.
They understood that they were just as likely to find themselves in a Nazi 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 1994.
I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltsin.
My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
We have some breaking news to tell you about.
Tennessee's Attorney General is suing a Nashville doctor.
In April 2024, a fertility clinic in Nashville shut down overnight and trapped behind locked doors were more than a thousand frozen embryos.
I was terrified.
Out of all of our journey, that was the worst moment ever.
At that point, it didn't occur to me what fight was going to come to follow.
But this story isn't just about a few families' futures.
It's about whether the promise of modern fertility care can be trusted at all.
It doesn't matter how much I fight, doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this.
It doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to what happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Stephan Curry, and this is Gentleman's Cut.
I think what makes Gentleman's Cut different is me being a part of, you know, developing the profile of this beautiful finished product.
With every sip, you get a little something different.
Visit gentleman's cutbourbon.com or your nearest Total Wines or Bethmo.
This message is intended for audiences 21 and older.
Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky.
For more on Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, please visit gentleman'scutbourbin.com.
Please enjoy responsibly.
Dad had the strong belief that the devil was attacking us.
Two brothers, one devout household, two radically different paths.
Gabe Ortiz became one of the highest-ranking law enforcement officers in Texas.
32 years, total law enforcement experience.
But his brother Larry, he stayed behind and built an entirely different legacy.
He was the head of this gang and nobody was going to tell him what to do.
You gonna push that line for the calls.
Took us under his wing and showed us the game, as they call it.
When Larry is murdered, Gabe is forced to confront the past he tried to leave behind and uncover secrets he never saw coming.
My dad had a whole nother life that we never knew about.
Like my mom started screaming my dad's name and I just heard one gunshot.
The Brothers Ortiz is a gripping true story about faith, family, and how two lives can drift so far apart and collide in the most devastating way.
Listen to the Brothers Ortiz on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Who would you call if the unthinkable happened?
I just feel and started screaming.
If you lost someone you loved in the most horrific way.
My sister was shot 22 times.
The police, right?
But what if the person you're supposed to go to for help is the one you're the most afraid of?
This dude is the devil.
He's a snake.
He'll hurt you.
I'm Nikki Richardson, and this is The Girlfriends, Untouchable.
Detective Roger Golubski spent decades intimidating and sexually abusing black women across Kansas City, using his police badge to scare them into silence.
This is the story of a detective who seemed above the law until we came together to take him down.
I told Roger Goloopski, I said, you're going to see my face till the day that you die.
Listen to The Girlfriends, Untouchable, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In June of 1993, 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 25th, 1993, thousands of armed Afrikaner nationalists showed up outside the World Trade Center.
The newly formed Afrikaner Folksfront, an umbrella organization of right-wing groups, staged a protest outside earlier in the morning, harassing 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 Terreblanche, an AWB member drove an armored car through the front of the building, and the crowd easily overcame the police and swarmed inside.
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 they're coming.
And then my own security man simply grabbed hold of me and ran.
Pandemonium just broke out in the entire building.
Many people on the AMC side, from the government side, all huddled into the government offices.
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 separatist slogans on the walls.
Now, the only photos I have that I know are of Monica Huggett were taken in 2012, and she was nearly 70 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 wistful reminiscence about that day in an interview she did in 2019.
They did the negotiations at the World Trade Center at the airport in Johannesburg.
It's not far from where I live.
And we went there one day when the AWB had made a sort of a Panzerwagen and went through the glass.
They really smashed the glass.
Oh my goodness, it just came down like diamonds.
And then we were about maybe 2,000, 3,000 people there protesting.
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 U.S. Capitol on January 6th.
And I don't just mean visually, 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 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 of Chris Hani, this attempt to derail the negotiations backfired badly.
Here's ANC negotiator and present-day South African president Cyril Ramaposa in an interview in 1995.
I was able to discuss the events with some of the 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.
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 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 Volkstadt, a white South African state.
If they couldn't stop what was coming for the nation of South 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 1994.
A white Afrikaner nationalist militia took up arms to keep a black man in power.
Let's back up for a second.
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 Bantu stands.
Under apartheid, South Africa established what they called native reserves.
These were territories set aside for the forcible resettlement of Black South Africans.
They were allegedly meant to be homelands for particular ethnic groups.
So the Bantustan of KwaZulu was meant for the Zulu people, Transke and Siske were for the Xhosa people, Bofu-Totswana for the Swana people, and so on.
In practice, though, it was pretty arbitrary.
And more importantly, they functioned to strip Black South Africans of their citizenship.
Laws passed in the 1970s 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.
Of the 10 Bantu stands, 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 1994, Lucas Mengope was the president of Bofu Totswana, and he wanted to remain the president.
After the upcoming elections, though, all of the Bantu stands 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 Mengope presidency, because his country wouldn't exist anymore.
In early March of 1994, Mengope announced that Bofu Totswana, or BOP for short, that's not just me shortening it, that is apparently what people call it.
But he announced that BOP 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 their pensions would be paid.
And the president ignored them.
Strikes and civil unrest quickly devolved into 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.
But if you're interested in a bit more about the Bofu Totswana crisis, the podcast Lions Led by Donkeys did an episode about it in December of 2021, and it's a fun listen.
Mengope was no stranger to unrest.
This wasn't even his first coup.
He'd put down an attempted coup in 1990 and he was briefly deposed by his own military in 1988.
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 Konstant Viljoon.
Viljun had retired as a general nearly a decade earlier.
And in 1993, he and three other retired generals formed the Afrikaner Folks Front, an attempt to unite the disparate elements of the white extreme right wing.
As a former general, Viljun was confident that if he ever went to war, a good chunk of the military would follow him.
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 from the defense force and would have joined me in fighting for the liberation of the Afrikaner people.
By 1994, Viljun claimed to have over 50,000 men under his command, trained paramilitaries, military reservists, and sympathetic members of the military who would follow his orders.
It all sounds a bit odd.
Why would Afrikaner nationalists lift a finger to help any black person?
But it's a little more complicated than black and white.
If Bop could successfully refuse to participate in the election, maybe other Bantu stands would follow suit, making the election less legitimate and weakening the state.
And if this Afrikaner militia could keep Mengope 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 land of their own within his territory so they could start their own white ethnostate.
But perhaps most importantly, Viljun 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.
And there was a 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 embolden white right-wingers around the country to take up arms.
After all, who was going to stop them?
And if the military refused orders to fire on his militia, Viljun could potentially take control of a significant portion of the military and maybe they could topple the entire government.
Here's South African Communist Party chair and ANC negotiator Joe Slovo describing that fear.
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.
So in March of 1994, the government took a sort of wait-and-see approach to the whole affair in BOP.
They couldn't risk a mass defection within the military.
And maybe things would have been different if Eugene Terre Blanche was more of a team player.
We'll never know.
When the dust finally settled, everyone else involved agreed that no one had invited Eugene Terre Blanche to the Auto Golpe.
But the AWB refused to be left out, and they showed up anyway.
Terreblanche had put out a call to AWB members in an address on Radio Pretoria, that pirate radio station where our German mercenaries had been assigned guard duty.
On March 11th, 1994, Eugene Terreblanche and a few hundred men under his command arrived in BOP.
Jack Turner, leader of the BOP soldiers loyal to Mangope, did not want AWB there.
Their reputation for uncontrollable racist violence preceded them.
And Turner was worried that the black soldiers under his command would panic at the sight of Terreblanche's neo-Nazis.
What they actually did, though, was mutiny.
When my own troops heard that some of the weapons were being earmarked for the Volkswagen, they didn't like it very much.
In actual fact, they refused to load any weapons onto vehicles and that any of the weapons were to be given to the Volkswagen.
When the BOP soldiers saw AWB men were part of the Volksfront 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 Volksfront.
But when AWB arrived, they no 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 started to leave.
On their way out of town, though, they started shooting black civilians at random.
As the convoy rolled through a town, picking off passersby from their car windows, an angry mob formed, blocking their path.
One of the AWB vehicles fired into the crowd, and that sent everyone running.
And this was the last straw for the BOP 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 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.
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 blue 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, snapping pictures.
— Can you just get us some help for him, please?
He's just wounded.
Are you finished with your photos and stuff?
Please get the ambulance now.
We need an ambulance for this guy that's wounded.
They're just lying there in the dirt, bleeding, and reporters are asking them questions.
One reporter asks them if they're members of AWB, and one of the bleeding men says yes.
And then, with the journalists' cameras still rolling, a BOP police officer calmly walked over and shot all three men at point-blank range.
That officer, Unblamense Bernstein Menyatso, would eventually be granted amnesty by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
When he appeared before the commission in 1998, Eugene Terreblanche himself cross-examined him about the incident.
After some extensive back and forth with Terreblanche really taking advantage of this opportunity to spin his version of events, Menyatso again explained that he shot those men because he had witnessed them shooting civilians, saying, quote, it was quite clear that the killings were going to continue.
And I decided that rather than to leave those people to destroy the black people, it 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 entire Volksfront out.
And once all the white paramilitary forces had withdrawn, the South African Defense Forces moved in.
And the mutinying soldiers quickly surrendered.
And Mengope was removed from power.
The government of Bofu-Totswana was dissolved by the end of the day.
The whole disastrous affair was the end of Konstan Villeune's dreams of a Boer Volkstadt.
As the leader of the Afrikaner Volksfront, he'd been loudly calling for a boycott of the elections.
The day after his troops were run out of BOP, he announced that not only was he no longer opposing the election, he had in fact decided to run in the election under 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 Huggett was hosting these German mercenaries in her home as a part of this larger effort to disrupt the upcoming election.
And with the failure in Bob, the Volksfront not only lost its leader when Villeune 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 to the cause.
Those three AWB members were shot on March 11th.
On March 12th, Konstant Villjun announced that he was on board with the elections and was in fact running for office.
And on Monday, March 14th, 1994, three German mercenaries opened fire on South African police officers in Tyrport, 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.
Other reports say the men intentionally led officers into a trap.
But either way, at some point, those Germans started firing their AK-47s at the two police officers, wounding but not killing them.
When the shooting stopped, police found the body of Thomas Kunst in the brush nearby.
He had a pair of night vision goggles on and several hundred rounds of ammunition strapped to his body.
Stephen Reyes was apprehended alive.
The third man, Horst Klens, managed to flee the scene, but he was arrested several days later along with a fourth mercenary, Alexander Nydline.
That much we know for sure.
Thomas Kunst died.
Stephen Reyes was arrested that night, and Klenz and Nydline 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 point of contact for each batch of foreign fighters.
When Reyes, Nydline, and Kunst arrived in South Africa in January of 1994, 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 just me spitballing.
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 Bop.
And when Eugene Terreblanche was trying to recruit AWB members to go there in the first place, he made the announcement on Radio Pretoria.
The radio station 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 Terreblanche to show back up and announce a new harebrain 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 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.
It hadn't come from any of our German mercenaries.
That bullet had been fired by Eugene Dekak.
Decock was a death squad leader.
He'd been a colonel in the South African police force, but he was relieved of duty in 1993 as part of the National Party's last-ditch efforts at damage control after public revelations about state-sponsored terror.
As the commander of the counterinsurgency unit C-10, Decoc oversaw the kidnapping, torture, and murder of countless anti-apartheid activists.
Later testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission would connect Decoc's C-10 unit to the violent attacks in Namibia in 1989, the ones intended to undermine Namibian independence.
After his bullet was discovered inside that policeman in 1994, 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 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 1989 intended to undermine Namibian independence.
Two weeks ago, we discussed one of those attacks in great detail, the murder of a UN security guard in Aotio.
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 Horst Klens.
So what are the odds that two men who'd participated in the same state-backed terrorism in 1989 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 quick search didn't seem promising.
A coincidence for the ages, maybe.
I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltsin.
My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
We have some breaking news to tell you about.
Tennessee's Attorney General is suing a Nashville doctor.
In April 2024, a fertility clinic in Nashville shut down overnight and trapped behind locked doors were more than a thousand frozen embryos.
I was terrified.
Out of all of our journey, that was the worst moment ever.
At that point, it didn't occur to me what fight was going to come to follow.
But this story isn't just about a few families' futures.
It's about whether the promise of modern fertility care can be trusted at all.
It doesn't matter how much I fight.
Doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this.
It doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to what happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Stephan Curry, and this is Gentleman's Cut.
I think what makes Gentleman's Cut different is me being a part of, you know, developing the profile of this beautiful finished product.
With every sip, you get a little something different.
Visit gentleman'scutbourbin.com or your nearest total wines or BEVMO.
This message is intended for audiences 21 and older.
Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky.
For more on Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, please visit gentleman's cutbourbon.com.
Please enjoy responsibly.
Dad had a strong belief that the devil was attacking us.
Two brothers, one devout household, two radically different paths.
Gabe Ortiz became one of the highest-ranking law enforcement officers in Texas.
32 years, total law enforcement experience.
But his brother Larry, he stayed behind and built an entirely different legacy.
He was the head of this gang, and nobody was going to tell him what to do.
You're going to push that line for the calls.
Took us under his wing and showed us the game, as they call it.
When Larry is murdered, Gabe is forced to confront the past he tried to leave behind and uncover secrets he never saw coming.
My dad had a whole nother life that we never knew about.
Like my mom started screaming my dad's name and I just heard one gunshot.
The Brothers Ortiz is a gripping true story about faith, family, and how two lives can drift so far apart and collide in the most devastating way.
Listen to the Brothers Ortiz on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Who would you call if the unthinkable happened?
I just feel and started screaming.
If you lost someone you loved in the most horrific way.
I said something shot 22 times.
The police, right?
But what if the person you're supposed to go to for help is the one you're the most afraid of?
This dude is the devil.
He's a snake.
He'll hurt you.
I got you.
I'm Nikki Richardson, and this is The Girlfriends, Untouchable.
Detective Roger Golupski spent decades intimidating and sexually abusing black women across Kansas City, using his police badge to scare them into silence.
This is the story of a detective who seemed above the law until we came together to take him down.
I told Roger Goloopsky, I said, you're going to see my face till the day that you die.
Listen to The Girlfriends, Untouchable on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
But back to our Germans.
A later report in Searchlight 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 Clense.
And based on the timeline of events and the fact that one of them was already dead, it had to have been Stephen Reyes who ratted Monica out.
Nydlin and Clenz weren't taken into custody 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 Doyster, Ralph Marajas, and Falk Semeng waited at the airport for nearly an hour before they tried calling the number they'd been given by their European contacts.
At Monica Huggett'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 there.
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 17th, 1994.
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 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 22nd, 1994.
But unfortunately, it does us absolutely no good to know that this segment probably aired after a German-dubbed rerun 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 Klenz had stayed in her home for some time and that the group he was 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 mercenaries stay in, quote, a private home in Kempton Park, where they were given money and documents before being dispatched to their assignments.
Given that we know for certain that Monica's Kempton Park home was Deuster'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, Ronald Doyster, 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, Deuster explained that he was quite good at making car bombs, having successfully detonated several in Bosnia.
But he found the whole operation here just embarrassingly amateurish.
He said 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.
He was, of 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 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 Magazine's 1996 series of articles about this whole operation mentions only in 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 1994, Monica Huggett left South Africa.
Nelson 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 in 1994.
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.
When I tried to go over to the United States the first time, I had to go for three interviews.
And they even knew my mother was a farmer and asked me when I go to the States for three months who's going to take care of the cows.
They asked me that.
The consul, not yeah.
So eventually I'm not going into detail, but anyway, I got the visa and I went to the United States in 1994.
I came back in 96 and then I got married in 2000 to an American citizen, Jim Stone.
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 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 Klansmen who'd sent her the bomb-making manual the Vit Commando had relied on when they made those bombs that they set off in professors' offices in 1980?
Did they 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 1996.
In the summer of 2000, 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 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 covering a trial here in Charlottesville.
I'll tell you about that soon 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 of a long-dead Boer mystic.
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, 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 fill some time by reading you the absolutely dreadful poems written by one of those mercenaries.
I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltsin.
My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
We have some breaking news to tell you about.
Tennessee's attorney general is suing a Nashville doctor.
In April 2024, a fertility clinic in Nashville shut down overnight and trapped behind locked doors were more than a thousand frozen embryos.
I was terrified.
Out of all of our journey, that was the worst moment ever.
At that point, it didn't occur to me what fight was going to come to follow.
But this story isn't just about a few families' futures.
It's about whether the promise of modern fertility care can be trusted at all.
It doesn't matter how much I fight.
It doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this.
It doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to what happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Stephan Curry, and this is Gentleman's Cut.
I think what makes Gentleman's Cut different is me being a part of, you know, developing the profile of this beautiful finished product.
With every sip, you get a little something different.
Visit gentleman's cutbourbin.com or your nearest total wines or BEVMO.
This message is intended for audiences 21 and older.
Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky.
For more on Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, please visit gentleman's cutbourbon.com.
Please enjoy responsibly.
Dad had the strong belief that the devil was attacking us.
Two brothers, one devout household, two radically different paths.
Gabe Ortiz became one of the highest-ranking law enforcement officers in Texas.
32 years, total law enforcement experience.
But his brother Larry, he stayed behind and built an entirely different legacy.
He was the head of this gang and nobody was going to tell him what to do.
You gonna push that line for the calls.
Took us under his wing and showed us the game, as they call it.
When Larry is murdered, Gabe is forced to confront the past he tried to leave behind and uncover secrets he never saw coming.
My dad had a whole nother life that we never knew about.
Like my mom started screaming my dad's name and I just heard one gunshot.
The Brothers Ortiz is a gripping true story about faith, family, and how two lives can drift so far apart and collide in the most devastating way.
Listen to the Brothers Ortiz on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Who would you call if the unthinkable happened?
I just feel and started screaming.
If you lost someone you loved in the most horrific way.
My sister was shot 22 times.
The police, right?
But what if the person you're supposed to go to for help is the one you're the most afraid of?
This dude is the devil.
He's a snake.
He'll hurt you.
I'm Nikki Richardson, and this is The Girlfriends, Untouchable.
Detective Roger Golubski spent decades intimidating and sexually abusing black women across Kansas City, using his police badge to scare them into silence.
This is the story of a detective who seemed above the law until we came together to take him down.
I told Roger Goloopsky, I said, you're going to see my face till the day that you die.
Listen to The Girlfriends, Untouchable on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
A very strange meeting took place in June of 1985.
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 hard time booking flights to Washington, D.C.
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 Rorabacher, President Ronald Reagan speechwriter, personally flew to a safe house in Tegusagalpa to hand deliver an invitation to Adolfo Calero, leader of the Nicaraguan Contras.
Anti-communist activist Jack Wheeler was in touch with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and Laotian rebel leader Pau Kaher.
And Grover Norquist had plenty of contacts who could get him in touch with Jonas Savimbi, leader of the Angolan insurgent force UNITA.
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, 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 security.
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 reconnected with an old friend, a South African military intelligence operative he'd first met on a visit to Johannesburg in 1983.
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.
Whether or not Jack Abramoff's strange summit had any impact on the course of the Cold War is 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.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
This 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 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 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 grainy videos of old Aryan nations World Congress meetings than making place cards and seating charts and trying to figure out how to do floral arrangements.
But here we are, 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 7,000 word research project every week, my heart's got to be in it.
And this week, I could not resist the siren song of a bad 80s action movie.
It was just too 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 Huggett 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 movements in South Africa.
But I was wrapping up my research connecting Monica to David Duke's 1996 Senate run when I realized I'd overlooked something massive.
It wasn't just 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 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 1980s, sub-Saharan Africa was a battleground in the Cold War, and the South African government was a big player in this perceived fight against Soviet influence on the continent.
So even as public disgust 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 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, the 1988 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.
And we don't really have to get into the thing Abramoff is most famous for, his 2006 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 did want 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 politics in college, working as a volunteer on Ronald Reagan's 1980 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 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 guard, 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.
And he was a busy man in the early 80s.
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 1984 in connection to a series of rallies that he organized celebrating the anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Grenada.
And maybe it's 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 almost exclusively on the Republican National Committee for their budget.
But Abramoff had something bigger in mind.
He wanted autonomy and he wanted 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 Falwell Library, have done a really phenomenal job of digitizing their collection of old documents related to the Conservative Caucus, a lobbying group whose board Abramoff 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 1984 in hopes of securing a big check.
And he says the USA Foundation, under his leadership, had hosted a delegation of South African student leaders on a trip to Washington in January of 1984.
And at that meeting, they'd made plans with those South African students from a group called the Students Moderate Alliance to co-host an international student conference later that year at a resort in the South African Bantustan of Bofutoswana.
That same archive contains a 1984 letter from one of Abramoff's colleagues, a right-wing think take veteran named Amy Moritz.
And it's a letter to William F. Buckley.
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 aide that 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 sicking the college Republicans on student groups that were 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 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.
They're investing.
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 80s, that meant getting out there 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 1983.
The trip was an effort to strengthen ties between student groups internationally.
And as part of that mission, he met with Russell Crystal, the leader of a group calling itself the Students' Moderate Alliance.
It wouldn't be officially revealed until 1992, so nine years after this meeting, that the Students' 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 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 1980, mocking the obvious charade of this organization calling itself moderate.
They immediately spotted what was obvious National Party propaganda.
Old issues of a Nusis-aligned student newspaper published by the South African Students' Press Union don't hold back.
A 1980 issue covering the student council election at the University of Witwatersfrand in Johannesburg, usually just shortened to WITS University, calls the Students' Moderate Alliance a neo-fascist group, and it dismisses them as joke candidates.
Although one of those joke candidates did win, Russell Crystal's brother Lance.
By 1983, the same paper reported that Russell Kristol, also a student at Witwattersfrand, had offered to help right-wing student groups at other schools pay the cost of printing their anti-Nusis pamphlets.
It was also widely believed that Crystal's Students 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 Nusis had authored them.
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 VITS University issued a statement that whoever had created the flyers, quote, does not have the best interest of students or of the country at heart.
The university administration also noted that, quote, the nature and countrywide method of their distribution suggests that the persons responsible for them command resources beyond those typically available to student organizations.
And throughout the 1980s, student newspapers in South Africa ran stories about the impossible level of funding the Students' 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 party office.
In 1982, a student newspaper obtained a sworn statement from someone who'd been detained under Section 22.
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 detainee was taken up to the 10th floor of the Johannesburg police station to be questioned.
The 10th 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 10th floor, this detainee saw a familiar face.
It was Russell Crystal.
And the sworn statement read in part, quote, I saw Crystal on the 10th floor of John Forster Square.
He was neither handcuffed nor accompanied by the security police.
He appeared calm and under no duress.
When his brother Lance Kristol was elected to the Witts Student Council in 1980, 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 Kristol reportedly said, quote, 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-80s determined that the Students' Moderate Alliance clearly had, quote, lavish funding from anonymous sources.
In addition to his Students' Moderate Alliance, Russell Kristol also founded the National Students Federation.
The WITS student newspaper sent a reporter to the group's conference in 1984.
It was held at a luxury hotel in downtown Johannesburg with little finger sandwiches served on silver platters.
Russell Kristol was elected as the group's president.
And the leader of the Students' 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 Haney's assassin in 1993.
That student newspaper reporter in 1984 concluded the article about the conference with a quote from a NUSA 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 broken and the government had been forced to admit to the existence of something called Project Anne-Marie, a years-long propaganda campaign aimed at undermining anti-apartheid activism at home and anti-apartheid opinion abroad.
Four high-ranking government officials were forced to resign in disgrace, including Prime 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 70s, millions of dollars had been spent from the defense budget to do in part exactly what these students feared was happening again.
Form front groups to disseminate propaganda and disrupt and discredit anti-apartheid groups like Nusis.
And so that student organizer told the paper, quote, while we would want to shy away from individualizing political differences, where the true 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 growing attempt to stifle opposition to apartheid.
It would take almost a decade to get the government to admit it, but she was right.
Russell Crystal's National Student Federation and Students Moderate Alliance were both entirely the creation of the apartheid government.
While I was researching this segment, I found a small collection of old issues of the Wits Student, that student newspaper at the University of the Wittwaterstrand.
It's such a fascinating window into the past.
It's just a college newspaper.
It's written by 20-year-olds.
And there are articles about how to get more information about university-sponsored insurance.
There are articles 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 the hands of the security police, held in detention without charges.
There are headlines like, 20th Wits 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, there are images of riot police with dogs 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 1983.
Again, the actual facts wouldn't come out until 1992.
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 that he was connected to the security police.
Even allegations that surfaced in 1982.
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 after returning from this trip, the National College Republican Committee formally adopted a resolution pledging their support to the Students' Moderate Alliance in their fight against communism.
The resolution condemned Soviet aggression and claimed that South Africa was plagued by deliberate KGB propaganda.
But it didn't actually mention apartheid at all.
When Abermoff gave a speech at the Republican National Convention in August of 1984, that was his parting message.
That he's mobilizing college-age voters to re-elect Ronald Reagan because America can only be free if Ronald Reagan is free to fund the anti-communist death squads.
Today's 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 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.
Thank you.
By 1985, Jack Abramoff had a new gig.
He was the executive director of Citizens for America, a lobbying group funded by right-aid heir Louis Lehrman.
This was very explicitly just a privately funded mouthpiece for Ronald Reagan.
Lehrman was the founder, funder, and leader of CFA, but 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 1983 with the idea of forming a group that could shape public opinion in his favor.
But they needed the right man for the job.
It was President Reagan himself who called up Lehrman and sold him on the idea.
Lehrman 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, Lehrman 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 human rights abuses, Congress had passed a series of ever-tightening restrictions on the kind of U.S. aid that they could receive.
And by 1985, Ronald Reagan couldn't legally send the Contras any U.S. 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 that they couldn't send the Contras any money.
They said that they couldn't send them any U.S. government money, money that had been appropriated by Congress, money from the budget of a U.S. agency.
There are other kinds of money.
And so the Reagan administration illegally sold weapons to Iran.
And they used that money, money that had never been appropriated by Congress, to fund the Contras.
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 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 pick back up with that strange story we opened with.
As director of the CFA, Abramoff convinced his boss, Louis Lehrman, 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 USAID to the Contras in Nicaragua, and they'd soon be hearing a bill on aid to Jonas Savimbi's UNITA forces in Angola.
Reagan insisted that arming what he called freedom fighters was actually self-defense for the United States.
The idea was that these rebel groups are fighting Soviet influence abroad, and that's a necessary thing in these last days of the Cold War.
So Abramoff's plan was to get them all in one room and brainstorm a strategy for convincing the world that these notorious human rights abusers are 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 of the Contras and the Mujahideen.
The whole affair sounds like it would make for a darkly funny comedy, and apparently someone did make a movie about Jack Abramoff in 2010.
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 their flight from Johannesburg to Angola, the plane they took had to fly very low and change course frequently to avoid detection by the Cubans who were in Angola.
And this left the entire delegation just miserably air sick.
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 in southern Angola, they endured a two-hour car ride in old jeeps over unpaved roads before arriving at the secret location of the UNITA base camp.
Jack Abramoff later wrote that because he couldn't travel on the Sabbath, he had actually departed for Jamba a day earlier than the rest of the delegation.
And so he wouldn't have to travel alone.
Adolfo Calero volunteered to go with him.
And that just seems so thoughtful, doesn't it?
I'm sure 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 about during five hours alone in May of 1985.
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 in thatched huts.
The delegation from the Mujahideen was using Abdulrahim Wardak'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.
A write-up in the New York Times says the Laotian translator kept referring to their Angolan host, Jonas Savimbi, as Mr. Zimbabwe.
And when the group's wealthy patron, Louis Lehrman, presented these rebel leaders, each with their own framed copy of the United States Constitution, they didn't even pretend to be impressed.
When the group sat down to get to business, Lehrman read them a letter from Ronald Reagan, appearing to endorse the summit.
And it read 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 enjoyed since birth.
Their goals are our goals.
But in reading this letter aloud, Lehrman omitted a pretty important line in the president's letter.
It wasn't addressed to this group.
It was addressed to Lehrman alone, and it was not intended to convey the president's endorsement of or promise of aid to anyone there.
In Jack Abramoff's memoirs, though, he claims, quote, there wasn't a dry eye in the house 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 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 $20 a can.
Grover Norquist 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 assembled at Jamba declare our solidarity with all freedom movements in the world and 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 falderall 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 Declaration of Independence and has gotten them all jumbled up somehow.
I mean, honestly, sick burn on Grover Norquist.
Adolfo Calero, 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 got home, Louis Lehrman discovered that Abramoff and Norquist had been blowing through money with reckless abandon, and they'd spent nearly $3 million out of the budget of Citizens for America.
Lehrman claims he fired them.
Abramoff says he quit.
Who knows?
But by the end of the summer of 1985, 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 of a newly founded DC-based think tank called the International Freedom Foundation.
It has the same 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 or newsletters about the evils of communism.
And I guess that's kind of what it was.
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 $1.5 million per year, every year, from 1986 through 1992, 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 out until 1995.
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 for Strategic Communications, which I guess is kind of a cute name for propaganda and disinformation.
Erasmus admitted to his own role in a years-long disinformation campaign smearing Winnie Mandela.
And he's spoken publicly over the years about the close relationship STRATCOM had with U.S.-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, is someone whose name I found twice.
Once in the 1980s 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 2012, his name comes up in connection with Monica Stone's South Africa Project rallies.
So now I wonder how far back those two go.
But in 1995, 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 in 1995 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, 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.
But it only did half the job.
It killed Jeanette Schoon and her six-year-old daughter.
Her husband Marius Schoon 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 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 1995, we decided that the only level we were going to be accepted was when it came to the Soviets and their surrogates.
So our strategy was to paint the ANC 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.
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 certainly wasn't involved in it.
Congressman Dan Burton led a delegation to observe the 1989 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 and publications.
They too denied 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 1995, his spokesman claimed that he'd never actually attended any meetings.
And honestly, it is kind of 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 1989 in Covert Affairs, a magazine founded by a former CIA officer turned critic of the agency, noted that the 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 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 grassroots organization.
But maybe they didn't know.
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 Crystal, the South African intelligence asset who'd helped Abramoff start the IFF in the first place, ran the organization's branch office in Johannesburg.
And Crystal 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 bookkeeping got a little sloppy, he would just have the military intelligence office make those wire transfers directly.
In 1989, 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 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 1992, the organization's revenue dropped to half of the level in prior years.
That was, not coincidentally, the year that South African President de Klerk 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 1993, the IFF commissioned a report that was designed to paint the ANC as the true villains.
You know, things are really almost over in 1993.
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 Mangope, the apartheid collaborationist president of the semi-sovereign Bantustan of Bufu Totswana.
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 1988 cinematic abomination, Red Scorpion.
To give you a brief idea of what the movie is about, it stars Dolph Lundgren as a Soviet special forces operative assigned to assassinate the leader of an anti-communist guerrilla 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 slideshow of these evil freedom fighters.
It's totally 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.
But Abramov has trouble sort of settling into a perspective because he's writing this derisively, if 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, Dolph Lundgren is just sort 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 80s action movie aesthetic where you're seeing the sort of shining, sweaty pecks of this enormous muscle man.
But I think there's more to this particular choice.
We have this gigantic blonde Swede and he's been outfitted in what I have to assume is a very intentional recreation of the iconic uniform of the Silu Scouts, the notoriously brutal Rhodesian Special Forces.
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 man he paid to write the actual screenplay based on his notes, a man named Arne Olson, later said that Abramov explicitly told him that Mumbaka is supposed to be Angola and he'd written the character of the rebel leader Sundata to represent Jonas Savimbi.
So Abramov obviously came up with the plot of this movie in 1985 when he met with those anti-communist leaders.
So he just took that story and he inverted it.
Because we know now for a fact that South African operatives assassinated leaders of the Soviet-supported socialist state 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.
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 conflicts throughout the region.
Russian soldiers in the movie dropped 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 Coast, South Africa's chemical and biological warfare program.
There were horrific tales of chemical agents being tested on detainees, specifically detainees from the Angolan conflict.
And they used biological weapons to wipe out villages in Mozambique, Angola, and Namibia, spanning years.
But in the movie, these anti-communist rebels 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 40 minutes long.
There is an extended sequence with no dialogue where a Kalahari Bushman is teaching Dolph Lundgren to hunt warthogs.
I don't know, I was kind of looking at my phone at that point.
Dolph Lundgren is basically just playing Ivan Drago again.
He's fresh off playing that Russian boxer in Rocky IV.
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 protagonist from certain death in the desert.
He's played by Rekhobstan, an elder in the Komani clan of the San people.
He was 95 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 Rekhobstan's son David would years later, after the fall of apartheid, successfully win a legal battle for the return of their ancestral lands.
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 protected as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
It is hard to say exactly how Red Scorpion came to be.
Abramov's version 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 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 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 1988.
And 1988 was the last year that the South African military was actively occupying much of Namibia before the UN arrived in 1989 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, 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 thought were showbiz liberals, Beverly Hills 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 at the children, chasing them away.
Unnamed sources close to Abramoff told Ken Silverstein, writing for Harper's in 2006, 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 told Silverstein that Red Scorpion had absolutely been a propaganda project, and Abramoff certainly knew it.
Asked in 1987 by the New York Times if the film, which was still in production at that point, was being financed by the South African government, Abramoff gave the incredibly normal sounding answer that he had raised the money from, quote, 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.
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 the United States in the late 1970s 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 South African magazine in the 1990s.
A judge in the Cape of Good Hope ruled that the magazine had in fact only been reporting the facts, not defaming Hall, when they reported, among other things, that he'd pressured a South African bank in 1983 to allow him to engage in currency exchange transactions that would be illegal 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 the International Freedom Foundation, says that Abramoff hired Russell Crystal as an executive producer on the film.
And Crystal, in addition to being a state intelligence asset running front groups throughout the 1980s, was at this time serving on President de Klerk's presidential council.
And Abramoff absolutely would have 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 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 1993 when the South African funding dried up.
Apartheid ended.
And by 1995, 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 canned tuna with the Mujahideen.
And half the conservative think tanks in Washington, D.C. secretly collaborated with South African military intelligence.
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Nellie Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at WeirdLittleGuyspodcast at gmail.com.
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His brother Larry, a mystery Gabe didn't want to solve until it was too late.
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Listen to what happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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