Considering Mr. Mandela's expressed views in How to be a Good Communist, by Nelson Mandela:A Communist is a member of the Communist Party who understands and accepts the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism as explained by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin , and who subjects himself to the discipline of the Party.
The goal of Communism is a classless society based on the principle: from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs. The aim is to change the present world into a Communist world where there will be no exploiters and no exploited, no oppressor and oppressed, no rich and no poor. Communists fight for a world where there will be no unemployment, no poverty and starvation, disease and ignorance. In such a world there will be no capitalists, no imperialists, no fascists. There will be neither colonies nor wars.
How shall we interpret his communist deception status in MI6? Double agent?
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Mandela is named as MI6 agent
By Neil Mackay Home Affairs Editor, Exclusive
Sunday Herald (Glasgow, Scotland)
Publication Date: Mar 19 2000
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NELSON Mandela is to be named as an MI6 agent who aided British intelligence officers with operations against Colonel Gadaffi's Libyan weapons programmes, supplied his handlers with details of arms shipments to Ulster terrorists and allowed UK spying operations to be based in South Africa.
Allegations of Mandela's recruitment by the British intelligence service will be revealed in a controversial new book, MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations, by the acclaimed intelligence expert Stephen Dorril. The book is due to be published at the end of this month.
MI6 launched an unsuccessful legal challenge to get the book's publisher, Fourth Estate, to release its contents. Special Branch officers also raided the London publishing house and seized computer equipment, but did not unearth details of Mandela's recruitment by MI6.
British intelligence chiefs are outraged that they failed to access the contents of Dorril's book after an Old Bailey judge ordered on Friday that the Guardian and Observer newspapers hand over documents relating to the former MI5 officer David Shayler. The ruling was made on the grounds that the papers could help police prosecute the rogue spy under the Official Secrets Act. Shayler had made claims that MI6 was involved in a plot to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi.
Stephen Dorril's book will stun the world with its allegations about Mandela, a Nobel Peace Prize winner. It is thought that Mandela's recruitment would have been motivated partly by his virulent anti-communism. In return MI6 offered information about potential assassination attempts on his life.
Dorril claims highly-placed MI6 officers told him about Mandela's recruitment by the Secret Intelligence Service - the arm of British intelligence which undertakes espionage activities overseas, recruits foreign spies and engages in counter- espionage against foreign agents working in the UK.
Sources within the Foreign Office and the intelligence service have said that Dorril's claim "is entirely credible". Last night, the Foreign Office did nothing to deny the allegation that Mandela worked for MI6.
There were also no denials, or threats of legal action against the book, from either Nelson Mandela's office in Johannesburg, South Africa or his London-based lawyers.
 MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service, By Stephen Dorril [*Amazon*] |
Part of Dorril's book, on the activities of MI6 in Africa, reads:"Another MI6 catch was ANC leader Nelson Mandela. Whether Mandela was recruited in London before he was imprisoned in South Africa is not clear, but it is understood that on a recent trip to London he made a secret visit to MI6's training section to thank the service for its help in foiling two assassination attempts directed against him soon after he became president."
Dorril says the assassination attempts referred to probably included one from within a faction of the African National Congress (ANC) which was bitterly opposed to Mandela's successful manoeuvring to oust Communist Party leaders from under the umbrella of the African National Congress. Another is believed to have been planned by a covert operations wing of the apartheid government's military.
Dorril, a writer on intelligence issues and a lecturer at Huddersfield University, claims Mandela was of use to MI6 as his friendliness with Colonel Gadaffi's Libyan government paved the way for the hand-over of the two Libyan agents accused of the Lockerbie bombing.
Both the British and American governments are keen to rebuild relations with Libya to exploit the country's rich oil fields. "Mandela was the key to turning Libya from a terrorist state to one open to the West," Dorril told the Sunday Herald. "The result of his actions will be a huge economic boost to western economies. It can be said that he charmed Gaddafi for western economic interests." He claimed MI6's psychological warfare, or IOps, department - responsible for propaganda - helped massage international opinion allowing Mandela to visit Gadaffi without courting virulent western opprobrium.
Dorril added: "Mandela helped MI6 with information over Libya's funding and arming of the IRA, and the sending of arms to loyalist terrorists in Ulster from apartheid South Africa." Dorril claimed Mandela told his MI6 handlers about Libya's attempts to develop chemical and biological warfare capabilities, and informed them about South Africa's own secret nuclear arsenal.
 World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World; By Christopher Andrew, Vasili Mitrokhin [*Amazon*] |
Dorril claims in his book that Britain did not push for full disclosure of South Africa's biological weapons programme as part of its plan to support Mandela when he was president, and Mandela helped stem the tide of South African scientists being recruited by Libya to build Gadaffi's bio-weapons programme.
One of MI6's biggest overseas stations is in South Africa. It was a key spy centre during the Cold War as Russia and America fought to take countries like neighbouring Mozambique and Angola into their sphere of influence. South Africa is also key to Britain's economic interests because of its natural uranium, gold and platinum deposits.
It is unclear exactly when Mandela was recruited. Nor is it clear whether MI6 courted Mandela with warnings about assassination attempts in order to lure him into the service's clutches, or if he was recruited and provided MI6 with information and then received the warnings in return.
The publisher of the book, Fourth Estate, has been under intense pressure to reveal the contents of Dorril's 900 page work to MI6 prior to its publication on March 30. MI6 made a request through its lawyers for a full disclosure of the contents but Fourth Estate successfully fended off the challenge. However, the publishing house was raided under a search warrant by Special Branch officers who seized the computer of Fourth Estate editor-in-chief Clive Priddle which contained notes on the book.
According to Nicky Eaton, Fourth Estate's publicist, the intelligence service is unaware of the Mandela claim. The book has been meticulously poured over for accuracy by Fourth Estate's own lawyers. Both Neil Harold, from Mandela's personal office, and Mandela's London lawyer, Iqbal Meer, of Meer Care Desai, were stunned by the allegations coming to light. They were both unable to contact Mandela last night to brief him on the claims. It is thought he is holidaying in the South African countryside, and is not contactable. Dorril claims his revelations are not damaging to Mandela's reputation. "There is nothing defamatory about being a recruit for MI6," he said.
Officially the Foreign Office said it could not comment on the allegation as it was a secu rity matter. However, unofficially senior Foreign Office sources hinted that the recruitment claim was credible.
One said: "If we focus on the allegations referring to assassination claims, it is not surprising that the ANC would have sought security advice from the UK, or its intelligence services, to protect key individuals."
 KGB Alpha Team Training Manual: How The Soviets Trained For Personal Combat, Assassination, And Subversion, By K.G.B. [*Amazon*] |
Foreign analysts and African experts also claim that Mandela's recruitment into MI6 is not only credible but will also have a seismic effect internationally.
One expert on Southern Africa said: "His life history shows how he would have been attractive to MI6 and MI6 would have been attractive to him. Mandela is deeply anti- communist. As a young man he would break up Communist Party meetings with his fists. Later in life, he came to realise that to end apartheid he needed every ally he could get and he pragmatically decided to get into bed with the Communists.
"Mandela admires Britain, its parliamentary democracy and its judicial system. Once he went into jail, Mandela moved further and further away from the Communists, privately pouring scorn on their policies. When he was freed, a struggle began for the soul of the ANC between the Communists and the 'democrats', like Mandela."
There has been intense speculation, including allegations by Winni Mandela, that the South African Communist leader, Chris Hani, who was assassinated in 1992, apparently by white extremists, may in fact have been a victim of this internal feud. "Many of the democrats in the ANC certainly hated the Communists enough to have them killed.
"British diplomats were also central to smoothing the end of apartheid during negotiations between Mandela and President De Klerk. It can not be underestimated how many MI6 and CIA officers were working in this area. Their numbers were colossal."
» » » » [Sunday Herald]
Secrets and spies
Mark Hollingsworth on Stephen Dorril's revealing history of MI6 (MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations)
The Guardian,
Saturday 8 April 2000 01.39 BST
At the heart of this exceptionally well researched book is the notion that MI6 has operated as the covert interventionist instrument of British foreign policy. In forensic detail Stephen Dorril shows how, since 1945, our secret service has engaged in what he politely calls "disruptive actions": attempted assassinations (Egypt, Libya), coup d'états (Albania, Iran, Oman), forging Swiss bank account documents (East Germany) and psychological warfare (planting of false information, secret funding of propaganda and smearing opponents).
Many MI6 officers believed in the 50s and 60s that they were the true arbiters of the national interest. As former deputy chief George Young stated: "It is the spy who has been called upon to remedy the situation created by deficiencies of ministers, diplomats, generals and priests." So, for the past 50 years, argues Dorril, MI6 has operated as a state within a state, influencing and manipulating foreign policy to suit its jaundiced view of the world.
Like most western leaders, MI6 believed that nationalism in the Middle East and Africa would inevitably lead to communism. That baseless but popular preconception, alongside a desire to protect US/UK oil interests, coloured their operations, and Dorril catalogues just how far the service was prepared to go to ensure that a government was to its liking. A recurring theme is MI6's dependence on the CIA, whose financial fire-power often gave it the edge, notably in funding European anti-communist networks and technical intelligence-gathering.
But their joint covert actions were not always successful. The 1949 attempt to overthrow the communist regime in Albania ended in abject failure. "It is a gruesome story," wrote defence specialist John Keegan, "made all the more so by the perception, apparently denied to the masterminds of subversion, that the Albanian communists were far more adept at deciding the future of their country than a bunch of romantic meddlers with a public-school education and a free supply of plastic explosives."
 Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, By Steve Coll [*Amazon*] |
A more effective operation was the MI6-controlled coup in Iran, which removed the popular and moderate prime minister, Mohammed Mossadeq, despised by the British because he nationalised the Iranian oil industry. MI6 and the CIA armed, funded and directed the conspirators, and Mossadeq was ousted in 1953.
A crucial component of what MI6 calls "special political action" is the use of psychological warfare. According to Dorril, MI6 planted false stories, secretly subsidised news agencies and radio stations, manipulated opinion polls and smeared opponents by leaking forged documents. Known as "black propaganda", this was a combination of covert news management and sinister dirty tricks.
What emerges from Dorril's exhaustive research is that MI6 has been a law unto itself. A group of senior operatives were obsessed with Britain's decline as a world power, and would resort to any illegal operation to reverse it; they appeared to think foreign policy should be founded on the maxim "God is an Englishman" (as stated by ex-operative Julian Amery). Former MI6 controllers admit that the period 1948-1958 was a horrific dark age, but they claim that the service was cleaned up by Harold Macmillan and has been under ministerial control ever since. Any controversial "black arts" operation needs full Foreign Office sanction. Is this credible?
Dorril provides evidence to the contrary. He cites MI6's involve ment in the 1970 coup in Oman and, to a lesser extent, in Yemen, and relates how, in 1965, MI6 conspired with the CIA to "liquidate" Indonesia's president Sukarno. Margaret Thatcher showed no reluctance in sharing the burden of policing the world; Dorril claims that, in 1980, Thatcher "authorised MI6 to undertake 'disruptive actions' " during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
More recently, former MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson described how, in 1992, he saw an internal document that described a plan to assassinate President Milosevic. Three years later, according to former MI5 officer David Shayler, MI6 plotted to murder Colonel Gaddafi by funding and running Libyan agents who opposed the regime. As more evidence emerges to support Shayler's allegation, it appears that MI6 has not quite relinquished its self-appointed role as an international enforcer of British foreign policy.
If it is to be effective in its new role - investigating the proliferation of nuclear and chemical weapons, tracking drug smugglers and countering money-laundering - MI6 will need to lift the veil of secrecy behind which it has hidden for too long. The lesson of this book is that, unless there is more transparency and accountability, a revival of unofficial bomb-and-blast foreign policy cannot be ruled out.
Dorril, co-author of books on the Profumo scandal and MI5's plot against Harold Wilson, has read an enormous amount. He has interviewed some former MI6 officers who have not spoken before; however, the book relies largely on published sources and there are some gaps. For example, there is not enough on MI6's organisation, its internal structure and how special operations were authorised.
It also suffers from inadequate editing, and Dorril has a tendency to bombard the reader with a bewildering array of facts and names. Given its ambitious scope, though, this is a remarkable achievement and an encyclopedic post-war history which any student of the secret world should read.
Mark Hollingsworth is the author, with Nick Fielding, of Defending the Realm: MI5 and the Shayler Affair (Andre Deutsch).
» » » » [Guardian.UK]
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