Spies and Lies Revealed in New Book by Longtime SA Journalist

A new book by veteran South African journalist John Matisonn claims that once-beloved (by many readers, at least) editor of the Sunday Times, Tertius Myburgh, was an apartheid spy and that Thabo Mbeki tried to warn US and UK leaders off attacking Iraq. These are two of numerous revelations made in the just-published “Gods, Spies and Lies”.

Matisonn, a respected journalist who started his career in 1974 at the Rand Daily Mail, crossed paths with many famed leaders during his reporting career, from Nelson Mandela to John Vorster to the revolutionary Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso.

In the weighty book, he covers not only the rise of various media in South Africa – from the very earliest days – but also the political events he covered. Here are a few other revelations that were reported in the media.

• An early quote from the book: “For a couple of months in the near perfect summer of 1990/1991, Jacob Zuma came to stay in my house in Norwood, Johannesburg… Twenty five years later, my former house guest has all but morally bankrupted Nelson Mandela’s ruling African National Congress. President Zuma’s vision-free leadership, corrupt personal behaviour and attempts to use his political power to distort the judicial system render him no better than Italy’s corrupt bunga-bunga partying ex-prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.”
• Tony Blair went to war in Iraq despite a report by South African experts with unique knowledge of the country that showed it did not possess weapons of mass destruction.
• Matisonn’s book describes how then-president Thabo Mbeki tried in vain to convince both Blair and US President George W Bush that toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003 would be a terrible mistake.
• South Africa had a special insight into Iraq’s potential for WMD because the apartheid government’s own biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programme in the 1980s led the countries to collaborate. The programme was abandoned after the end of white minority rule in 1994 but the expert team, known as Project Coast, was put back together by Mbeki to investigate the US and UK assertion that Saddam had WMD – the central premise for mounting an invasion.
• The book relates the secret history of the remarkable relationship between a young Nelson Mandela and one of the unsung heroes of South African journalism, Charles Bloomberg. Bloomberg, who worked as a political journalist for the Sunday Times, was the first to crack open the clandestine and powerful Afrikaner Broederbond.
• The first newspaper to be published in South Africa, The Cape Town Gazette and African Advertiser, and its Dutch version Kaapse Stads, published by two Scotsmen, did not challenge the government and “advertisements for the sale of slaves were a regular feature.”
• In a chapter “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Editor”, Matisonn claims that longtime Sunday Times editor Tertius Myburgh was a willing and voluntary spy for the apartheid government. He says Myburgh (who was his boss at the Times) “betrayed his staff. He betrayed his profession. Most important of all, he betrayed his readers who were dependent on the media to tell the truth.”
• Myburgh took over the Rand Daily Mail, a thorn in the apartheid government’s side, when Allister Sparks was fired in 1981, and remained editor of the Sunday Times while overseeing the demise of the RDM.

Gods, Lies and Spies – Finding South Africa’s Future Through its Past is available from Missing Link.