We return to our discussion with South African journalist and editor, Allister Sparks. We talked about the ties between South Africa and indicted Washington lobbyist, Jack Abramoff. In 1989, Abramoff produced the film Red Scorpion. It was filmed in South African-occupied Namibia, with the cooperation of the notorious apartheid regime. But before that, Abramoff helped launch the pro-apartheid International Freedom Foundation in the mid-1980s. The IFF was promoted as an independent think tank, but it was actually part of an elaborate South African military intelligence operation set up to combat sanctions and undermine Nelson Mandela's African National Congress. While Abramoff headed the IFF in Washington, in South Africa it was run in part by Craig Williamson, a notorious military intelligence officer known for carrying out a series of bombings and assassinations. I asked Allister Sparks to talk about Craig Williamson's record.
That's just Amy Goodman's recap of this dude Williamson for this interview she did with Allister Sparks a well-known South African journalist. Here's what sparks said about Williamson:
Oh, Craig Williamson was one of our more odious intelligence spies. Intelligence? Well, I suppose, it's the right word. He was quite smart the way he went about things. He, first of all, infiltrated student organizations. He went abroad. He operated out of Geneva for a time, working in international students in that field, shopping many of his colleagues. They didn't know. They thought he was a good guy. And, you know, part of the student movement, which was opposed to apartheid, he embedded himself very successfully there.
But then, later, his activities became increasingly horrendous. I mean, he took to planting or sending letter bombs to various people. He was responsible for killing one of the leading white opposition figures, Ruth First, who was married to Joe Slovo. They were both communists, and I suppose it was deemed that that made them fair game. And she was blown up in her office at the University in Maputo. She was killed.
He was also involved in the killing of the family of an Afrikaner, a white Afrikaner dissident named Marius Schoon, whose -- a letter bomb killed his wife, his daughter, and injured a two-year-old boy who was left floundering around in this devastated home for two days before anyone found him. Yeah, that's the record of Craig Williamson.
Sparks just described a pal of Abramoff's. Abramoff has been described as pals to quite a few Republican politicians.
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