There’s a saying among my fellow military veterans that if a guy in a bar tells you that he was a Recce, one of South Africa’s famed Special Forces reconnaissance soldiers – he wasn’t.
That’s because despite their fearsome reputation as a hard-as-nails combat elite, they are also soldiers of the shadows, subtle intelligence-gatherers skilled in blending into their environment, and so as a result are seldom self-aggrandising braggarts, but are more likely to be the quietest guys in the bar. In fact, the last time I hung out at a bar with a group of Recce veterans, earlier this year, they were all quietly sipping diet Coke.
When I was young, they were rumoured to be selected from among those who showed obvious, wild psychopathic tendencies, but this just isn’t true; cool temperaments were required to survive on long-range recon ops in two-man teams for up to three months deep in enemy territory without hope of helicopter rescue.
Historically, there were, it could be argued, two types of Recces who passed the gruelling selection week followed by 51 weeks of basic training to become an “operator”: those who became the old SADF’s most respected elite warriors, and those who became apartheid’s plausibly deniable state terrorists; sometimes, they were the same men.
Today, I focus on the current débâcle over the charging of twelve men from 5 Special Forces Regiment (“5 Recce”) with the assassination of police Hawks investigator Lt-Col Frans Mathipa on the N1 near Hammanskraal north of Pretoria on the night of 6 August 2023 – an alleged inter-service killing that has shaken the democratic state to its core.
The affair is as murky as one would expect of one involving Special Forces, whose operations remain classified and operators’ identities shielded decades after they retire. But the Mathipa murder appears to be yet another poisoned chalice handed down to us from former President Jacob Zuma’s era of treasonous state capture.
Double agent
Mathipa was investigating the disappearance of Ethiopian national and US-sanctioned Islamic State terrorist Abdella Hussein Abadigga [as his name is spelled as in his passport] and his bodyguard Kadir Abotese, apparently kidnapped from the parking garage of the Mall of Africa in Midrand on 29 December 2022.
A two-part investigation by BBC Africa Eye journalists Dino Mahtani and Yeshiel Panchia revealed that Abadigga was, in the words of Mathipa’s since-retired colleague, Colonel Tollie Vreugdenburg, either the head of the Islamic State underground in South Africa, or very close to the top of the network.
Abadigga ran a well-armed Islamic State cell in the back offices of the Al-Taqwa Mosque in Mayfair, which it had hijacked, and from which it operated a racket extorting Muslim businessmen to raise funds for terrorism.
Vreugdenburg was head of the Hawks’ Crimes Against the State (CATS) unit that holds a brief for countering terrorism, and so was closely watching Abadigga, who had been granted temporary asylum status in South Africa in 2008, intent on arresting him.
But in October 2017, Abadigga, who had flown to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to deliver a drone and camera to the Islamic State-aligned Allied Democratic Forces, was arrested by the DRC armed forces, along with a group of Salafist militants, and held for two years in the Ndolo Military Prison in Kinshasa.
There, Vreugdenburg told the BBC, he was interrogated by various foreign intelligence agencies such as the CIA – but it appears that while the South African Secret Service (SASS) and SANDF’s Defence Intelligence had access to Abadigga, CATS was denied the same. So, in 2019, Vreugdenburg asked at least that Abadigga be deported from the DRC to Ethiopia, and was assured by the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) that this had occurred.
Yet in reality, the SANDF secretly chartered an Antonov transport, flew Abadigga back to South Africa, accompanied by a DHA official, and smuggled him back into the country, bypassing customs at OR Tambo International Airport.
Vreugdenburg was shocked to see Abadigga back in his old haunts in Joburg, and says it was apparent the terrorist had been turned double agent by either a domestic or international intelligence agency. Though he declined to say which, I speculate it was the SANDF’s Defence Intelligence, probably sharing information with the CIA, which has a station in Pretoria.
Off-script
Vreugdenburg says that while Abadigga and his Islamic State cell were at liberty to extort the local community, despite the man being sanctioned as a terrorist financier and recruiter by the US in March 2022, CATS investigators were blocked at every turn by other state departments in attempting to effect Abadigga’s arrest and deportation.
Yet two weeks before his abduction, Abadigga was suddenly denied refugee status, rendering him vulnerable; it appears the double agent had gone off-script or had outlived his usefulness to Defence Intelligence and/or the CIA, so a decision had been taken to either eliminate him or deport him.
The Hawks’ case had been sparked by Abadigga’s brother Ameen who launched a private investigation into the disappearances that showed three luxury vehicles trailing his brother and bodyguard at the mall. Things took a weird turn when the investigation revealed that the vehicles were registered to Peters Communications Trust (PCT), a front company for Special Forces.
The vehicles and PCT had previously been linked by investigative nonprofit Open Secrets to the controversial unloading of ammunition for Special Forces from US-sanctioned Russian cargo vessel the Lady R at the Simon’s Town Naval Base in December 2022.
The Lady R saga, reportedly leaked to the press by the CIA, caused ructions in steadily worsening US-South African diplomatic relations as it is suspected that gold and/or diamonds were loaded aboard the vessel in payment for the ammunition; though the ammunition shipment was in fulfilment of a delayed SANDF order from before the Russian war on Ukraine, Washington frowned on sanctions-busting for a Russia short on foreign reserves.
Special forces strike
So, perhaps to ease tensions, Pretoria handed over Abadigga in an extrajudicial rendition to US custody (my sources say this appears likely): the BBC reported that Abadigga’s cellphone was linked to a US special forces strike in Somalia on 25 January 2023 that killed ten Islamic State terrorists including leader Bilal al-Sudani, so Abadigga is clearly a person of interest in the US’ “War on Terror”.
Such a rendition would not conform to a 2001 extradition treaty between the US and SA, but might have placated the CIA; this seems to reveal an uncomfortable geopolitical truth, that South Africa is beholden to many international interests, and so is walking a tightrope by attempting to play the US and Russia against each other – with Islamic State the piggy in the middle.
Vreugdenburg and Mathipa, and now the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), rather believe that Abadigga and his bodyguard are rotting in shallow graves somewhere; with fingers pointed at the Recces, an internal NPA memo recently revealed by veteran defence correspondent Erika Gibson in Rapport shows that the operators have instead claimed that Abadigga was actually deported back to Ethiopia.
This opens the accused Recces to perjury, Gibson argues, as they previously claimed in court that the mall operation, commanded by 5 Recce’s then-Maj Sunnybooi Wambi, was an unrelated plainclothes “training exercise” and they had no knowledge of the two vanished men.
Lt-Col Sunnybooi Wambi [Image: Yeshiel Panchia, Michael Schmidt’s collection]
But Mathipa’s investigation threatened to uncover far more than merely the fate of some sleazy Salafist double agent: in demanding the Recces hand over vehicle tracking and cellphone data for the six operators implicated in the Mall of Africa abduction, he unwittingly risked revealing the black ops of a hitherto unknown Recce entity that has become adept at blurring the lines of what operators are legally allowed to do.
On 6 August 2023, months after asking the SANDF for this data, Mathipa was assassinated, shot while driving home by a high-velocity weapon from a black BMW. A subsequent CATS investigation showed the BMW was owned by the Recces’ PCT front company, and identified one of the men in the assassins’ car as Major Wambi.
Pseudo-operations
Last week, I revealed exclusively that Wambi, an officer with a reputation not for brilliance but for slavishly following orders, had from 2010 led a small Recce squad that provided close protection for President Jacob Zuma; the squad became accustomed to doing private jobs for “No.1” and relished their presidential access and thus untouchable status.
In 2016, the entity was formalised as an ultra-secret Recce unit with a chain of command that led directly from Zuma to Chief of the SANDF (CSANDF) Gen Solly Shoke, then down to the General Officer Commanding Special Forces (GOCSF) Brig-Gen Thamela “Tom” Yalo, then down to Major Wambi.
The following year, PCT was registered to give the civvies-clothed unit a civilian appearance. This is an old Special Forces counter-insurgency tactic called “pseudo-operations,” where operators disguise themselves as civilians or even as guerrillas; however, under the Geneva Conventions, to capture or kill an opponent while so disguised, as is alleged to have happened with Abadigga and his bodyguard, constitutes the war crime of perfidy.
In February 2018, Cyril Ramaphosa ascended the presidency and so replaced Jacob Zuma as the unit’s commander-in-chief. It appears the new No.1 found he liked having his own personal detachment of Recce operators at his beck and call, and following the December 2019 theft of eighteen R4 rifles and three pistols from an army base, Wambi’s unit was put on the trail.
As Hennie van Vuuren of Open Secrets showed, in its search for the stolen weapons, the unit brutally interrogated several suspects and Wambi allegedly beat one of them, a 35-year-old man known only as Sphamandla, so severely with sticks and branches in a Military Police bar at Pretoria’s Thaba Tshwane military base, that he died of his injuries the same day.
Participating in the ghastly “interrogation” in the presence of Wambi’s operators was the base’s acting Military Police commander Maj Doris Netshanzhe, who Van Vuuren says earned the nickname “Mama Skebenga” (Mama Gangster) from Wambi’s unit and who later allegedly boasted to a fellow officer: “I work with Special Forces; we make people disappear.”
Rewarding war crimes
Despite the alleged torture-murder of Sphamandla, the successful recovery of all of the stolen weapons by the unit by May 2020 made Maj Wambi a hero in certain circles; at a ceremony during Armed Forces Day at Richards Bay on 21 February 2023, Ramaphosa personally conferred the Order of the Silver Leopard for “bravery” on a masked yet uniformed Wambi.
To put it baldly, the president rewarded Wambi’s perfidious war crimes.
In the interim, in June 2021, Gen Rudzani Maphwanya, who had been GOCSF prior to Yalo when the unit was founded, assumed the post of Chief of the SANDF, which suggests the unit now has the protection at the highest military tier of one of its own.
Today, disguised as civilians, this presidential “shadow unit” consists of some 30 Recce operators plus a few Defence Intelligence personnel, making it equal in size to each of 5 Recce’s five commandos. With PCT as its front company, and Ramaphosa as its boss, it is cash-flush and can draw down weapons and equipment from Recce stores.
Yet the Hawks would not let the Mathipa murder rest, and last June, Wambi and another eleven Recces including the Mall of Africa abduction squad and the four directors of PCT were charged with the assassination of Mathipa, the kidnapping and killing of Abadigga and his bodyguard, fraud, obstruction of justice, and submitting false affidavits on the “training exercise” at the mall.
But Wambi and six junior operators – the abduction squad – have since refused to appear in court despite their bail having been revoked, claiming they are ill, but are actually believed to be heavily armed and holed up at the Boekenhoutskloof military base north of Pretoria.
Astonishingly, since he was charged, Wambi was promoted to lieutenant-colonel, as was Netshanzhe, surely a mark of them continuing to find favour with the brass, though Wambi was recently replaced as head of Ramaphosa’s shadow unit by a captain, which suggests a downgrading of the entity.
Ramaphosa and the military hierarchy have declined to comment to the BBC on the affair, but with the shadow unit warning the Hawks that “You can appoint ten investigating officers; we will kill all of them,” this unprecedented stand-off between the police and the military has dire implications for the rule of law in South Africa.
[Image: by Getmilitaryphotos]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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