Introduction
Intelligence officers who blow the whistle get attacked by their erstwhile employers. Agee, Stockwell, Marchetti,Wallace, Holroyd, Jock Kane, Cathy Massiter – they all have variously suffered for their decision to go public. Their allegations and their characters are rubbished; operations are mounted to discredit them and disrupt their lives – and worse.
Gordon Winter is an Englishman who was recruited by BOSS. His 1981 book Inside BOSS, was the first (and only) inside account of South Africa’s intelligence agency. The book was not reprinted after its first edition after a number of libel suits were issued against it. (NB our statement in Lobster 11, ref. 3, that the book had been withdrawn was wrong.) As a result, the status of Winter and his book is still a matter of dispute. Among those who were libelled it is suspected of being, in part, a disinformation exercise. While we were putting this issue together one of those who were libelled began corresponding with us about it – this, it should be noted, was entirely a coincidence: the person concerned had no idea we were planning to publish this piece – and, as a result, we now know a good deal more about the details of the book’s history than we used to. We will publish some of this in a future Lobster.
For the moment, however, we are not convinced that Inside BOSS was deliberate disinformation. We still think this is one of the most important political memoirs. Even if elements of the book were included to disinform, as some believe, Inside BOSS still contains an invaluable piece of the covert history of Britain in the sixties and seventies. Winter described offensive intelligence operations inside the UK on a massive scale.
The book is extremely hard to find second-hand but libraries will have it – or will get it. It should be read. In the meantime, here are some of Winter’s reflections on the book its reception, and his life since it appeared. (This piece was written at our invitation.) To our knowledge, this is the first time anything of Winter’s has been published in the UK since the book was published. We may prove to be wrong, but for the moment we are still of the opinion that the British liberal-left ditched Winter too quickly.
Robin Ramsay
I don’t really want to write this. It’s not really worth it. I’m not getting paid for it – so why should I risk another good hiding? I still bear the mental bruises from the ‘magnum opus’ I wrote about spies and spying. But here I am, banging out these words for Lobster – for three reasons.
- One: I respect the way Lobster handles the subject of spies and spying.
- Two: I have a few things I want to get off my chest.
- Three: Inside all of us (particularly writers who have been well and truly smeared) there is that quite natural wish to be understood.
My big problem as a journalist was that I always leaned backwards to see the other man’s point of view, even the enemy’s. This made me a good journalist (and spy) but not much cop as a human being because most of the time I was a hypocrite to myself and didn’t even know it. Which brings me to British Intelligence. You can’t blame them for keeping tabs on possible subversives. That’s what the name of the Intelligence game is all about – being intelligent. They would be stupid if they didn’t keep those kind of files, wouldn’t they? That’s what ‘Need to Know’ is all about. They need to know about people who might constitute a danger to the (their) Realm, so that they can do something about it before the clever ones get too smart-arse and start rocking the boat with their free-thinking shit.
Question: why is it that hardly any publicity has been given to that part of Peter Wright’s book Spycatcher which discloses that British Intelligence (GCHQ) computers can intercept any phone call and telex messages going in and out of Britain? Also studiously ignored by the mass media – even though it’s a great news story – is that British Intelligence has long had a really marvellous portable X-ray device which enables them to ‘read’ the combination inside super modern ‘thief-proof’ safes.
Please don’t think that I am trying to glamourise my book Inside BOSS by associating it with Spycatcher. There is no comparison whatever. Compared with Peter Wright I was very small fish as a spy. He really was big time, Don’t believe for one moment those smears that he was a nobody. He knows more secrets than any 20 British intelligence operatives who spend their time sitting at desks poring over secret reports. Peter Wright was out in the field – doing spectacular things. And don’t believe those smears that he’s a ‘traitor’ to the land of his birth. He’s still a violently anti-Communist right-winger who firmly believes in Queen and country. He wrote Spycatcher for the simple reason that he and his wife were going broke – because those idiots in Curzon Street’s Leconsfield House failed to give him the pension they promised, the 20-year pension he had earned with the Admiralty but lost when he joined MI5.
If he had been one of those scores of titled gentlemen who work for British Intelligence, whether on staff or freelance, you can be sure he would have got that pension. That’s what hurt him most. He finally worked it out that they had discriminated against him just because he was a lower-middle class nobody who never went to a ‘proper school’ and was not ‘one of them’. I mention all this about Wright because he had the ‘cheek’ to write a book which disclosed intelligence secrets. So did I – British Intelligence secrets as well as South African. Peter Wright has been well and truly smeared by most sections of the British press, although any half-intelligent person can – after reading Spycatcher – quite easily work out that most of the British newspapers spread vicious lies about him. And that is why I would like you to go to your public library, get a copy of my book, read it, and then decide for yourself.
Let’s examine one claim I made in that book, that British Intelligence breaches the secrecy of the ballot box by monitoring all votes cast for British Communists. On p. 419 I explained that most people in Britain believe that their vote is sacrosanct, that nobody can possibly discover how you voted. Not so. When you enter a polling station your name is automatically checked on the voters’ roll. This gives your home address. Then, so you can register your vote, you are given a numbered counterfoil and the person who gives you that counterfoil writes down your voters’ roll number on the counterfoil stub which bears the same number. Whatever they may tell you, this means that after you have marked your voting slip and popped it into the ballot box that slip can later be identified, by relating it to that (numbered) counterfoil stub which gives your number on the voter’s roll. And this in turn gives your name and address.
When my book mentioned this fact, you simply would not have believed the nonsense some newspapers published in order to knock it flat. One newspaper said my claim was ridiculous because all voting slips are destroyed after the election. Not true. After an election these voting slips are boxed and stored in buildings belonging to the Lord Chancellor’s department in west London, where they are stored for one year before being destroyed. Most newspapers stressed that the boxes containing the voting slips are ‘sealed’. So what? I remember BOSS telling me (in the late sixties) that they had stopped using their (heavily sealed) diplomatic pouches to send top-secret material to Pretoria by air from London. Why? Because a British Intelligence operative (an extreme right-winger who admired South Africa) had tipped us off that the back-room boys in Whitehall had found a way of opening our (and all other) ‘dip’ pouches. The much simpler seals on the voting boxes would hardly cause them a problem. Another newspaper said that it would be a ridiculously difficult task for ‘any person’ to scrutinise the voting slips. This is a clever misuse and deliberate twisting of words. Of course it would be difficult for ‘one person’ to do. But I never stated that one person monitored the voting slips. I said British Intelligence did it. Another newspaper said it would be impossible for anyone to get these voting slips because there were ‘locked up’. You have to laugh. Your voting slips are not even locked in modern safes. They are kept in boxes, in a locked room.
But the award of the year went to that revered Establishment newspaper The Times. In their issue of Monday 26th October 1981, they ran a lengthy story about my voting slip claims, a knocking story aimed at reassuring their civilised readers that British Intelligence would not be so uncivilised as to read other peoples’ voting slips. In the story’s second paragraph reporter David Nicholson-Lord described me as ‘a South African spy and disinformation specialist suggesting to the reader that this claim about voting slips is just disinformation. The Times then went on: ‘A person wanting to know how another voted would have to break into the place where the voting papers are stored. ‘ There you are, another newspaper is using that ‘a person’ trick again. The Times continued: ‘The intruder would also have to find the voting paper and its counterfoil, which bears a pencilled number. He would then have to find this number on the electoral roll to discover who marked the cross ……’
Hang on a minute though. British Intelligence would send more than one man, wouldn’t they? And surely they would not be so ham-fisted as to tell their ‘intruder’ to ‘break into the place’ would they? Surely British Intelligence would have the intelligence to get the key for the door? And, in any case, the British Intelligence operatives ‘breaking in’ wouldn’t have to do all their searching through voting slips in that room, would they? Couldn’t they take all the papers away with them and do it at leisure? They have a whole year to do it in, haven’t they?
In their article The Times then wrote: ‘Although the correlation of voting slips and electoral rolls is acknowledged to be technically possible, given the access, one loacl authority source consulted by The Times described it as “an unbelievably arduous task to sift through the slips in the ballot boxes. It would be an extremely tedious and difficult job even if anyone wanted to do it.”‘
Having made that quite definite statement, The Times destroyed the whole picture they had painted by stating in the next paragraph: ‘it would be simplified, however, by virtue of the slips being bundled up in groups of 50, with the candidates name and sorting colour at the top.’ As a former journalist I laughed when I saw that wonderful paragraph in The Times. How can one paragraph say that a thing could be ‘unbelievably arduous’ and ‘extremely tedious and difficult’ and then, in the very next breath, show that the voting slips were bundled together in groups of 50, with the candidates name and sorting colour at the top. My goodness, all the votes for a Communist candidate are bundled together? And with a special sorting colour at the top! Well, that really would ‘simplify’ that ‘unbelievably arduous, extremely tedious and difficult task’ somewhat, wouldn’t it?
Knowing the newsroom of The Times quite well, I realised they would spot this thunderous error. They certainly did. So what did they do? They went to the trouble of rejigging that whole page for their next edition. And they took out that very unhappy (for them) paragraph. As it happened I was grateful to The Times because I then flew to Amsterdam and Brussels to give several press conferences there. And at the end of each question and answer session, I invited the journalists to gather round and compare the different editions of The Times. To say those Dutch and Belgian reporters were appalled is putting it mildly. The respect they had previously held for the prestige Times took a deep nosedive.
The Times’ version 1:
Although the correlation of voting slips and electoral rolls is acknowledged to be technically possible, given the access, one local authority source consulted by The Times described it as an ‘unbelievably arduous task to sift through the slips in the ballot boxes.’ It would be an extremely tedious and difflcult job oven if anyone wanted to do it.”
It would be simplified, however, by virtue of the slips being bundled up in groups of 50; with the candidate’s name and sorting colour at the top.Shortly after an election, the sealed boxes are dispatched to buildings belonging to the Lord Chancellor’s department in west London where they are stored for a year before being destroyed. According to the Home Office; the scat can only be broken by an order from the House of Commons or the Privy Council.
The Times version 2 :
Although the correlation of voting slips and electoral rolls is acknowledged to be technically possible, given the access, one local authority source consulted by The Times described it as an “unbelievably arduous” task to sift through the slips in the ballot boxes.
Shortly after an election, the sealed boxes are dispatched to buildings belongg to the Lord Chancellor’s department in west London where they are stored for a year before being destroyed. According to the Home Office, the seal can only be broken by an order from the House of Commons or the Privy Council.
To further knock my claim, The Times published another very significant paragraph. This stated: ‘Senior Ministers told The Times last night that they had never heard of the secrecy of the ballot box being broached.’ Now that really was unbelievable and incredible. Those ‘senior ministers’ certainly did not know what was going on in the outside world because there was noting at all new in the claim that British Intelligence could monitor Communist votes in British general elections. The British Communist newspaper The Morning Star had repeatedly mentioned this very same subject in its columns for many years – long before my book was published.
It mentioned the subject in my book for another reason. This is what I wrote on p. 419:
‘The most astonishing allegations I heard about British Intelligence and its links with BOSS was that the names of all people who voted Communist in British general elections were passed on to South Africa and other anti-Communist countries. This was told to me in confidence by General H.J. van den Bergh in 1968. This was invaluable to South African Intelligence. When British Communists visited South Africa they were automatically monitored at all times in case they were involved in underground politics.’
After disclosing this fact in my book I ended the chapter by repeating something else van den Bergh (the head of BOSS) had told me on the subject: ‘Those black boxes contain the names of people who voted communist. In intelligence terms that’s like knowing where there’s several thousand of tons of gold which can be stolen without anyone knowing. Can you imagine British Intelligence not scrutinizing those voting slips? They’d be stupid if they didn’t.’ I am sure that the head of BOSS was speaking the truth when he told me about this. In any case, I have seen the computer print-outs in BOSS headquarters in Pretoria. On the other hand, to be absolutely fair minded, let’s presume that he lied to me. Perhaps he told me that to cover up the fact that his BOSS men in Britain had somehow managed to steal all the names and addresses. But I’m quite sure van den Bergh did not deceive me. During those 16 years I spied for him, I was one of his top favourites and he never once lied to me, to my knowledge. Anyway, I leave it to you to decide who is telling the truth. And don’t be too hard on The Times because they published that terribly biased article on the voting slips. Maybe they did it because they are true blue patriots who just did not want to let the side down.
That used to be my game, too. In Inside BOSS I explain that, as a hatchet man for South African Intelligence, one of my jobs as a journalist propagandist was to attack any book which criticised the South African Government or the policy of apartheid. One of the most dangerous disclosures I made in my book was that BOSS had a top secret ‘death squad’ known as the ‘Z-squad’, which was formed to kill Pretoria’s known enemies, particularly those living in exile outside South Africa. This expose was treated with ridicule when my book came out. But the world’s newspapers obviously believe me now because they invariably name South Africa’s ‘Z-squad’ as the culprit when a South African exile is mysteriously murdered overseas. Since I made that disclosure literally dozens of South African political exiles have been shot or blown up in Tanzania, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Botswana – most of them members of the ANC. Apart from the parcel bomb killing of senior ANC member Ruth First, the car bomb maiming of the liberal South Affiran lawyer Albie Sachs, in Mozambique last year, and the shooting down of the ANC representative in Paris, Mrs Dulcie September in 1987, few of these cases have been given much publicity.
When I wrote Inside BOSS I made one great mistake. I did not take any political stand. Naively believing I could now really write without ‘slanting’ (for a change) I spared no side. I tried to put all sides. And, so that my readers could understand why the South African Government behaved like it did, I gave Pretoria’s point of view about the ANC, Pan-Africanist Congress (RAC), the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the Blacks, the Coloureds, the Reds, and yes, those pinko langoustine liberals too. This didn’t go down very well at all. Anyway, BOSS came up with a great gimmick. They put the rumour our to their secret agents (dozens of them being journalists in South Africa and elsewhere) that not to worry, Gordon is still a loyal BOSS agent. Ignore his book, its just a cunning cover for something else he’s doing. Now you have to give credit where credit is due. BOSS deserves a pat on the back for that brilliant disinformer. It was such a humdinger that the whole of Fleet St., the BBC and TV networks fell for it. So much so that in all the eight major TV interviews I gave the commentator always ended up by suggesting that I might still be working for BOSS or the CIA or the KGB.
When I handed my Inside BOSS manuscript, and a big bundle of secret BOSS documents to Penguin Books, I dealt with their Editor, Neil Middleton. He’s a terrific guy and I liked him a lot. I warned him that BOSS would try to get into Penguin’s offices, to get advance details from my book. I didn’t have to worry though as the man who brought out Philip Agee’s A CIA Diary (Penguin 1975), Neil Middleton knew what security was about. But that didn’t stop the spooks. . Someone still managed to steal (from Penguin’s offices) all the BOSS documents and various other papers which substantiated claims I made in my book. I still had all my personal copies, but that’s not the point. Whoever stole those documents then had advance knowledge of what would appear in my book. Forewarned is forearmed. This meant the spooks had plenty of time to plot and connive in ways ways of reducing the danger potential in my book. Based on information I gathered later from journalists (and spies), I am quite sure I know the identity of the man who stole those documents. And he certainly was not a BOSS man.
Another interesting thing. Months before Inside BOSS was published, I discovered that page-proofs of the book had been in the hands of at least one senior South African journalist. And he had never left Johannesburg. Did he get them from BOSS? And, if so, how on earth did BOSS get those page-proofs? Could it be that British Intelligence passed them on? In July 1980, before my book was published, three senior members of the BBC’s Panorama programme flew from to London to interview me in Dublin. One of that team was Tom Mangold – and he’s nobody’s fool. He gave me a rare old grilling and I could see I needed to pull one out of the hat to convince him. But I managed it. In the mid-1970s, when the Jeremy Thorpe scandal was hitting the front pages. Tom Mangold flew to America and obtained an exclusive interview with Jeremy Thorpe’s old pal, the late Peter Bessell, the former Liberal MP for Bodmin. (Peter Bessell, as well as an self-admitted agent for the United States, presumably for the CIA, has also been described as a source for MI5’s ‘F’ branch. See Private Eye 15 May 1987). During his interview with Tom Mangold, Peter Bessell said something sensational: ‘Thorpe did have a scene with the male model, Norman Scott’. Tom Mangold flew back to London with a major story (on tape) in his briefcase.
But as it was libellous at the time, the BBC decided it could not use that interview. A transcript of the tape was sealed in a safe at the BBC. Within ten days of that transcript being placed in the safe, the Head of BOSS had a full copy of it. And because one of the pages (p.19) mentioned my name, he gave me a copy, so that I could defend myself against the British press if the story ever came out. It didn’t, but I kept that page 19. Some four years later, as Tom Mangold was quizzing me at that interview in Dublin, I asked him if his interview with Peter Bessell had ever been used by the BBC. When he said it hadn’t, I asked him if the transcript of his interview was still locked away in that BBC safe. He said it was. So I pulled p.19 out of my suitcase and asked Mr Mangold how on earth the Head of BOSS could have given it to me. Tom Mangold was so flabbergasted that he flew back to London, asked the BBC to get that transcript out of their safe and then compared my copy of p.19 with the original. It was identical, even down to small creases and photostat lines on the paper. Who do you think got into that BBC safe?
Here’s another puzzle for you. On 24 February 1976, when the Jeremy Thorpe case was about to erupt, the Young Liberal Peter Hain sat down and typed out a five-page memorandum in which he mentioned the fact that I was a suspected BOSS agent. Hain handed this memo to Jeremy Thorpe who – knowing full well that I was responsible for setting up the whole Norman Scott homosexual scandal – quickly handed it to Premier Harold Wilson. Within ten days ‘HJ’, head of BOSS, had a copy of it. Later I sent Peter Hain a copy of his memo. He’s still wondering how BOSS obtained possession of it.
Here’s yet another puzzle. In 1976 Harold Wilson, just after retiring as Prime Minister, secretly assigned two freelance BBC reporters, Barry Penrose and Roger Cortiour to mount an investigation into the Jeremy Thorpe/Norman Scott scandal to discover how deeply BOSS was involved in It. Wilson quite categorically named me as a’known BOSS agent’. During one of his talks with Penrose and Courtiour, the BBC’s Director General, Sir Charles Curran, was present in Harold Wilson’s home. ‘The four men agreed that their discussions should be kept top secret after Mr Wilson said he distrusted the British Security Services – which, he claimed, were ‘riddled with operatives who were pro-South African’. This is amusing when you know that it has been alleged that Sir Charles Curran was, for years, a top British Intelligence operative. (Izvestia 20/12/68, based on information supplied by Kim Philby.) Within a couple of days of this ‘top secret’ meeting the head of BOSS called me over to his Pretoria office and told me exactly what had been said in Mr Wilson’s home. He gave me this advance warning because he knew that the two BBC reporters would be telephoning me at my home in Johannesburg and he wanted me to be ready for their attack. But for some reason H.J. van den Bergh told me that when the BBC men telephoned I could kick them in the teeth by disclosing that I knew all about their secret meeting in Harold Wilson’s home. And when Barry Penrose did phone me, I did give him that kick. His reaction was: ‘My God, you really are well-informed. How on earth did you know about that?’ Barry is a super sleuth but he still doesn’t know exactly how BOSS obtained full details of that top secret conversation with Harold Wilson.
But I know how Lord Wilson was so clued-up about me and my involvement in the Thorpe/Scott scandal. One week before Britain’s general election in February 1974, on the instructions of BOSS, I gave the Sunday People my complete dossier on Jeremy Thorpe. This dossier included some 50 letters typed on House of Commons notepaper and several tape recordings, all of which I had compiled while interviewing made model Norman Scott for two weeks in my London flat. After delivering this dossier to the offices of the Sunday People, I went downstairs to the ‘Stab’ – a pub used by most of the journalists in the IPC group – and sat at the bar having a drink with a former girl friend, Jill Evans of the Daily Mirror. Ten minutes later, a large-nosed man came up to the bar and offered to buy me a drink saying, ‘I’ve been skimming through the stuff you just brought us on Jeremy Thorpe and must congratulate you. It looks a great story.’ Highly flattered, I thanked him. But then the hair on the back of my neck started prickling when ‘big nose’ started ‘pumping’ me for information about Norman Scott, particularly his whereabouts. This made me clam up and become rather frosty. When he departed I asked Jill Evans who ‘big nose’ was. She replied, ‘That’s Sydney Jacobsen, Deputy Chairman of the IPC group – you’re in the big time now, boyo’.
But that prickling sensation on the back of my neck had been quite right. Later I discovered (from a reliable political reporter on the Daily Mirror) that dear old Sydney Jacobsen had made copies of everything in my Thorpe/Scott dossier and carried it over to Downing Street. For this, and other possible acts of friendship, mister Jacobsen was given a title. And when I tackled him on this later, he didn’t even try to deny it. ‘You did your duty and I did mine’, was all he said – with a condescending sneer. I can disclose this now because Lord Jacobsen died in 1988.
Although I was the man who started that Scott/Thorpe scandal, I felt sorry for Jeremy Thorpe when he was toppled from power. He really did take a thousand kicks in the groin from the media – just like I did when Inside BOSS was published. But not just from the media. The ANC and their friends in the South African Communist Party also gave me a terrific hiding. Months before my book came out, they set up a first class ‘think tank’ in London and did a brilliant spoiling job on the book. Not that I blame them one jot. I did enough damage to them during my years as a spy on the Black beat in South Africa. The anti-apartheid people in London must have been delighted when I named secret agents who worked for BOSS. But here’s something crazy: at least half of the agents I named in my book are still operating, doing the same things I accused them of doing.
After Inside BOSS came out I wrote a sequel, entitled Secret Agent for South Africa a 547-pager published in Dutch for a really delightful chap called Rob van Gennep. In that book I named many more agents who worked for BOSS. And not one of them dared to sue. When they contacted the van Gennep publishing house, and started the same old threats they had applied to Penguin in London, Rob van Gennep was not at all scared. He told them, ‘You want to sue us? OK, come to Holland. We will pay your air fare and your hotel bills. Come to court and see what happens to you.’ Not one of them did. Now that’s a real warrior – and I love him for it. My Dutch book received 93 whole pages of publicity in Dutch and Belgian newspapers and magazines in the space of two weeks, and not one of them published a lie or a distortion. They played it down the middle, reporting the facts – and leaving their readers to decide for themselves. Holland is definitely the most honest and just society I have ever encountered.
The success of my Dutch book pleased me immensely. But I still could not get over the way my own country had beaten the stuffing out of Inside BOSS. So, in a big sulk, I took my wife and kids off to Greece in an old coal van – to write an even better book for the German market. But the ANC even managed to sabotage that – on the very day I was due to sign a juicy contract. This left me broke. So we returned to Ireland in the 18-year-old coal van and my wife took a job as dish washer and general dogsbody in a posh country hotel. I was hired as general handyman and potato peeler (two big buckets full every day).
Instead of being paid a wage I earned our free occupancy of a little two up and two down cottage in the grounds of the hotel – with free water trickling down the walls. That rather humbling experience did me a world of good. There’s nothing better for a big head than being brought down to size, not that I enjoyed it much at the time.
That’s why I finally tore myself way from those buckets of potatoes and, with some money from my mother-in-law, took my family in that same old coal truck all the way to my old hunting ground of Tangier in Morocco. There I wrote a guide book to that city which provided me with enough money to sit down and start writing a film script for an American company. When I was spying in London for BOSS under cover of being a deportee from South Africa, a short notice appeared in the Personal Columns of The Times on 18th March 1969. It asked volunteers to reply to a box number if they were interested in working for a worthy cause. It was carefully worded to appeal to people of a liberal frame of mind and – to discourage chancers – made it clear that there would be no financial reward. The head of BOSS instructed me to answer this advert, saying the man who had inserted it had some connection with South Africa. Only later did I discover that, as per routine, British Intelligence monitor all unusual Personal Column notices. I mention this because it later became obvious that British Intelligence had tipped off BOSS about that advert.
Anyway I wrote to the box number and found myself in a plot to rescue the ANC leader, Nelson Mandela, from prison in South Africa. I infiltrated the plot and became leader of the group in London which was to be responsible for recruiting suitable people. BOSS was delighted by all this and helped me in a hundred ways so that Mandela’s escape could be achieved. As I explain in Inside BOSS, BOSS was most keen to help Mandela escape. Then they could shoot him dead in a lovely ‘recapture’ operation and, in an equally lovely show trial, they could jail all the Britons who had taken part in the plot. One of them was to be Miss Sheila Scott, the most famous British solo aviator of her time, who was to fly Mandela out of South Africa in her two-seater plane after his escape from jail. (Little did she know that Mandela would be shot as he ran to board that plane on the landing strip of a farm near Cape Town.) Sheila Scot would have given BOSS fabulous world headlines when she stood in the dock accused of complicity in Mandela’s ‘escape’.
This plot and counter plot really would have worked because BOSS had even supplied me with a warder in the Robben Island jail where Mandela was held. But then something went wrong. The mastermind of the rescue plot, Mr Gordon Bruce, an employee at a Johnnesburg dynamite factory, made contact with an eminently respectable man in London, an old friend of his, a man he knew he could trust absolutely. For the time being I will call this man by his official codename, ‘Mr Chips’.
Gordon Bruce told this completely trustworthy ‘Mr Chips’ about the escape plan. He even told him my name and mentioned that I had managed to get a warder on Roben Island who would assist in the escape. But, unknown to Gordon Bruce, ‘Mr Chips’ was a British Intelligence pal. And, of course, he tipped off British Intelligence. They took a dim view of me recruiting Britons to take part in a plot in which we all knew (we being BOSS and British Intelligence) would end in them all being arrested in South Africa by BOSS. So British Intelligence quietly complained to the Head of BOSS that this sort of thing was not on. And so, eventually, our ‘escape’ plot was called off – for which Nelson Mandela, from the bottom of his heart, can thank British Intelligence – and ‘Mr Chips’.
When I defected from BOSS in 1979, I contacted Peter Hain in London and told him about the Mandela Escape Plan – and how ‘Mr Chips’ had smashed it by telling British Intelligence. Peter Hain did not believe me. He said he knew ‘Mr Chips’ well enough to know that the role I gave him in the plot was quite preposterous. So I gave Peter Hain various letters and documents which made it abundantly clear that ‘Mr Chips’ really had been privy to the plot. I take my hat off to Peter. He went to see ‘Mr Chips’, showed him the documents, and told him that I was going to disclose the whole Plot in my book. The first thing ‘Mr Chips’ asked Peter Hain was: ‘Is Gordon Winter going to name me in his book, or will be be referring to me by the codename ‘Mr Chips’?’ When Peter Ham indicated that he did not know, ‘Mr Chips’ then said: ‘You can tell Mr Winter that if he does not mention my real name, I will not deny his story’.
Now you know why I did not name ‘Mr Chips’ on p. 279. It just wasn’t worth disclosing his name and being denied. But I can disclose his name now. ‘Mr Chips’ was Sir Robert Birley, the former Headmaster at Eton. I can tell you that because he can’t deny his role – he died at his beautiful home in Somerset in 1982. Many of Britain’s liberals will be shocked to hear that the immensely respected and trusted Sir Robert Birley was a British Intelligence pal, because he was privy to many secrets given to him by Black leaders – some of them very left-wing – from all over Africa. But I’m not at all shocked, I reckon he told British Intelligence because was a true blue English patriot. Isn’t that what Eton is all about?
When I wrote about the Mandela Escape Plot in my book, I fully expected to get a hiding because the whole thing sounded like something from a boy’s adventure book. Yet, incredibly, all the people involved in that plot had the moral calibre to stand up and admit that I was telling the truth. Even the flier Sheila Scott. To ensure that her comments were strictly on the record, she gave a press interview in front of her lawyer, during which she confirmed that everything I had said was the truth.
Sheila Scott died of cancer in a London hospital in October 1988. When she started life she was a bit part actress and, during talks with her years ago when she was a world-famous flier, she mentioned with a tinge of regret – that she really would have liked to have had just one starring role in a big film. It’s too late to tell her now, but she will. Because that film script I mentioned earlier has just been bought and a Hollywood set-up is now busy making a full-length film about the Mandela Escape Plot.
Footnote
What happened to Gordon Bruce, that delightful but unlucky man (unlucky because he trusted me and Sir Robert Birley), who masterminded the admirable but ill-fated Escape Plot? Nothing happened to him. He’s still living in South Africa with his wife (who happens to be blind). BOSS couldn’t arrest him and bring him to court – even though they had hundreds of letters and documents proving his guilt. Because by doing so it would have proved – beyond a shadow of a doubt, in a court of law – that I was a BOSS agent.
And that, to this day, BOSS still denies. But BOSS got its revenge on Gordon Bruce in 1988 when his son, along with hundreds of other young Whites, refused to serve in the South African army. They picked Gordon’s son out and sent him to jail for six years.