Civil Cooperation Bureau - Known and Suspected Operations

Known and Suspected Operations

To date there is no published record covering all operations conducted during the CCB's five year existence. It is estimated that 85-100 active operations were conducted, including:

• Alleged harassment of
  • Afrikaner dissident and Vrye Weekblad editor Max du Preez by pointing an RPG7 at him while forcing him to consume a large amount of mampoer or moonshine
  • actor and playwright Hannes Muller for his role in Somewhere on the Border, a play banned by the authorities for its criticism of the South African Border War
• Alleged shooting of Danger Nyoni - 12 December 1986
• Attempted contamination of drinking water in a Namibian refugee camp, by introducing cholera bacterium into it, in an effort to disrupt that country's independence from South Africa - August 1989
• Attempted assault on UN Special Representative, Martti Ahtisaari, in Namibia - 1989. According to a hearing in September 2000 of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, two CCB operatives (Kobus le Roux and Ferdinand Barnard) were tasked not to kill Ahtisaari, but to give him "a good hiding". To carry out the assault, Barnard had planned to use the grip handle of a metal saw as a knuckleduster. In the event, Ahtisaari did not attend the meeting at the Keetmanshoop Hotel, where Le Roux and Barnard lay in wait for him, and thus escaped injury.
• Attempted killing of
  • Jeremy Brickhill in Harare - 13 October 1987
  • Reverend Frank Chikane by poisoning - 1989
  • Father Michael Lapsley, who lost both hands and an eye in a letter bomb attack in Harare - 28 April 1990
  • Godfrey Motsepe in Brussels - 4 February 1988
  • January Masilela — known as "Che O'Gara", his Umkhonto we Sizwe nom-de-guerre. On 30 September 2002, Masilela wrote to the South African Special Forces League conferring the Defence Minister's recognition of the SFL as being "legally representative of the interests of military veterans."
  • Dullah Omar - 1989
  • Anton Roskam - incorrectly spelled Rosskam in TRC transcripts, received threatening letters, car was set alight
  • Albie Sachs - by bombing in Maputo in which he lost an arm and sight in one eye while in a car borrowed from Indres Naidoo thought to have been the actual target - 7 April 1988
• Bombing of a Western Cape kindergarten - the Early Learning Centre - on the evening of 31 August 1989
• Harassment of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, by hanging a baboon foetus in the garden of his Cape Town home in 1989 in the hope that it would bewitch him
• Killing of
  • Tsitsi Chiliza, the wife of an ANC member killed in an operation targeted at Jacob Zuma - 11 May 1987
  • Christopher, by injection on the way to Zeerust in a vehicle in which operatives Danie Phaal and Trevor Floyd were traveling
  • SWAPO activist Anton Lubowski
  • Jacob 'Boy' Molekwane
  • ANC activist, Gibson Ncube (also known by the surname Mondlane) by poisoning
  • Matsela Polokela - some TRC documents misspell the surname 'Pokolela'
  • Dulcie September in Paris - 29 March 1988. French Secret Service involvement is alleged.
  • Dr. David Webster - Wits University academic and anti-apartheid activist killed by Ferdi Barnard 1 May 1989, outside the Eleanor Street, Troyeville, Johannesburg home he shared with partner Maggie Friedman
• Supplying materials to SAP members for the 1986 killing of KwaNdebele cabinet minister Piet Ntuli