African Intelligence Services

African Intelligence Services
Author: Ryan Shaffer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2021-09-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1538150832

This book argues for making African intelligence services front-and-center in studies about historical and contemporary African security. As the first academic anthology on the subject, it brings together a group of international scholars and intelligence practitioners to understand African intelligence services’ post-colonial and contemporary challenges. The book’s eleven chapters survey a diverse collection of countries and provides readers with histories of understudied African intelligence services. The volume examines the intelligence services’ objectives, operations, leaderships, international partners and legal frameworks. The chapters also highlight different methodologies and sources to further scholarly research about African intelligence.

The Handbook of African Intelligence Cultures

The Handbook of African Intelligence Cultures
Author: Ryan Shaffer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 833
Release: 2023-02-06
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1538159988

Bringing together a group of international scholars, The Handbook of African Intelligence Cultures provides the first review of intelligence cultures in every African country. It explores how intelligence cultures are influenced by a range of factors, including past and present societal, governmental and international dynamics. In doing so, the book examines the state’s role, civil society and foreign relations in shaping African countries’ intelligence norms, activities and oversight. It also explores the role intelligence services and cultures play in government and civil society.

The South African Intelligence Services

The South African Intelligence Services
Author: Kevin A. O'Brien
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2010-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1136892818

This book is the first full history of South African intelligence and provides a detailed examination of the various stages in the evolution of South Africa’s intelligence organizations and structures. Covering the apartheid period of 1948-90, the transition from apartheid to democracy of 1990-94, and the post-apartheid period of new intelligence dispensation from 1994-2005, this book examines not only the apartheid government’s intelligence dispensation and operations, but also those of the African National Congress, and its partner, the South African Communist Party (ANC/SACP) – as well as those of other liberation movements and the ‘independent homelands’ under the apartheid system. Examining the civilian, military and police intelligence structures and operations in all periods, as well as the extraordinarily complicated apartheid government’s security bureaucracy (or 'securocracy') and its structures and units, the book discusses how South Africa’s Cold War ‘position’ influenced its relationships with various other world powers, especially where intelligence co-operation came to bear. It outlines South Africa’s regional relationships and concerns – the foremost being its activities in South-West Africa (Namibia) and its relationship with Rhodesia through 1980. Finally, it examines the various legislative and other governance bases for the existence and operations of South Africa’s intelligence structures – in all periods – and the influences that such activities as the Rivonia Trial (at one end of the history) or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (at the other end) had on the evolution of these intelligence questions throughout South Africa’s modern history. This book will be of great interest to all students of South African politics, intelligence studies and international politics in general.

Apartheid's Friends

Apartheid's Friends
Author: James Sanders
Publisher: John Murray Publishers
Total Pages: 580
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN:

Very little has been written about the South African secret intelligence, but revelations to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the new culture of confessions now make that possible. James Sanders has gathered classified documents and interviewed ex-operatives since 1997 and has pieced together an extraordinary, unsavoury picture of the Intelligence Service, both inside South Africa and overseas. He reveals evidence of state-sponsored murder not only to intimidate the ANC but also to allow hard men within the police and the armed forces to let off steam. He reveals that Republican political candidates in the US were assisted in elections against anti-Apartheid Democrats. He shows that South Africa supplied Argentina with weapons during the Falklands War and that Harold Wilson's surprising outbursts, when he claimed that South African intelligence agents were trying to bring down his government, were based on hard evidence. At operational level, South African Intelligence had intimate links with counterparts in the CIA, British Intelligence, and other agencies worldwide. Apartheid's Friends not only provides an insight into a dark area of South Africa's past, it is also an important contribution to the international history of secret service.

Empires of Intelligence

Empires of Intelligence
Author: Martin Thomas
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 447
Release: 2008
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520251172

'Empires of Intelligence' argues that colonial control in British and French empires depended on an elabroate security apparatus. Thomas shows the crucial role of intelligence gathering in maintaining imperial control in the years before decolonization.

White Malice

White Malice
Author: Susan Williams
Publisher: Hurst Publishers
Total Pages: 688
Release: 2021-09-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1787385825

Accra, 1958. Africa’s liberation leaders have gathered for a conference, full of strength, purpose and vision. Newly independent Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Congo’s Patrice Lumumba strike up a close partnership. Everything seems possible. But, within a few years, both men will have been targeted by the CIA, and their dream of true African autonomy undermined. The United States, watching the Europeans withdraw from Africa, was determined to take control. Pan-Africanism was inspiring African Americans fighting for civil rights; the threat of Soviet influence over new African governments loomed; and the idea of an atomic reactor in black hands was unacceptable. The conclusion was simple: the US had to ‘recapture’ Africa, in the shadows, by any means necessary. Renowned historian Susan Williams dives into the archives, revealing new, shocking details of America’s covert programme in Africa. The CIA crawled over the continent, poisoning the hopes of 1958 with secret agents and informants; surreptitious UN lobbying; cultural infiltration and bribery; assassinations and coups. As the colonisers moved out, the Americans swept in—with bitter consequences that reverberate in Africa to this day

Africanistan

Africanistan
Author: Serge Michailof
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 560
Release: 2018-06-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0199092702

In Africa, progress can be seen across the board. But the important question is whether this so-called progress is sustainable. The continent is a powder keg: the powder is demographics and unemployment the detonator. By 2050, the number of young people of working age in Africa is expected to be three times that of China’s. But will there be enough jobs for them? What is troubling for the continent is even more dramatic for the Sahel, a huge region of about 100 million inhabitants where insecurity is spreading like a bushfire. Despite major differences in geography and culture, there are huge similarities between the Sahel and Afghanistan: a demographic impasse, stagnating agriculture, widespread rural misery, high unemployment, deep ethnic and religious fault lines, weak states, regional instability, drug trafficking, and the spread of radical Islam. And unfortunately the same recipes that failed in Afghanistan are being rolled out in the Sahel. Are we headed to a ‘Sahelistan’ and to an ‘Africanistan’? Serge Michailof helps us find the answer to this important question.

Agent 407

Agent 407
Author: Olivia Forsyth
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
Total Pages: 472
Release: 2015-07-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1868426661

"I owe it to many people, and to myself, to set the record straight. There have been many versions of parts of the story in the press over the years, many lies overlaid with truths and truths overlaid with lies. Much of the truth is just a palimpsest, an echo that changes even in the act of repeating it, but this is my story." In the dying years of apartheid, a most extraordinary story hit the headlines. Agent Olivia Forsyth had escaped from ANC imprisonment in Angola. Upon her return home she was feted as a hero by the government. In a flurry of media appearances and press releases, Forsyth claimed to have infiltrated the ANC and passed on vital information. Is that what really happened? In the world of espionage, truth is the first victim and nothing is as it seems. Here, for the first time and in her own words, South Africa's most notorious female spy during apartheid lays bare the story of her life. Olivia Forsyth was also known as agent RS407, codename Lara, lieutenant in the Security Branch of the South Africa Police, ANC comrade Helen Bronson, prisoner Thandeka, alias Christine Smith.

The Unlikely Secret Agent

The Unlikely Secret Agent
Author: Ronnie Kasrils
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2012
Genre: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY
ISBN: 1583672788

Originally published: Auckland Park, South Africa: Jacana Media, 2010.