I also was involved in ... I got deeply involved in the normal bureaucracy of intelligence work and the government departments, the State Security Council (SSC) and the sub-committees and the evaluations and daily reports and, you know, all that stuff.
And I became quite involved in the Mozambique situation from 1985 after the accord 1984/1985, because I sat on the joint-security commission between Mozambique and South Africa and I liaised with the Mozambiquean intelligence.
In 1983 I started getting ... let me put it this way: in the years I'd been underground I thought ... I had an image of South African intelligence and of government strategy which was different to what I found when I came out.
Instead of them being very clever and carrying out very clever strategies I found we were basically doing crisis management.
So 1980/1981/1982 I was learning the system and I wasn't ... my transition from being an operator on my own, involved in ... at the highest level in political negotiations and political work relating to South Africa and its position internationally, I'd suddenly had to become a bureaucrat, and it was difficult.
I had to work with budgets and ... but also I wasn't too impressed with the thinking process that was going on.
So I started writing an article, which I published, I think in June July 1984 in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, which nearly got me fired because... the only reason it didn't get me fired is because I'd been intelligent enough to get permission to publish it, but the Minister of Law and Order, Louis le Grange was very angry with what I said, because basically what I said was that in a democratic society, and I said "we're in a new South Africa, we have a new constitution, a new tripartite system where we have coloureds Indians and whites for the first time now voting."
The blacks still didn't have the vote, but there was some movement.
I said
- "now, as part of this new approach to politics in South Africa, we also have to have some new thinking in the security system.
And I wrote absolutely straight that the use of military force against a country's own population by its government means the end of democracy. General Johann Coetzee laughed.
Secondly, the state of emergency I completely disagreed
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