Speaker 1: Col Zone Media.
Speaker 2: September twenty second, twenty twelve may have been the first
Speaker 2: day of autumn, but it was a warm afternoon in.
Speaker 1: Washington, DC.
Speaker 2: A charter bus pulled to the curb at the edge
Speaker 2: of Lincoln Park and its passengers piled out, all fourteen
Speaker 2: of them. Most of the attendees of that day's rally
Speaker 2: were dressed alike, black pants and a blue button up
Speaker 2: shirt with a black tie, the uniform of the Aryan Nations.
Speaker 2: They'd denounced the rally months ahead of time, giving DC
Speaker 2: locals ample time to plan their counter protest. Hundreds of
Speaker 2: people showed up to see what turned out to be
Speaker 2: barely a dozen neo Nazis. The tiny group marched the
Speaker 2: mile and a half from the park to the Capital
Speaker 2: Reflecting Pool, safely escorted by hundreds of police officers from
Speaker 2: the DC Metropolitan Police, US Park Police, and the US
Speaker 2: Capitol Police. Dozens of officers on bicycles and on horseback
Speaker 2: flanked the little march, keeping counter protesters at bay. A
Speaker 2: fax of Capitol Police in riot gear marched alongside them,
Speaker 2: far outnumbering the actual marchers. When they reached their destination,
Speaker 2: they were escorted into a little pen surrounded by barricades,
Speaker 2: with the Capitol building in the background, surrounded by angry
Speaker 2: counter protesters and curious tourists. ARAN Nations member Ryan Mullins
Speaker 2: tried to address the crowd with a megaphone, but he
Speaker 2: was almost completely drowned out by chance of Nazi scum.
Speaker 2: If he did manage to give a speech about the
Speaker 2: plight of the white South African farmer, he'd saw most
Speaker 2: certain no one actually heard it. But just behind him
Speaker 2: the rally goers were holding a banner that read stop
Speaker 2: White Genocide in South Africa, and standing between the two
Speaker 2: nearly identical bald men dressed all in black holding either
Speaker 2: end of that banner was an old woman.
Speaker 1: She stood out in the.
Speaker 2: Small crowd not only as the only woman, but because
Speaker 2: she was wearing a neatly pressed Khaki uniform.
Speaker 3: It had been nearly.
Speaker 2: Twenty years since the fall of the apartheid regime, and
Speaker 2: over a decade since she'd married an American and moved
Speaker 2: to Louisiana, but it seems Monica huggets Stone still had
Speaker 2: her Africaner Resistance Movement uniform in the back of her closet.
Speaker 2: I'm Molly Conger.
Speaker 1: This it's weird, little guys.
Speaker 2: We are nearing the end of the story of Monica
Speaker 2: huggets Stone. Not because I'm done digging. I could write
Speaker 2: half a dozen more episodes, but because I think you'll
Speaker 2: start to get restless if I keep trying to tell
Speaker 2: the same story for months at a time. I know
Speaker 2: I keep saying this, but it's always true. I really
Speaker 2: thought this was going to be a two parter, starting
Speaker 2: with those rallies in twenty twelve, talking about the model
Speaker 2: resurgence of the white genocide conspiracy theory rhetoric couched in
Speaker 2: this concern for the largely imaginary murders of South African farmers,
Speaker 2: and then just a brief retrospective on the woman behind
Speaker 2: those rallies. I could not possibly have predicted that there
Speaker 2: would be so much international intrigue buried in her past.
Speaker 2: I certainly didn't expect to spend the last month translating
Speaker 2: fifty year old white supremacist newspapers from Afrikaans, or pouring
Speaker 2: over thirty year old memos in Croatian tapped out on
Speaker 2: typewriters by dead war criminals. I had no idea that
Speaker 2: a German neo Nazi blew up a United Nations office
Speaker 2: in Namibia, or that a South African accomplice still coaches
Speaker 2: rugby in Cambridgeshire, evading an international arrest warrant. How could
Speaker 2: I have known? But now we do. History is a
Speaker 2: strange and messy thing, and I suppose it's only fair
Speaker 2: to give you a brief recap here at the top
Speaker 2: before we start approaching the end. You might need a
Speaker 2: reminder of where we've been. The first episode in this
Speaker 2: series was about an event that took place in February
Speaker 2: of twenty twelve, a dozen or so rallies across the
Speaker 2: country that all took place on the same day. Only
Speaker 2: the one in Sacramento was attended by more than a
Speaker 2: handful of people, and it was the only one that
Speaker 2: made it into the newspaper because counter protesters from the
Speaker 2: nearby Occupy encampment showed up to heckle the neo Nazis
Speaker 2: and ended up getting into a bit of a scuffle
Speaker 2: with the police. In that episode, I talked a bit
Speaker 2: about what the event claimed to be doing, raising awareness
Speaker 2: about white genocide and South Africa, which, if you don't
Speaker 2: remember the episode, is not a real thing. It is
Speaker 2: not happening at all, but it is a conspiracy theory
Speaker 2: of some importance to white supremacists around the world, and
Speaker 2: it was something of a fringe idea, but unfortunately now
Speaker 2: the President of the United States has gotten a hold
Speaker 2: of it and decided that white South Africans qualify for
Speaker 2: refugee resettlement in the United States. In the second episode,
Speaker 2: the one I really thought was going to be the
Speaker 2: end of the story, I only managed to get through
Speaker 2: a single incident. The first time Monica Huggot's name showed
Speaker 2: up in the historical record alongside a bombing. In nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty she was a member of a small African or
Speaker 2: nationalist terrorist cell calling itself the VIT Commando or the
Speaker 2: White Commandos. After a brief bombing campaign targeting anti apartheid
Speaker 2: activists and academics, they were all arrested. Most of the
Speaker 2: members of the Vit Commando turned out to be Italian fascists,
Speaker 2: and Monica Huggot's charges were dropped after she testified against them.
Speaker 2: In her testimony, she claimed to be a member of
Speaker 2: the American Ku Klux Klan. She wasn't even in the
Speaker 2: next chapter of her own story. I lost track of
Speaker 2: her for most of the nineteen eighties, but one of
Speaker 2: the men who would be connected to her later on,
Speaker 2: had a very strange past of his own. In the
Speaker 2: third episode of the series, we followed German neo Nazi
Speaker 2: Horsed Cleans and his South African accomplices. They carried out
Speaker 2: an attack on a UN office in Namibia in nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty nine, killing a security guard and later murdering a
Speaker 2: police officer In their escape from custody, The men involved
Speaker 2: in the attack fled back to South Africa, joining a
Speaker 2: new africaner Neo Nazi organization called the Order Borafolk. After
Speaker 2: another series of bombings and arrests, they all somehow ended
Speaker 2: up no longer in jail. That group, the Order Borafolk,
Speaker 2: also pulled off a high profile heist of a massive
Speaker 2: cache of weapons from a South African Air Force base.
Speaker 2: Remember I asked you to keep those guns in the
Speaker 2: back of your mind. One of them shows up again
Speaker 2: in this story. And by this point we're up to
Speaker 2: the early nineteen nineties and it's clear to everyone who
Speaker 2: is paying attention that the apartheid regime is unsustainable. Multi
Speaker 2: party negotiations had begun. The African National Congress and the
Speaker 2: ruling National Party were slowly working their way through the
Speaker 2: process of coming to an agreement about how the nation
Speaker 2: would move forward. And as you might expect, most of
Speaker 2: the characters in this story weren't ready to give up
Speaker 2: the fight. And that's where our international network of mercenaries
Speaker 2: comes in, the subject of last week's episode. In the
Speaker 2: summer of nineteen ninety three, at an international fascist rally
Speaker 2: in Belgium, leaders of European Neo Nazi groups met to
Speaker 2: discuss an mercenaries to South Africa to cause chaos. A
Speaker 2: date had been set for the election. They only had
Speaker 2: a few months left to either overthrow the government and
Speaker 2: cancel that election, or convince enough white South Africans to
Speaker 2: secede and form their own white ethno state. And in
Speaker 2: that episode last week I got a little lost sifting
Speaker 2: through old documents from the Bosnian War, trying to nail
Speaker 2: down exactly how our German mercenaries got from one conflict
Speaker 2: to another, so that brings us all back up to
Speaker 2: speed more or less. I spent most of last week's
Speaker 2: episodes sifting through the distant past, looking at the history
Speaker 2: of the clan in South Africa, then looking at distant
Speaker 2: places tracing the paths of those mercenaries but there is
Speaker 2: some context at the heart of this story that we
Speaker 2: need to sketch out before we move on, because, like
Speaker 2: I said, the end of a part time it wasn't
Speaker 2: a single moment. There were years of political negotiations before
Speaker 2: that election. In April of nineteen ninety four, the election
Speaker 2: of Nelson Mandela marked the official end, but it had
Speaker 2: been all but over for months, and the end had
Speaker 2: been in sight for nearly a year. Here's AWB's leader,
Speaker 2: Eugene tare Blanche, offering his thoughts on the negotiation process
Speaker 2: to a reporter in May of nineteen ninety three.
Speaker 4: If I believe that they can can negotiate for our
Speaker 4: fatherland and get it back and travel, let them try.
Speaker 4: I'm preparing myself for the war.
Speaker 2: An increasingly desperate and fractured extreme right wing was doubling
Speaker 2: down on violence, but the political process was proceeding without them,
Speaker 2: and everything they did to try to stop that process
Speaker 2: only seemed to accelerate it. On April tenth, nineteen ninety three,
Speaker 2: the Saturday before Easter, Chris Hani was assassinated. Hani was
Speaker 2: the General secretary of the South African Communist Party and
Speaker 2: the chief of staff of the a N c's armed
Speaker 2: wing Mukanto with Siezway. He was a beloved and immensely
Speaker 2: popular leader within the African National Congress, particularly among young
Speaker 2: anti apartheid activists. He'd given his bodyguard the day off,
Speaker 2: and he was supposed to be at home. His killer
Speaker 2: hadn't actually intended to carry out the plan that day.
Speaker 2: In particular, he would later claim he'd only been in
Speaker 2: the area conducting one last reconmission, but when he spotted
Speaker 2: Hani returning home from buying a newspaper, accompanied only by
Speaker 2: his fifteen year old daughter, he knew he'd never get
Speaker 2: a better shot. As Hanni stepped out of his car,
Speaker 2: the killer shouted his name, and as Honey turned around
Speaker 2: to see where the voice had come from, his killer fired,
Speaker 2: hitting him four times in the chest and head. The
Speaker 2: assassin was arrested almost immediately. One of Hani's neighbors, a
Speaker 2: white woman, called the police and was able to give
Speaker 2: them the killer's license plate. When police found him that afternoon,
Speaker 2: the murder weapon was still sitting on the back seat
Speaker 2: of his car. By Monday, Eugene taire Blanche had publicly
Speaker 2: confirmed that the killer, a Polish immigrant named Yanush Walous,
Speaker 2: had been a member of the Africaner Resistance movement. Once
Speaker 2: in custody, Wallous confessed to a police officer he had
Speaker 2: incorrectly assumed was a fellow traveler. There were plenty of
Speaker 2: police officers who would have been on his side he
Speaker 2: murdered a black communist, after all, but this turned out
Speaker 2: not to be one of them. He told the officer
Speaker 2: that the gun had been given to him by Clive
Speaker 2: Derby Lewis, a sitting member of Parliament in the Conservative Party.
Speaker 2: It had also been one of the guns the Ordoborofolk
Speaker 2: had stolen from an Air Force base three years earlier.
Speaker 2: When Walous's apartment was searched, officers found a printed list
Speaker 2: of names. Given that Chris Hani's name was on that
Speaker 2: list and he'd just been shot to death, it appears
Speaker 2: to have been a hit list, but Walous almost certainly
Speaker 2: didn't write that list himself. It was mostly high profile
Speaker 2: political figures like Nelson Mandela, Chris Hani, and Communist Party
Speaker 2: chair Jo Slovo, but there were also the names of
Speaker 2: several journalists, most of whom published only in Afrikaans, which
Speaker 2: Walous could not read. The same list of names was
Speaker 2: later found in the personal papers of Clive Derby Lewis's wife,
Speaker 2: gay but white supremacist journalist Arthur Kemp would later testify
Speaker 2: that he'd been the original author of the list. As
Speaker 2: far as the official record goes, Camp was not involved,
Speaker 2: he was not charged, and he claimed he'd had no
Speaker 2: idea the list would be used in any murders. Within
Speaker 2: hours of Haney's murder, Nelson Mandela gave a televised address
Speaker 2: urging con.
Speaker 5: Chris Honey championder the cause of peace, trudging to every
Speaker 5: corner of South Africa, calling for a spirit of tolerance
Speaker 5: among all our people. We are a nation in mourning.
Speaker 5: Our pain and anger is real. Yet we must not
Speaker 5: permit ourselves to be provoked by those who seek to
Speaker 5: deny us. They're very afraidom Chris Haney gave his life.
Speaker 2: Hani's murder didn't have the desire effect. It didn't provoke
Speaker 2: violent reprisals from anti apartheid groups. It didn't disrupt the
Speaker 2: ongoing negotiations. It didn't make the African National Congress less
Speaker 2: willing to compromise during those negotiations. If anything, it had
Speaker 2: the opposite effect. Mendela's public addresses in the days that
Speaker 2: followed were calm, reasonable, and committed to peace, and the
Speaker 2: ruling National Party had nothing to celebrate in Hani's death either.
Speaker 2: It only served to demonstrate the extreme right wing's willingness
Speaker 2: to disrupt the process by any means necessary. They understood
Speaker 2: that they were just as likely to find themselves in
Speaker 2: a Nazi's crosshairs as the men on the other side
Speaker 2: of the negotiating table. It wasn't long after Hani's murder
Speaker 2: that it was announced that they'd set a date the
Speaker 2: elections would go forward, taking place in April of nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety four. In June of nineteen ninety three, around the
Speaker 2: time the election date was announced, negotiations about what that
Speaker 2: government would look like were still ongoing, and they were
Speaker 2: held at the Kempton Park World Trade Center. On June
Speaker 2: twenty fifth, nineteen ninety three, thousands of armed Africaner nationalists
Speaker 2: showed up outside the World Trade Center. The newly formed
Speaker 2: Africaner Folksfront, an umbrella organization of right wing groups, staged
Speaker 2: a protest outside earlier in the morning, harassing delegates as
Speaker 2: they arrived. As the day wore on, the crowd began
Speaker 2: to grow restless, particularly among the ranks of the AWB.
Speaker 2: On orders from Eugene Tareblanche, an AWB member, drove an
Speaker 2: armored car through the front of the building, and the
Speaker 2: crowd easily overcame the police and swarmed inside.
Speaker 6: All of a sudden, I saw the security people running out,
Speaker 6: and I said, what's up, and they said, they've broken through,
Speaker 6: and they coming, And then my own security men simply
Speaker 6: grabbed hold of me and ran.
Speaker 7: Pandemonium just broke out in the entire building. Many people
Speaker 7: on the AMC side from the government side all huddled
Speaker 7: into the government offices.
Speaker 2: Officials on both sides of the negotiating table fled, fearing
Speaker 2: they'd be shot and killed by the armed men. For
Speaker 2: two hours, the AWB occupied the World Trade Center, smashing
Speaker 2: windows and furniture. They took over the conference room where
Speaker 2: the negotiations had been going on, and spray painted separate
Speaker 2: as slogans on the walls. Now, the only photos I
Speaker 2: have that I know are of Monica Huggett. We're taken
Speaker 2: in twenty twelve, and she was nearly seventy years old then,
Speaker 2: so it was impossible for me to try to find
Speaker 2: her in old photos. But I do know she was there.
Speaker 2: She said so herself in this wistful reminiscence about that
Speaker 2: day in an interview she did in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 8: They did the negotiations at the World Trade Center at
Speaker 8: the airport in Joannasloo. It's not far from where I live,
Speaker 8: and we went there one day when the awb Ad
Speaker 8: made a sort of a ponzard of argon and went
Speaker 8: through the glass. They clearly smashed the glass. Oh my goodness,
Speaker 8: it just came down like diamonds. And then we would
Speaker 8: about maybe two thousand and three thousand people they're protesting.
Speaker 2: There's quite a bit of actual video of this event,
Speaker 2: and it looks really familiar. It looks unsettlingly like footage
Speaker 2: of the protesters storming the Congressional chambers at the US
Speaker 2: Capitol on January sixth. And I don't just mean visually,
Speaker 2: although the visual similarities are striking, but there's that same
Speaker 2: sort of unnerving mix of bloodlust and lighthearted adventurism. In
Speaker 2: both cases. There were reports of protesters pissing and shitting
Speaker 2: on office furniture on the floors, and some of the
Speaker 2: protesters just look like they're along for the ride, they're
Speaker 2: just enjoying the chaos. They're just smash things and wandering around,
Speaker 2: but there are also clear leaders and more militant elements
Speaker 2: that are obviously focused on a mission. History really does rhyme,
Speaker 2: I guess. But just like the assassination of Chris Hani,
Speaker 2: this attempt to derail the negotiations backfired badly. Here's a
Speaker 2: and C negotiator and present day South African President Cyril
Speaker 2: Ramaposa in an interview in nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 7: I was able to discuss the events with some of
Speaker 7: the National Party ministers and they, in the end, I think,
Speaker 7: drove them more and more away from having any form
Speaker 7: of understanding or even sympathy with the right wingers.
Speaker 2: This kind of stunt only made the far right look
Speaker 2: more unreasonable, more unstable, and less viable as any kind
Speaker 2: of political partner. The adults were at the negotiating table
Speaker 2: and these hooligans were driving trucks through windows and pissing
Speaker 2: on the floor. Any remaining hope of effectively disrupting the
Speaker 2: political process was fading quickly, and while opinions on the
Speaker 2: extreme right varied widely as to what the most effective
Speaker 2: course of action might be, most extremists had their sights
Speaker 2: set on a folk shot a white South African state,
Speaker 2: if they couldn't stop what was coming for the nation
Speaker 2: of South Africa, they'd have to find a way to
Speaker 2: secure a nation of their own, and to do that well,
Speaker 2: they'd need an army. Something very strange happened in March
Speaker 2: of nineteen ninety four, a white Africaner nationalist militia took
Speaker 2: up arms to keep a black man in power. Let's
Speaker 2: back up for a second. This is a bit of
Speaker 2: history I was admittedly unfamiliar with, so maybe you'd also
Speaker 2: benefit from a brief explanation of apartheid South Africa's semi
Speaker 2: sovereign bantustans. Under apartheid, South Africa established what they called
Speaker 2: native reserves. These were territories set aside for the forcible
Speaker 2: resettlement of black South Africans. They were allegedly meant to
Speaker 2: be homelands for particular ethnic groups, So the Bantustan of
Speaker 2: Quasulu was meant for the Zulu people, frans Ke and
Speaker 2: Siske were for the Kosa people, both with Atswana for
Speaker 2: the Swana people, and so on. In practice, though, it
Speaker 2: was pretty arbitrary, and more importantly, they functioned to strip
Speaker 2: black South Africans of their citizenship. Laws passed in the
Speaker 2: nineteen seventies designated all black South Africans as citizens only
Speaker 2: of their home land, that is, the Bantustan they'd been
Speaker 2: assigned to, and not a citizen of the country of
Speaker 2: South Africa. Of the ten Bantustans, four were recognized as
Speaker 2: independent states by the Government of South Africa. No one
Speaker 2: else in the world recognized these as sovereign nations. But
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety four, Lucas Mangope was the president of
Speaker 2: Bothu Tatswana and he wanted to remain the president after
Speaker 2: the upcoming elections, though all of the Bantustans would be
Speaker 2: reincorporated into South Africa and all South Africans, black and white,
Speaker 2: would be full citizens of the nation.
Speaker 1: Of South Africa.
Speaker 2: Black South Africans were preparing to cast their ballots in
Speaker 2: a national election for the first time, and that would
Speaker 2: mean an end to the Mangope presidency because his country
Speaker 2: wouldn't exist anymore. In early March of nineteen ninety four,
Speaker 2: Mangope announced that both Withatswana or BOP for short, that's
Speaker 2: not just me shortening it, that is apparently what people
Speaker 2: call it. But he announced that BOB would not be
Speaker 2: participating in the election at all. But with the potential
Speaker 2: disestablishment of their country on the horizon, civil servants wanted
Speaker 2: assurances that their pensions would be paid, and the president
Speaker 2: ignored them. Strikes and civil unrest quickly devolved into a
Speaker 2: bit of a situation when the police joined the protest.
Speaker 2: This is an incredibly strange bit of history, and I'm
Speaker 2: speeding through it here because we've got other places to
Speaker 2: go today. But if you're interested in a bit more
Speaker 2: about the Boufu Tatswana crisis, the podcast Lions Led by
Speaker 2: Donkeys did an episode about it in December of twenty
Speaker 2: twenty one, and it's a fun listen. Mengobe was no
Speaker 2: stranger to unrest. This wasn't even his first coup. He'd
Speaker 2: put down an attempted coup in nineteen ninety and he
Speaker 2: was briefly deposed by his own military in nineteen eighty eight,
Speaker 2: but the South African government intervened, sending in troops to
Speaker 2: restore him to power. This time, though it wasn't the
Speaker 2: South African government he turned to for help was a
Speaker 2: man named Constant Villiun. Villiune had retired as a general
Speaker 2: nearly a decade earlier, and in nineteen ninety three, he
Speaker 2: and three other retired generals formed the Africaner Folksfront, an
Speaker 2: attempt to unite the disparate elements of the white extreme
Speaker 2: right wing. As a former general, Villiune was confident that
Speaker 2: if he ever went to war, a good chunk of
Speaker 2: the military would follow him.
Speaker 3: I also had forces available, I would say from what
Speaker 3: would split off from the Defense Force, Because had I
Speaker 3: really taken a military action, there was a real danger
Speaker 3: of polarization within the Defense Force. It would certainly have
Speaker 3: been a substantial number of people that would have split
Speaker 3: it from the Defense Force and would have joined me
Speaker 3: in fighting for the liberation of the Africana people.
Speaker 2: By nineteen ninety four, Villyun claimed to have over fifty
Speaker 2: thousand men under his command, trained paramilitaries, military reservists, and
Speaker 2: sympathetic members of the military who would follow his orders.
Speaker 2: It all sounds a bit odd, why would African or
Speaker 2: nationalists lift a finger to help any black person? But
Speaker 2: it's a little more complicated than black and white. If
Speaker 2: Bob could successfully refuse to participate in the election, maybe
Speaker 2: other Bantustans would follow suit, making the election less legitimate
Speaker 2: and weakening the state. And if this African or militia
Speaker 2: could keep Mangope in power, they would have access to
Speaker 2: land and weapons in a sovereign nation within South Africa's borders.
Speaker 2: It could be a stronghold from which to launch more attacks.
Speaker 2: And perhaps they hoped to eventually negotiate with Mangope for
Speaker 2: a bit of land of their own within his territory
Speaker 2: so they could start their own white ethno state. But
Speaker 2: perhaps most importantly, Millyun was taking a calculated risk. If
Speaker 2: his Folks Front militia came to Mangope's aid, the South
Speaker 2: African government might send in the military to restore order.
Speaker 2: And there was a widespread belief on the right and
Speaker 2: a profound fear within the government that the military would
Speaker 2: refuse those orders that they would not fire on a
Speaker 2: white militia. If the military were to refuse those orders,
Speaker 2: it would embold in white right wingers around the country
Speaker 2: to take up arms. After all, who was going to
Speaker 2: stop them. And if the military refused orders to fire
Speaker 2: on his militia, Villyun could potentially take control of a
Speaker 2: significant portion of the military and maybe they could topple
Speaker 2: the entire government. Here's South African Communist Party chair and
Speaker 2: ANC negotiator Joe Slovo, describing that fear.
Speaker 9: Some of my colleagues and I feared very much that
Speaker 9: the echelons of the army might see this as the
Speaker 9: opportunity to try to prevent the transformation. We weren't certain
Speaker 9: of the degree of loyalty that we could attract from
Speaker 9: the upper echulance of the army, So.
Speaker 2: In March of nineteen ninety four, the government took a
Speaker 2: sort of wait and see approach to the whole affair
Speaker 2: and bop They couldn't risk a massed affection within the military,
Speaker 2: and maybe things would have been different if Eugene terre
Speaker 2: Blanche was more of a team player. We'll never know.
Speaker 2: When the dust finally settled, everyone else involved agreed that
Speaker 2: no one had invited Eugene terre Blanche to the autogal Pey,
Speaker 2: but the AWB refused to be left out, and they
Speaker 2: showed up anyway. Terre Blanche had put out a call
Speaker 2: to AWB members in an address on Radio Pretoria, that
Speaker 2: pirate radio station where our German mercenaries had been assigned
Speaker 2: guard duty on March eleventh, nineteen ninety f for Eugene
Speaker 2: Terreblanche and a few hundred men under his command. Arrived
Speaker 2: in Bob Jack Turner, leader of the soldiers loyal to Mangope,
Speaker 2: did not want AWB there. Their reputation for uncontrollable racist
Speaker 2: violence preceded them, and Turner was worried that the black
Speaker 2: soldiers under his command would panic at the sight of
Speaker 2: Terre Blanche's neo Nazis. What they actually did, though, was mutiny.
Speaker 10: When my own troops heard that some of the weapons
Speaker 10: were being earmarked for the Fox Front, they didn't like.
Speaker 5: It very much.
Speaker 10: In extual fact, they refused to load any weapons onto
Speaker 10: vehicles and that any of the weapons were to be
Speaker 10: given to the Folks Flow.
Speaker 2: When the BOP soldiers saw AWB men were part of
Speaker 2: the Folks Front contingent, they refused. They refused to participate.
Speaker 2: They wouldn't arm any of the white paramilitary men AWB
Speaker 2: or otherwise, and maybe they would have happily collaborated with
Speaker 2: just the Folks Front, But when AWB arrived, they no
Speaker 2: longer made any distinction between the two. Anyone willing to
Speaker 2: stand with AWB was just as bad as they were,
Speaker 2: and the soldiers wouldn't have any part in it. When
Speaker 2: the soldiers threatened to attack the AWB men, if they
Speaker 2: didn't leave. Hair Blanche's convoy begrudgingly packed up and started
Speaker 2: to leave. On the way out of town, though, they
Speaker 2: started shooting black civilians at random. As the convoy rolled
Speaker 2: through a town, picking off passers by from their car windows,
Speaker 2: an angry mob formed blocking their path. The web vehicles
Speaker 2: fired into the crowd and that sent everyone running, and
Speaker 2: this was the last straw for the BOP police. These
Speaker 2: neo Nazis had felt quite brave when they were shooting
Speaker 2: at unarmed civilians, but it was a very different story
Speaker 2: when someone in an armored vehicle started shooting back. Several
Speaker 2: people in the convoy were hit, but they all managed
Speaker 2: to escape except the last car at the very end
Speaker 2: of the line. The driver of a blue Mercedes was
Speaker 2: shot and killed, leaving his passengers two other AWB members stranded.
Speaker 2: The video of this moment is surreal. I mean, it's
Speaker 2: bizarre that there's even video of this moment to watch,
Speaker 2: and it shows three men in their khaki uniforms and
Speaker 2: they've sort of spilled out of this blue Mercedes and
Speaker 2: they're lying on the ground and one of them appears
Speaker 2: to be already dead and the other two are wounded
Speaker 2: lying on the ground, surrounded by photojournalists snapping pictures.
Speaker 3: Just get us some outpline please, he's just wounded.
Speaker 4: Let's look.
Speaker 8: Are you finished?
Speaker 3: Get the mills.
Speaker 2: We need an ambulance for this guy that's wounded. They're
Speaker 2: just lying there in the dirt, bleeding, and reporters are
Speaker 2: asking them questions. One reporter asks them if they're members
Speaker 2: of AWB, and one of the bleeding men says yes,
Speaker 2: And then, with the journalists cameras still rolling about, police
Speaker 2: officer calmly walked over and shot all three men at
Speaker 2: point blank range. That officer Vlamitza Beernstein Mignazzo would eventually
Speaker 2: be granted amnesty by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. When
Speaker 2: he appeared before the Commission in nineteen ninety eight, Eugene
Speaker 2: Terreblanche himself cross examined him about the incident. After some
Speaker 2: extensive back and forth, with terre Blanche really taking advantage
Speaker 2: of this opportunity to spin his version of events, Minatto
Speaker 2: again explained that he shot those men because he had
Speaker 2: witnessed them shooting civilians, saying, quote, it was quite clear
Speaker 2: that the killings were going to continue, and I decided
Speaker 2: that rather than to leave those people to destroy the
Speaker 2: black people who won't do me any good. But the
Speaker 2: only alternative is to do away with them, and that
Speaker 2: is exactly what I did. Within hours of the shooting
Speaker 2: at the convoy, the BOP soldiers had run the entire
Speaker 2: Folks Front out, and once all the white paramilitary forces
Speaker 2: had withdrawn, the South African Defense Forces moved in and
Speaker 2: the mutining soldiers quickly surrendered and Mengoe was removed from power.
Speaker 2: The government of Bofu Tatswana was dissolved by the end
Speaker 2: of the day. The whole disastrous affair was the end
Speaker 2: of Constant Villiun's dreams of a Boer Folkstadt. As the
Speaker 2: leader of the Afrikaaner Folks Front, he had been loudly
Speaker 2: calling for a boycott of the elections. The day after
Speaker 2: his troops were run out of bob he announced that
Speaker 2: not only was he no longer opposing the election, he
Speaker 2: had in fact decided to run in the election under
Speaker 2: the banner of his newly formed Freedom Front Party, a
Speaker 2: conservative party representing white interests. So this is the context
Speaker 2: the subject of our story.
Speaker 1: Herself.
Speaker 2: In Monica, Huggett was hosting these German mercenaries in her
Speaker 2: home as a part of this larger effort to disrupt
Speaker 2: the upcoming election, and with the failure in Bob, the
Speaker 2: Folksfront not only lost its leader when vill June abandoned
Speaker 2: the plan, but they'd suffered a pretty serious blow to morale.
Speaker 2: Seeing your brothers in arms shot like stray dogs in
Speaker 2: the street on the evening news might lead you to
Speaker 2: ask yourself some hard questions about your commitment to the cause.
Speaker 2: Those three AWB members were shot on March eleventh. On
Speaker 2: March twelfth, Constant Villejune announced that he was on board
Speaker 2: with the elections and was in fact running for office,
Speaker 2: and on Monday, March fourteenth, nineteen ninety four, three German
Speaker 2: mercenaries opened fire on South African police officers in Tierport,
Speaker 2: outside of Pretoria. Exactly what happened is impossible to say.
Speaker 2: Even reporting from the time just isn't consistent. Some reports
Speaker 2: say police simply happened to notice several men in combat
Speaker 2: fatigues in a car and tried to pull them over.
Speaker 2: Other reports say the men intentionally led officers into a trap,
Speaker 2: but either way, at some point those Germans started firing
Speaker 2: their AK forty sevens at the two police officers, wounding
Speaker 2: but not killing them. When the shooting stopped, police found
Speaker 2: the body of Thomas Konst in the brush near by.
Speaker 2: He had a pair of night vision goggles on and
Speaker 2: several hundred rounds of ammunitions trapped to his body. Stephen
Speaker 2: Rays was apprehended alive. The third man, Horse Cleans, managed
Speaker 2: to flee the scene, but he was arrested several days later,
Speaker 2: along with a fourth mercenary, Alexander Nydline. That much we
Speaker 2: know for sure. Thomas Coons died, Stephen Rays was arrested
Speaker 2: that night, and Clen's and Nydeline were picked up that weekend.
Speaker 2: Everything else is a little bit fuzzy. In the last episode,
Speaker 2: I mentioned that Monica Huggett was in charge of picking
Speaker 2: the mercenaries up from the airport. She was the first
Speaker 2: point of contact for each batch of foreign fighters. When Raised, Nydeline,
Speaker 2: and Coons arrived in South Africa in January of nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety four, she set them up with their first assignment,
Speaker 2: serving as armed guards for the right wing pirate radio
Speaker 2: station Radio Pretorio. Now this is absolutely just me spitballing.
Speaker 2: I'm just guessing here, but I have to wonder if
Speaker 2: this confrontation had something to do with the radio station. Remember,
Speaker 2: this shootout is happening just days after the internationally televised
Speaker 2: violence in Bob and when Eugene Tarblance was trying to
Speaker 2: recruit ADVB members to go there in the first place,
Speaker 2: he made the announcement on Radio Pretoria. The radio station
Speaker 2: isn't mentioned in any of the reporting about the shootout,
Speaker 2: but I wonder if this alleged trap they led police
Speaker 2: into was connected to their job protecting the station, or
Speaker 2: if police were patrolling the area near the station specifically
Speaker 2: because of the recent events in Bop. Maybe they expected
Speaker 2: Tare Blanche to show back up and announce a new
Speaker 2: hair brain scheme. An article published in Aberlin newspaper that month, though,
Speaker 2: says that they'd grown bored of standing around guarding the
Speaker 2: station and had struck off on their own. Maybe they
Speaker 2: saw footage of civilians being shot by the AWB convoy
Speaker 2: and instead of feeling disgusted, they felt left out and
Speaker 2: they wanted to find their own adventure. I guess we
Speaker 2: can't really know. I have a lot of unanswered questions
Speaker 2: about this incident, but one of them stands out above
Speaker 2: the rest. When doctors removed the bullets that had struck
Speaker 2: those police officers. One of them didn't match. It hadn't
Speaker 2: come from any of our German mercenaries. That bullet had
Speaker 2: been fired by Eugene Decoc. Decoc was a death squad leader.
Speaker 2: He had been a colonel in the South African Police Force,
Speaker 2: but he was relieved of duty in nineteen ninety three
Speaker 2: as part of the National Party's last ditch efforts at
Speaker 2: damage control after public revelations about state sponsored terror. As
Speaker 2: the commander of the Counterinsurgency Unit C ten, Decoc oversaw
Speaker 2: the kidnapping, torture, and murder of countless anti apartheid activists.
Speaker 2: Later testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation committ would connect
Speaker 2: Decoq's C ten unit to the violent attacks in Namibia
Speaker 2: in nineteen eighty nine, the ones intended to undermine Namibian independence.
Speaker 2: After his bullet was discovered inside that policeman in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety four, a police spokesman said quote. He told investigators
Speaker 2: he was on a neighboring property when he heard shooting.
Speaker 2: Fearing for his life, he fired in the general direction
Speaker 2: of the muzzle fire. I know it's a mess of
Speaker 2: a story, But that bit about Namibia might be jumping
Speaker 2: out at you. Those violent attacks in nineteen eighty nine
Speaker 2: intended to undermine Namibian independence. Two weeks ago we discussed
Speaker 2: one of those attacks in great detail, the murder of
Speaker 2: a UN security guard in aut Yo. That operation was
Speaker 2: later revealed to have been funded by the South African government.
Speaker 2: But one of the men who actually threw a grenade
Speaker 2: at the UN office was German mercenary horse to cleanse.
Speaker 2: So what are the odds that two men who'd participated
Speaker 2: in the same state backed terrorism in nineteen eighty nine
Speaker 2: would just completely accidentally cross paths again five years later
Speaker 2: while one of them was in the middle of a
Speaker 2: shootout with the police. It's possible that the answers are
Speaker 2: buried somewhere in the case file for Decoc's later conviction
Speaker 2: for crimes against humanity, but a quick search didn't seem
Speaker 2: promising a coincidence for the ages.
Speaker 11: Maybe, but back to our Germans.
Speaker 2: A later report in Searchlight magazine says that after they
Speaker 2: were arrested, one of the Germans talked, telling police that
Speaker 2: it had been Monica Huggett who'd introduced them to Klent's
Speaker 2: and based on the timeline of events and the fact
Speaker 2: that one of them was already dead, it had to
Speaker 2: have been Stephen Ray's who ratted Monica out. Nideline and
Speaker 2: Cleans weren't taken into custody until Sunday, and Monica had
Speaker 2: already been arrested by then. When the next round of
Speaker 2: mercenaries arrived from Europe just a few days after the shootout,
Speaker 2: there was no one waiting for them at the airport.
Speaker 2: Ronald Doyster, Ralph Morajaz, and falk Semeng waited at the
Speaker 2: airport for nearly an hour before they tried calling the
Speaker 2: number they'd been given by their European contacts at Monica
Speaker 2: Huggitt's house. A woman answered and told them she had
Speaker 2: no idea where Monica was, but she gave them the
Speaker 2: address so they could take a taxi and wait for
Speaker 2: her there. They were sitting in Monica's living room when
Speaker 2: they found out she'd been arrested on a weapons charge,
Speaker 2: so she was certainly in police custody on March seventeenth,
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety four, but she pretty quickly made bail. An
Speaker 2: Associated Press report published a week after the incident, quotes
Speaker 2: from a German television News broadcast. I searched desperately for
Speaker 2: actual video of this segment, but to no avail. I
Speaker 2: did find a copy of the TV guide for ard
Speaker 2: that German TV network for this date, March twenty second,
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety four, but unfortunately, it does us absolutely no
Speaker 2: good to know that this segment probably aired after a
Speaker 2: German dubbed rerun of the American police drama Lady Blue.
Speaker 2: But the AP write up says an anonymous South African
Speaker 2: woman with knowledge of the German Mercenary cell appeared on
Speaker 2: the broadcast, and the woman said that Horst Cleans had
Speaker 2: stayed in her home for some time and that the
Speaker 2: group he was operating with had come to South Africa
Speaker 2: to assassinate Nelson Mandela. Reporting from the same time period
Speaker 2: in the Johannesburg City Press says that upon arrival in
Speaker 2: the country, the German mercenary stay in a private home
Speaker 2: in Kempton Park, where they were given money and documents
Speaker 2: before being dispatched to their assignments. Given that we know
Speaker 2: for certain that Monica's Kempton Park home was Deyster's destination,
Speaker 2: it seems likely that she is this unnamed woman from
Speaker 2: Kempton Park with the election just weeks away, the plan
Speaker 2: was unraveling. Our Dutch mercenary Ronald Deuster, was unable to
Speaker 2: make contact with Monica Huggett. He was redirected to a
Speaker 2: farm owned by another AWB member. With his vast experience
Speaker 2: as a soldier for hire, he was put to work
Speaker 2: teaching the group how to make car bombs. In a
Speaker 2: later confession, Doyster explained that he was quite good at
Speaker 2: making car bombs, having successfully detonated several in Bosnia, but
Speaker 2: he found the whole operation here just embarrassingly amateurish. He
Speaker 2: said the people on the farm were ridiculous and pathetic
Speaker 2: and that quote. The whole camp was in chaos. They
Speaker 2: couldn't even source the materials he'd asked for to make
Speaker 2: nail bombs, and the guy he was trying to explain
Speaker 2: car bombs to didn't know anything about explosives. He was,
Speaker 2: of course personally and ideologically interested in participating in a
Speaker 2: white revolution, but he was a career mercenary and his
Speaker 2: top priority is always his own survival, and this obviously
Speaker 2: wasn't going to work. So he went to the police.
Speaker 2: He was willing to exchange information about this operation in
Speaker 2: exchange for his own freedom, and when his information proved
Speaker 2: to be valuable, he was hired by South African intelligence
Speaker 2: to assist them in taking down the network. Searchlight magazine's
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety six series of articles about this whole operation
Speaker 2: mentions only in passing that Monica Huggitt went right back
Speaker 2: to her old ways after being released, placing more ads
Speaker 2: for soldiers in Eastern European newspapers. But there's no date
Speaker 2: attached to that in the article, because at some point
Speaker 2: she left. Sometime in nineteen ninety four, Monica Huggitt left
Speaker 2: South Africa. Nelson Mandela was elected president in April, apartheid
Speaker 2: was over. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission wouldn't be formed
Speaker 2: for another year and a half, so there was no
Speaker 2: promise of amnesty on the table in nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 2: I don't know if she left to avoid prosecution, or
Speaker 2: if she left because she couldn't bear the torment of
Speaker 2: living in an integrated society, or for some other reason,
Speaker 2: but she did leave.
Speaker 12: When I tried to go over to the United States
Speaker 12: the first time, I had to go for three interviews,
Speaker 12: and I even knew my mother was a farmer and
Speaker 12: asked me, when I go to the States for three months,
Speaker 12: was going to take care of the cows? They asked
Speaker 12: me that the consul not. Yeah, so eventually I'm not
Speaker 12: going into detail, but anyway, I got the visa and
Speaker 12: I went to the United States in nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 12: I came back in ninety six, and then I got
Speaker 12: married in two thousand to an American citizen, Jimstone.
Speaker 2: I wish she would go into detail, how exactly did
Speaker 2: she manage to spend two years in the United States
Speaker 2: on a three month visa and why was she granted
Speaker 2: a visa at all? Over the course of those three interviews,
Speaker 2: did they just talk about her mother's cows or did
Speaker 2: they ask about the terrorism because they obviously knew some
Speaker 2: information about her If they knew about the cows, did
Speaker 2: they ask her if she planned to visit the American
Speaker 2: clansmen who'd sent her the bomb making manual the VIT
Speaker 2: Commando had relied on when they made those bombs that
Speaker 2: they set off in Professor's offices in nineteen eighty Did
Speaker 2: they ask her about the weapons charge she was still
Speaker 2: out on bond for, or the dead mercenary who'd been
Speaker 2: staying in her guest room.
Speaker 1: I really would love to.
Speaker 2: Know how those interviews went, because somehow she gained legal
Speaker 2: entry into the United States. She spent two years here
Speaker 2: on that three month visa before returning to South Africa
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety six. In this hour of two thousand, she
Speaker 2: married a retired sports broadcaster from Louisiana at a ceremony
Speaker 2: in her hometown of Kempton Park, and the couple returned
Speaker 2: to Mandeville, Louisiana together.
Speaker 11: I know I.
Speaker 2: Promised this story was over, and it seems absolutely criminal
Speaker 2: of me to stretch this out over so many episodes,
Speaker 2: But in my defense, I did warn you that there
Speaker 2: might not be an episode this week at all. I
Speaker 2: lost most of my workdays this week covering a trial
Speaker 2: here in Charlottesville. I'll tell you about that soon too,
Speaker 2: But I don't want to rush the ending of this story.
Speaker 2: I mean, I didn't even have time to tell you
Speaker 2: about Monica's belief in the prophecies of a long dead
Speaker 2: boor mystic. And in the weeks I've spent putting this together,
Speaker 2: history has marched on. It was the President's bizarre our
Speaker 2: executive order condemning South African land perform that sent me
Speaker 2: down this path in the first place, and he's only
Speaker 2: doubled down on his commitment to the white genocide conspiracy
Speaker 2: theory since then. No, I think there is a whole
Speaker 2: episode's worth of story left to tell. But if I've
Speaker 2: somehow misjudged how much of the story is actually left,
Speaker 2: I can always feel some time by reading you the
Speaker 2: absolutely dreadful poems written by one of those mercenaries. Treed
Speaker 2: Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: It's researched, written and recorded by me Dolly Conker. Our
Speaker 2: executive producers are Sophie Lichtermann and Robert Evans. The show
Speaker 2: is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme
Speaker 2: music was posed by Brad Diggert. You can email me
Speaker 2: at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I
Speaker 2: would have definitely read.
Speaker 1: It, but I probably won't answer it. It's been me personal.
Speaker 2: You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
Speaker 2: listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post
Speaker 2: anything that's gonna make you one of my Weird Little
Speaker 2: Guys