Student takes on CIA over report

Published Jan 17, 2014

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At a timewhen secrecy shrouds government actions, a US doctoral student has launched a court challenge against the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to force it to release secret documents expected to link US intelligence to Nelson Mandela’s 1962 Howick arrest.

Massachussetts Institute of Technology student Ryan Shapiro told the Daily News that he hopes his battle will strengthen citizens’ democratic right to information. He filed the papers in the Columbia District Court last week after the CIA ignored his request for documents relating to Mandela in terms of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

He requested the documents after Mandela’s death on December 11 and lodged similar requests with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA).

“The CIA has been widely and credibly believed to have been involved in Nelson Mandela’s arrest and this includes former leading CIA and SA intelligence officials flatly coming out and saying as much,” Shapiro claimed.

“Additionally, the broader US intelligence community, particularly the NSA, has been widely known since the 1980s to have regularly provided intelligence on the SA anti-apartheid movement to the apartheid regime.

“What we don’t have, especially in the case of the CIA’s involvement in Mandela’s arrest, despite leading intelligence operatives from both countries coming out and saying as much, is hard documentary evidence.

“The CIA has ignored my request and therefore they are in violation of the FOIA and that’s why I am suing them,” Shapiro said.

“FOIA lawsuits are slow, long drawn out affairs. We have filed the lawsuit. The CIA will respond and we will respond to that.”

He said the other agencies had responded in different ways and the requests remained in motion.

“It remains to be seen how those will turn out. I am of course hopeful that the NSA, DIA and FBI will comply.”

Shapiro said the US intelligence community on the whole is “deeply antagonistic” to the FOIA in particular, and transparency in general.

“The CIA, DIA, NSA and FBI in general do everything they can to avoid compliance with the FOIA.”

Shapiro hopes the documents will answer the question of why the US labelled Mandela a terrorist threat in the US until 2008; why and to what extent US intelligence supported and provided information to the apartheid regime and whether it continued to conduct surveillance on Mandela following his release from prison.

However, Shapiro said his motivation for obtaining the documents was not just for their historical value, but in the interests of democracy.

“The US intelligence community has a long and sad track record of policing political dissents. Just as the CIA very certainly worked to counter Mandela and the anti-apartheid movement in SA, the FBI actively surveilled and suppressed Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement in the US,” Shapiro said.

“This sort of activity continues to the present in part in the form of US suppression of a broad range of American social justice movements prominently including the anti-war, animal rights and environmental protection movements.”

Said Shapiro: “In the interest of democracy we must fight this myopic vision of security and the governmental obsession with secrecy that sustains it.”

The FBI, NSA and CIA declined to respond to the Daily News’s questions regarding Shapiro’s criticism of the agencies and his FOIA request. The DIA had not responded to a media request at the time of going to print.

However, FBI spokesman Christopher Allen said the FBI was currently processing FOIA files for Mandela and would post the results on its website.

CIA spokesman, Todd Ebitz, said: “As a general rule, the CIA does not comment on legal matters pending before the courts.”

In South Africa, the Nelson Mandela Foundation director of research and archives, Verne Harris, said the centre was interested in accessing intelligence records relevant to the life and times of Mandela that might dispel or prove the rumours surrounding his arrest.

“As part of our first phase audit of the Mandela Archive, we did make enquiries about US intelligence records relating to Mandela. Our endeavour in this regard will continue,” Harris said.

“Any records which are released into the public domain as a result of Shapiro’s requests would be of interest to us.”

Harris said relatively little research had been done on the broader question of collaboration between South African and Western intelligence services during the apartheid era.

Harris said the centre’s research on Mandela’s capture suggested that the rumours of betrayal by friends and collusion by foreign intelligence agencies “remain just that – rumours”.

“The harsh reality seems to be – and this is something which Mandela is on record as acknowledging – that Mandela’s carelessness as an underground operative after his return to South Africa in 1962 made it easy for the South African Police, even with its limited surveillance capacity at that time, to track his movements and capture him without assistance from outside agencies,” Harris said.

“The only responsible way of addressing rumours is to respect and to make available the archival record.

“The Foundation is committed fundamentally to that responsibility.”

US editor and film-maker and former ABC News and CNN producer Danny Schechter, who made documentaries about the making and meaning of the movie Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom and author of Madiba A to Z: The Many Faces of Nelson Mandela cites reports confirming the CIA’s involvement in his arrest in the book.

“Others have commented on it but the ANC and Madiba himself to my knowledge remained silent, perhaps because of a sense that there was not much they could do about it before his release and the need to create good relations with the US government when the ANC came to power and the period before that,” Schechter said.

Schechter said Shapiro was “brave” to make an effort to better understand history “at a time when secrecy and the role of the NSA as well as the whistle blowing by Edward Snowden is a major news story”.

“This mast adds another wrinkle in trying to help us understand American power as part of a global strategy to strengthen the status quo and complicity with many dictatorships of which apartheid was one,” Schechter said.

Schechter, who has himself petitioned the NSA and CIA for documents in the past under the FOIA added:

“I don’t think they will fully disclose their relationship with the old South Africa.

“My documents were blacked out but they do confirm their disregard for personal privacy and contempt for our freedom.

“Clearly the US government has no interest in coming clean about our role in supporting apartheid and assisting in that arrest, especially because of the love letter that President Obama sent to Madiba in his speech at the Memorial service,” Schechter said.

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