In 1962, when Nelson Mandela was arrested by South African police shortly after returning to the country, it led many to speculate that the CIA may have been involved in helping the South African police find the then-controversial revolutionary.
The United States and the Soviet Union were embroiled in the Cold War at the time and Africa was a major battleground for the two superpowers, with multiple newly independent states either officially working with the Soviets or were suspected to be by the US intelligence community. Apartheid South Africa was an ally of the United States and gave it a major foothold on the continent. It also had a large supply of uranium which was a strategically important resource in the nuclear arms race.
Richard Stengel, a former editor for TIME and the author of Mandela’s Way and a podcast chronicling his conversations with the future South African president titled Mandela: The Lost Tapes, wrote an article on Monday outlining the evidence supporting the theory so far and a few more tidbits that add more credence.
The suspicions initially began while Mandela was still incarcerated.
In 1986, the Johannesburg Star ran an article without a byline that stated “a retired senior police officer” said the South African police had been tipped off by an American diplomat at the US consulate in Durban that was “the CIA operative for the region.” The Star noted the diplomat revealed his role to the police officer while drunk at a party at the apartment of a mercenary named Mike Hoare.
Then, right after Mandela’s release in 1990, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published an article that a “retired intelligence official” said a senior CIA operative named Paul Eckel walked into his office after Mandela’s arrest.
“We have turned Mandela over to the South African security branch," Eckel allegedly said. "We gave them every detail, what he would be wearing, the time of day, just where he would be. They have picked him up. It is one of our greatest coups."
More than two and a half decades later, retired CIA officer Donald Rickard, who was then 88 and nearing the end of his life, told a British filmmaker that he informed the South African police about Mandela. Rickard never expressed regret for doing so, insisting until his death two weeks later that it was the right move because had the communists taken South Africa, it may have led to war between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Reports from both the United States and South Africa at the time said that Rickard had been removed from his post in South Africa for having a penchant for talking about CIA activities while drunk. Hoare would later confirm in a 2018 biography written about him that Rickard’s story was accurate.
Classified CIA documents released in 2017 but not reported on until Stengel’s article on Monday, confirm the CIA thought the African National Congress (ANC), of which Mandela was a part of, was “communist-dominated” and dubbed Mandela a “probable communist.” Another declassified document hints the CIA was monitoring his movements outside of South Africa.
After Mandela’s death in 2013, both the ANC and the South African Communist party would confirm the CIA’s suspicions. Mandela was not just a member of the Communist party, he was a member of its central committee.
Ultimately, what Stengel lays out is not a smoking gun per se, but a continually building story that gained its first piece of evidence in 1985 and has been gaining corroborating evidence in the decades since, without any contrary evidence presenting itself. Stengel filed a Freedom of Information Act with the CIA, asking for documents from the time that mention Mandela or Rickard, but they denied him and refused to confirm or deny the existence of any documents mentioning either of them.
Stengel ponders if the CIA may be better served by admitting to its alleged role in Mandela’s arrest. The United States government is currently attempting to limit China and Russia’s influence in the continent while increasing its own. The first step to that, says Stengel, is to come clean about its past.
For his part, Mandela didn’t care much to find out if the CIA was behind his arrest. When Stengel asked him about it in an interview in 1993, Mandela said he had no evidence either way and never asked the US government about the possibility. Instead, Mandela insisted he was happy the United States had become an ally of the newly-desegregated South Africa.