Free Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation by John Carlin

he and twenty-five others were jailed and charged with murder. The law of Common Purpose, as it was called, allowed for the prosecution not only of the person or persons directly responsible for a crime, but also of all those who might have shared in the desire to commit it, who had lent their moral support. Given such a loose definition, the police could have rounded up two people, or five, ten, twenty, or sixty-two. They opted for twenty-six, charging them all with the murder of the one man. Among the defendants was a married couple in their sixties who had eleven children between them and no criminal—or even mildly political—record. The police investigators made no effort to distinguish between the old couple’s degree of guilt and Bekebeke’s. They didn’t know that Bekebeke had been the one who had administered the decisive blows. Nor would they find out in the course of the long trial that followed. If found guilty, the “Upington 26” would face the same sentence Mandela had prepared for when he had stood at the dock in Pretoria twenty-one years earlier: death by hanging.

CHAPTER IV
    BAGGING THE CROC
    1986-89
     
    Kobie Coetsee had succumbed more quickly than either he or Mandela would have expected. But Mandela doubted his next target would roll over quite so easily. His ultimate goal—a meeting with Botha himself—could only be attained after, or if, he won over the man guarding the presidential door, the head of the National Intelligence Service, Niël Barnard. Barnard, who had studied international politics at George-town University in Washington, D.C., acquired a reputation in his twenties as a boy genius. Botha first heard about him when Barnard was a lecturer in political science at the University of the Orange Free State. Impetuously, Botha hired him out of the university, aged thirty, to head up the NIS. That was on June 1, 1980. Barnard was to remain in the job until January 31, 1992, serving Botha for nearly ten years and his successor, F. W. de Klerk, for two.
    No one in the apartheid state apparatus knew more about what was going on in South African politics than Barnard, who had informers everywhere, some of them deep in the ANC. He was shrewd and discreet, a civil servant to the marrow, with a powerful sense of duty. During the twelve years he remained as head of the NIS, an organization that the likes of the CIA and Britain’s MI6 came to respect, if not love, his face was as unknown to the general public as Mandela’s had been in prison. There was no man Botha trusted more.
    Barnard was a tall, sleek, dark-haired, humorless fellow. An Afrikaner Mr. Spock, he spoke in a monotone and his features were so blankly set that if you were to run across him a day after meeting him you would probably fail to recognize him. But the workings of his mind were crystal clear, and while he had a stilted way of talking, years later his memory remained sharp regarding the political mood and the fights within government in the 1980s.
    “Some people, specifically in the military, but in the police as well, deep down believed that we had to fight it out in some way or another,” he recalled. “We at the NIS believed this to be the wrong way to go about things. We took the view that a political settlement was the only answer to the problems of this country.” That was a very hard message indeed to sell to the South African government apparatus. Barnard had no illusions about that. “But the important thing was that P. W. Botha, who was more or less born and bred within the security establishment, firmly believed that in some way or another we had to . . . how should I say . . . stabilize the South African situation, and then from there try to find some kind of political solution.”
    Botha summoned Barnard to his office one day in May 1988, and told him, “Dr. Barnard, we want you to meet Mr. Mandela now. Try to find out what you have been advocating for some time. Is it possible to find a peaceful