Goldie Taylor—How the CIA Sold Out Nelson Mandela
He spent nearly three
decades in prison. Known the world over as a freedom fighter and an ambassador
of social justice, today Nelson Mandela is an icon whose death in 2013 at age
95 sparked mourning around the globe. President Barack Obama
and a high-profile
official delegation that included former presidents Jimmy Carter,
George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton attended the memorial service, televised
everywhere on the planet. But—if a former State Department official and
reported Central Intelligence Agency operative can be believed—the U.S.
government aided in Mandela’s 1962 capture and thus bears some responsibility
for the 27 years he spent in jail.
Donald Rickard, who
died in March, alleges that U.S. intelligence had a direct hand in Mandela’s
apprehension. In fact, the former U.S. vice-consul in Durban, who was
reportedly employed by the CIA until 1978, said he was the spy
who tipped South African authorities to Mandela’s whereabouts en route
between Durban and Johannesburg. “I found out when he
was coming down and how he was coming,” Rickard reportedly told a British
filmmaker. “That’s where I was involved and that’s where Mandela was caught.”
In those days, the man
affectionately called Madiba was an anti-apartheid revolutionary deep in the
throes of a resistance campaign against the South African government. This was
at the height of the Cold War, and many in the U.S. foreign intelligence
community also believed Mandela was cooperating with and receiving support from
the Soviet Union. Complicating matters
further, the U.S. also was grappling with its own civil rights movement and the
fight to destroy segregationist Jim Crow laws. A year after Mandela was jailed,
Martin Luther King Jr. was leading the March on Washington, and was put under
surveillance by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.
For his part, Mandela
never publicly blamed the U.S. for his imprisonment. In his autobiography, he
says the arrest was a result of his own mistakes. “I cannot lay my capture at
[the CIA’s door],” he wrote in The Long Walk to Freedom. This isn’t the first
time the explosive allegation has come to light. A report
by the Cox News Service in 1990, after Mandela’s release, appears to
bolster Rickard’s claims, although it is possible he was one of the sources... read more:
