Craig Williamson

Craig Michael Williamson (born 1949), is a former officer in the South African Police, who was exposed as a spy and assassin for the Security Branch in 1980.

Williamson was involved in a series of events involving state-sponsored terrorism.

This included overseas bombings, burglaries, kidnappings, assassinations and propaganda during the apartheid era.

In the late 1970s, Craig Williamson had inveigled Lars Eriksson, director of the International University Exchange Fund (IUEF) in Geneva, into employing him as deputy director and help in the award of IUEF scholarships to African students.

He was thus able to infiltrate the banned African National Congress (ANC) and, at the same time, make high-level contacts in Sweden which provided most of the funding for the IUEF.

Williamson's networking through prime minister Olof Palme's office in Stockholm put him in touch with a number of Palme's close associates including Pan Am Flight 103 victim, Bernt Carlsson, who had become secretary-general of the Socialist International in 1976 and was based in London until 1983.

In 1981, Williamson recruited the woman who would become South Africa's best-known female spy, Olivia Forsyth.

The same source accused Williamson of syphoning off IUEF funds to establish a dirty tricks operation in Pretoria known as "Long Reach" in order to target apartheid's opponents both in South Africa and abroad.

This dirty tricks operation also involved arms trafficking.

Again using IUEF funds, Williamson set up the South African News Agency to recruit and use journalists for apartheid South African counter-intelligence purposes.

Williamson also attempted to infiltrate the International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF), though he was successfully deflected by Phyllis Altman, general secretary of IDAF.

His cover was finally revealed by Arthur McGiven who reported his activities in the Observer.

In 1982, a burglary took place at the Pan Africanist Congress office in London.

Two suspects were arrested.

One of them, a Swedish journalist, Bertil Wedin, was eventually acquitted by an English court.

Wedin admitted, however, that he was working for South African intelligence and that he had been recruited by Craig Williamson.

The other suspect, South African Defence Force Sergeant Joseph Klue had diplomatic immunity as a member of staff at the South African embassy in London and was ordered to leave the United Kingdom.

She was killed by a letter-bomb in Maputo, Mozambique on 18 August 1982.

In January 1984, minutes of the apartheid State Security Council, chaired by Prime Minister P. W. Botha, recorded Craig Williamson as plotting the overthrow of the government in Mozambique.

In mid-1984 Craig Williamson mailed a letter-bomb which on 28 June killed Jeanette Schoon, wife of Marius Schoon, and their six-year-old daughter Katryn, at the family's home in exile in Lubango in Angola.

Both Jeanette and Marius Schoon were prominent South African anti-apartheid activists and members of the ANC.

While in exile in Botswana some years earlier, the Schoons had broken Williamson's cover internally within the ANC, several months before his public exposure in the UK, allowing the ANC leadership to attempt to manipulate Williamson covertly for their own purposes.

The Schoons' younger son Fritz, then aged three, witnessed the murder of his mother and sister at close hand; found wandering alone in the house, and severely traumatised, he developed epilepsy from which he never fully recovered.

Following Williamson's application for amnesty for the killings, Schoon filed a civil suit against Williamson, seeking damages for his son.

However, the suit was suspended pending Williamson's Amnesty hearing.

It has never been determined whether the letter-bomb had been addressed specifically to Marius Schoon or to both him and his wife; Williamson claimed to his subordinate, the bomb-maker Jerry Raven, that the former was the case.

On 21 February 1986, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme addressed the anti-apartheid conference Svensk folkriksdag mot apartheid (Swedish People's Parliament Against Apartheid) at the People's House in Stockholm, Sweden.

A week later, Palme was shot and killed after attending the cinema with his wife, Lisbeth Palme.

The subsequent Stockholm Police investigation into the murder was criticised for its lassitude and incompetence for not quickly solving the crime.

Five days after Palme's murder, Swedish author and journalist Per Wästberg reported twice to the Swedish police that South African intelligence services must have been involved, but no action was taken by the police.

Williamson applied for amnesty in 1995 from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) for bombing the London office of the ANC in March 1982.

In the British House of Commons in June 1995, Peter Hain MP asked through the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard, that the British police should interview and consider extraditing Williamson to stand trial for the London bombing.

The Home Secretary turned down Hain's request.

Amnesty was eventually granted by the TRC to Williamson and seven others on 15 October 1999.

Following the TRC hearing, South African lawyer Anton Alberts commented to the "woza" news agency: "If you look at the Lockerbie disaster - this is very similar. I think Britain would like to see these guys are prosecuted in England even though they get amnesty here."

Williamson ordered the assassination of Ruth Slovo, who was an exiled campaigner for the Anti-Apartheid Movement, close friend of Sweden's prime minister, Olof Palme and the ANC author of a pioneering study of Namibia.

She was also the wife of the South African Communist Party's leader, Joe Slovo.

In June 2000, a year after Marius Schoon died of lung cancer, TRC amnesty for this killing and that of Ruth Slovo was granted to Williamson, despite Marius Schoon's earlier testimony strongly opposing amnesty.

Schoon had argued that the whole truth about the murder of his wife and daughter had not, as required, been revealed by Williamson, and that the murder of his wife and daughter had been carried out in revenge.

Williamson's bomb-maker, Jerry Raven, testified: