In the dog-eat-dog world of espionage, nothing is sacred

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How many of you remember that popular comic strip in Mad magazine, Spy vs Spy, which features two agents involved in hilarious espionage activities? One dressed in white and the other in black, the pair are constantly at war, using a variety of booby traps to inflict harm on each other, parodying the political conflict of the Cold War. Today, the two characters have become so famous, they feature in popular video games and an animated TV series. I thought about them when reading news reports dominating the headlines recently about Russia’s alleged espionage activities and how they meddled in the 2016 US presidential elections. It gets all the more intriguing when you get to the part of how Donald Trump’s son met some Russian lawyer during the poll, hoping to dig up dirt against arch-rival Hillary Clinton.

Which all goes to illustrate how, in the murky and dog-eat-dog world of espionage, nothing is sacred. And the rules are there only for the breaking.

I’ve been wondering why the US has been making such a big fuss about being spied on by the Russians when they have been sticking their noses into the affairs of other countries for decades.

With Nelson Mandela’s birthday being celebrated this week, it is worth remembering it is almost 55 years ago to the day that police waved down a car on a lonely KZN road to stop a passing motorist.

That motorist happened to be Mandela, who was posing as a chauffeur after a clandestine visit to Durban while on the run from the apartheid authorities.

How did the apartheid cops know it was the Black Pimpernel?

Well, it was a man called Donald Rickard, a former US vice-consul in Durban at the time and a CIA operative, who tipped off the cops and helped put Mandela behind bars for 27 years.

He apparently claimed he did it because the Americans believed Mandela was “completely under the control of the Soviet Union”.

As we all now know, Mandela was no terrorist, as the US spies then claimed.

He was a dedicated freedom fighter engaged in a just struggle for justice, peace and democracy in our country.

Lest we forget.

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The Sunday Independent

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