March 20, 2025 • 56 mins
In 1989, four Afrikaner nationalists and one German mercenary killed a security guard at a United Nations outpost in Namibia. After escaping from custody, they fled home to South Africa. A possibly non-existent group called The White Wolves took credit for the wave of bombings that followed.
Sources:
Du Preez, M. (2010). Pale native: Memories of a Renegade reporter. Zebra Press.
Rotberg, Robert (1988). The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Enigma of Power. Oxford University Press.
Falkof, Nicky. The End of Whiteness: Satanism and Family Murder in Late Apartheid South Africa. Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2016.
https://web.archive.org/web/20010429091808/http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/spec/aress14-1.htm
https://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZASCA/1999/72.html
https://ctc.westpoint.edu/the-nexus-between-far-right-extremists-in-the-united-states-and-ukraine/
https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1043&context=ncitereportsresearch
https://web.archive.org/web/20181118212149/
https://www.iol.co.za/pretoria-news/the-day-wit-wolf-turned-pretoria-red-with-blood-18125595
https://www.jordanharbinger.com/bradley-steyn-undercover-with-mandelas-spies-part-one/
https://www.iol.co.za/news/world/us-wit-wolf-slaughter-1873433
https://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/what-became-of-the-big-wit-wolf-424408
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Coo Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
On August tenth, nineteen eighty nine, around nine thirty pm,
a white sedan pulled up outside the United Nations Transition
Assistance Groups administrative headquarters in Autyo, a town in northern Namibia.
They had what appeared to be UN issued license plates
and the United Nations emblem was painted on the side,
(00:30):
so perhaps it didn't look out of place there at first.
Initial reports say witnesses saw three men dressed in green
camouflage uniforms. The UN Transition Assistance Group had arrived in
Namibia four months earlier, authorized by UN Resolution four thirty five.
The resolution had actually been adopted over a decade earlier,
(00:53):
but it took that entire decade to get all parties to.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Come to the table.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
The Transition Assistance Group was there to ensure the sea
fire was honored, that South African troops would withdraw from Namibia,
and that the upcoming election would be free and fair.
Those first four months had not been without incident, but
a ceasefire was re established Over the summer. The South
African military was withdrawing s planned and UN officials were
(01:18):
making progress on disarming and disbanding the citizen militias. Paid
by the South African government. If things continued on this path,
it was looking good for the November elections. But not
everyone was on board with UN Resolution four thirty five.
One small group in particular, calling itself Axi Kontra four
(01:40):
three five Action against four thirty five, did just what
the name implies.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
They took action.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
When those men in green camos stepped out of their
car outside the UN offices in Autyo that night. They
opened fire with automatic weapons hand grenades caused extensive damage
to the buildings, both the administrative offices and the sleeping quarters.
A security guard named Michael Hoseg was killed in the attack,
(02:11):
but the men fled into the night without finishing the mission.
The entire cell was arrested fairly quickly, and authorities found
a massive arsenal of guns and explosives the group planned
to use in future attacks on United Nations targets with
the goal of stopping the upcoming elections. And those men
(02:33):
were in custody in November when the elections were held,
but they didn't stay there.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
They escaped.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
They'd failed to prevent Namibian independence, but now the fight
was in South Africa and they would do everything in
their power to prevent the end of apartheid. I'm Molly Kunger,
and this is where there were GUIDs. This is still
(03:16):
the story of Monica Huggett Stone, the elderly South African
woman who was living in Mandeville, Louisiana, when she organized
a series of nationwide Nazi rallies in twenty twelve. But
she isn't in this part of the story because I
can't tell you about the international network of mercenaries she
was organizing in nineteen ninety four without telling you a
(03:37):
little bit more about some of those men, who they
were and what they were up to in the years
leading up to that deadly shootout with the police on
the eve of the South African elections. I know I
don't have to make excuses for this meandering narrative. It's
my story, and I'll tell it the only way I
know how. I never know where we're going when I
(03:58):
start putting my notes together, and I really can't help
but chase down this seemingly infinite number of surprisingly deep
rabbit holes. And I'm so fascinated by this international network.
Speaker 3 (04:12):
It's come up a bit in other stories.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Dennis Mahon and Tom Metzger had close ties with Heritage
Front in Canada. In the early nineties, Denis Mayhon flew
to Germany to show German neo Nazis a good old
fashioned American ku Klux Klan cross burning, and he gave
fiery speeches stoking the flames of the anti immigrant riots
that were exploding across Germany at the time. The week
(04:36):
before Dennis started making that bomb that he went to
prison for, he'd been hanging out with an Ulster unionist
who'd carried up bombings in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
British Holocaust denied David Irving traveled regularly to the United
States to network with American white supremacists. Frank Sweeney joined
the American Nazi Party in New Jersey as a teenager
(04:57):
and later joined the Rhodesian Army as a mercenary. Members
of American white supremacist groups like the Base, Adam Waffen,
and the Rise Above movement and its spin off active clubs,
have a particular fondness for traveling to Ukraine to fight
with far right groups like the azof Battalion. Patriot Front.
Flags have popped up at Neo Nazi marches and Poland
(05:19):
and its members have met with leaders of foreign fascist
groups like the Nordic Resistance Movement in Sweden and Cossa.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
Pound in Italy.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
One of the young men arrested in connection with the
Terogram Collective was taken into custody at the airport before
he could board a flight to Ukraine to join the
Russian Volunteer Corps. The fascists, racists, and anti Semites of
the world are obsessed with borders, but they don't seem
to mind crossing them. So that's what we're exploring here.
(05:50):
And we'll find Monica again in the next chapter of
this story when she does a bit of border crossing
of her own, but that's not until nineteen ninety four,
and right now it's nineteen eighty nine. In nineteen eighty nine,
South Africa was still five years away from ending apartheid,
(06:10):
five years away from holding their first election with universal suffrage,
five years away from electing Nelson Mandela as their first
post apartheid president. In nineteen eighty nine, Nelson Mandela was
still in prison, where he'd been since nineteen sixty two.
But in nineteen eighty nine, one of South Africa's neighbors
(06:31):
was taking the leap into multi racial democracy.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
Well.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Whether or not South Africa considered Namibia to be a
neighboring country or a country at all, depends on who
you ask. The present day nation of Namibia had been
a German colony from eighteen eighty four until nineteen fifteen.
During World War One, when everyone was a little preoccupied elsewhere,
(06:56):
South Africa captured the colony known as Southwest Afria. In
nineteen sixty six, the United Nations General Assembly passed a
resolution declaring that South Africa no longer had a right
to the territory, but South Africa continued illegally occupying the
area that the United Nations now recognized as Namibia. The
conflict lasted over two decades. The South African Border War
(07:20):
wasn't just about South Africa's desire to extend apartheid into
this colonial territory. It was inextricably intertwined with other conflicts
in the region, things like the Angle and Civil War.
It was a modern consequence of the nineteenth century Scramble
for Africa. It was the unraveling of a century of colonialism.
(07:41):
It was fueled by Cold War anxiety about communist guerrilla
forces and Soviet influence, and it was about white anxiety.
If Black Africans were allowed to participate in government, if
they were, god forbid, allowed to rule their own nations,
what would they do with that power. The whole world
(08:02):
got in on the action, both officially, with major powers
sending material support to their preferred parties, and none officially,
with independent mercenaries and shadowy state sponsored operations popping up
all over Sub Saharan Africa. But by nineteen eighty nine
it was finally time. The border war was over and
(08:24):
Namibia was going to have free and fair elections in November.
In April of that year, peacekeeping forces from the United
Nations Transition Assistance Group arrived to oversee the process. Namibia
was going to be an independent nation, one without apartheid,
and this was a frightening prospect for those white South
Africans trying desperately to hold onto power in an increasingly
(08:48):
unsustainable form of government. Now this next part might sound
like a conspiracy theory. I try to tread waters like
this with immense care. I nearly drove myself to madness
trying to thread the needle of fact, fiction and question marks.
When I talked about the Oklahoma city bombing a while back,
(09:10):
and when I started poking around this particular history, I'll
admit I didn't have a lot of context.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
I don't know the landscape here.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
So sorting fact from speculation and sifting out the lies
as a tricky prospect, And at first I completely dismissed
the idea that these neo Nazi terrorists could have been
acting on government orders. That's tinfoil hat territory, right. I
saw the idea heavily insinuated in some reporting from.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
The time period.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
An article published in nineteen ninety in an issue of
Frei Vigblad, a South African newspaper with an anti apartheid stance,
opened with this fairly explosive allegation. They are fugitives accused
of murder. They come from South Africa, Britainbia and Zimbabwe.
They have one common characteristic. They left a trail of destruction,
(10:06):
death and bloodshed in Southern Africa over the past decade,
but cannot be prosecuted. They are among the most wanted
men in our neighboring states, but enjoy the protection of
the South African government because they have worked or still
work for the security forces.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
But that's not prove right.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Think about how often you see similar sentiments expressed when
it comes to American far right groups. Allegations that this
group or that one, or whichever prominent white supremacist leader
hasn't been prosecuted because they're being protected by the state,
And that's always a possibility, sure, but that doesn't mean
it's true. But some of those men would themselves later
(10:47):
claim that they couldn't be prosecuted for murders and bombings
because they'd been acting on government orders. And again that's
not proof. I've seen that before too. Sometimes people will
say anything to avoid responsibility, and that doesn't necessarily mean
it's true. I'd been chugging along, accumulating sources and taking
(11:11):
my notes, translating old newspapers. I subscribed to several South
African genealogical databases. I was really getting into the weeds here,
all under the assumption that there wasn't really a need
to explore that angle. It could be true, but it
wasn't something I'd be able to substantiate, And it's the
kind of thing I'm not comfortable exploring without something to
(11:33):
hold on to. I don't want to abuse your trust
by speculating wildly and getting reckless with the facts. But
then I realized this is a very unusual set of circumstances.
Normally a government would never admit to state sponsored terrorism.
They all do it, but nobody admits it. And if
(11:56):
you ever do prove it, it's nothing short of a miracle.
You need leaked documents and deathbed confessions. But the South
Africa of nineteen ninety five wasn't really the same South
Africa that had existed until nineteen ninety four. This government
wasn't admitting to its own crimes. The Truth and Reconciliation
(12:17):
Commission was an unusually transparent look at the nation's past,
and they admitted it. There is an entire chapter of
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission final report called secret State Funding,
and according to the report, Oxe Kontra four thirty five,
the group behind the attack at the UN offices in
(12:38):
Autio in nineteen eighty nine is believed to have been
entirely creation of funded by the South African government. At
least one of the men involved was later confirmed to
have been an operative of the South African Civil Cooperation Bureau,
an odd name for what was essentially government sponsored death squads,
(13:00):
and I tell you that now so you can draw
your own conclusions later in the story when things get
a little murkier. So just keep that in the back
of your mind for now. It wasn't long after the
attack on Autyo that members of Axi Kontra four thirty
five started getting arrested. Although the group's name disappears from
(13:22):
the conversation pretty quickly, the men who carried out that
attack were members of other groups too. Specifically, they were
all members of the African or Resistance movement, the AWB
led by Eugene terre Blanche. The first to be arrested
were two South African citizens, Arthur Archer and Craig Barker,
(13:43):
and a German mercenary named Horst Cleans. South Africans Darrell
Stopped Fourth and Leonard Vnendahl were arrested soon after. By
October of nineteen eighty nine, two months after the attack
in Autyo, five men had been arrested. Charges against Craig
Barker were dropped early on, and the charges against Arthur
Archer were dropped after he agreed to cooperate, And so
(14:06):
in December of nineteen eighty nine, it's just three Nandal,
Cleanse and stopped fourth were officially charged with murder in
a Namibian court. The courthouse was a three hour drive
from the prison where the men were being held. After
the hearing, Leonard Venendal asked to use the bathroom before
they were loaded back into the transport van to return
(14:27):
to their cells. And this is one of those moments
where it's useful to bear in mind that the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission names Leonard Venandal as a known operative
of the Civil Cooperation Bureau, those government sponsored death squads,
and he's named as an operative of the CCB specifically
in connection with these events in Namibia. So with that
(14:51):
in mind, Leonard Vnandal goes to the bathroom at the
courthouse and he somehow knows to take the top off
the tank of a particular tur toilet. Someone had left
him a gift in there, a pistol, and he takes
the gun out of the toilet and he tucks it
away and he allows himself to be placed back in
the van. About three quarters the way through the drive
(15:14):
back to the jail, somewhere in the middle of nowhere,
the men insisted that they just couldn't hold it any longer.
They needed to stop to go to the bathroom, and
the two Namibian police officers agreed. They pulled over and
they led their three prisoners out to pee on the
side of the road, and then suddenly another vehicle appeared.
(15:35):
It stopped and two men got out, and Vinadel produced
the pistol from his hiding place, and the two officers
were overpowered by the three prisoners and their two accomplices.
Constable Ricardo van Wick was shot in the stomach and
later died. The surviving officer was forced at gunpoint into
the back of the van, which the prisoners drove half
an hour off the main road before abandoning it. And
(15:58):
then they disappeared in the vehicle driven by their accomplices,
And they really did disappear. Darrel stopped fourth, Leonard Fienandal
(16:21):
and Horse Glens had murdered a UN security guard and
an Amibian police officer. They were supposed to have gone
on trial in Namibia, but they vanished for a little
while anyway. Just a few short months later, both Leonard
Feenandal and Daryl stopped Forth came out of hiding. They
were home in South Africa and South Africa had no
(16:43):
extradition treaty with the newly independent nation of Namibia. There
were warrants for their arrest there, but there was nothing
anyone could really do. Benadal said in a public statement
a few months after his escape, I have now returned
to my family and I'm going to devote myself full
time to the cause as the revolution is here. A
(17:04):
photo of Nadal taken around that time shows him wearing
his AWB uniform and holding his newborn son. He'd named
the boy Daryl, presumably to honor Darrel's top fourth, the
man he'd just committed two murders with.
Speaker 4 (17:19):
And there's an.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Odd thing I keep seeing these guys do as I'm
researching this story. They have this strange fondness for giving
interviews when they're supposed to be in hiding on the
run from the law. When it was announced in September
of nineteen eighty nine, a month after the attack and
aut Yo, that Leonard of Nadal had been arrested, a
reporter in South Africa came forward with a pretty wild story.
(17:43):
While Venadel had been on the run, he'd taken the
time to sit down for a two hour interview with
a reporter and In that interview, he spoke openly about
his membership in the AWB. That fact alone wasn't really
a secret. He was Eugene Tablanche's personal bodyguard, and he
was the leader of the Johannesburg branch of the group.
(18:04):
But he also claimed there had been a split within Aquala,
the militant arm of a WB, with some members openly
declaring their willingness and intent to die for the cause,
forming a sort of Kamakazi unit that planned to carry
out high profile assassinations.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
He also showed the.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Reporter a small circular placard of sorts with a picture
of a wolf. The reporter, yuhung Kus, just looked at
it with disbelief, and he said, there's no such thing
as the White Wolves, and Vinard all smiled at him
and replied, believe me, they exist.
Speaker 3 (18:49):
The White Wolves.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
Probably didn't exist, not really, not then anyway, not in
any way that really means anything.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
Yes, they kind of did, in the.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Sense that if someone were to carry out a series
of bombings and then call the newspaper to say that
the White Wolves did it, he sort of retroactively created
the idea of a group that could be imagined to exist,
because NANDL would later be connected to an attempt to
do just that. But by most accounts, the White Wolves
(19:24):
wasn't a terrorist organization that actually existed. But in September
of nineteen eighty nine, as he's sitting there with this
reporter from the Sunday Times, everyone in South Africa had
heard of the White Wolf, at least in the singular.
(19:44):
Earlier that year, a former policeman who called himself the
White Wolf had been sentenced to death. He was a
former policeman because he'd been dismissed a year earlier after
opposing for a photo holding the severed head of a
black man who had died a gruesome car accident. He
tried to submit the photo for publication in a police magazine,
(20:06):
but they declined to publish it. He'd joined a to
w B at just sixteen with his father's support and encouragement.
He'd been sentenced to die for something he did. In
November of nineteen eighty eight, one afternoon, a twenty three
year old named Baron Stredam put on his custom belt
buckle engraved with the words White Wolf and Afrikaans. He
(20:31):
barked his car near a busy City Square in downtown Pretoria,
and he got out and he started walking, and then
he started shooting. On the day of the massacre, he
just walked for several blocks, just shooting black people at random.
He murdered eight people and wounded sixteen others, and every
(20:55):
survivor says the same thing. He smiled the entire time.
Bradley Stein was just seventeen years old that day and
he was on his way home from rugby practice when
he saw Stridem. He didn't understand at first what he
was looking at.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
This man with a.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
Gun must be a police officer, He must be trying
to catch a bad guy. But then he saw Stridem
walk up to an old woman carrying groceries, and without
saying a word, Stridem shot her in the head. At
that moment, a black teenager called out to Stein, beckoning
him over to the bench he was hiding behind, and
the two teens hid behind the bench together, but Stridem
(21:39):
found them. He shot the black boy. As Steyne, who's white,
cradled this bleeding stranger in his lap. He looked up
at Stridem and asked him why.
Speaker 4 (21:54):
Then I turned up to him and I said, who
kom duniad why are you doing this? And he said,
I said, I don'd it for it two cooms for
wet Sit Africa corners, which means I'm doing this for
the future of white South Africans.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Stritum never fired at a white person. The shooting only
stopped with a black taxi driver, a man named Simon Mucondeley,
tapped Stritum on the shoulder while he was reloading. He
must have caught the killer off guard because as Stridum
turned round, Mucondeley was able to grab the gun out
of his hands. As I was reading about Stridem's murders,
(22:34):
it felt so familiar to me. I've read accounts of
a lot of mass shootings. I've seen videos I wish
I could forget. I've wasted countless hours reading manifestos, and
there are plenty of similarities between white supremacist mass shootings.
There are a lot of common denominators when it comes
(22:55):
to a young white man who carries out a racist
mass shooting. But this felt so terribly, eerily familiar to me.
It was inescapable. It felt just like the Charleston church shooting.
It felt like Dylan Roof and back in twenty fifteen,
(23:17):
several South African journalists covering that story that American shooting
referred to Dylan Rufe as America's white Wolf. So I
guess I'm not alone in that feeling. We talked briefly
last week about the apartheid era South African flag patch
in photos of roof taken shortly before he murdered nine
(23:37):
people at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in twenty fifteen.
So we know he had a fondness for apartheid, but
I wonder if he was familiar with the white Wolf.
So in Venadela is sitting there with this reporter showing
him this little picture of a wolf.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
This is what he's talking about.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
He's telling the reporter that he's a member of this
extremely militant, violent arm of the AWB, that they're planning
to get a race war going before Christmas, and he
really wants the paper to run a story that will
convince people that there are hundreds more Barren Stritums out
there lying in wait. And the reason the reporter didn't
(24:23):
believe him is because it had been discussed extensively during
Stritem's trial just a few months earlier. There was no
reason to believe any actual group called the White Wolves existed.
He was a member of AWB, that was fairly certain,
But when it came to the White Wolves, it appeared
to just be a pack of one. Finandel was maybe
(24:46):
just planting seeds of propaganda. He was trying to capitalize
on this intense fear and trauma surrounding Stritem's murders by
convincing people it could happen again at any time. But
Leonard Fienentdal had been telling the truth about at least
one thing when he spoke to that reporter. Before his arrest,
(25:07):
there had been some splintering within the Africaner Resistance movement.
Members of a w B had started forming increasingly violent
breakaway groups, groups like the Orde Vandi Dude, which translates
to the Order of Death and the Order Borfolk the
Order of the Boer People. And that name might sound familiar.
(25:29):
A violent fascist group calling itself the Order, We've heard
that one before. Its founder would later say that he'd
never actually heard of Robert J. Matthews, the American neo
Nazi who founded a group called The Order in nineteen
eighty three. It seems both men arrived at the name independently,
but for the exact same reason. It was the name
(25:51):
of the fictional white supremacist organization in William Luther Pierce's
novel The Turner Diaries. And you might remember the name
of the man who founded the South African version of
the Order. Remember last week we were talking about the
trial of Massimo Bolo and Fabiomiello, the Italian fascist convicted
of the vit Commando bombings in nineteen eighty. As the
(26:14):
two men were led into the court room on the
first day of their trial, one man in the gallery
stood up and applauded for the bombers. And that man
was pretorious city councilor Pete Rudolph. And so by this
point in our timeline, Rudolph is a high ranking member
of the africaner resistance movement, the AWB, and Pete Rudolph
(26:35):
maintains to this day that he founded the Order in
nineteen eighty nine with the knowledge and blessing of AWB's leader,
Eugene are Blanche, specifically so that AWB members could engage
in more violent resistance without risking AWB itself being sanctioned
or banned. And if that's true, it's actually quite similar
(27:00):
in that respect to the group of the same name
in the United States. When Robert Matthews founded the Order,
he did so with the knowledge and blessing of William
Luther Pierce, announcing the formation of the group in a
speech at the annual meeting of Pierce's National Alliance. And
National Alliance benefited ideologically and financially from the Order's crimes,
(27:22):
but they had the plausible deniability of having no formal
affiliation with the group. Just like Pierce, a National Alliance,
Terre Blanche and the AWB could sit back and enjoy
the political benefit of their orders act of terror without
the risk of appearing to have authorized them. The Order
(27:43):
Boro Folk was definitely founded and led by Pete Rudolph,
but press clippings over the years occasionally name other men
as the group's leader. At one point, Nick Stridem, the
father of mass murderer Baron Stritem, is quoted as the
head of the US Order. In nineteen ninety four, a
South African TV news program aired an interview with a
(28:06):
man claiming to be the leader of the Order. I
was perhaps as surprised as Pete Rudolph was to see
Leonard Vnandhal staring back at me from the screen. Rudolph
would later tell the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Venandal
had appointed himself as chief of Staff of the Order
without his permission, and that such a position didn't even exist,
(28:28):
And he called Venandal quote a man fond of publicity
with strong national socialist inclinations. And he scoffed at the
very idea that he would have let Vnondal lead anything,
disparagingly referring to Venondal's habit of appearing in public in
a khaki uniform, saying, I despise a khaki uniform. Let
(28:52):
me tell you, because khaki is the color of the British.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
But I guess the fashion.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
Police unit of the Nazi terror squad is really neither
here nor there. No one denies Venandal was a member
of the Order. In fact, when Venandal, Cleans and stopped
Forth had escaped from custody in Namibia, it had been
the Order who picked them up on the side of
the road there next to the still bleeding policemen. The
(29:19):
man driving their getaway car was Rudolph's chief deputy, Hank Bradenhan.
Rudolph claims the Order was formerly established in October of
nineteen eighty nine, but they didn't announce their presence to
the world until February of nineteen ninety, when a small
group of quote suspicious looking white men vandalized the British
(29:40):
embassy in Pretoria. Witnesses saw them walk up to the
embassy gates and spray paint in Afrikaans. The struggle begins
and they signed the statement Order. Borofolk police looked at
the graffiti and said they'd never heard of the group.
(30:01):
One member spoke anonymously with the press and said they
were allied with the White Wolves. In April of nineteen ninety,
(30:23):
the Order Boro Folk took its first big step. Pete
Rudolph organized and led a raid on a South African
Air Force base, carried out in collaboration with three young
A Tobb sympathizers within the Air Force. Order members, including
Leonard Wienendahl, stole a busload of guns and ammunition from
the South African Defense Force. Rudolph called the Pretoria News
(30:45):
while on the run to take credit for the heist,
saying it was time for war. Quote, I have now
crossed the rubicon. The Boer now have a chance to
arm themselves. We are now going for the a n
c's throat. And keep those guns in the back of
your mind too. I'll remind you, but one of those
(31:06):
guns shows back up. In June, Rudolph recorded a half
hour long video declaring war against the government, and he
mailed copies to several news outlets as well as other
right wing groups. I could only find a short clip
of it. I don't know why it looked so hard
(31:26):
for the full video. It wouldn't have done me any good.
It's all in Afrikaans, but still frames from the video
show Rudolph sitting at a desk flanked by masked men
carrying rifles they'd stolen from the military. And the message
was part press release, part warning, part call to action.
He's speaking to a variety of audiences here and for
(31:49):
his fellow African or nationalists. His message was pretty simple.
It's not time to talk anymore and it is quote
better to die in glory than to live in disgrace.
Within days of this video's release, the bombs started going off.
(32:09):
In late June and early July nineteen ninety bombs went
off every night. A bomb went off at a bus
terminal in Johannesburg. Injuring nearly thirty people. Bombs went off
at both the home and business belonging to Clive Gilbert,
a Johannesburg City councilor who was both Jewish and a
member of the Democratic Party. That same week, a synagogue
(32:32):
in Johannesburg was bombed and defaced with swastikas and pro
apartheid slogans. The office of the National Union of Mine Workers,
a radical black labour organization, was destroyed by a bomb
that went off overnight. A bomb blew out the windows
of the offices of the anti apartheid weekly newspaper Frei Vigblad,
and the homes and offices of several members of the
(32:54):
ruling National Party were targeted as well, accompanied by warnings
that President day Clerk must stop all efforts to adopt
moderate reforms. And then the phone calls came. Two phone
calls to the offices of a pro government newspaper. The
first caller spoke English, not Afrikaans. A day later a
(33:17):
second call came in to the same paper, and this
caller spoke Afrikaans, but he used the code word the
reporter had given the previous caller to ensure he was
speaking with the same group. Both callers told the newspaper
that the White Wolves were responsible for the bombings and
that the bombings would continue if their demands weren't meant.
(33:39):
Their primary demand was pretty straightforward. They wanted President to
Clerk to call an election. His moves towards reform and
concessions and negotiations with the ANC, and his recent release
of Nelson Mandela. These things were unacceptable, and they wanted
the opportunity to elect a better white president. But the
(34:00):
group had two other strangely specific requests. They wanted the
White Wolf himself, Baron Stridum, released from prison, and they
wanted the police to call off the man hunt for
Pete Rudolph, who was at this time still on the
run after claiming responsibility for stealing all those guns from
(34:20):
the military and then sending the government a videotaped declaration
of war. But like I said, the White Wolves almost
certainly didn't exist, not in nineteen ninety, not as an
actual organized group, whatever that means for a group that
(34:42):
didn't exist, though they were very busy in nineteen ninety.
In February, shortly after Nelson Mandela was released from prison,
letters threatening to assassinate him were received by newspapers, and
those letters were signed the White Wolves. In May, when
President Declark announced another round of apartheid reforms, including the
(35:04):
repeal of the law that segregated libraries, the White Wolves
put out a press release warning the president to watch
his back. In May of nineteen ninety three black activists
with the African National Congress were run off the road
by two white men. Prince Makina and Simon Koba were murdered,
but Xavier Liquote survived to testify.
Speaker 3 (35:28):
He says before one.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Of the white men started shooting at them, he'd ask
if they'd heard of the White Wolves.
Speaker 3 (35:35):
Lequote said he replied that he.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
Had, and just before opening fire, the man looked down
at them and said, I'm going to show you just
who the White Wolves are. And now in July, the
White Wolves are claiming responsibility for most, though not all,
of the bombs that had been going off every night
for a week. It's possible that some of the other
(35:57):
incidents involving people claiming to be the White Wolves were
just people doing what Leonard Biinendal had done with that reporter.
They were pretending they were acting on their own or
in connection with some other group. But they liked the
way it sounded to say they were the White Wolves.
They understood the kind of fear it would inspire and
(36:18):
the kind of plausible deniability it would give their actual
group affiliation for whatever they'd done. And more importantly, they
wanted to honor the White Wolf Baron Stretum. I see
a lot of parallels here between the way Stritum's murders
so quickly achieved this almost religious significance and the way
(36:39):
modern terogram culture canonized as mass shooters. I didn't realize
they'd been doing that for so many decades. I don't
know that it was ever conclusively proven who was actually
behind every instance of someone claiming to be the White Wolves,
but in at least one of those cases, we knew
exactly who it was. The men who murdered Prince Makina
(37:03):
and Simon Coba in May of nineteen ninety was Peter Grinevald,
son of General Teiney Grunevald, South Africa's head of military intelligence.
Peter Grunivald fled the country after the murders, and he
spent years hiding in Portugal. When he was finally brought
to justice. He testified that at the time of the murders,
(37:23):
he had been an employee of the Civil Cooperation Bureau,
just like Leonard Wienenthal. I'm not sure with conclusion to
draw here, but the only two people I can say
with conclusive proof were telling people that the White Wolves
were real. Both turned out to be members of state
(37:46):
sponsored death squads. But when it comes to those bombings
in July, the police knew it wasn't the White Wolves
because they knew it was members of the AWB, know
more specifically that it was members of the closely aligned
splinter group, the Ordered Bora Folk. There are a lot
(38:07):
of reasons why we know that to be true, but
just in case, here's Pete Rudolph himself saying it in
an interview last year.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
We blew up National Party offices, we attacked some of
the trade unions, and it was becoming an open war.
And this was under the flag of the Order bouer Vault.
Speaker 5 (38:38):
Under the Order Bafowk, which was started on the tenth
of October eighteen eighty nine in Connivance and with the
assistance of the AWB.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
All three of the men who bombed those UN offices
in Namibia in nineteen eighty nine, had appeared in South
Africa by mid nineteen ninety, and all three were actively
involved in the Order's bombing campaign that summer, and when
the police started making arrests in July of nineteen ninety,
Horse Cleans, Darryl Stopped Fourth and Leonard Fienendal were three
(39:17):
of the ten men detained in connection with the bombings.
All ten of those men had ties to AWB. Several
would later testify that they'd also been members of the
Order of Death, a group that required members to commit
a random, unprovoked murder as an act of initiation. Now
I'm gonna be honest with you, I don't know what
(39:41):
happened next. I tried so hard to sort this out.
I love a day by day timeline, but I think
there are a lot of factors complicating things here. I mean,
first of all, it was thirty five years ago. Not
every piece of news has been archived and digitized, and
there's probably reporting out there that I just can't access.
(40:02):
And there are still the issues I talked about last
week when it comes to locating source material in a
foreign language with naming conventions and cultural context that I
just don't have. I've noticed a surprisingly casual attitude towards
spelling and nicknames. I mean, it was incredibly common across
all of my sources for this story for someone's name
(40:24):
to be spelled a handful of different ways, pretty interchangeably,
sometimes even within the same article. And it seems like
it might be normal in Afrikaans to refer to a
particular individual using their full name, or just their first
and middle initial with their last name, or some kind
of nickname, even in very formal writing, again totally interchangeably.
(40:49):
It took me a week to realize that KOs is
a nickname for Jacobis and one guy might be written
about both ways from sentence to sentence.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (40:59):
Maybe this is cultural, I have no idea, but it
really complicates the process of looking for information. I've also
noticed dates are often wrong, I mean a lot, like
markedly provably wrong, just not consistent from source to source,
sometimes just offering information that isn't possible. I mentioned last
(41:23):
week that some of the dates in the Truth and
Reconciliation Report are definitely not correct. Things like the year
the BIT commando trials took place are pretty easy to
corroborate with newspaper archives, and it happens over and over again.
The bombing of the Frei Week Blot office is widely
reported in later sources to have occurred in nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 3 (41:45):
The paper's own.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
Editor, Max Duprees even puts the date as nineteen ninety
one in his memoirs, but.
Speaker 3 (41:51):
That's not true. He spoke to a reporter.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
From The London Times about the bombing the day after
it happened in July of nineteen ninety and Dubray's writes
in his book that Leonard Vnendhal had confessed to having
planted that bomb, which again could not have happened in
nineteen ninety one because Leonard Venondal was in prison in
nineteen ninety one, and the confession in question is actually
(42:18):
very well documented because Venondal would later testify before the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission that he'd only confess to that
bombing because police interrogators had electrocuted his testicles in July
of nineteen ninety. So sorting out a day by day timeline,
which is again my preferred strategy, really just wasn't possible here.
(42:42):
There is no consistently reliable source when it comes to
when a particular event actually happened. And I'm not kidding
about that, the bit about Vnondal claiming to have been tortured.
He applied to testify before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
not as a purportuse, but as a victim. He offered
(43:03):
testimony about abuse he'd suffered after his arrest in July
of nineteen ninety.
Speaker 6 (43:10):
I then experienced being shocked. Then the current would come
through my legs, through my armpun through my gentiles. Sometimes
they would come all three together. While this was going,
he shout at me, why don't I call my God
to release me from the chain.
Speaker 2 (43:34):
That clip comes from one of the weekly hour long
broadcasts that aired every Sunday from nineteen ninety six through
nineteen ninety eight. Every week South Africans could tune in
for the Truth and Reconciliation Special Report, a compilation of
clips from the hearings that was presented by Max Dupries,
the newspaper editor whose office Mean and All admitted to bombing,
(43:58):
and Dupriez ends that segment of the show with his
own commentary, I'm.
Speaker 7 (44:05):
Looking forward to mister Finnandah's amnesty, education hearing, and perhaps
are Departments of Justice and Foreign Affairs of the public
and explanation why he has not been sent back to
themobia to stand trial.
Speaker 2 (44:19):
But back to the question of the missing facts, perhaps
the biggest factor here is that some of this information
just isn't there to find. And I don't mean it's
missing from the archives. I mean it doesn't exist. These
final years of the apartheid regime were chaotic. Someone might
(44:40):
get arrested for terrorism and then there just isn't ever
any follow up. I may be searching for answers that
aren't there, because sometimes Copps would round up a bunch
of guys and put a story in the newspaper, and
then I don't know, they just aren't in jail anymore
and there's never any more to the story. Sometimes people
(45:00):
escaped two members of the Order Boro Folk definitely did.
And sometimes people were quietly released because they secretly worked
for the government. And during this time period especially, the
government had a strategy of politically targeted amnesty. As part
of this effort to cool tensions and advanced negotiations, there
(45:25):
were these occasional releases of political prisoners. They just pick
a few guys on both sides of the conflict and
let them go. And unlike the later, more organized and
thoughtful process of granting amnesty through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
this at least to me, I could be wrong here,
but this looked a little haphazard. It doesn't look like
(45:48):
these early nineties amnesty releases really involved any sort of
long process of thoroughly accounting for what actually happened and
documenting the specifics and getting statements on the record, getting
people to admit.
Speaker 3 (46:02):
What they'd done.
Speaker 2 (46:03):
They just sort of let people go. And one of
the more egregious instances of this was the release of
Baron Stritum in nineteen ninety two. The men who laughed
as he shot pedestrians at random, had served just four years,
and the release of political prisoners was a part of
(46:25):
the ongoing negotiations between the National Party administration and the
African National Congress. Both sides were getting some of their
people out of prison, and the A and C seemed
generally supportive of the strategy, but not when it came
to Baron Stritum. Cyril Ramaposa, the current President of South Africa,
was the A and C General secretary back in nineteen
(46:47):
ninety two, and he issued their statement condemning the decision.
Our prisoners will not go out and commit these acts again,
he said, But there's no guarantee that the prisoners who
hate black people will not come out and shoot more
black people. Baron Stredam didn't carry out another mass shooting
after his release, not that I'm aware of, but he
(47:08):
did continue to support and encourage far right violence. Shortly
after his release, Australian journalist Alan Hogan interviewed Stritam about
the murders on camera, not in a studio or his
living room. No, the interview took place as the pair
walked together along the path that Stridam had taken that day,
(47:30):
and he's pointing out the locations, each spot where he
took a human life, and he's laughing, and he enthusiastically
agrees that, Yeah, if you gave me a gun right now,
I'd do it again, right Glynnland?
Speaker 3 (47:49):
Then I say shut another one.
Speaker 7 (47:51):
Yeah, that's three, so that's.
Speaker 6 (47:54):
Free so far.
Speaker 7 (47:56):
You see these couple of bucks sitting here now, if.
Speaker 1 (47:59):
Yeah, would you like to shake them another time?
Speaker 2 (48:06):
Series All that to say, the early nineties were a
little chaotic, so I'm comfortable saying I just don't know
why it looks like no one was ever charged for
those bombings in July of nineteen ninety. I can tell
(48:27):
you for certain that ten members of the Order were
arrested in the summer of nineteen ninety after that series
of bombings. One was released after he agreed to cooperate
to escape and Leonard Wienendal, Darryl stopped Forth and Horse
Cleans were in jail, originally held in connection with the
(48:48):
bombings for violations of Section twenty nine of the Internal
Security Act, and they seemed to stay in jail for
quite a while. No charges were ever actually filed against
them for those bombs in South Africa, but while they
were in custody, the newly independent nation of Namibia filed
a petition to have them extradited to face trial for
(49:09):
those murders.
Speaker 3 (49:10):
In nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
The Truth and Reconciliation Report notes in passing that they
were never interviewed by Namibian authorities during this time period.
It doesn't say why, if they asked and weren't given permission,
or if they just never asked. And I do have
articles that were published in nineteen ninety and nineteen ninety one.
(49:33):
That seemed to indicate they remained in continuous custody throughout
this time. But after those first few months, the articles
stopped mentioning why they'd been arrested in the first place,
and they only refer to the fact that they're still
being held pending a determination about extradition. By July of
nineteen ninety one, a year after they were arrested, both
Vinendhal and Clem's were reportedly dangerously ill from an ongoing
(49:57):
hunger strike, along with other incarcerated members they Order moor Folk.
Speaker 3 (50:02):
They were political prisoners.
Speaker 2 (50:03):
They said they'd only carried out the orders of the state.
They can't be prosecuted for that, and they said they
would continue their hunger strike until their demands were met.
News stories show finnandl was on a hunger strike as
early as January of ninety one and as late as
August of ninety two, So that can't have been continuous.
Speaker 3 (50:24):
Because he's still alive. But for about two years.
Speaker 2 (50:29):
I can place him in jail and he's going on
intermittent hunger strikes to protest this continued detention. In April
of nineteen ninety two, a South African judge did rule
that the Autio three could be extradited to Namibia. Stop
Fourth and Venandal tried to appeal that ruling, but horse
Glens wasn't really participating. He just kind of disappeared, and
(50:52):
when they were all released on bond in December of
nineteen ninety two to await this final ruling, he disappeared entirely.
It would take another four years, but in nineteen ninety
six the Minister of Justice finally signed the extradition order.
Horst Glen's was otherwise engaged by then. He was serving
time for the plot will cover next week. But Darrell
(51:14):
Stopped Fourth and Leonard Venendal were ordered to surrender themselves
for extradition to Namibia, but they didn't. I can't figure
out where Darryl Stopped Fourth ended up. I tried, but
I know exactly where Leonard Venandal is because just as
he was due to present himself to the authorities to
(51:34):
be extradited, he stole the car, crossed the border, and
flew to the United Kingdom. Some reporting says he initially
entered the United Kingdom using a false passport, probably because
he was on inner Poll's most wanted list, and that
he didn't try to claim asylum until after he was caught.
Speaker 3 (51:54):
But it's unclear.
Speaker 2 (51:56):
The man that Eugene Terreblanche used to affectionately refer to
as as my little fanatic settled down with his family
in Wisbeck, a town about one hundred miles north of London.
He's the chair of the Wisbeck Rugby Club and his
wife Tracy is the treasurer. The payday loan company he
started after moving to England went into liquidation a few
(52:17):
years ago. I'm not really familiar with how anything works
in the UK, and I really don't know how you
could bankrupt a business that's pure extortionate profit, but that
is what the paperwork appears to show. There's been a
handful of articles over the years asking why Leonard Wienandal
was allowed to enter and remain in the United Kingdom.
(52:38):
In two thousand and three, a reporter tracked him down
in his home in Wisbeck, and Searchlight magazine would later
report that Venandal allegedly attacked the reporter, grabbing him and
slamming him up against a wall, shouting, you're going to
find yourself in a very negative position. Subsequent attempts to
write articles about Vnondal don't contain quotes from him. He
(53:01):
and his wife are South African citizens born in South Africa.
There's no evidence he actually applied for political asylum. Corporate
filings for his bankrupt paid a loan company list his
nationality as South African, which, again, knowing nothing about British business,
I assume means he did not seek British citizenship. So
(53:22):
the UK is just willingly harboring a man who still
wanted for two murders in Namibia. International extradition law can
be a bit tricky, but ultimately, even if they couldn't
or don't want to extradite him to Namibia, why is.
Speaker 3 (53:39):
He still in the UK.
Speaker 2 (53:41):
They could deport him back to South Africa and presumably
the South African government would finish what they started in
nineteen ninety and send him to Namibia. In February of
this year, as Donald Trump started parroting white nationalist talking
points about South Africa, min Anddal made a flurry of
(54:01):
online posts praising the American President, writing in one post
last month, thank you President Donald J. Trump, not only
for hearing the plight of my people, the boor africaners,
but for boldly stepping up to stand with them in
their hour of need and face of adversity.
Speaker 3 (54:17):
When Jimmy Carter.
Speaker 2 (54:18):
Died in December, Bvenandal posted, he just died, so we're
supposed to pretend he's a saint. But Carter was instrumental
in killing the free, prosperous state of Rhodesia. Like I said,
I can't tell you whatever became of Darrell stop Fourth,
but we'll pick back up next week.
Speaker 3 (54:38):
With Horst Cleans.
Speaker 2 (54:40):
He was released from the South African jail in nineteen
ninety two, pending a decision on whether or not he
could be extradited to Namibia. Unlike Stop Fourth in Fienandal,
he doesn't seem to have participated in the legal battle
to appeal that decision. He went underground, and he doesn't
resurface again until nineteen ninety five, or when he's arrested again,
(55:04):
this time after a shootout with the South African police
that left one of his young German mercenaries dead. And
that's where we'll find the woman who set me down
this long, strange path. It was Monica Huggett, who was
graciously playing host for those foreign mercenaries. Weird Little Guys
(55:31):
is a production of cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written,
and recorded by me Holly Kunker. Our executive producers are
Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by
the wildly talented Bory Gigan. The theme music was composed
by Brad dickerd. You can email me at Weirdly Guys
podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it,
but I probably won't answer it. You can exchange conspiracy
(55:53):
theories about the show. We have the listeners on the
Weirdly Guy's subreddit, and this week you can apply to
a post on the subreddit with any questions you'd like
to have answered on an upcoming.
Speaker 3 (56:02):
Q and A episode.
Speaker 2 (56:03):
And as always, don't post anything that's going to make
you one of my weird Little guys.
Coo Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
On August tenth, nineteen eighty nine, around nine thirty pm,
a white sedan pulled up outside the United Nations Transition
Assistance Groups administrative headquarters in Autyo, a town in northern Namibia.
They had what appeared to be UN issued license plates
and the United Nations emblem was painted on the side,
(00:30):
so perhaps it didn't look out of place there at first.
Initial reports say witnesses saw three men dressed in green
camouflage uniforms. The UN Transition Assistance Group had arrived in
Namibia four months earlier, authorized by UN Resolution four thirty five.
The resolution had actually been adopted over a decade earlier,
(00:53):
but it took that entire decade to get all parties to.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Come to the table.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
The Transition Assistance Group was there to ensure the sea
fire was honored, that South African troops would withdraw from Namibia,
and that the upcoming election would be free and fair.
Those first four months had not been without incident, but
a ceasefire was re established Over the summer. The South
African military was withdrawing s planned and UN officials were
(01:18):
making progress on disarming and disbanding the citizen militias. Paid
by the South African government. If things continued on this path,
it was looking good for the November elections. But not
everyone was on board with UN Resolution four thirty five.
One small group in particular, calling itself Axi Kontra four
(01:40):
three five Action against four thirty five, did just what
the name implies.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
They took action.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
When those men in green camos stepped out of their
car outside the UN offices in Autyo that night. They
opened fire with automatic weapons hand grenades caused extensive damage
to the buildings, both the administrative offices and the sleeping quarters.
A security guard named Michael Hoseg was killed in the attack,
(02:11):
but the men fled into the night without finishing the mission.
The entire cell was arrested fairly quickly, and authorities found
a massive arsenal of guns and explosives the group planned
to use in future attacks on United Nations targets with
the goal of stopping the upcoming elections. And those men
(02:33):
were in custody in November when the elections were held,
but they didn't stay there.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
They escaped.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
They'd failed to prevent Namibian independence, but now the fight
was in South Africa and they would do everything in
their power to prevent the end of apartheid. I'm Molly Kunger,
and this is where there were GUIDs. This is still
(03:16):
the story of Monica Huggett Stone, the elderly South African
woman who was living in Mandeville, Louisiana, when she organized
a series of nationwide Nazi rallies in twenty twelve. But
she isn't in this part of the story because I
can't tell you about the international network of mercenaries she
was organizing in nineteen ninety four without telling you a
(03:37):
little bit more about some of those men, who they
were and what they were up to in the years
leading up to that deadly shootout with the police on
the eve of the South African elections. I know I
don't have to make excuses for this meandering narrative. It's
my story, and I'll tell it the only way I
know how. I never know where we're going when I
(03:58):
start putting my notes together, and I really can't help
but chase down this seemingly infinite number of surprisingly deep
rabbit holes. And I'm so fascinated by this international network.
Speaker 3 (04:12):
It's come up a bit in other stories.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Dennis Mahon and Tom Metzger had close ties with Heritage
Front in Canada. In the early nineties, Denis Mayhon flew
to Germany to show German neo Nazis a good old
fashioned American ku Klux Klan cross burning, and he gave
fiery speeches stoking the flames of the anti immigrant riots
that were exploding across Germany at the time. The week
(04:36):
before Dennis started making that bomb that he went to
prison for, he'd been hanging out with an Ulster unionist
who'd carried up bombings in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
British Holocaust denied David Irving traveled regularly to the United
States to network with American white supremacists. Frank Sweeney joined
the American Nazi Party in New Jersey as a teenager
(04:57):
and later joined the Rhodesian Army as a mercenary. Members
of American white supremacist groups like the Base, Adam Waffen,
and the Rise Above movement and its spin off active clubs,
have a particular fondness for traveling to Ukraine to fight
with far right groups like the azof Battalion. Patriot Front.
Flags have popped up at Neo Nazi marches and Poland
(05:19):
and its members have met with leaders of foreign fascist
groups like the Nordic Resistance Movement in Sweden and Cossa.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
Pound in Italy.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
One of the young men arrested in connection with the
Terogram Collective was taken into custody at the airport before
he could board a flight to Ukraine to join the
Russian Volunteer Corps. The fascists, racists, and anti Semites of
the world are obsessed with borders, but they don't seem
to mind crossing them. So that's what we're exploring here.
(05:50):
And we'll find Monica again in the next chapter of
this story when she does a bit of border crossing
of her own, but that's not until nineteen ninety four,
and right now it's nineteen eighty nine. In nineteen eighty nine,
South Africa was still five years away from ending apartheid,
(06:10):
five years away from holding their first election with universal suffrage,
five years away from electing Nelson Mandela as their first
post apartheid president. In nineteen eighty nine, Nelson Mandela was
still in prison, where he'd been since nineteen sixty two.
But in nineteen eighty nine, one of South Africa's neighbors
(06:31):
was taking the leap into multi racial democracy.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
Well.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Whether or not South Africa considered Namibia to be a
neighboring country or a country at all, depends on who
you ask. The present day nation of Namibia had been
a German colony from eighteen eighty four until nineteen fifteen.
During World War One, when everyone was a little preoccupied elsewhere,
(06:56):
South Africa captured the colony known as Southwest Afria. In
nineteen sixty six, the United Nations General Assembly passed a
resolution declaring that South Africa no longer had a right
to the territory, but South Africa continued illegally occupying the
area that the United Nations now recognized as Namibia. The
conflict lasted over two decades. The South African Border War
(07:20):
wasn't just about South Africa's desire to extend apartheid into
this colonial territory. It was inextricably intertwined with other conflicts
in the region, things like the Angle and Civil War.
It was a modern consequence of the nineteenth century Scramble
for Africa. It was the unraveling of a century of colonialism.
(07:41):
It was fueled by Cold War anxiety about communist guerrilla
forces and Soviet influence, and it was about white anxiety.
If Black Africans were allowed to participate in government, if
they were, god forbid, allowed to rule their own nations,
what would they do with that power. The whole world
(08:02):
got in on the action, both officially, with major powers
sending material support to their preferred parties, and none officially,
with independent mercenaries and shadowy state sponsored operations popping up
all over Sub Saharan Africa. But by nineteen eighty nine
it was finally time. The border war was over and
(08:24):
Namibia was going to have free and fair elections in November.
In April of that year, peacekeeping forces from the United
Nations Transition Assistance Group arrived to oversee the process. Namibia
was going to be an independent nation, one without apartheid,
and this was a frightening prospect for those white South
Africans trying desperately to hold onto power in an increasingly
(08:48):
unsustainable form of government. Now this next part might sound
like a conspiracy theory. I try to tread waters like
this with immense care. I nearly drove myself to madness
trying to thread the needle of fact, fiction and question marks.
When I talked about the Oklahoma city bombing a while back,
(09:10):
and when I started poking around this particular history, I'll
admit I didn't have a lot of context.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
I don't know the landscape here.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
So sorting fact from speculation and sifting out the lies
as a tricky prospect, And at first I completely dismissed
the idea that these neo Nazi terrorists could have been
acting on government orders. That's tinfoil hat territory, right. I
saw the idea heavily insinuated in some reporting from.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
The time period.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
An article published in nineteen ninety in an issue of
Frei Vigblad, a South African newspaper with an anti apartheid stance,
opened with this fairly explosive allegation. They are fugitives accused
of murder. They come from South Africa, Britainbia and Zimbabwe.
They have one common characteristic. They left a trail of destruction,
(10:06):
death and bloodshed in Southern Africa over the past decade,
but cannot be prosecuted. They are among the most wanted
men in our neighboring states, but enjoy the protection of
the South African government because they have worked or still
work for the security forces.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
But that's not prove right.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Think about how often you see similar sentiments expressed when
it comes to American far right groups. Allegations that this
group or that one, or whichever prominent white supremacist leader
hasn't been prosecuted because they're being protected by the state,
And that's always a possibility, sure, but that doesn't mean
it's true. But some of those men would themselves later
(10:47):
claim that they couldn't be prosecuted for murders and bombings
because they'd been acting on government orders. And again that's
not proof. I've seen that before too. Sometimes people will
say anything to avoid responsibility, and that doesn't necessarily mean
it's true. I'd been chugging along, accumulating sources and taking
(11:11):
my notes, translating old newspapers. I subscribed to several South
African genealogical databases. I was really getting into the weeds here,
all under the assumption that there wasn't really a need
to explore that angle. It could be true, but it
wasn't something I'd be able to substantiate, And it's the
kind of thing I'm not comfortable exploring without something to
(11:33):
hold on to. I don't want to abuse your trust
by speculating wildly and getting reckless with the facts. But
then I realized this is a very unusual set of circumstances.
Normally a government would never admit to state sponsored terrorism.
They all do it, but nobody admits it. And if
(11:56):
you ever do prove it, it's nothing short of a miracle.
You need leaked documents and deathbed confessions. But the South
Africa of nineteen ninety five wasn't really the same South
Africa that had existed until nineteen ninety four. This government
wasn't admitting to its own crimes. The Truth and Reconciliation
(12:17):
Commission was an unusually transparent look at the nation's past,
and they admitted it. There is an entire chapter of
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission final report called secret State Funding,
and according to the report, Oxe Kontra four thirty five,
the group behind the attack at the UN offices in
(12:38):
Autio in nineteen eighty nine is believed to have been
entirely creation of funded by the South African government. At
least one of the men involved was later confirmed to
have been an operative of the South African Civil Cooperation Bureau,
an odd name for what was essentially government sponsored death squads,
(13:00):
and I tell you that now so you can draw
your own conclusions later in the story when things get
a little murkier. So just keep that in the back
of your mind for now. It wasn't long after the
attack on Autyo that members of Axi Kontra four thirty
five started getting arrested. Although the group's name disappears from
(13:22):
the conversation pretty quickly, the men who carried out that
attack were members of other groups too. Specifically, they were
all members of the African or Resistance movement, the AWB
led by Eugene terre Blanche. The first to be arrested
were two South African citizens, Arthur Archer and Craig Barker,
(13:43):
and a German mercenary named Horst Cleans. South Africans Darrell
Stopped Fourth and Leonard Vnendahl were arrested soon after. By
October of nineteen eighty nine, two months after the attack
in Autyo, five men had been arrested. Charges against Craig
Barker were dropped early on, and the charges against Arthur
Archer were dropped after he agreed to cooperate, And so
(14:06):
in December of nineteen eighty nine, it's just three Nandal,
Cleanse and stopped fourth were officially charged with murder in
a Namibian court. The courthouse was a three hour drive
from the prison where the men were being held. After
the hearing, Leonard Venendal asked to use the bathroom before
they were loaded back into the transport van to return
(14:27):
to their cells. And this is one of those moments
where it's useful to bear in mind that the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission names Leonard Venandal as a known operative
of the Civil Cooperation Bureau, those government sponsored death squads,
and he's named as an operative of the CCB specifically
in connection with these events in Namibia. So with that
(14:51):
in mind, Leonard Vnandal goes to the bathroom at the
courthouse and he somehow knows to take the top off
the tank of a particular tur toilet. Someone had left
him a gift in there, a pistol, and he takes
the gun out of the toilet and he tucks it
away and he allows himself to be placed back in
the van. About three quarters the way through the drive
(15:14):
back to the jail, somewhere in the middle of nowhere,
the men insisted that they just couldn't hold it any longer.
They needed to stop to go to the bathroom, and
the two Namibian police officers agreed. They pulled over and
they led their three prisoners out to pee on the
side of the road, and then suddenly another vehicle appeared.
(15:35):
It stopped and two men got out, and Vinadel produced
the pistol from his hiding place, and the two officers
were overpowered by the three prisoners and their two accomplices.
Constable Ricardo van Wick was shot in the stomach and
later died. The surviving officer was forced at gunpoint into
the back of the van, which the prisoners drove half
an hour off the main road before abandoning it. And
(15:58):
then they disappeared in the vehicle driven by their accomplices,
And they really did disappear. Darrel stopped fourth, Leonard Fienandal
(16:21):
and Horse Glens had murdered a UN security guard and
an Amibian police officer. They were supposed to have gone
on trial in Namibia, but they vanished for a little
while anyway. Just a few short months later, both Leonard
Feenandal and Daryl stopped Forth came out of hiding. They
were home in South Africa and South Africa had no
(16:43):
extradition treaty with the newly independent nation of Namibia. There
were warrants for their arrest there, but there was nothing
anyone could really do. Benadal said in a public statement
a few months after his escape, I have now returned
to my family and I'm going to devote myself full
time to the cause as the revolution is here. A
(17:04):
photo of Nadal taken around that time shows him wearing
his AWB uniform and holding his newborn son. He'd named
the boy Daryl, presumably to honor Darrel's top fourth, the
man he'd just committed two murders with.
Speaker 4 (17:19):
And there's an.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Odd thing I keep seeing these guys do as I'm
researching this story. They have this strange fondness for giving
interviews when they're supposed to be in hiding on the
run from the law. When it was announced in September
of nineteen eighty nine, a month after the attack and
aut Yo, that Leonard of Nadal had been arrested, a
reporter in South Africa came forward with a pretty wild story.
(17:43):
While Venadel had been on the run, he'd taken the
time to sit down for a two hour interview with
a reporter and In that interview, he spoke openly about
his membership in the AWB. That fact alone wasn't really
a secret. He was Eugene Tablanche's personal bodyguard, and he
was the leader of the Johannesburg branch of the group.
(18:04):
But he also claimed there had been a split within Aquala,
the militant arm of a WB, with some members openly
declaring their willingness and intent to die for the cause,
forming a sort of Kamakazi unit that planned to carry
out high profile assassinations.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
He also showed the.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Reporter a small circular placard of sorts with a picture
of a wolf. The reporter, yuhung Kus, just looked at
it with disbelief, and he said, there's no such thing
as the White Wolves, and Vinard all smiled at him
and replied, believe me, they exist.
Speaker 3 (18:49):
The White Wolves.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
Probably didn't exist, not really, not then anyway, not in
any way that really means anything.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
Yes, they kind of did, in the.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Sense that if someone were to carry out a series
of bombings and then call the newspaper to say that
the White Wolves did it, he sort of retroactively created
the idea of a group that could be imagined to exist,
because NANDL would later be connected to an attempt to
do just that. But by most accounts, the White Wolves
(19:24):
wasn't a terrorist organization that actually existed. But in September
of nineteen eighty nine, as he's sitting there with this
reporter from the Sunday Times, everyone in South Africa had
heard of the White Wolf, at least in the singular.
(19:44):
Earlier that year, a former policeman who called himself the
White Wolf had been sentenced to death. He was a
former policeman because he'd been dismissed a year earlier after
opposing for a photo holding the severed head of a
black man who had died a gruesome car accident. He
tried to submit the photo for publication in a police magazine,
(20:06):
but they declined to publish it. He'd joined a to
w B at just sixteen with his father's support and encouragement.
He'd been sentenced to die for something he did. In
November of nineteen eighty eight, one afternoon, a twenty three
year old named Baron Stredam put on his custom belt
buckle engraved with the words White Wolf and Afrikaans. He
(20:31):
barked his car near a busy City Square in downtown Pretoria,
and he got out and he started walking, and then
he started shooting. On the day of the massacre, he
just walked for several blocks, just shooting black people at random.
He murdered eight people and wounded sixteen others, and every
(20:55):
survivor says the same thing. He smiled the entire time.
Bradley Stein was just seventeen years old that day and
he was on his way home from rugby practice when
he saw Stridem. He didn't understand at first what he
was looking at.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
This man with a.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
Gun must be a police officer, He must be trying
to catch a bad guy. But then he saw Stridem
walk up to an old woman carrying groceries, and without
saying a word, Stridem shot her in the head. At
that moment, a black teenager called out to Stein, beckoning
him over to the bench he was hiding behind, and
the two teens hid behind the bench together, but Stridem
(21:39):
found them. He shot the black boy. As Steyne, who's white,
cradled this bleeding stranger in his lap. He looked up
at Stridem and asked him why.
Speaker 4 (21:54):
Then I turned up to him and I said, who
kom duniad why are you doing this? And he said,
I said, I don'd it for it two cooms for
wet Sit Africa corners, which means I'm doing this for
the future of white South Africans.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Stritum never fired at a white person. The shooting only
stopped with a black taxi driver, a man named Simon Mucondeley,
tapped Stritum on the shoulder while he was reloading. He
must have caught the killer off guard because as Stridum
turned round, Mucondeley was able to grab the gun out
of his hands. As I was reading about Stridem's murders,
(22:34):
it felt so familiar to me. I've read accounts of
a lot of mass shootings. I've seen videos I wish
I could forget. I've wasted countless hours reading manifestos, and
there are plenty of similarities between white supremacist mass shootings.
There are a lot of common denominators when it comes
(22:55):
to a young white man who carries out a racist
mass shooting. But this felt so terribly, eerily familiar to me.
It was inescapable. It felt just like the Charleston church shooting.
It felt like Dylan Roof and back in twenty fifteen,
(23:17):
several South African journalists covering that story that American shooting
referred to Dylan Rufe as America's white Wolf. So I
guess I'm not alone in that feeling. We talked briefly
last week about the apartheid era South African flag patch
in photos of roof taken shortly before he murdered nine
(23:37):
people at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in twenty fifteen.
So we know he had a fondness for apartheid, but
I wonder if he was familiar with the white Wolf.
So in Venadela is sitting there with this reporter showing
him this little picture of a wolf.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
This is what he's talking about.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
He's telling the reporter that he's a member of this
extremely militant, violent arm of the AWB, that they're planning
to get a race war going before Christmas, and he
really wants the paper to run a story that will
convince people that there are hundreds more Barren Stritums out
there lying in wait. And the reason the reporter didn't
(24:23):
believe him is because it had been discussed extensively during
Stritem's trial just a few months earlier. There was no
reason to believe any actual group called the White Wolves existed.
He was a member of AWB, that was fairly certain,
But when it came to the White Wolves, it appeared
to just be a pack of one. Finandel was maybe
(24:46):
just planting seeds of propaganda. He was trying to capitalize
on this intense fear and trauma surrounding Stritem's murders by
convincing people it could happen again at any time. But
Leonard Fienentdal had been telling the truth about at least
one thing when he spoke to that reporter. Before his arrest,
(25:07):
there had been some splintering within the Africaner Resistance movement.
Members of a w B had started forming increasingly violent
breakaway groups, groups like the Orde Vandi Dude, which translates
to the Order of Death and the Order Borfolk the
Order of the Boer People. And that name might sound familiar.
(25:29):
A violent fascist group calling itself the Order, We've heard
that one before. Its founder would later say that he'd
never actually heard of Robert J. Matthews, the American neo
Nazi who founded a group called The Order in nineteen
eighty three. It seems both men arrived at the name independently,
but for the exact same reason. It was the name
(25:51):
of the fictional white supremacist organization in William Luther Pierce's
novel The Turner Diaries. And you might remember the name
of the man who founded the South African version of
the Order. Remember last week we were talking about the
trial of Massimo Bolo and Fabiomiello, the Italian fascist convicted
of the vit Commando bombings in nineteen eighty. As the
(26:14):
two men were led into the court room on the
first day of their trial, one man in the gallery
stood up and applauded for the bombers. And that man
was pretorious city councilor Pete Rudolph. And so by this
point in our timeline, Rudolph is a high ranking member
of the africaner resistance movement, the AWB, and Pete Rudolph
(26:35):
maintains to this day that he founded the Order in
nineteen eighty nine with the knowledge and blessing of AWB's leader,
Eugene are Blanche, specifically so that AWB members could engage
in more violent resistance without risking AWB itself being sanctioned
or banned. And if that's true, it's actually quite similar
(27:00):
in that respect to the group of the same name
in the United States. When Robert Matthews founded the Order,
he did so with the knowledge and blessing of William
Luther Pierce, announcing the formation of the group in a
speech at the annual meeting of Pierce's National Alliance. And
National Alliance benefited ideologically and financially from the Order's crimes,
(27:22):
but they had the plausible deniability of having no formal
affiliation with the group. Just like Pierce, a National Alliance,
Terre Blanche and the AWB could sit back and enjoy
the political benefit of their orders act of terror without
the risk of appearing to have authorized them. The Order
(27:43):
Boro Folk was definitely founded and led by Pete Rudolph,
but press clippings over the years occasionally name other men
as the group's leader. At one point, Nick Stridem, the
father of mass murderer Baron Stritem, is quoted as the
head of the US Order. In nineteen ninety four, a
South African TV news program aired an interview with a
(28:06):
man claiming to be the leader of the Order. I
was perhaps as surprised as Pete Rudolph was to see
Leonard Vnandhal staring back at me from the screen. Rudolph
would later tell the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Venandal
had appointed himself as chief of Staff of the Order
without his permission, and that such a position didn't even exist,
(28:28):
And he called Venandal quote a man fond of publicity
with strong national socialist inclinations. And he scoffed at the
very idea that he would have let Vnondal lead anything,
disparagingly referring to Venondal's habit of appearing in public in
a khaki uniform, saying, I despise a khaki uniform. Let
(28:52):
me tell you, because khaki is the color of the British.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
But I guess the fashion.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
Police unit of the Nazi terror squad is really neither
here nor there. No one denies Venandal was a member
of the Order. In fact, when Venandal, Cleans and stopped
Forth had escaped from custody in Namibia, it had been
the Order who picked them up on the side of
the road there next to the still bleeding policemen. The
(29:19):
man driving their getaway car was Rudolph's chief deputy, Hank Bradenhan.
Rudolph claims the Order was formerly established in October of
nineteen eighty nine, but they didn't announce their presence to
the world until February of nineteen ninety, when a small
group of quote suspicious looking white men vandalized the British
(29:40):
embassy in Pretoria. Witnesses saw them walk up to the
embassy gates and spray paint in Afrikaans. The struggle begins
and they signed the statement Order. Borofolk police looked at
the graffiti and said they'd never heard of the group.
(30:01):
One member spoke anonymously with the press and said they
were allied with the White Wolves. In April of nineteen ninety,
(30:23):
the Order Boro Folk took its first big step. Pete
Rudolph organized and led a raid on a South African
Air Force base, carried out in collaboration with three young
A Tobb sympathizers within the Air Force. Order members, including
Leonard Wienendahl, stole a busload of guns and ammunition from
the South African Defense Force. Rudolph called the Pretoria News
(30:45):
while on the run to take credit for the heist,
saying it was time for war. Quote, I have now
crossed the rubicon. The Boer now have a chance to
arm themselves. We are now going for the a n
c's throat. And keep those guns in the back of
your mind too. I'll remind you, but one of those
(31:06):
guns shows back up. In June, Rudolph recorded a half
hour long video declaring war against the government, and he
mailed copies to several news outlets as well as other
right wing groups. I could only find a short clip
of it. I don't know why it looked so hard
(31:26):
for the full video. It wouldn't have done me any good.
It's all in Afrikaans, but still frames from the video
show Rudolph sitting at a desk flanked by masked men
carrying rifles they'd stolen from the military. And the message
was part press release, part warning, part call to action.
He's speaking to a variety of audiences here and for
(31:49):
his fellow African or nationalists. His message was pretty simple.
It's not time to talk anymore and it is quote
better to die in glory than to live in disgrace.
Within days of this video's release, the bombs started going off.
(32:09):
In late June and early July nineteen ninety bombs went
off every night. A bomb went off at a bus
terminal in Johannesburg. Injuring nearly thirty people. Bombs went off
at both the home and business belonging to Clive Gilbert,
a Johannesburg City councilor who was both Jewish and a
member of the Democratic Party. That same week, a synagogue
(32:32):
in Johannesburg was bombed and defaced with swastikas and pro
apartheid slogans. The office of the National Union of Mine Workers,
a radical black labour organization, was destroyed by a bomb
that went off overnight. A bomb blew out the windows
of the offices of the anti apartheid weekly newspaper Frei Vigblad,
and the homes and offices of several members of the
(32:54):
ruling National Party were targeted as well, accompanied by warnings
that President day Clerk must stop all efforts to adopt
moderate reforms. And then the phone calls came. Two phone
calls to the offices of a pro government newspaper. The
first caller spoke English, not Afrikaans. A day later a
(33:17):
second call came in to the same paper, and this
caller spoke Afrikaans, but he used the code word the
reporter had given the previous caller to ensure he was
speaking with the same group. Both callers told the newspaper
that the White Wolves were responsible for the bombings and
that the bombings would continue if their demands weren't meant.
(33:39):
Their primary demand was pretty straightforward. They wanted President to
Clerk to call an election. His moves towards reform and
concessions and negotiations with the ANC, and his recent release
of Nelson Mandela. These things were unacceptable, and they wanted
the opportunity to elect a better white president. But the
(34:00):
group had two other strangely specific requests. They wanted the
White Wolf himself, Baron Stridum, released from prison, and they
wanted the police to call off the man hunt for
Pete Rudolph, who was at this time still on the
run after claiming responsibility for stealing all those guns from
(34:20):
the military and then sending the government a videotaped declaration
of war. But like I said, the White Wolves almost
certainly didn't exist, not in nineteen ninety, not as an
actual organized group, whatever that means for a group that
(34:42):
didn't exist, though they were very busy in nineteen ninety.
In February, shortly after Nelson Mandela was released from prison,
letters threatening to assassinate him were received by newspapers, and
those letters were signed the White Wolves. In May, when
President Declark announced another round of apartheid reforms, including the
(35:04):
repeal of the law that segregated libraries, the White Wolves
put out a press release warning the president to watch
his back. In May of nineteen ninety three black activists
with the African National Congress were run off the road
by two white men. Prince Makina and Simon Koba were murdered,
but Xavier Liquote survived to testify.
Speaker 3 (35:28):
He says before one.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Of the white men started shooting at them, he'd ask
if they'd heard of the White Wolves.
Speaker 3 (35:35):
Lequote said he replied that he.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
Had, and just before opening fire, the man looked down
at them and said, I'm going to show you just
who the White Wolves are. And now in July, the
White Wolves are claiming responsibility for most, though not all,
of the bombs that had been going off every night
for a week. It's possible that some of the other
(35:57):
incidents involving people claiming to be the White Wolves were
just people doing what Leonard Biinendal had done with that reporter.
They were pretending they were acting on their own or
in connection with some other group. But they liked the
way it sounded to say they were the White Wolves.
They understood the kind of fear it would inspire and
(36:18):
the kind of plausible deniability it would give their actual
group affiliation for whatever they'd done. And more importantly, they
wanted to honor the White Wolf Baron Stretum. I see
a lot of parallels here between the way Stritum's murders
so quickly achieved this almost religious significance and the way
(36:39):
modern terogram culture canonized as mass shooters. I didn't realize
they'd been doing that for so many decades. I don't
know that it was ever conclusively proven who was actually
behind every instance of someone claiming to be the White Wolves,
but in at least one of those cases, we knew
exactly who it was. The men who murdered Prince Makina
(37:03):
and Simon Coba in May of nineteen ninety was Peter Grinevald,
son of General Teiney Grunevald, South Africa's head of military intelligence.
Peter Grunivald fled the country after the murders, and he
spent years hiding in Portugal. When he was finally brought
to justice. He testified that at the time of the murders,
(37:23):
he had been an employee of the Civil Cooperation Bureau,
just like Leonard Wienenthal. I'm not sure with conclusion to
draw here, but the only two people I can say
with conclusive proof were telling people that the White Wolves
were real. Both turned out to be members of state
(37:46):
sponsored death squads. But when it comes to those bombings
in July, the police knew it wasn't the White Wolves
because they knew it was members of the AWB, know
more specifically that it was members of the closely aligned
splinter group, the Ordered Bora Folk. There are a lot
(38:07):
of reasons why we know that to be true, but
just in case, here's Pete Rudolph himself saying it in
an interview last year.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
We blew up National Party offices, we attacked some of
the trade unions, and it was becoming an open war.
And this was under the flag of the Order bouer Vault.
Speaker 5 (38:38):
Under the Order Bafowk, which was started on the tenth
of October eighteen eighty nine in Connivance and with the
assistance of the AWB.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
All three of the men who bombed those UN offices
in Namibia in nineteen eighty nine, had appeared in South
Africa by mid nineteen ninety, and all three were actively
involved in the Order's bombing campaign that summer, and when
the police started making arrests in July of nineteen ninety,
Horse Cleans, Darryl Stopped Fourth and Leonard Fienendal were three
(39:17):
of the ten men detained in connection with the bombings.
All ten of those men had ties to AWB. Several
would later testify that they'd also been members of the
Order of Death, a group that required members to commit
a random, unprovoked murder as an act of initiation. Now
I'm gonna be honest with you, I don't know what
(39:41):
happened next. I tried so hard to sort this out.
I love a day by day timeline, but I think
there are a lot of factors complicating things here. I mean,
first of all, it was thirty five years ago. Not
every piece of news has been archived and digitized, and
there's probably reporting out there that I just can't access.
(40:02):
And there are still the issues I talked about last
week when it comes to locating source material in a
foreign language with naming conventions and cultural context that I
just don't have. I've noticed a surprisingly casual attitude towards
spelling and nicknames. I mean, it was incredibly common across
all of my sources for this story for someone's name
(40:24):
to be spelled a handful of different ways, pretty interchangeably,
sometimes even within the same article. And it seems like
it might be normal in Afrikaans to refer to a
particular individual using their full name, or just their first
and middle initial with their last name, or some kind
of nickname, even in very formal writing, again totally interchangeably.
(40:49):
It took me a week to realize that KOs is
a nickname for Jacobis and one guy might be written
about both ways from sentence to sentence.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (40:59):
Maybe this is cultural, I have no idea, but it
really complicates the process of looking for information. I've also
noticed dates are often wrong, I mean a lot, like
markedly provably wrong, just not consistent from source to source,
sometimes just offering information that isn't possible. I mentioned last
(41:23):
week that some of the dates in the Truth and
Reconciliation Report are definitely not correct. Things like the year
the BIT commando trials took place are pretty easy to
corroborate with newspaper archives, and it happens over and over again.
The bombing of the Frei Week Blot office is widely
reported in later sources to have occurred in nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 3 (41:45):
The paper's own.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
Editor, Max Duprees even puts the date as nineteen ninety
one in his memoirs, but.
Speaker 3 (41:51):
That's not true. He spoke to a reporter.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
From The London Times about the bombing the day after
it happened in July of nineteen ninety and Dubray's writes
in his book that Leonard Vnendhal had confessed to having
planted that bomb, which again could not have happened in
nineteen ninety one because Leonard Venondal was in prison in
nineteen ninety one, and the confession in question is actually
(42:18):
very well documented because Venondal would later testify before the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission that he'd only confess to that
bombing because police interrogators had electrocuted his testicles in July
of nineteen ninety. So sorting out a day by day timeline,
which is again my preferred strategy, really just wasn't possible here.
(42:42):
There is no consistently reliable source when it comes to
when a particular event actually happened. And I'm not kidding
about that, the bit about Vnondal claiming to have been tortured.
He applied to testify before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
not as a purportuse, but as a victim. He offered
(43:03):
testimony about abuse he'd suffered after his arrest in July
of nineteen ninety.
Speaker 6 (43:10):
I then experienced being shocked. Then the current would come
through my legs, through my armpun through my gentiles. Sometimes
they would come all three together. While this was going,
he shout at me, why don't I call my God
to release me from the chain.
Speaker 2 (43:34):
That clip comes from one of the weekly hour long
broadcasts that aired every Sunday from nineteen ninety six through
nineteen ninety eight. Every week South Africans could tune in
for the Truth and Reconciliation Special Report, a compilation of
clips from the hearings that was presented by Max Dupries,
the newspaper editor whose office Mean and All admitted to bombing,
(43:58):
and Dupriez ends that segment of the show with his
own commentary, I'm.
Speaker 7 (44:05):
Looking forward to mister Finnandah's amnesty, education hearing, and perhaps
are Departments of Justice and Foreign Affairs of the public
and explanation why he has not been sent back to
themobia to stand trial.
Speaker 2 (44:19):
But back to the question of the missing facts, perhaps
the biggest factor here is that some of this information
just isn't there to find. And I don't mean it's
missing from the archives. I mean it doesn't exist. These
final years of the apartheid regime were chaotic. Someone might
(44:40):
get arrested for terrorism and then there just isn't ever
any follow up. I may be searching for answers that
aren't there, because sometimes Copps would round up a bunch
of guys and put a story in the newspaper, and
then I don't know, they just aren't in jail anymore
and there's never any more to the story. Sometimes people
(45:00):
escaped two members of the Order Boro Folk definitely did.
And sometimes people were quietly released because they secretly worked
for the government. And during this time period especially, the
government had a strategy of politically targeted amnesty. As part
of this effort to cool tensions and advanced negotiations, there
(45:25):
were these occasional releases of political prisoners. They just pick
a few guys on both sides of the conflict and
let them go. And unlike the later, more organized and
thoughtful process of granting amnesty through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
this at least to me, I could be wrong here,
but this looked a little haphazard. It doesn't look like
(45:48):
these early nineties amnesty releases really involved any sort of
long process of thoroughly accounting for what actually happened and
documenting the specifics and getting statements on the record, getting
people to admit.
Speaker 3 (46:02):
What they'd done.
Speaker 2 (46:03):
They just sort of let people go. And one of
the more egregious instances of this was the release of
Baron Stritum in nineteen ninety two. The men who laughed
as he shot pedestrians at random, had served just four years,
and the release of political prisoners was a part of
(46:25):
the ongoing negotiations between the National Party administration and the
African National Congress. Both sides were getting some of their
people out of prison, and the A and C seemed
generally supportive of the strategy, but not when it came
to Baron Stritum. Cyril Ramaposa, the current President of South Africa,
was the A and C General secretary back in nineteen
(46:47):
ninety two, and he issued their statement condemning the decision.
Our prisoners will not go out and commit these acts again,
he said, But there's no guarantee that the prisoners who
hate black people will not come out and shoot more
black people. Baron Stredam didn't carry out another mass shooting
after his release, not that I'm aware of, but he
(47:08):
did continue to support and encourage far right violence. Shortly
after his release, Australian journalist Alan Hogan interviewed Stritam about
the murders on camera, not in a studio or his
living room. No, the interview took place as the pair
walked together along the path that Stridam had taken that day,
(47:30):
and he's pointing out the locations, each spot where he
took a human life, and he's laughing, and he enthusiastically
agrees that, Yeah, if you gave me a gun right now,
I'd do it again, right Glynnland?
Speaker 3 (47:49):
Then I say shut another one.
Speaker 7 (47:51):
Yeah, that's three, so that's.
Speaker 6 (47:54):
Free so far.
Speaker 7 (47:56):
You see these couple of bucks sitting here now, if.
Speaker 1 (47:59):
Yeah, would you like to shake them another time?
Speaker 2 (48:06):
Series All that to say, the early nineties were a
little chaotic, so I'm comfortable saying I just don't know
why it looks like no one was ever charged for
those bombings in July of nineteen ninety. I can tell
(48:27):
you for certain that ten members of the Order were
arrested in the summer of nineteen ninety after that series
of bombings. One was released after he agreed to cooperate
to escape and Leonard Wienendal, Darryl stopped Forth and Horse
Cleans were in jail, originally held in connection with the
(48:48):
bombings for violations of Section twenty nine of the Internal
Security Act, and they seemed to stay in jail for
quite a while. No charges were ever actually filed against
them for those bombs in South Africa, but while they
were in custody, the newly independent nation of Namibia filed
a petition to have them extradited to face trial for
(49:09):
those murders.
Speaker 3 (49:10):
In nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
The Truth and Reconciliation Report notes in passing that they
were never interviewed by Namibian authorities during this time period.
It doesn't say why, if they asked and weren't given permission,
or if they just never asked. And I do have
articles that were published in nineteen ninety and nineteen ninety one.
(49:33):
That seemed to indicate they remained in continuous custody throughout
this time. But after those first few months, the articles
stopped mentioning why they'd been arrested in the first place,
and they only refer to the fact that they're still
being held pending a determination about extradition. By July of
nineteen ninety one, a year after they were arrested, both
Vinendhal and Clem's were reportedly dangerously ill from an ongoing
(49:57):
hunger strike, along with other incarcerated members they Order moor Folk.
Speaker 3 (50:02):
They were political prisoners.
Speaker 2 (50:03):
They said they'd only carried out the orders of the state.
They can't be prosecuted for that, and they said they
would continue their hunger strike until their demands were met.
News stories show finnandl was on a hunger strike as
early as January of ninety one and as late as
August of ninety two, So that can't have been continuous.
Speaker 3 (50:24):
Because he's still alive. But for about two years.
Speaker 2 (50:29):
I can place him in jail and he's going on
intermittent hunger strikes to protest this continued detention. In April
of nineteen ninety two, a South African judge did rule
that the Autio three could be extradited to Namibia. Stop
Fourth and Venandal tried to appeal that ruling, but horse
Glens wasn't really participating. He just kind of disappeared, and
(50:52):
when they were all released on bond in December of
nineteen ninety two to await this final ruling, he disappeared entirely.
It would take another four years, but in nineteen ninety
six the Minister of Justice finally signed the extradition order.
Horst Glen's was otherwise engaged by then. He was serving
time for the plot will cover next week. But Darrell
(51:14):
Stopped Fourth and Leonard Venendal were ordered to surrender themselves
for extradition to Namibia, but they didn't. I can't figure
out where Darryl Stopped Fourth ended up. I tried, but
I know exactly where Leonard Venandal is because just as
he was due to present himself to the authorities to
(51:34):
be extradited, he stole the car, crossed the border, and
flew to the United Kingdom. Some reporting says he initially
entered the United Kingdom using a false passport, probably because
he was on inner Poll's most wanted list, and that
he didn't try to claim asylum until after he was caught.
Speaker 3 (51:54):
But it's unclear.
Speaker 2 (51:56):
The man that Eugene Terreblanche used to affectionately refer to
as as my little fanatic settled down with his family
in Wisbeck, a town about one hundred miles north of London.
He's the chair of the Wisbeck Rugby Club and his
wife Tracy is the treasurer. The payday loan company he
started after moving to England went into liquidation a few
(52:17):
years ago. I'm not really familiar with how anything works
in the UK, and I really don't know how you
could bankrupt a business that's pure extortionate profit, but that
is what the paperwork appears to show. There's been a
handful of articles over the years asking why Leonard Wienandal
was allowed to enter and remain in the United Kingdom.
(52:38):
In two thousand and three, a reporter tracked him down
in his home in Wisbeck, and Searchlight magazine would later
report that Venandal allegedly attacked the reporter, grabbing him and
slamming him up against a wall, shouting, you're going to
find yourself in a very negative position. Subsequent attempts to
write articles about Vnondal don't contain quotes from him. He
(53:01):
and his wife are South African citizens born in South Africa.
There's no evidence he actually applied for political asylum. Corporate
filings for his bankrupt paid a loan company list his
nationality as South African, which, again, knowing nothing about British business,
I assume means he did not seek British citizenship. So
(53:22):
the UK is just willingly harboring a man who still
wanted for two murders in Namibia. International extradition law can
be a bit tricky, but ultimately, even if they couldn't
or don't want to extradite him to Namibia, why is.
Speaker 3 (53:39):
He still in the UK.
Speaker 2 (53:41):
They could deport him back to South Africa and presumably
the South African government would finish what they started in
nineteen ninety and send him to Namibia. In February of
this year, as Donald Trump started parroting white nationalist talking
points about South Africa, min Anddal made a flurry of
(54:01):
online posts praising the American President, writing in one post
last month, thank you President Donald J. Trump, not only
for hearing the plight of my people, the boor africaners,
but for boldly stepping up to stand with them in
their hour of need and face of adversity.
Speaker 3 (54:17):
When Jimmy Carter.
Speaker 2 (54:18):
Died in December, Bvenandal posted, he just died, so we're
supposed to pretend he's a saint. But Carter was instrumental
in killing the free, prosperous state of Rhodesia. Like I said,
I can't tell you whatever became of Darrell stop Fourth,
but we'll pick back up next week.
Speaker 3 (54:38):
With Horst Cleans.
Speaker 2 (54:40):
He was released from the South African jail in nineteen
ninety two, pending a decision on whether or not he
could be extradited to Namibia. Unlike Stop Fourth in Fienandal,
he doesn't seem to have participated in the legal battle
to appeal that decision. He went underground, and he doesn't
resurface again until nineteen ninety five, or when he's arrested again,
(55:04):
this time after a shootout with the South African police
that left one of his young German mercenaries dead. And
that's where we'll find the woman who set me down
this long, strange path. It was Monica Huggett, who was
graciously playing host for those foreign mercenaries. Weird Little Guys
(55:31):
is a production of cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written,
and recorded by me Holly Kunker. Our executive producers are
Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by
the wildly talented Bory Gigan. The theme music was composed
by Brad dickerd. You can email me at Weirdly Guys
podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it,
but I probably won't answer it. You can exchange conspiracy
(55:53):
theories about the show. We have the listeners on the
Weirdly Guy's subreddit, and this week you can apply to
a post on the subreddit with any questions you'd like
to have answered on an upcoming.
Speaker 3 (56:02):
Q and A episode.
Speaker 2 (56:03):
And as always, don't post anything that's going to make
you one of my weird Little guys.
Host
Molly Conger
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