The Whites' Last Stand

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Col Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
September twenty second, twenty twelve may have been the first
day of autumn, but it was a warm afternoon in.

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Washington, DC.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
A charter bus pulled to the curb at the edge
of Lincoln Park and its passengers piled out, all fourteen
of them. Most of the attendees of that day's rally
were dressed alike, black pants and a blue button up
shirt with a black tie, the uniform of the Aryan Nations.

(00:38):
They'd denounced the rally months ahead of time, giving DC
locals ample time to plan their counter protest. Hundreds of
people showed up to see what turned out to be
barely a dozen neo Nazis. The tiny group marched the
mile and a half from the park to the Capital
Reflecting Pool, safely escorted by hundreds of police officers from

(01:01):
the DC Metropolitan Police, US Park Police, and the US
Capitol Police. Dozens of officers on bicycles and on horseback
flanked the little march, keeping counter protesters at bay. A
fax of Capitol Police in riot gear marched alongside them,
far outnumbering the actual marchers. When they reached their destination,

(01:25):
they were escorted into a little pen surrounded by barricades,
with the Capitol building in the background, surrounded by angry

(02:01):
counter protesters and curious tourists. ARAN Nations member Ryan Mullins
tried to address the crowd with a megaphone, but he
was almost completely drowned out by chance of Nazi scum.
If he did manage to give a speech about the
plight of the white South African farmer, he'd saw most
certain no one actually heard it. But just behind him

(02:25):
the rally goers were holding a banner that read stop
White Genocide in South Africa, and standing between the two
nearly identical bald men dressed all in black holding either
end of that banner was an old woman.

Speaker 1 (02:41):
She stood out in the.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
Small crowd not only as the only woman, but because
she was wearing a neatly pressed Khaki uniform.

Speaker 3 (02:50):
It had been nearly.

Speaker 2 (02:51):
Twenty years since the fall of the apartheid regime, and
over a decade since she'd married an American and moved
to Louisiana, but it seems Monica huggets Stone still had
her Africaner Resistance Movement uniform in the back of her closet.

(03:11):
I'm Molly Conger.

Speaker 1 (03:13):
This it's weird, little guys.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
We are nearing the end of the story of Monica
huggets Stone. Not because I'm done digging. I could write
half a dozen more episodes, but because I think you'll
start to get restless if I keep trying to tell
the same story for months at a time. I know
I keep saying this, but it's always true. I really

(03:54):
thought this was going to be a two parter, starting
with those rallies in twenty twelve, talking about the model
resurgence of the white genocide conspiracy theory rhetoric couched in
this concern for the largely imaginary murders of South African farmers,
and then just a brief retrospective on the woman behind
those rallies. I could not possibly have predicted that there

(04:17):
would be so much international intrigue buried in her past.
I certainly didn't expect to spend the last month translating
fifty year old white supremacist newspapers from Afrikaans, or pouring
over thirty year old memos in Croatian tapped out on
typewriters by dead war criminals. I had no idea that

(04:38):
a German neo Nazi blew up a United Nations office
in Namibia, or that a South African accomplice still coaches
rugby in Cambridgeshire, evading an international arrest warrant. How could
I have known? But now we do. History is a
strange and messy thing, and I suppose it's only fair

(05:00):
to give you a brief recap here at the top
before we start approaching the end. You might need a
reminder of where we've been. The first episode in this
series was about an event that took place in February
of twenty twelve, a dozen or so rallies across the
country that all took place on the same day. Only

(05:20):
the one in Sacramento was attended by more than a
handful of people, and it was the only one that
made it into the newspaper because counter protesters from the
nearby Occupy encampment showed up to heckle the neo Nazis
and ended up getting into a bit of a scuffle
with the police. In that episode, I talked a bit
about what the event claimed to be doing, raising awareness

(05:43):
about white genocide and South Africa, which, if you don't
remember the episode, is not a real thing. It is
not happening at all, but it is a conspiracy theory
of some importance to white supremacists around the world, and
it was something of a fringe idea, but unfortunately now

(06:06):
the President of the United States has gotten a hold
of it and decided that white South Africans qualify for
refugee resettlement in the United States. In the second episode,
the one I really thought was going to be the
end of the story, I only managed to get through
a single incident. The first time Monica Huggot's name showed

(06:27):
up in the historical record alongside a bombing. In nineteen
eighty she was a member of a small African or
nationalist terrorist cell calling itself the VIT Commando or the
White Commandos. After a brief bombing campaign targeting anti apartheid
activists and academics, they were all arrested. Most of the

(06:49):
members of the Vit Commando turned out to be Italian fascists,
and Monica Huggot's charges were dropped after she testified against them.
In her testimony, she claimed to be a member of
the American Ku Klux Klan. She wasn't even in the
next chapter of her own story. I lost track of

(07:10):
her for most of the nineteen eighties, but one of
the men who would be connected to her later on,
had a very strange past of his own. In the
third episode of the series, we followed German neo Nazi
Horsed Cleans and his South African accomplices. They carried out
an attack on a UN office in Namibia in nineteen
eighty nine, killing a security guard and later murdering a

(07:33):
police officer In their escape from custody, The men involved
in the attack fled back to South Africa, joining a
new africaner Neo Nazi organization called the Order Borafolk. After
another series of bombings and arrests, they all somehow ended
up no longer in jail. That group, the Order Borafolk,

(07:55):
also pulled off a high profile heist of a massive
cache of weapons from a South African Air Force base.
Remember I asked you to keep those guns in the
back of your mind. One of them shows up again
in this story. And by this point we're up to
the early nineteen nineties and it's clear to everyone who

(08:15):
is paying attention that the apartheid regime is unsustainable. Multi
party negotiations had begun. The African National Congress and the
ruling National Party were slowly working their way through the
process of coming to an agreement about how the nation
would move forward. And as you might expect, most of

(08:38):
the characters in this story weren't ready to give up
the fight. And that's where our international network of mercenaries
comes in, the subject of last week's episode. In the
summer of nineteen ninety three, at an international fascist rally
in Belgium, leaders of European Neo Nazi groups met to

(08:59):
discuss an mercenaries to South Africa to cause chaos. A
date had been set for the election. They only had
a few months left to either overthrow the government and
cancel that election, or convince enough white South Africans to
secede and form their own white ethno state. And in
that episode last week I got a little lost sifting

(09:22):
through old documents from the Bosnian War, trying to nail
down exactly how our German mercenaries got from one conflict
to another, so that brings us all back up to
speed more or less. I spent most of last week's
episodes sifting through the distant past, looking at the history
of the clan in South Africa, then looking at distant

(09:45):
places tracing the paths of those mercenaries but there is
some context at the heart of this story that we
need to sketch out before we move on, because, like
I said, the end of a part time it wasn't
a single moment. There were years of political negotiations before

(10:05):
that election. In April of nineteen ninety four, the election
of Nelson Mandela marked the official end, but it had
been all but over for months, and the end had
been in sight for nearly a year. Here's AWB's leader,
Eugene tare Blanche, offering his thoughts on the negotiation process

(10:26):
to a reporter in May of nineteen ninety three.

Speaker 4 (10:31):
If I believe that they can can negotiate for our
fatherland and get it back and travel, let them try.
I'm preparing myself for the war.

Speaker 2 (10:44):
An increasingly desperate and fractured extreme right wing was doubling
down on violence, but the political process was proceeding without them,
and everything they did to try to stop that process
only seemed to accelerate it. On April tenth, nineteen ninety three,
the Saturday before Easter, Chris Hani was assassinated. Hani was

(11:10):
the General secretary of the South African Communist Party and
the chief of staff of the a N c's armed
wing Mukanto with Siezway. He was a beloved and immensely
popular leader within the African National Congress, particularly among young
anti apartheid activists. He'd given his bodyguard the day off,

(11:31):
and he was supposed to be at home. His killer
hadn't actually intended to carry out the plan that day.
In particular, he would later claim he'd only been in
the area conducting one last reconmission, but when he spotted
Hani returning home from buying a newspaper, accompanied only by
his fifteen year old daughter, he knew he'd never get

(11:52):
a better shot. As Hanni stepped out of his car,
the killer shouted his name, and as Honey turned around
to see where the voice had come from, his killer fired,
hitting him four times in the chest and head. The
assassin was arrested almost immediately. One of Hani's neighbors, a

(12:13):
white woman, called the police and was able to give
them the killer's license plate. When police found him that afternoon,
the murder weapon was still sitting on the back seat
of his car. By Monday, Eugene taire Blanche had publicly
confirmed that the killer, a Polish immigrant named Yanush Walous,
had been a member of the Africaner Resistance movement. Once

(12:38):
in custody, Wallous confessed to a police officer he had
incorrectly assumed was a fellow traveler. There were plenty of
police officers who would have been on his side he
murdered a black communist, after all, but this turned out
not to be one of them. He told the officer
that the gun had been given to him by Clive

(12:59):
Derby Lewis, a sitting member of Parliament in the Conservative Party.
It had also been one of the guns the Ordoborofolk
had stolen from an Air Force base three years earlier.
When Walous's apartment was searched, officers found a printed list
of names. Given that Chris Hani's name was on that

(13:20):
list and he'd just been shot to death, it appears
to have been a hit list, but Walous almost certainly
didn't write that list himself. It was mostly high profile
political figures like Nelson Mandela, Chris Hani, and Communist Party
chair Jo Slovo, but there were also the names of
several journalists, most of whom published only in Afrikaans, which

(13:45):
Walous could not read. The same list of names was
later found in the personal papers of Clive Derby Lewis's wife,
gay but white supremacist journalist Arthur Kemp would later testify
that he'd been the original author of the list. As
far as the official record goes, Camp was not involved,
he was not charged, and he claimed he'd had no

(14:07):
idea the list would be used in any murders. Within
hours of Haney's murder, Nelson Mandela gave a televised address
urging con.

Speaker 5 (14:20):
Chris Honey championder the cause of peace, trudging to every
corner of South Africa, calling for a spirit of tolerance
among all our people. We are a nation in mourning.
Our pain and anger is real. Yet we must not

(14:44):
permit ourselves to be provoked by those who seek to
deny us. They're very afraidom Chris Haney gave his life.

Speaker 2 (14:57):
Hani's murder didn't have the desire effect. It didn't provoke
violent reprisals from anti apartheid groups. It didn't disrupt the
ongoing negotiations. It didn't make the African National Congress less
willing to compromise during those negotiations. If anything, it had
the opposite effect. Mendela's public addresses in the days that

(15:21):
followed were calm, reasonable, and committed to peace, and the
ruling National Party had nothing to celebrate in Hani's death either.
It only served to demonstrate the extreme right wing's willingness
to disrupt the process by any means necessary. They understood
that they were just as likely to find themselves in

(15:41):
a Nazi's crosshairs as the men on the other side
of the negotiating table. It wasn't long after Hani's murder
that it was announced that they'd set a date the
elections would go forward, taking place in April of nineteen
ninety four. In June of nineteen ninety three, around the

(16:15):
time the election date was announced, negotiations about what that
government would look like were still ongoing, and they were
held at the Kempton Park World Trade Center. On June
twenty fifth, nineteen ninety three, thousands of armed Africaner nationalists
showed up outside the World Trade Center. The newly formed

(16:37):
Africaner Folksfront, an umbrella organization of right wing groups, staged
a protest outside earlier in the morning, harassing delegates as
they arrived. As the day wore on, the crowd began
to grow restless, particularly among the ranks of the AWB.
On orders from Eugene Tareblanche, an AWB member, drove an

(16:58):
armored car through the front of the building, and the
crowd easily overcame the police and swarmed inside.

Speaker 6 (17:08):
All of a sudden, I saw the security people running out,
and I said, what's up, and they said, they've broken through,
and they coming, And then my own security men simply
grabbed hold of me and ran.

Speaker 7 (17:32):
Pandemonium just broke out in the entire building. Many people
on the AMC side from the government side all huddled
into the government offices.

Speaker 2 (17:46):
Officials on both sides of the negotiating table fled, fearing
they'd be shot and killed by the armed men. For
two hours, the AWB occupied the World Trade Center, smashing
windows and furniture. They took over the conference room where
the negotiations had been going on, and spray painted separate
as slogans on the walls. Now, the only photos I

(18:11):
have that I know are of Monica Huggett. We're taken
in twenty twelve, and she was nearly seventy years old then,
so it was impossible for me to try to find
her in old photos. But I do know she was there.
She said so herself in this wistful reminiscence about that

(18:32):
day in an interview she did in twenty nineteen.

Speaker 8 (18:38):
They did the negotiations at the World Trade Center at
the airport in Joannasloo. It's not far from where I live,
and we went there one day when the awb Ad
made a sort of a ponzard of argon and went
through the glass. They clearly smashed the glass. Oh my goodness,

(19:00):
it just came down like diamonds. And then we would
about maybe two thousand and three thousand people they're protesting.

Speaker 2 (19:12):
There's quite a bit of actual video of this event,
and it looks really familiar. It looks unsettlingly like footage
of the protesters storming the Congressional chambers at the US
Capitol on January sixth. And I don't just mean visually,

(19:33):
although the visual similarities are striking, but there's that same
sort of unnerving mix of bloodlust and lighthearted adventurism. In
both cases. There were reports of protesters pissing and shitting
on office furniture on the floors, and some of the

(19:53):
protesters just look like they're along for the ride, they're
just enjoying the chaos. They're just smash things and wandering around,
but there are also clear leaders and more militant elements
that are obviously focused on a mission. History really does rhyme,
I guess. But just like the assassination of Chris Hani,

(20:17):
this attempt to derail the negotiations backfired badly. Here's a
and C negotiator and present day South African President Cyril
Ramaposa in an interview in nineteen ninety five.

Speaker 7 (20:32):
I was able to discuss the events with some of
the National Party ministers and they, in the end, I think,
drove them more and more away from having any form
of understanding or even sympathy with the right wingers.

Speaker 2 (20:54):
This kind of stunt only made the far right look
more unreasonable, more unstable, and less viable as any kind
of political partner. The adults were at the negotiating table
and these hooligans were driving trucks through windows and pissing
on the floor. Any remaining hope of effectively disrupting the

(21:16):
political process was fading quickly, and while opinions on the
extreme right varied widely as to what the most effective
course of action might be, most extremists had their sights
set on a folk shot a white South African state,
if they couldn't stop what was coming for the nation

(21:36):
of South Africa, they'd have to find a way to
secure a nation of their own, and to do that well,
they'd need an army. Something very strange happened in March
of nineteen ninety four, a white Africaner nationalist militia took

(21:56):
up arms to keep a black man in power. Let's
back up for a second. This is a bit of
history I was admittedly unfamiliar with, so maybe you'd also
benefit from a brief explanation of apartheid South Africa's semi
sovereign bantustans. Under apartheid, South Africa established what they called

(22:21):
native reserves. These were territories set aside for the forcible
resettlement of black South Africans. They were allegedly meant to
be homelands for particular ethnic groups, So the Bantustan of
Quasulu was meant for the Zulu people, frans Ke and

(22:42):
Siske were for the Kosa people, both with Atswana for
the Swana people, and so on. In practice, though, it
was pretty arbitrary, and more importantly, they functioned to strip
black South Africans of their citizenship. Laws passed in the
nineteen seventies designated all black South Africans as citizens only

(23:05):
of their home land, that is, the Bantustan they'd been
assigned to, and not a citizen of the country of
South Africa. Of the ten Bantustans, four were recognized as
independent states by the Government of South Africa. No one
else in the world recognized these as sovereign nations. But

(23:28):
in nineteen ninety four, Lucas Mangope was the president of
Bothu Tatswana and he wanted to remain the president after
the upcoming elections, though all of the Bantustans would be
reincorporated into South Africa and all South Africans, black and white,
would be full citizens of the nation.

Speaker 1 (23:47):
Of South Africa.

Speaker 2 (23:50):
Black South Africans were preparing to cast their ballots in
a national election for the first time, and that would
mean an end to the Mangope presidency because his country
wouldn't exist anymore. In early March of nineteen ninety four,
Mangope announced that both Withatswana or BOP for short, that's

(24:10):
not just me shortening it, that is apparently what people
call it. But he announced that BOB would not be
participating in the election at all. But with the potential
disestablishment of their country on the horizon, civil servants wanted
assurances that their pensions would be paid, and the president

(24:31):
ignored them. Strikes and civil unrest quickly devolved into a
bit of a situation when the police joined the protest.
This is an incredibly strange bit of history, and I'm
speeding through it here because we've got other places to
go today. But if you're interested in a bit more

(24:53):
about the Boufu Tatswana crisis, the podcast Lions Led by
Donkeys did an episode about it in December of twenty
twenty one, and it's a fun listen. Mengobe was no
stranger to unrest. This wasn't even his first coup. He'd
put down an attempted coup in nineteen ninety and he

(25:14):
was briefly deposed by his own military in nineteen eighty eight,
but the South African government intervened, sending in troops to
restore him to power. This time, though it wasn't the
South African government he turned to for help was a
man named Constant Villiun. Villiune had retired as a general

(25:37):
nearly a decade earlier, and in nineteen ninety three, he
and three other retired generals formed the Africaner Folksfront, an
attempt to unite the disparate elements of the white extreme
right wing. As a former general, Villiune was confident that
if he ever went to war, a good chunk of
the military would follow him.

Speaker 3 (26:01):
I also had forces available, I would say from what
would split off from the Defense Force, Because had I
really taken a military action, there was a real danger
of polarization within the Defense Force. It would certainly have
been a substantial number of people that would have split
it from the Defense Force and would have joined me
in fighting for the liberation of the Africana people.

Speaker 2 (26:27):
By nineteen ninety four, Villyun claimed to have over fifty
thousand men under his command, trained paramilitaries, military reservists, and
sympathetic members of the military who would follow his orders.
It all sounds a bit odd, why would African or
nationalists lift a finger to help any black person? But

(26:53):
it's a little more complicated than black and white. If
Bob could successfully refuse to participate in the election, maybe
other Bantustans would follow suit, making the election less legitimate
and weakening the state. And if this African or militia
could keep Mangope in power, they would have access to

(27:14):
land and weapons in a sovereign nation within South Africa's borders.
It could be a stronghold from which to launch more attacks.
And perhaps they hoped to eventually negotiate with Mangope for
a bit of land of their own within his territory
so they could start their own white ethno state. But

(27:36):
perhaps most importantly, Millyun was taking a calculated risk. If
his Folks Front militia came to Mangope's aid, the South
African government might send in the military to restore order.
And there was a widespread belief on the right and
a profound fear within the government that the military would

(28:00):
refuse those orders that they would not fire on a
white militia. If the military were to refuse those orders,
it would embold in white right wingers around the country
to take up arms. After all, who was going to
stop them. And if the military refused orders to fire

(28:22):
on his militia, Villyun could potentially take control of a
significant portion of the military and maybe they could topple
the entire government. Here's South African Communist Party chair and
ANC negotiator Joe Slovo, describing that fear.

Speaker 9 (28:42):
Some of my colleagues and I feared very much that
the echelons of the army might see this as the
opportunity to try to prevent the transformation. We weren't certain
of the degree of loyalty that we could attract from
the upper echulance of the army, So.

Speaker 2 (29:07):
In March of nineteen ninety four, the government took a
sort of wait and see approach to the whole affair
and bop They couldn't risk a massed affection within the military,
and maybe things would have been different if Eugene terre
Blanche was more of a team player. We'll never know.

(29:29):
When the dust finally settled, everyone else involved agreed that
no one had invited Eugene terre Blanche to the autogal Pey,
but the AWB refused to be left out, and they
showed up anyway. Terre Blanche had put out a call
to AWB members in an address on Radio Pretoria, that

(29:52):
pirate radio station where our German mercenaries had been assigned
guard duty on March eleventh, nineteen ninety f for Eugene
Terreblanche and a few hundred men under his command. Arrived
in Bob Jack Turner, leader of the soldiers loyal to Mangope,
did not want AWB there. Their reputation for uncontrollable racist

(30:16):
violence preceded them, and Turner was worried that the black
soldiers under his command would panic at the sight of
Terre Blanche's neo Nazis. What they actually did, though, was mutiny.

Speaker 10 (30:32):
When my own troops heard that some of the weapons
were being earmarked for the Fox Front, they didn't like.

Speaker 5 (30:41):
It very much.

Speaker 10 (30:42):
In extual fact, they refused to load any weapons onto
vehicles and that any of the weapons were to be
given to the Folks Flow.

Speaker 2 (30:56):
When the BOP soldiers saw AWB men were part of
the Folks Front contingent, they refused. They refused to participate.
They wouldn't arm any of the white paramilitary men AWB
or otherwise, and maybe they would have happily collaborated with
just the Folks Front, But when AWB arrived, they no

(31:18):
longer made any distinction between the two. Anyone willing to
stand with AWB was just as bad as they were,
and the soldiers wouldn't have any part in it. When
the soldiers threatened to attack the AWB men, if they
didn't leave. Hair Blanche's convoy begrudgingly packed up and started

(31:39):
to leave. On the way out of town, though, they
started shooting black civilians at random. As the convoy rolled
through a town, picking off passers by from their car windows,
an angry mob formed blocking their path. The web vehicles

(32:00):
fired into the crowd and that sent everyone running, and
this was the last straw for the BOP police. These
neo Nazis had felt quite brave when they were shooting
at unarmed civilians, but it was a very different story
when someone in an armored vehicle started shooting back. Several

(32:23):
people in the convoy were hit, but they all managed
to escape except the last car at the very end
of the line. The driver of a blue Mercedes was
shot and killed, leaving his passengers two other AWB members stranded.
The video of this moment is surreal. I mean, it's

(32:47):
bizarre that there's even video of this moment to watch,
and it shows three men in their khaki uniforms and
they've sort of spilled out of this blue Mercedes and
they're lying on the ground and one of them appears
to be already dead and the other two are wounded
lying on the ground, surrounded by photojournalists snapping pictures.

Speaker 3 (33:15):
Just get us some outpline please, he's just wounded.

Speaker 4 (33:20):
Let's look.

Speaker 8 (33:22):
Are you finished?

Speaker 3 (33:24):
Get the mills.

Speaker 2 (33:27):
We need an ambulance for this guy that's wounded. They're
just lying there in the dirt, bleeding, and reporters are
asking them questions. One reporter asks them if they're members
of AWB, and one of the bleeding men says yes,

(33:50):
And then, with the journalists cameras still rolling about, police
officer calmly walked over and shot all three men at
point blank range. That officer Vlamitza Beernstein Mignazzo would eventually
be granted amnesty by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. When

(34:13):
he appeared before the Commission in nineteen ninety eight, Eugene
Terreblanche himself cross examined him about the incident. After some
extensive back and forth, with terre Blanche really taking advantage
of this opportunity to spin his version of events, Minatto
again explained that he shot those men because he had

(34:35):
witnessed them shooting civilians, saying, quote, it was quite clear
that the killings were going to continue, and I decided
that rather than to leave those people to destroy the
black people who won't do me any good. But the
only alternative is to do away with them, and that
is exactly what I did. Within hours of the shooting

(34:59):
at the convoy, the BOP soldiers had run the entire
Folks Front out, and once all the white paramilitary forces
had withdrawn, the South African Defense Forces moved in and
the mutining soldiers quickly surrendered and Mengoe was removed from power.
The government of Bofu Tatswana was dissolved by the end

(35:19):
of the day. The whole disastrous affair was the end
of Constant Villiun's dreams of a Boer Folkstadt. As the
leader of the Afrikaaner Folks Front, he had been loudly
calling for a boycott of the elections. The day after
his troops were run out of bob he announced that
not only was he no longer opposing the election, he

(35:43):
had in fact decided to run in the election under
the banner of his newly formed Freedom Front Party, a
conservative party representing white interests. So this is the context
the subject of our story.

Speaker 1 (36:00):
Herself.

Speaker 2 (36:00):
In Monica, Huggett was hosting these German mercenaries in her
home as a part of this larger effort to disrupt
the upcoming election, and with the failure in Bob, the
Folksfront not only lost its leader when vill June abandoned
the plan, but they'd suffered a pretty serious blow to morale.

(36:22):
Seeing your brothers in arms shot like stray dogs in
the street on the evening news might lead you to
ask yourself some hard questions about your commitment to the cause.
Those three AWB members were shot on March eleventh. On
March twelfth, Constant Villejune announced that he was on board
with the elections and was in fact running for office,

(36:46):
and on Monday, March fourteenth, nineteen ninety four, three German
mercenaries opened fire on South African police officers in Tierport,
outside of Pretoria. Exactly what happened is impossible to say.
Even reporting from the time just isn't consistent. Some reports

(37:10):
say police simply happened to notice several men in combat
fatigues in a car and tried to pull them over.
Other reports say the men intentionally led officers into a trap,
but either way, at some point those Germans started firing
their AK forty sevens at the two police officers, wounding

(37:32):
but not killing them. When the shooting stopped, police found
the body of Thomas Konst in the brush near by.
He had a pair of night vision goggles on and
several hundred rounds of ammunitions trapped to his body. Stephen
Rays was apprehended alive. The third man, Horse Cleans, managed

(37:53):
to flee the scene, but he was arrested several days later,
along with a fourth mercenary, Alexander Nydline. That much we
know for sure. Thomas Coons died, Stephen Rays was arrested
that night, and Clen's and Nydeline were picked up that weekend.
Everything else is a little bit fuzzy. In the last episode,

(38:17):
I mentioned that Monica Huggett was in charge of picking
the mercenaries up from the airport. She was the first
point of contact for each batch of foreign fighters. When Raised, Nydeline,
and Coons arrived in South Africa in January of nineteen
ninety four, she set them up with their first assignment,
serving as armed guards for the right wing pirate radio
station Radio Pretorio. Now this is absolutely just me spitballing.

(38:44):
I'm just guessing here, but I have to wonder if
this confrontation had something to do with the radio station. Remember,
this shootout is happening just days after the internationally televised
violence in Bob and when Eugene Tarblance was trying to
recruit ADVB members to go there in the first place,
he made the announcement on Radio Pretoria. The radio station

(39:09):
isn't mentioned in any of the reporting about the shootout,
but I wonder if this alleged trap they led police
into was connected to their job protecting the station, or
if police were patrolling the area near the station specifically
because of the recent events in Bop. Maybe they expected
Tare Blanche to show back up and announce a new

(39:30):
hair brain scheme. An article published in Aberlin newspaper that month, though,
says that they'd grown bored of standing around guarding the
station and had struck off on their own. Maybe they
saw footage of civilians being shot by the AWB convoy
and instead of feeling disgusted, they felt left out and

(39:54):
they wanted to find their own adventure. I guess we
can't really know. I have a lot of unanswered questions
about this incident, but one of them stands out above
the rest. When doctors removed the bullets that had struck
those police officers. One of them didn't match. It hadn't

(40:18):
come from any of our German mercenaries. That bullet had
been fired by Eugene Decoc. Decoc was a death squad leader.
He had been a colonel in the South African Police Force,
but he was relieved of duty in nineteen ninety three
as part of the National Party's last ditch efforts at

(40:38):
damage control after public revelations about state sponsored terror. As
the commander of the Counterinsurgency Unit C ten, Decoc oversaw
the kidnapping, torture, and murder of countless anti apartheid activists.
Later testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation committ would connect

(41:01):
Decoq's C ten unit to the violent attacks in Namibia
in nineteen eighty nine, the ones intended to undermine Namibian independence.
After his bullet was discovered inside that policeman in nineteen
ninety four, a police spokesman said quote. He told investigators
he was on a neighboring property when he heard shooting.

(41:24):
Fearing for his life, he fired in the general direction
of the muzzle fire. I know it's a mess of
a story, But that bit about Namibia might be jumping
out at you. Those violent attacks in nineteen eighty nine
intended to undermine Namibian independence. Two weeks ago we discussed

(41:45):
one of those attacks in great detail, the murder of
a UN security guard in aut Yo. That operation was
later revealed to have been funded by the South African government.
But one of the men who actually threw a grenade
at the UN office was German mercenary horse to cleanse.

(42:05):
So what are the odds that two men who'd participated
in the same state backed terrorism in nineteen eighty nine
would just completely accidentally cross paths again five years later
while one of them was in the middle of a
shootout with the police. It's possible that the answers are

(42:26):
buried somewhere in the case file for Decoc's later conviction
for crimes against humanity, but a quick search didn't seem
promising a coincidence for the ages.

Speaker 11 (42:37):
Maybe, but back to our Germans.

Speaker 2 (42:55):
A later report in Searchlight magazine says that after they
were arrested, one of the Germans talked, telling police that
it had been Monica Huggett who'd introduced them to Klent's
and based on the timeline of events and the fact
that one of them was already dead, it had to
have been Stephen Ray's who ratted Monica out. Nideline and

(43:16):
Cleans weren't taken into custody until Sunday, and Monica had
already been arrested by then. When the next round of
mercenaries arrived from Europe just a few days after the shootout,
there was no one waiting for them at the airport.
Ronald Doyster, Ralph Morajaz, and falk Semeng waited at the
airport for nearly an hour before they tried calling the

(43:38):
number they'd been given by their European contacts at Monica
Huggitt's house. A woman answered and told them she had
no idea where Monica was, but she gave them the
address so they could take a taxi and wait for
her there. They were sitting in Monica's living room when
they found out she'd been arrested on a weapons charge,

(43:58):
so she was certainly in police custody on March seventeenth,
nineteen ninety four, but she pretty quickly made bail. An
Associated Press report published a week after the incident, quotes
from a German television News broadcast. I searched desperately for
actual video of this segment, but to no avail. I

(44:21):
did find a copy of the TV guide for ard
that German TV network for this date, March twenty second,
nineteen ninety four, but unfortunately, it does us absolutely no
good to know that this segment probably aired after a
German dubbed rerun of the American police drama Lady Blue.

(44:43):
But the AP write up says an anonymous South African
woman with knowledge of the German Mercenary cell appeared on
the broadcast, and the woman said that Horst Cleans had
stayed in her home for some time and that the
group he was operating with had come to South Africa
to assassinate Nelson Mandela. Reporting from the same time period

(45:09):
in the Johannesburg City Press says that upon arrival in
the country, the German mercenary stay in a private home
in Kempton Park, where they were given money and documents
before being dispatched to their assignments. Given that we know
for certain that Monica's Kempton Park home was Deyster's destination,

(45:29):
it seems likely that she is this unnamed woman from
Kempton Park with the election just weeks away, the plan
was unraveling. Our Dutch mercenary Ronald Deuster, was unable to
make contact with Monica Huggett. He was redirected to a
farm owned by another AWB member. With his vast experience

(45:52):
as a soldier for hire, he was put to work
teaching the group how to make car bombs. In a
later confession, Doyster explained that he was quite good at
making car bombs, having successfully detonated several in Bosnia, but
he found the whole operation here just embarrassingly amateurish. He

(46:14):
said the people on the farm were ridiculous and pathetic
and that quote. The whole camp was in chaos. They
couldn't even source the materials he'd asked for to make
nail bombs, and the guy he was trying to explain
car bombs to didn't know anything about explosives. He was,

(46:35):
of course personally and ideologically interested in participating in a
white revolution, but he was a career mercenary and his
top priority is always his own survival, and this obviously
wasn't going to work. So he went to the police.

(46:56):
He was willing to exchange information about this operation in
exchange for his own freedom, and when his information proved
to be valuable, he was hired by South African intelligence
to assist them in taking down the network. Searchlight magazine's
nineteen ninety six series of articles about this whole operation

(47:17):
mentions only in passing that Monica Huggitt went right back
to her old ways after being released, placing more ads
for soldiers in Eastern European newspapers. But there's no date
attached to that in the article, because at some point
she left. Sometime in nineteen ninety four, Monica Huggitt left

(47:39):
South Africa. Nelson Mandela was elected president in April, apartheid
was over. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission wouldn't be formed
for another year and a half, so there was no
promise of amnesty on the table in nineteen ninety four.
I don't know if she left to avoid prosecution, or

(48:02):
if she left because she couldn't bear the torment of
living in an integrated society, or for some other reason,
but she did leave.

Speaker 12 (48:15):
When I tried to go over to the United States
the first time, I had to go for three interviews,
and I even knew my mother was a farmer and
asked me, when I go to the States for three months,
was going to take care of the cows? They asked
me that the consul not. Yeah, so eventually I'm not

(48:38):
going into detail, but anyway, I got the visa and
I went to the United States in nineteen ninety four.
I came back in ninety six, and then I got
married in two thousand to an American citizen, Jimstone.

Speaker 2 (48:58):
I wish she would go into detail, how exactly did
she manage to spend two years in the United States
on a three month visa and why was she granted
a visa at all? Over the course of those three interviews,
did they just talk about her mother's cows or did

(49:20):
they ask about the terrorism because they obviously knew some
information about her If they knew about the cows, did
they ask her if she planned to visit the American
clansmen who'd sent her the bomb making manual the VIT
Commando had relied on when they made those bombs that
they set off in Professor's offices in nineteen eighty Did

(49:40):
they ask her about the weapons charge she was still
out on bond for, or the dead mercenary who'd been
staying in her guest room.

Speaker 1 (49:48):
I really would love to.

Speaker 2 (49:50):
Know how those interviews went, because somehow she gained legal
entry into the United States. She spent two years here
on that three month visa before returning to South Africa
nineteen ninety six. In this hour of two thousand, she
married a retired sports broadcaster from Louisiana at a ceremony

(50:11):
in her hometown of Kempton Park, and the couple returned
to Mandeville, Louisiana together.

Speaker 11 (50:18):
I know I.

Speaker 2 (50:20):
Promised this story was over, and it seems absolutely criminal
of me to stretch this out over so many episodes,
But in my defense, I did warn you that there
might not be an episode this week at all. I
lost most of my workdays this week covering a trial
here in Charlottesville. I'll tell you about that soon too,

(50:41):
But I don't want to rush the ending of this story.
I mean, I didn't even have time to tell you
about Monica's belief in the prophecies of a long dead
boor mystic. And in the weeks I've spent putting this together,
history has marched on. It was the President's bizarre our
executive order condemning South African land perform that sent me

(51:04):
down this path in the first place, and he's only
doubled down on his commitment to the white genocide conspiracy
theory since then. No, I think there is a whole
episode's worth of story left to tell. But if I've
somehow misjudged how much of the story is actually left,

(51:24):
I can always feel some time by reading you the
absolutely dreadful poems written by one of those mercenaries. Treed

(51:45):
Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written and recorded by me Dolly Conker. Our
executive producers are Sophie Lichtermann and Robert Evans. The show
is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme
music was posed by Brad Diggert. You can email me
at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I
would have definitely read.

Speaker 1 (52:06):
It, but I probably won't answer it. It's been me personal.

Speaker 2 (52:09):
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post
anything that's gonna make you one of my Weird Little
Guys

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