07 September 2010 Piet Swanepoel and General Johann van der Merwe comment on the Harris case In late August Politicsweb published a review by Jeremy Gordin of David Beresford's new book "Truth is a Strange Fruit: A personal journey through the apartheid war." At the centre of the book is the story of John Harris of the African Resistance Movement who was hanged in 1965 for planting a bomb on the concourse of Johannesburg Station which killed one and injured others. This article provoked a response from all sides of the historical divide which Politicsweb extracted and published here. The question around the Harris bomb is whether he gave sufficient warning to the police to enable them to clear the station concourse, or not. In Inside Boss (1981) the former journalist and spy Gordon Winter said that in a private interview with him General HJ van den Bergh of BOSS had "admitted that the Railway Police had alerted him about the anonymous telephone call it had received at 4.18 saying a bomb had been planted. HJ had got this warning by 4.20 and had used his hot line to call Justice Minister John Vorster." Winter further claimed that JJ Viktor of the security branch had been responsible the brutal interrogation of Harris, which had left him with a broken jaw. This version is strongly disputed by Viktor and other former members of the security services. Politicsweb asked Pieter Swanepoel, formerly of Republican Intelligence and the National Intelligence Service and one of the commentators on Gordin's article, for his view of Winter's version of the events. This and a further comment on the case by former police commissioner General Johann van der Merwe were published in The Police Gazette: Un-official Newsletter for SAP-Veterans edited by Hennie Heymans. They follow below: 5.2 Comment by Mr Pieter Swanepoel (ex-RIS & NIS) and author of Really Inside Boss:
The fact that a lie has been repeated umpteen times does not make it "common cause". I prefer to believe general Viktor. You ask what the truth, as I see it, is about Harris and his warning about the bomb. Well to start with, it has always been my belief that a man who plants a bomb anywhere and then phones the Police to tell them about it, does so purely to attract the Police to the scene so that they will be the first to be destroyed. Gordon Winter, who wrote his book in 1981, claims to have known Harris well. He writes that evidence by a state witness that Harris was a violent man, was not true. "He was, in truth, a softie and dozens of his friends who live in Britain, will, I am sure, confirm it". Strangely enough, Winter allowed this softie friend to be tried and 11