Inside Apartheid's Most Deadly Police Cells-A Further Comment To My Wife

My Dear:
That jail facility was run by the Bureau of State Security (BOSS) and South African military intelligence. The actual guards were South African policemen. I never got to talk to the intelligence types who worked there years before. I did talk to the police who were actually there every day for three months. One old-time inmate also knew a lot about it. No one ever refused to talk and cooperate after getting that treatment.
I can surmise that they might have left someone in that state, brought them back to some normality and given them a familiar person they felt comfortable with. Then the Stockholm Syndrome comes into play. The most militant Communist broke. No one died refusing to talk.
The fate of the prisoners was sad and hidden. They never went to court. I am sure some were traded for South African prisoners. Some were released for political advantage. I did know a Major Nick van Zyl who worked for BOSS. He said that some prisoners came over to the South African side and were sent back to infiltrate Communist organizations as double agents. I am sure the rest were taken out and shot. After all when a spy is caught behind enemy lines out of uniform, the international laws of war allows for such captured people to be shot. I presume a military tribunal is required before this happens.
When I had dinner in April, 2004 with F.W. de Klerk and his wife I was brave enough to ask him all about the South African nuclear weapons program.He gave me some shocking and frank answers including the fact that South Africa developed nuclear weapons on their own with no help from Israel. I was not brave enough to ask him about that program. Most of the bad things happened under his predecessor P.W. Botha. The whole thing was "swept under thr rug" and perhaps dealt with as a foot note during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings.
I gave that as an example of my contention that anybody can be broken during the interrogation process and that the CIA used (uses) primitive and brutal techniques like "water boarding" when the South Africans were much more sophisticated.
All of this is abhorrent to civilized people. As I have told you many times, when people get very frightened and feel that their whole existence is threatened, they resort to very uncivilized tactics to survive.
amoa,
-JackW