Reply #6: Guys, last one. But please read this. OMG!

[TayTay]

Apartheid Front Mulled Funds For Kemp Team
Newsday, HOME, Sec. NEWS, p A06 07-23-1995
By Dele Olojede. AFRICA CORRESPONDENT; Susan Page of the Washington Bureau and Ron Howell contributed to this story.

Johannesburg, South Africa

Johannesburg, South Africa - A Washington foundation that was set up as a front for apartheid South Africa's military intelligence considered giving a substantial contribution to Jack Kemp's 1987 presidential campaign in the hope of buying influence in American politics, according to documents obtained by Newsday.

As a reward for help in supplying a campaign airplane, costing $450,000, officials of the International Freedom Foundation expected automatic membership in Kemp's "kitchen cabinet," according to the documents. South African officials also thought they could win a voice in picking a sympathetic assistant secretary of state for African affairs, according to a former South African spy who covertly helped guide the foundation's work in the 1980s.

The foundation rejected the proposed contribution, made at the request of a Kemp campaign staffer, because officials thought it unlikely that the former Buffalo congressman could win the Republican nomination. The donation would have been a violation of federal law, which prevents tax-exempt not-for-profit organizations from making such contributions. Vice President George Bush went on to win the presidency, and Kemp served in his cabinet.

Kemp, who voted for economic sanctions against the apartheid regime over then-President Ronald Reagan's veto, vehemently denied Friday that he had anything to do with the request for a plane and said that the aide who wrote the letter acted without authorization.

"I've made a lot of mistakes in my life, but that's not one of them, tying myself to South African intelligence," an anguished Kemp said in an interview.

The maneuverings between the foundation and the campaign provide an unusual look behind the scenes into how a foreign government tried to influence the direction of U.S. policy. Last week, Newsday revealed that the foundation, supposedly a conservative Washington think tank, was part of an elaborate intelligence-gathering and propaganda operation largely funded by the South African military. It drew in many prominent conservative politicians and served as a South African weapon to fight the growing influence of anti-apartheid activists and black liberation movements on U.S. policy.

Prominent Republican and conservative figures associated with the foundation, such as Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, have denied any knowledge of the hidden hand behind the foundation.

According to the documents, Colleen Morrow, then foundation treasurer, argued strongly in an internal memo to the foundation's operational headquarters in Johannesburg for $450,000 to be committed to buying the Kemp campaign a plane. The memo was dated May 26, 1987, in response to a same-day letter from the Kemp campaign, asking Morrow's "assistance with helping the Jack Kemp for President Committee find the use of a jet." That letter was signed by Michael Simpfenderfer, finance coordinator for the Kemp campaign, whom Kemp described Friday as "a rogue elephant" who was subsequently fired.

"We can be the 'kitchen cabinet' types of the Kemp administration," Morrow said in her memo to Russel Crystal, head of IFF Johannesburg who had served in various capacities with security police and the military.

"Due to a loophole in FEC (Federal Electoral Commission) law, one person - the person who provides the plane - has the capacity to become the largest donor to the Kemp campaign," Morrow said in the memo. Kemp said he never heard of the foundation, never met Morrow and did not even know Simpfenderfer, who could not be reached for comment.

"I am embarrassed," Kemp said. "I can't apologize because there is nothing in my background that would tie me to the apartheid regime," he said. "I take responsibility, I guess, for my campaign. If I had known then what I know now, a) it wouldn't have happened, and b) if it did happen without me authorizing it, I would have fired him."

Craig Williamson, commonly known in South Africa as the superspy who ran aspects of the South African military's foreign intelligence operations, said he scuttled the request because he did not think that Kemp had any chance of winning the Republican nomination.

"The IFF came to me to say, 'Can we get $400,000?' " said Williamson, now retired. "If we've got to put in $400,000, we would have put it in Bush's campaign, but they couldn't give me a line into the Bush campaign."

Williamson at that time ran another front corporation for military intelligence known as Long Reach, a British-registered firm that supposedly specialized in security-risk analysis in dangerous neighborhoods around the world. Williamson said Long Reach was in fact an intelligence-gathering outfit that set up listening posts around the globe and that the IFF generated vast amounts of information that was then passed to Long Reach for intelligence evaluation.

But Crystal, who first denied any connection with South African intelligence and later admitted that IFF undertook many assignments for it, said Williamson didn't know what he was talking about. When presented with copies of the letters, Crystal admitted that they were genuine but pleaded a failing memory.

"As far as I know, nothing ever came of this," he said Friday.

On further prodding, Crystal said he recalled talk about a campaign plane.

"Craig at one stage had a plane available somewhere in Africa that he was trying to rent or something," he said. "Whether the available plane was a South African plane or not, I can't tell you."

Crystal added, however, that Williamson was unlikely to have turned down an offer to pay for the aircraft.

Having denied that the IFF "branch" in Johannesburg was actually pulling the strings, Crystal minimized the request from the Washington foundation. "We were a team; we were all friends," Crystal said of IFF officials worldwide. "We shared everything together. We were board members. For something like this to come to us was not unusual."

Despite using foundation letterhead, Morrow said the request for the plane was a private effort by the movie producer Jack Abramoff to aid the Kemp campaign. She at first blamed the whole thing on Abramoff, whose movie, "Red Scorpion," was apparently financed in part by South African intelligence, as reported last week by Newsday. Morrow finally admitted that she was probably skirting with illegality. "It sounds to me from what I know now what I was suggesting didn't sound legal," she said.

Abramoff, a former IFF official who has denied receiving money from South African intelligence, also said he did try to organize a plane for the Kemp campaign but couldn't because "a lawyer told me it couldn't be done." At one point, he said the deal fell through simply because "I didn't personally have the resources."

Newsday revealed last week that South Africa's Military Intelligence spent up to $1.5 million a year on the IFF project, which was code-named "Operation Babushka." Crystal, who ran it from Johannesburg, was code-named "Gypsy." The operation targeted respectable conservatives like Kemp and influential - and currently powerful - ones like Helms, Reps. Dan Burton of Indiana, Robert Dornan of California and Philip Crane of Illinois, all Republicans.

While all have denied any knowledge of the IFF's true motives, their public association with it lent enough credibility to the foundation that it was able to attract upfront donations from individuals and institutions in the United States.

According to several former South African spies and spy chiefs, the South African authorities sometimes moved money from Johannesburg and Pretoria to Washington through a local financial institution, the Volkskas Bank. They also transferred money through the South African Reserve Bank under the guise of "strategic procurements," and through various "dead" accounts in Europe, to the IFF in Washington.

Occasionally, IFF officials hand-carried cash from Johannesburg. Wim Booyse, at the time an IFF official in Johannesburg, said he once saw Crystal carry $30,000 in cash through U.S. Customs undetected while both of them were on a trip to Washington. Williamson said the fraud-riddled Bank of Credit and Commerce International also was sometimes used. The Arab-owned bank collapsed after being subjected to intensive FBI and multi-national investigations into allegations of money laundering.

Williamson said the foundation was invaluable to Long Reach's intelligence-gathering operation.

"You'd have an agent who would use IFF cover but was controlled by Long Reach," he said. "There were games within games and wheels within wheels."