FBI monitored Nelson Mandela in 1990s over perceived communist threat

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

FBI monitored Nelson Mandela in 1990s over perceived communist threat

Ed Pilkington in New York
theguardian.com, Thursday 10 July 2014 18.10 BST

The FBI monitored the interactions between Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress and leftwing groups in the US through the 1980s and 1990s as part of its ongoing investigations into what the bureau deemed to be the communist threat to US national security, new documents reveal.

The batch of 36 pages of previously classified documents, extracted from the FBI under freedom of information laws, show that federal agents continued to monitor Mandela’s and the ANC’s connections within the US even after the legendary South African leader was released from prison in February 1990. The bureau monitored meetings between Mandela and other world leaders, tracked the movements of senior ANC officials as they travelled across the US, and kept a close eye on the anti-apartheid activities of the Communist Party USA (CP-USA).

The declassified documents are marked “secret” under recognised codes for domestic and foreign counter-intelligence investigations. They include a record kept by federal agents of a meeting in Namibia just a month after Mandela’s release from jail between him and the then president of Yugoslavia, Janez Drnovsek. The record notes that a transcript of the proceedings was sent in Serbo-Croat to the FBI’s Cleveland office.

Another document records the FBI’s decision in June 1990, four months after Mandela was set free, to send an informant from Philadelphia to New York to snoop on a meeting that the bureau thought was about to take place between Mandela and Puerto Rican independence activists. “Information contained in this communication is extremely singular in nature and must not be disseminated outside the FBI or existing terrorism task forces,” it stated.

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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/10/fbi-monitored-mandela-1990s-communist-threat

[cprise]

1. I've literally seen Conservatives forget to breathe for a while

and turn even whiter, when reminding them that Reagan failed in his gambit to support the Apartheid regime.

Against a background of shallow rhetoric about "freedom" and "liberty", it must be vexing to say the least.