Tony Holland now lives in Melbourne in Australia but 30 years ago he worked for a company centrally involved in the development of the Rio Tinto Zinc operated mine at Rossing. He was present when the Israeli’s negotiated a supply of enriched uranium to enable them to develop their nuclear programme. He later joined a mercenary gang operating out of the Caprivi Strip near Grootfontein, which we will cover in the next issue.
Born in a poor district of Bradford in Yorkshire during the Second World War Holland had dragged himself to University, where he gained a double first in Engineering and Mathematics.
After tiring of ‘flogging jewellery’ in his father-in-laws business he wrote to Marconi “looking for a professional job.” On acceptance he was told that a great deal of Marconi’s work was top secret and so he would have to go through ‘what we call positive vetting.’
He was unsurprised as it “was no secret that Marconi did a lot of defence work” and jobs for the security services. Named after Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian who had succeeded in sending wireless signals over one and a half miles in 1885, the company was known to have had a long relationship with British military intelligence who had quickly recognised the military importance of radio communication.
“The security clearance consisted of being asked all sorts of questions about politics, religion and sexual preferences but nothing about “my technical experience.”
He found himself alongside three other trainees, including a South African. “I got on well with him. We used to chat a great deal, and the subject of South Africa came up quite often” especially “how much money could be earned there, which sounded good” and “how they were in trouble with sanctions, particularly a shortage of oil.” He made sympathetic noises.
Marconi also sent their new recruits to do some army training at Farmborough where he found himself undergoing psychological tests, being trained in hand-to-hand combat, taught “how to strip a gun” and how to encode and decode messages.
They “said I’d been trained.” He didn’t really know what for. When he signed the Official Secrets Act he was also issued with guns and authorised to use them on behalf of the British Government “when instructed to do so.”
Confused he was asked “didn’t
you realise you had been recruited for black operations?”
and repeatedly told ‘Don’t ask too many questions’.”
He was told that his work would be vital for Britain. Just as he was finishing “the South African” phoned to invite him to the House of Commons.
“My friend was clearly expected” and after he completed an entry card “a tall distinguished looking-man appeared down the corridor” in an immaculate suit. “He was introduced to me as Barnett Janner” and he began questioning the young man about South Africa.
According to Holland Barnett Janner’s son Greville Janner later joined them and all of them were treated to the elder man lecturing the group on how badly the South Africans were being treated by his Labour colleagues. “He complained about sanctions against Southern Rhodesia and anti-apartheid activity in England.”
Holland was asked if he’d like to go to South Africa. A few days later “my boss at Stanmore asked exactly the same question.” He was told they were doing job interviews at the British Embassy in Bonn. He went there.
“A South African called Johannes Brandt Fourie interviewed me” said Holland, mainly about his views on Rhodesia.
Holland was to work for Fraser and Chalmers, an engineering company “into sanction busting” which Holland admits he knew little about.
Holland was given a tie by Fourie with the initials of the then British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. The tie was made out of the word “Bullshit.” It was a club tie for sanction busters and opponents of Harold Wilson. The British embassy was being used to break sanctions in Rhodesia and Harold Wilson knew nothing, and could do nothing to stop it.
Holland and his wife later flew from Bonn in RAF transport via Cyprus “to a military airfield near Pretoria.”
A large black Austin Princess at the airport took them to their house in Doorfontein. Only when he arrived did he discover that the job he had been hired for was “all about uranium enrichment.”
As one of the biggest producers of uranium in the world the South African Government was keen to add value to the primary product which involved adding to one of the two isotopes which go make it up, these being the stable U-238 and the lighter and unstable U-235.
“For nuclear power plants, a relatively low level of enrichment is necessary, raising U-235 from its normal 0.7% to 23%. For nuclear weapons, enrichment needs to be at least 90%” Holland soon realised that “The South Africans were going all the way.”
The mining of uranium is “only economic if the cost can be offset by also working gold mines at the same time.” As these became exhausted attention had turned to a massive uranium deposit in South West Africa, at Rossing.
Although the “ore at Rossing was not rich averaging 0.6% uranium the quantities were so vast and access so easy” then according to what Holland knew “it appeared capable of giving assured feedstock for a major processing plant.”
Rossing is in South West Africa and in 1966 the United Nations had taken over responsibility for territories which had until then been under the control of South Africa following a League of Nations Mandate after World War one.
The United Nations was to act on behalf of the indigenous people. Any mining licence issued by the South African Government was technically void. What they did was to describe Rossing as “a Rio Tinto Zinc venture” whilst bringing the company under the provisions of section 36 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1967.
“The development or Rossing” was done “under a thick blanket of secrecy” and as he saw at first hand “British company RTZ went ahead with a vast open-air operation at Rossing” with Fraser and Chalmers, a South African subsidiary of the British company; Mitchell Cotts which specialised in heavy engineering and construction, awarded the contract for the infrastructure development.
“Of course, hundreds
of other companies were involved in one way or another, supplying equipment
and materials, but Fraser and Chalmers, as head contractor, were responsible
for coordinating all these activities.
Holland was to keep all the logistics in order. This involved critical path
planning and cost monitoring, collecting data from the various engineering disciplines
and putting them together in management plans and reports. He spent most of
his time in the Rossing planning room far from the mine itself.
The mine itself was a long
way away. Along with the head of the project Holland “flew to Oranjemond
via Cape Town,” en route to Rossing.
Oranjemond, owned and run by Consolidated Diamond Mines, is one of the main
Oppenheimer interests in South Africa and was established in 1919.
He was put up in a room at the Oppenheimer mansion. “It was a huge palace
with marble floors and a pillared portico, fully staffed like a hotel, but better
than a hotel, because I had the staff all to myself and no bill to pay.
He signed the Visitor’s Book. “On a subsequent visit, I found myself signing underneath Kurt Waldheim, the Secretary General of the United Nations, who his staff claimed was apparently there to get grassroots knowledge of SWAPO.” This was an unlikely place to do so.
Holland drove to Rossing.
.
Things went well as he got to know people, looked around the mine and worked
out who could be trusted, whilst at the same time trying to establish their
confidence in him...
At the same time he noticed that “There were buildings, which no white
man entered without protective clothing. But I saw black men sent in without
any protective gear at all, to move little plastic buckets of uranium slurries.
I guess they’d all
be dead now.”
Although Rossing was supposed to be an RTZ operation Holland was in little doubt
that the “man in charge Alec Barber wasn’t RTZ at all.”
He couldn’t work out
who employed him. “Barber walked around in his pin stripe trousers and
while I had a room in the Senior Engineers’ Quarters, and ate in their
mess, Alec had a house to himself.
“The odd thing was that he showed a peculiarly intense interest in the
information I was collecting and my analysis of it, so much so that one day,
I said, jokingly, “Are you a spy?” And he grinned and shrugged in
a way which I understood as,
“You could say so if you wanted to.
Furthermore, he seemed to believe that, whoever it was he was working for, I was working for them too. And it wasn’t RTZ or Fraser and Chalmers. “
Back in Johannesburg Holland was invited to lunch with a man from Salisbury, Rhodesia. “This proved to be a very jolly fellow called Ken Flower” who confirmed the impression given to Holland by his immediate superior that he was the Mi6 resident in Salisbury, with responsibilities for South Africa.
“Ken himself confirmed
this impression. He grilled me on progress at Rossing, listing questions to
which “the firm” wanted answers. Flower clearly seemed to think
that I knew exactly what “the firm” was and that I was a part of
it. In fact, I knew little or nothing about MI6 and certainly had no idea, despite
all that had happened that I had any connection with it whatsoever. “
In fact Ken Flower was the head of the Rhodesian Security Service, a role he
learned after receiving training in London by MI6.
When Holland met him in 1969 the British Government was trying to bring the rebel regime to its knees with economic sanctions and general excommunication, but MI6 were clearly happy to give it all the help they could.
“At the very least, Ken Flower was at this time doing various jobs for MI6, and maintaining contact with those who were keeping an eye on developments at Rossing was one of those jobs. And it seemed that one member of that select band was myself.
Along with his boss and two others Holland was “supposed to bring Ken Flower up to date with everything that was happening in the project. This was obviously industrial espionage. But the odd thing was that the people we were spying on must have known that we were spies, and didn’t worry about it at all. It took me quite a time to work that one out.”
Although the Americans would have nothing to do with Rossing or South African uranium others were less choosy. The British, for example, at the time took South African uranium for making their nuclear weapons program, and some of it finished up in the warheads for their trident missiles.
“However the South Africans wanted to find someone with whom they could negotiate on equal terms.”
Hardly surprising, at this time the South African regime was amongst the pariahs of the world.
“But there was one country, which was having difficulty with its own clandestine nuclear program and this country was excluded from full membership of the nuclear club: Israel.”
The Israeli’s attempts to develop their nuclear programme in alliance with the French had collapsed after the Yom Kippur war, and they were left without a secure supply of uranium.
“The Israelis and
the South Africans became natural partners. There agreement had been incorporated
in the terms of a military agreement signed in 1968 by Moshe Dayan, in his capacity
of Minister of Defence. The Israeli end of the clandestine trade went through
a front organization called the Tahal Waterworks Company.”
“The progress of this alliance was one of the things I was able to report
to Ken Flower. For example, I attended a meeting in Johannesburg with some Israelis
who were visiting to see how Rossing was getting on. By then I was really getting
on top of the job, and I was not surprised when the MD of Fraser and Chalmers,
a man called John Fox, asked me to brief him on the current state of progress.
Fox was very quick, grasping it all immediately, and when the actual meeting took place I hardly had to say a word he did all the explaining.
According to Holland the meeting with the Israelis took place in the Boardroom of Fraser and Chalmers in Johannesburg.
“Fox sat at the head, with the project director on his left and the leader of the Israeli delegation, Moshe Dayan, on his right. Dayan wasn’t wearing his eye patch, and there was a gouged eye underneath. I got the impression he could see out of it.
But the flesh was certainly a bit of a mess. We were told that if anyone recognised him and asked what he was doing in Johannesburg, we were to say that he was there for an operation on the eye.
Below these three, the Fraser and Chalmers team ran down one side of the table and the Israeli team down the other, three on each side, arranged in descending order of importance. “
Holland was at the bottom.
“The main purpose of the meeting was to reassure the Israeli’s that the project was running to time and within a cost budget. It seems that their own enrichment facilities were very small scale, and they wanted to concentrate on processes even further down the line. Fox was able to give them a positive report with very good documentation, some provided by myself. “
Holland “was able to give the same to Ken Flower a few days later. “
Both parties benefited,
Israel was able to develop its own nuclear programme and South Africa got some
much needed foreign currency to help maintain the apartheid state.
Mark Metcalf