Did The CIA Help Apartheid S Africa Arrest Nelson Mandela?

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http://www.mintpressnews.com/the-cia-helped-apartheid-era-south-africa-arrest-nelson-mandela/167159/

By Frederick Reese | August 19, 2013

For the last 23 years, the United States and the United Kingdom have desperately tried to keep the wraps on a deeply embarrassing secret, whose truth has only been alleged. In light of recent history — the end of apartheid, the election of Nelson Mandela as the first Black president of South Africa and, 14 years later, the election of Barack Obama as the first Black president of the United States — the idea that the U.S. and the U.K. were directly involved in the arrest of Mandela in 1962 forces hard questions about the nations’ motives and support for the Apartheid State and about the ramifications of being on the wrong side of history.

As originally published in the Chicago Tribune in 1990, a former Central Intelligence Agency official acknowledged that Paul Eckel, a former senior CIA operative, walked into his office hours after Mandela’s 1962 arrest to the South African special police saying, “We have turned Mandela over to the South African security branch. We gave them every detail, what he would be wearing, the time of day, just where he would be. They have picked him up. It is one of our greatest coups.”

In light of controversial foreign policy decisions, such as current American intervention in Yemen and central Africa and past experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, the question of if the United States — 30 years from now — will be covering up its actions begs the question of the morality of dividing the world between good and bad.

Cold War logic

With Mandela free, the operative felt that this information was no longer a matter of national security. The operative called this episode “one of the most shameful, utterly horrid” byproducts of the Cold War struggle between Moscow and Washington.

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