In the early 1960s Nelson Mandela was South Africa's most wanted political dissident. He was the leader of the outlawed African National Congress (ANC), which wanted to take power in South Africa. Many of its leaders were in exile.
When Mandela returned to South Africa to organize clandestinely, he was tracked down and ambushed by the white authorities.
New details being published Monday by TIME bolster claims that the CIA may have helped South Africa capture Mandela in 1962.
Richard Stengel, the collaborator on Mandela's autobiography, "Long Walk to Freedom," and a former editor at TIME, writes about a previously unpublished interview he taped with Mandela in 1993. The interview surfaced as Stengel prepared for a podcast series on Mandela.
Stengel reveals that Mandela told him then that he had heard an American consul with CIA connections had tipped off South African authorities about Mandela's travel habits and arrested him when he was traveling from Durban to Johannesburg in 1962.
Beginning in the summer of 2021, TIME and Stengel filed several requests under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, seeking information about whether the CIA had tipped off South African police.
In response, the agency said it "can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records," Axios reported.
Other newspapers in the past, including the Johannesburg Star and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, have reported that police were given tips of Mandela's whereabouts by a U.S. operative in South Africa.
Stengel told Axios: "I think it would be good for the intelligence community to be more forthright about this, the way they have about other things in the past."
"August 1962 was the height of the Cold War—Mandela's capture occurred only a few weeks before the Cuban Missile Crisis—and the American intelligence community believed that Mandela and the ANC were secret allies of the Soviets," Stengel writes in TIME.
Stengel provided a rationale for his argument.
"The CIA saw Mandela and the ANC as a threat to the stability of the South African government. The U.S. had just signed a military cooperation agreement with South Africa, and the country was an important source of uranium and other strategic minerals. More importantly, apartheid South Africa was the West's most reliable ally against the Soviets, who had strong ties with many other newly independent African states. At the time, the U.S. intelligence presence in South Africa was larger and more sophisticated than the South African government's."
When he was arrested in 1962, Mandela had just returned from a two-month trip across Africa, where he had been raising money for the ANC's military campaign.
Mandela wound up spending 27 years in prison. While Mandela advocated peaceful talks with the white minority government, he did not rule out violence when talks became futile.
Mandela finally was released from prison in 1990, and the ruling National Party under President F.W. de Klerk voluntarily announced the first democratic elections in South Africa. (Blacks compose about 80% of the population.) Mandela was elected South Africa's first Black president in 1994, serving for five years. He died in 2013 at age 95.
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