Operation Vula
It was commanded by Mac Maharaj and Siphiwe Nyanda, whom ANC President Oliver Tambo congratulated in 1988 on not only "the immense potential of the Vula concept but also its tremendous yield in terms of what has been achieved within a short period of time.
[6] In 1986, the ANC National Executive Committee (NEC), based in Lusaka, Zambia, approved the initiation of Operation Vula,[6] apparently having been lobbied to do so by Mac Maharaj.
[6][3] In Lusaka, the operation was overseen by ANC President Oliver Tambo and by Joe Slovo, the general secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP).
[3] In the past, Operation Vula has been perceived – and was portrayed by the apartheid government[2] – as straightforwardly seeking to establish internal networks for a violent insurrection, in line with this latter view.
Vula must strike out on a new road – to lay the indispensable foundations for a viable armed struggle by first creating, building and consolidating a strong, resilient, extensive political network that is self-protective, absorb shocks.
By infiltrating senior leaders into the country and establishing effective intelligence networks, the ANC could assert strategic control over the internal anti-apartheid struggle, arguably for the first time since its banning in 1960.
[13][15] Academic Kenneth Good has gone so far as to argue that "through Operation Vula, the ANC intended to terminate the UDF and the broad and deep democratisation it encouraged," commandeering control of the internal struggle.
[4][5][3] Notably, Vula operatives coordinated the ANC response to, and containment of, the scandal that arose around Winnie Madikizela-Mandela's involvement in the 1989 death of teenaged activist Stompie Seipei.
[4][3] The military capacity of Operation Vula was never tested, but it did reportedly manage to smuggle into the country large amounts of weapons, which the ANC underground stored in various safe houses.
[3] Operation Bible was an ANC intelligence project involving the running of an Afrikaner agent, nicknamed the "Nightingale," recruited in 1986 from within the Security Branch of the South African Police.
Those were Maharaj, Nyanda, Pravin Gordhan, Billy Nair, Raymond Lala, Dipuo Catherine Mvelase, Susanna Tshabalala, Dipak Patel, and Amnesh Sankar.
[1][24] The media referred to the operation as "the Red Plot,"[2] and the ANC reportedly spent some time distancing itself from it,[3][19][8] before ultimately admitting that it had been sanctioned at the highest levels.
[2][25] Two ANC operatives detained in July 1990, Charles Ndaba and Mbuso Shabalala, were missing until 1998,[14] when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that they had been arrested and killed by the Security Branch and their bodies thrown in the Tugela River.
[9] In September 2003, Maharaj and Moe Shaik (by then the former transport minister and a foreign ministry adviser respectively) leaked to City Press that Bulelani Ngcuka, then the National Director of Public Prosecutions and an apparent Mbeki ally, had probably been an apartheid spy, nicknamed "Agent RS452.
