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Netherlands: BVD's secret contacts with apartheid's spies in1980s: ex-chief Docters van Leeuwen accused of perjury

01 November 1996

Mr C Landman, head of political affairs at the South African embassy in the Hague from 1983-1987, has disclosed that an agent of the National Intelligence Service (NIS) stationed at the embassy maintained regular contacts with the Binnenlandse Veiligheidsdienst (BVD) and other Dutch security services during that period. Mr Landman was speaking in a closed session of the court case of journalist Willem Oltmans against the state, which centres around the assumed thirty-year long covert government campaign to undermine Mr Oltmans's credibility and journalistic activities. In an earlier court session on 30 May 1996, former BVD chief Arthur Docters van Leeuwen stated under oath that the BVD has never maintained contacts with its South African sister service. Mr Oltmans's lawyers have announced they will ask the public prosecutor to charge Docters with perjury. In his current function as Procurator-General, Docters is the formal head of the public prosecutors' office. Mr Landman, who following his tour of duty in The Hague went on to head a special intelligence section of the South African Foreign Office from 1987-1992, declined to go into details of the intelligence collaboration between Holland and South Africa. He only said that "if we wanted information on Oltmans, we would get it from our sister service. That's how things went", and added that interested parties should ask the South African government to release relevant documents. Mr Oltmans's lawyers intend to do just that: they have already obtained three confidential documents supporting Mr Landman's testimony through "backdoor" channels, and intend to ask the authorities in Pretoria for more.