OBITUARY: Former SADF boss Georg Meiring at the heart of intrigues
He survived a military purge in SA’s turbulent transition years and briefly led the military under Mandela
In the bitterly cold winter of 1992, Col Joe Verster, the shadowy former Civil Co-operation Bureau (CCB) chief, was rumoured to be recruiting a second generation of operatives to illegally rebuild that notorious counterinsurgency unit to destabilise the coming democracy.
Verster’s timing could not have been at a more delicate juncture, with the ANC having just withdrawn in high dudgeon from the Codesa 2 negotiations on a new democratic dispensation in response to the June 17 1992 Boipatong massacre, which left 45 people dead — an action in which the hand of the deep state’s “third force” was apparently discernible...
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