It’s still unclear exactly how the so-called Spy Cables were leaked from South Africa’s State Security Agency, but it appears that centralisation of data sources, as well as poor process control, could have contributed to their exposure.
Al Jazeera, which is publishing the leaked documents over the next weeks, reports that a security assessment in 2009 concluded that the country’s secrets were at serious risk and would remain so for the long-term – a prognosis that would seem to have been borne out by the current leaks.
The vulnerabilities ranged from poor controls among civil servants to regular access to secret documents by foreign agencies.
Among documents thought to have been stolen are nuclear information and blueprints for the Rooivalk helicopter.
Private security firms were also fingered as being part of the problem, with many outsiders having access to government and security systems.
Corruption also played a part, with some documents suggesting that tender information for the arms deal may have been tampered with.
Perhaps the biggest vulnerability, however, came from the merging of five foreign and domestic intelligence agencies into the State Security Agency in 2009.
African Defence Review’s Darren Olivier says it’s impossible at this stage to speculate on how the documents were leaked or who did it without knowing more about the internal structure of the SSA and how it stores its documents.
“Of interest is that the documents appear to be from both the SSA Foreign Branch (formerly the SA Secret Service) and the SSA Domestic Branch (formerly the National Intelligence Agency), indicating that whoever leaked the material either had access to both agencies’ document repositories or that the SSA has irresponsibly pooled its documents with another agency,” he says.
He adds that the government will need to do everything it can to figure out where the leak happened and make the changes needed to prevent future ones. “This will be a minimum requirement if it is to regain the trust of counterpart agencies around the world.”
It is still impossible to quantify the true extent of the leak and its potential damage at this point, as only a fraction of hundreds of documents have been released thus far. “Only the SSA, Al Jazeera and The Guardian know how much the full set of documents will reveal,” Olivier says.
“Much initial focus has been placed on the Mokopa missile case, but that’s fairly small-scale in the greater scheme of things,” he adds. “Some employees of Denel and related companies attempted to sell the missile’s blueprints – they succeeded in selling them to one or more Israeli businesses and Mossad and the SSA arranged a return. This isn’t that unusual, industrial espionage is a regular occurence and this wasn’t the first or last attempt at acquiring technology from Denel.”
* For more analysis on the unfolding Spy Cables story, read African Defence Review (www.africandefence.net).
