Johnny Kleintjes secretly backed up intelligence files while South Africa’s newly integrating intelligence services struggled to combine records and colleagues removed material from the systems. The backups became both a safeguard against institutional erasure and a source of suspicion: Monica Kleintjes could not say what her father intended to do with the data, and later evidence suggested that some of it may never have been formally returned.

A records project in a divided service

After the elections, Johnny was brought back to help consolidate intelligence records across institutions that had operated separately and often distrusted one another. The task was immense. The project encompassed material from Infoplan in Pretoria, Denel, the Security Police and Military Intelligence, as well as the Secret Service and the African National Congress’s systems in Lusaka and London. The accumulated data amounted to an estimated four or five hundred gigabytes, ranging from personal information about members of the public to weapons systems, informants and double agents.

Johnny was placed in charge of combining computer records into a central, uniform database. The work involved more than collecting files: he was expected to identify material that could cause trouble, erase it, and preserve information considered useful. Those decisions made the new database a contested account of the past as well as a technical project. What survived depended on officials’ judgments about what should be kept, and the various branches’ competition and mutual concealment made a complete, trustworthy record difficult to create.

Why the backups began

Monica’s account places the copying within that unstable transition. She said her father had encountered orders he believed Nelson Mandela and Alfred Nzo would not approve of, and that he was initially unsure how to respond. As colleagues obstructed one another, protected their careers or tried to prevent information from disappearing, Johnny became afraid of what the system’s disorder could conceal. He began making copies of some material on hard disks and sometimes worked on it at home through the night.

A second account, given by Groenewald in testimony, describes the same breakdown from inside the team. Years of institutional secrecy had conditioned some employees to treat records as liabilities; operational material began to disappear when individuals feared it might count against them. When Johnny realized files were being deleted, he started making backups. Groenewald said they worked together as quickly as they could. After one backup tape vanished, Johnny began taking work home. The two accounts establish repeated copying and the movement of work beyond the office, while leaving the precise sequence and the full extent of the material uncertain.

Monica was close enough to keep house for her father while her mother was ill, but she said she stayed out of the work. She knew he was troubled by what he found and that he had taken data home; she did not know what was on the disks. Her testimony therefore records both the persistence of the backups and the limit of what the family could know about them.

What the files contained—and what copying could not settle

Groenewald identified several kinds of records Johnny retained. These included X-lists containing compromising information about politicians, judges and intelligence personnel, such as their political connections or financial difficulties; E-lists, which recorded people already killed or marked for elimination; and the Zulu Dossier, concerning Zulu nationalists. The files were not a neutral store of administrative facts. They joined private information, political surveillance and records of intended violence in an archive whose handling could affect people’s safety and reputations.

The copying also reflected a broader vulnerability in the service’s information practices. Digital files and magnetic media could be duplicated and circulated with ease, while networked systems could be penetrated. The organization’s response elsewhere was to restrict access and produce a single controlled paper copy: typists transcribed material in a monitored room, signed tapes in and out, and the digital tapes were deleted after transcription. Against that model of tightly managed custody, Johnny’s private backups preserved alternate copies outside the official chain of control. They could retain material that would otherwise vanish, but they also created uncertainty about who possessed it and how it might be used.

Unresolved custody and consequences

Monica suspected that her father had not handed the disks back in and might have been trying to sell the data, but she presented this as an inference, not something she knew. The distinction matters: the evidence supports that Johnny copied files, worked on data at home and retained at least some material; it does not establish his final purpose or the complete contents of the disks. His precautions could be read as resistance to deletion, yet the same unaccounted-for copies invited suspicion that the records had become private property or potential leverage.

The backups acquire further significance when Monica explains that Johnny instructed her to involve Thobela Mpayipheli if something happened to him. Janina Mentz later recognizes that Johnny’s involvement of Thobela was not accidental, but the reason for the instruction remains unresolved. The hard disk’s contents become a clue in the search for whoever had knowledge of the wider operation, not a complete explanation of Johnny’s motives. The episode leaves the archive suspended between preservation and misuse: files survive outside the institution, while their meaning, custody and intended destination remain contested.