Kleintjes secretly backs up and retains intelligence files

Johnny Kleintjes secretly backs up and retains intelligence files as South Africa’s intelligence services struggle to consolidate records after the elections. His copying begins as a response to deletions and institutional secrecy, but the files he preserves contain information with consequences far beyond routine administration. The narrative makes the backups both an act of preservation and the source of a dangerous uncertainty: the material survives, while Kleintjes’s ultimate purpose remains unknown.

Integration and the disappearing record

After the elections, Kleintjes was brought back to help combine the intelligence services’ computer records. The task spanned several former and current institutions, including material held at Infoplan in Pretoria and Denel, records of the Security Police and military intelligence, and African National Congress systems in Lusaka and London. Monica describes a mass of roughly four to five hundred gigabytes, ranging from personal information about members of the public to weapons systems, informants, and double agents. The project required Kleintjes to sort through this material, remove information considered dangerous, preserve useful records, and build a central database on a uniform platform.

That official consolidation took place amid mistrust. Monica recalls that branches competed, covered up, and lied to one another, while some people tried to protect their careers and others sought advantage. In a separate account of the same record-keeping environment, Groenewald describes secrecy as deeply ingrained: some personnel could not handle the new conditions, and operational material disappeared. Kleintjes began making backups when he realized records were being deleted. When one backup tape went missing, he took work home and continued the copying with Groenewald. The sequence links his decision to a concrete vulnerability in the project: records were not merely difficult to integrate; they were being removed even as the integration proceeded.

What the backups contained

The surviving account identifies several kinds of material Kleintjes retained. Groenewald says the files included X-lists concerning politicians, judges, and intelligence personnel: information about private relationships, financial difficulties, and political affiliations. Other files were E-lists, recording people who had been killed and people marked for future elimination. The collection also included the Zulu Dossier, which went beyond names to contain weapons caches, strategy, and plans connected to the Organization for Zulu Independence.

The dossier’s significance extended to a particularly sensitive identity. Groenewald says it named Inkululeko, a high-ranking member of the organization who had infiltrated the African National Congress and was rumoured to have worked for the CIA during the Cold War. He had heard that the person might still be assisting the Americans. These claims are presented as Groenewald’s account and as rumour, not as verified conclusions. Even so, they explain why the backup material could not be treated as a neutral administrative archive: it joined personal vulnerabilities, records of state violence, organizational strategy, and the possible identity of a deeply placed informant.

A private archive and an uncertain purpose

Monica says that Kleintjes brought data home on hard disks and sometimes worked on it through the night. She kept away from the work and says she did not know what the disks contained or what he planned to do with them. In retrospect, she thought he had not handed the material in and might have been trying to sell it, but she could not establish that intention. Her account therefore distinguishes what she witnessed—data taken home and work continued there—from what she could only infer about its destination.

Groenewald offers a different kind of uncertainty. He believes Kleintjes personally knew Inkululeko and may have been his friend. This is Groenewald’s interpretation, not proof of Kleintjes’s motive for keeping the files. The possibility nevertheless gives the archive a personal dimension: the material may have mattered not only because of the institutions it implicated, but because of what Kleintjes knew about someone named within it.

Consequences and unresolved questions

The retention of the files complicates any straightforward distinction between protecting records and exploiting them. In the period’s unstable intelligence system, a backup could preserve evidence that deletion would otherwise erase; at the same time, the information’s sensitivity made its private possession consequential. Monica’s suspicion that Kleintjes might have intended to sell it remains unconfirmed, while Groenewald’s belief that he knew Inkululeko leaves open a different possible explanation. Neither account resolves what Kleintjes meant to do.

Later, Janina Mentz concludes that the operation involving Thobela Mpayipheli was not a coincidence: Kleintjes had instructed Monica to involve him if something happened to her father. Mentz then considers several possible sources for the events in Lusaka, including the National Intelligence Agency, the Secret Service, and Military Intelligence, whose rivalries and corruption could have produced the leak. She recognizes that the hard disk’s contents are a separate key to identifying who was involved, but the leak’s source remains unknown. The backups thus acquire a double significance: they preserve a record of what institutions tried to erase, yet their incomplete custody and uncertain purpose prevent that record from settling the larger mystery.