Reclusive former death-squad commander Eugene de Kock caused a media sensation while testifying in March at the reopened Cradock Four inquest, his first official public appearance since being released in 2015 after serving 18 years in maximum security.
Now he has opened himself to public debate on his Eugene Alexander de Kock Facebook page, offering to engage anyone with an interest in an honest assaying of the crimes for which he was responsible and about which he has knowledge.
His mission statement on the page is lengthy. He states that its purpose is “to serve as a historical archive” and is neither an attempt to mobilise former security forces members against the current government nor “an attempt to present me as a hero”. He owns “responsibility for my conduct” which brought him “prosecution, imprisonment and public infamy”.
This is a controversial move for the man dubbed “Prime Evil”, who was sentenced in 1996 to two life terms plus 212 years for murder, kidnapping and crimes against humanity. The revelations of the damage done during his 1985–1993 command of the Security Branch Section C1 counter-terrorism unit, better known as Vlakplaas, galvanised the country.
In a lengthy mea culpa, the now overweight 77-year-old, with sandbagged eyes, a grey beard and a heart condition, while candidly admitting to his own crimes, argues that he was sent into the wilderness as the sondebok, the Judas goat, bearing the sins of the entire apartheid system.
To meet the man on whom so much opprobrium and hatred have been heaped, as the FM previously did, is disarming. De Kock looms as physically large as his reputation but is impeccably polite, calm and helpful; it is only on the rare occasion that he may suddenly become aggressive and cold, as if a switch has tripped in his head.
Today, he is particularly galled by the fact that the higher ranks who gave the orders on who should be abducted, tortured, turned or murdered were barely touched. In particular, he points a finger at his immediate superior at Section C of the Security Branch, Maj-Gen Izak “Krappies” Engelbrecht, and Lt-Gen Sebastian “Basie” Smit, the former commander of the Security Branch from October 1988. Both have avoided prosecution thanks to an apparent conspiracy currently being exhumed at the Khampepe Commission of Inquiry into interference into prosecutions emanating from the Truth & Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
De Kock recalls that former National Prosecuting Authority advocate Anton Ackermann SC recently told the Khampepe commission that his strategy in prosecuting De Kock had been based on a “chain conspiracy” approach: that the former Vlakplaas commander would be used as a key witness to prosecute his former chain of command.
This ran from Engelbrecht to Smit and from there to police chief Gen Johan van der Merwe.
But those prosecutions never happened. Ackermann testified that he had drafted an indictment against Engelbrecht, but it never saw the light of day as he was informed that De Kock was off-limits, supposedly because he was co-operating with the TRC.
Van der Merwe died in 2022. Smit is now in his 90s, is blind, and did not respond to phone calls via an intermediary. Engelbrecht, 85, said he was too old to conduct an interview.
‘Decades of silence’
The pieces fitted neatly together. As historian Kevin O’Brien writes, the profiling of activists to be killed by C1 was done by C4, nicknamed Trewits (Teenrewolusionêre Inligtingtaakspan or Counter-Revolutionary Information Task Team). It reported to a State Security Council (SSC) committee chaired by military intelligence’s Brig JP “Tolletjie” Botha (now deceased), which in turn reported upwards to the Joint Security Staff (Geveilstaf), the “operational executive co-ordinator of the security community”, O’Brien writes.
Though former SSC secretary Johan Mostert denied this in a 2025 interview, Brig Jack Cronjé told the TRC that Trewits’s primary task was to identify targets for elimination. The actual kill orders given to De Kock would have come from the Geveilstaf in the case of high-value targets.
The Geveilstaf was the command component of the SSC’s all-powerful National Joint Management Centre, headed by deputy minister of law & order Roelf Meyer — now South Africa’s ambassador to the US. Meyer did not respond to a request for comment. It must have been led at the time by the chiefs of the South African Defence Force, notably Gen Johannes “Jannie” Geldenhuys and, later, Gen Andreas “Kat” Liebenberg, both since deceased.
“Why,” De Kock asks, “did the state pursue the person who could explain the chain but fail to complete the prosecution of the chain itself? Why did so many families receive promises of future investigation, followed by decades of silence? These are not efforts to erase my own responsibility. They are questions about whether accountability was applied consistently.”
Indeed, it raises the question of whether the title of “Prime Evil” should have been applied to De Kock at all — or rather to those who gave him his orders.
