Author Description

It is the early 1990s and South Africa is on a knife-edge. Nelson Mandela is free at last, but a peaceful political transition looks virtually impossible. Both sides of the political divide, the left and the right, are poised to take up arms. In the midst of this threat of violence, with the future of the country at stake, the largely unprepared and rudderless NP government faced the ANC at the negotiation table at Codesa. As head of National Intelligence (NI), Niël Barnard was central to this turbulent process, which was almost derailed several times. Barnard was there the day the ever-calm Nelson Mandela lost his temper and tore into FW de Klerk with a verbal attack. He experienced first-hand how the moral high ground slipped through the NP's fingers and the ANC gained the ascendancy. In this book, Niël Barnard provides a penetrating look at what happened behind the scenes at Codesa. He also reveals intriguing details of top-secret meetings between the ANC and the NI in hotel rooms in Europe, and writes about his surreal encounters with the Russian KGB in Moscow.