why send a unit when you already had a ghost? (13. 406)

Our gratitude to MetaFilter for directing us towards this captivating long-form cloak-and-dagger interview with the unlikely political saboteur, Rodney Wilkinson, Olympic fencer and veteran of the apartheid regime’s secret war with Angola who successfully planted four bombs in South Africa’s under construction Koeberg nuclear power station in December of 1982, pulled the pins on the detonators and bicycled away, covert until 1995. The damage, costing an estimated half-a-billion rand (when the currency was at parity with the US dollar) set the programme back eighteen-months before the reactor—still the continent’s only one—could be repaired and brought online, and the attack was organised by uMkhonto we Sizwe, the paramilitary wing of the African National Congress (ANC) in exile—founded by the then imprisoned Nelson Mandela after the massacre of ninety-one demonstrators protesting racial segregation in Sharpeville Township. Intelligence for the sabotage came from anti-apartheid activist Renfrew Leslie Christie (*1949 - †2025) who went on to further thwart South Africa’s nuclear ambitions, undermining its clandestine project to develop an atomic arsenal—best known for his defiant quote, referencing his family members whom had died fighting against the Third Reich: “I learned from them very early that what one does with Nazis is kill them.”