A spy’s story – David Africa’s book ‘Lives On The Line’ thrills

David Africa is not your typical debut author. He’s lived every moment in his book Lives On The Line even though it reads like a spy craft thriller.

Between the pages, the story of how a handful of operatives dismantled one of South Africa’s most dangerous and notorious urban terror organisations.

Pagad, or People Against Gangsterism and Drugs, reigned in Cape Town with a vicious terror campaign just more than two decades ago.

Who can ever forget the Planet Hollywood bombing 27 years ago or the bomb-proof public dustbins of the time, or the fear that blanketed the Mother City’s streets?

Covert operations

The story tells of how a small, classified unit within crime intelligence built a covert, technical, and operationally agile capability and used its small capacity to shut down Pagad almost overnight.

“To the public, it looked like one day there were bombings, and the next day, nothing,” he said.

“What they didn’t see was the six years it took to get to that point. Infiltration, surveillance, gadgets, and response capabilities. And none of it was common knowledge, and not even to most people inside crime intelligence.”

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“I actually started writing the book 23 years ago,” Africa said. “But it was too soon. The subject was still sensitive. There were still security concerns, and some things weren’t ready to be told.”

When he finally sat down to finish it, his goal was to honour the people who worked in secret and draw lessons for the future of intelligence work.

“These were individuals who stopped a terrorist organisation that had created massive instability. They deserve recognition. And there’s a lot in that experience that young intelligence officers today could still learn from.”

Neutralising urban terror came for Africa when his career in espionage and counterintelligence was already in cruise mode.

“I grew up in Manenberg in the ’70s and ’80s,” he said. “In 1985, when the national uprising broke out, I became politically active. By the time I was 17, I was recruited into the ANC underground. That’s where I first got into intelligence work.”

His early assignments involved identifying targets for sabotage and rooting out informants.

“We had to know who was real and who was working against us. That’s how I learnt the basics. How to target intelligence, counterintelligence and I was trained by some of the most competent people in the struggle underground,” he said.

The first officer to investigate Pagad

Post-1994, the transition into state intelligence felt like a compromise.

“I sort of found myself, half reluctantly, in police crime intelligence,” he said. “And that’s where my involvement with Pagad began. I was the first intelligence officer in the country to start formally investigating them.”

He said it was slow going getting traction and then momentum in the investigation.

“There was sabotage, incompetence, and a complete unwillingness by government to call Pagad what it was at the time. A terrorist group,” he said.

“It took years to build a response structure capable of dealing with them.” Eventually, that structure did more than just monitor threats. It dismantled them.

“By the end of 2000, we had the ability to shut down any planned attack in real time. And we did.”

Lives On The Line, he added, was first pitched as a textbook or case study to law enforcement. Only later, after agencies pooh-poohed it, did it shape into a non-fiction novel, so to speak.

“It’s non-fiction, but I didn’t want it to be dry,” Africa said. “I wanted something that’s factual, but accessible. So, I wrote it creatively as something light, something enjoyable to read, even if the subject matter is dark.”

More thrilling than Hollywood

There are moments in Lives On The Line where reality blurs with fiction, and not because it’s been dramatised, but because the real events are more thrilling than anything out of Hollywood.

“When I was in it, I didn’t think of it in the sense of a spy movie,” he said. “But when I wrote it down, I realised it reads like 007. And we had the apparatus. We had our own Q, M, the works. Only, we weren’t drinking martinis. We were stopping bombs.”

Africa feels that it is important to read the book.

“Because people saw the headlines, but they never got the full story,” he said. “Even many professionals in intelligence didn’t know what actually happened. This is the first real insider account. And it’s written to bring history alive. However, not as propaganda, but as a contribution to understanding the craft.”

Africa said that he believes intelligence work, if done right, can play a major role in building a safer society. “Think of what 15 people achieved,” he said.

“Now imagine a few hundred like them, trained, capable, resourced properly. You’d transform crime intelligence entirely.”

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