ABSTRACT
In Chapter 2, the development of the apartheid state’s national security architecture and its capabilities to conduct both security intelligence and counter-insurgency activities was outlined. To support all of these elements, and to ensure that the state’s entire intelligence capability was geared towards supporting it, a national security strategy was required. This would form initially around the “Total National Strategy” and later, following a significant evolution in both the state’s security operations and the ANC’s revolutionary onslaught, around a “Total Counter-revolutionary Strategy”. As this chapter discusses, these strategies – symbiotically – both became the key determinants of the intelligence requirements of the state, at both operational and strategic levels, and were in turn driven and, to a great extent, determined by the nature of the intelligence dispensation developed by the state. In this sense, the intelligence-led national security strategy of apartheid South Africa became self-sustaining, almost paradoxically losing – it will be argued – the ability to see outside of the security paradigm created by this intelligence paradigm.
