The White Wolf

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I couldn't even believe it was real.

Join me, Tatiana Siegel, executive editor of film and media at Variety, for a four-part tale of youthful ambition, artistic integrity, and the dark side of fame.

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On August 10th, 1989, around 9.30 p.m.,

A white sedan pulled up outside the United Nations Transition Assistance Group's administrative headquarters in Aotio, a town in northern Namibia.

It had what appeared to be UN-issued license plates, and the United Nations emblem was painted on the side.

So perhaps it didn't look out of place there, at first.

Initial reports say witnesses saw three men dressed in green camouflage uniforms.

The UN Transition Assistance Group had arrived in Namibia four months earlier, authorized by UN Resolution 435.

The resolution had actually been adopted over a decade earlier, but it took that entire decade to get all parties to come to the table.

The Transition Assistance Group was there to ensure the ceasefire was honored, that South African troops would withdraw from Namibia, and that the upcoming election would be free and fair.

Those first four months had not been without incident, but a ceasefire was re-established over the summer, the South African military was withdrawing as planned, and UN officials were making progress on disarming and disbanding the citizen militias paid by the South African government.

If things continued on this path, it was looking good for the November elections.

But not everyone was on board with UN Resolution 435.

One small group in particular, calling itself Axi Contra 435, Action Against 435,

did just what the name implies.

They took action.

When those men in green camos stepped out of their car outside the UN offices in Aotio that night, they opened fire with automatic weapons.

Hand grenades caused extensive damage to the buildings, both the administrative offices and the sleeping quarters.

A security guard named Michael Hoseg was killed in the attack.

But the men fled into the night without finishing the mission.

The entire cell was arrested fairly quickly, and authorities found a massive arsenal of guns and explosives the group planned to use in future attacks on United Nations targets with the goal of stopping the upcoming elections.

And those men were in custody in November when the elections were held.

But they didn't stay there,

they escaped.

They'd failed to prevent Namibian independence, but now the fight was in South Africa, and they would do everything in their power to prevent the end of apartheid.

I'm Molly Conger,

and this is Weird Look Eyes.

This is still the story of Monica Huggett Stone.

The elderly South African woman who was living in Mandeville, Louisiana, when she organized a series of nationwide Nazi rallies in 2012.

But she isn't in this part of the story.

Because I can't tell you about the international network of mercenaries she was organizing in 1994

without telling you a little bit more about some of those men, who they were, and what they were up to in the years leading up to that deadly shootout with the police on the eve of the South African elections.

I know I don't have to make excuses for this meandering narrative.

It's my story and and I'll tell it the only way I know how.

I never know where we're going when I start putting my notes together, and I really can't help but chase down this seemingly infinite number of surprisingly deep rabbit holes.

And I'm so fascinated by this international network.

It's come up a bit in other stories.

Dennis Mahon and Tom Metzger had close ties with Heritage Front in Canada.

In the early 90s, Dennis Mahon flew to Germany to show German neo-Nazis a good old-fashioned American Ku Klux Klan crossburning.

And he gave fiery speeches stoking the flames of the anti-immigrant riots that were exploding across Germany at the time.

The week before Dennis started making that bomb that he went to prison for, he'd been hanging out with an Ulster Unionist who'd carried out bombings in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

British Holocaust denier David Irving traveled regularly to the United States to network with American white supremacists.

Frank Sweeney joined the American Nazi Party in New Jersey as a teenager and later joined the Rhodesian Army as a mercenary.

Members of American white supremacist groups like the BASE, Adam Waffen, and the Rise Above movement and its spin-off active clubs have a particular fondness for traveling to Ukraine to fight with far-right groups like the Azoff Battalion.

Patriot Front flags have popped up at neo-Nazi marches in Poland.

and its members have met with leaders of foreign fascist groups like the Nordic Resistance Movement in Sweden and Casa Pound in Italy.

One of the young men arrested in connection with the Terrogram Collective was taken into custody at the airport before he could board a flight to Ukraine to join the Russian Volunteer Corps.

The fascists, racists, and anti-Semites of the world are obsessed with borders.

But they don't seem to mind crossing them.

So that's what we're exploring here.

And we'll find Monica again in the next chapter of this story when she does a bit of border crossing of her own.

But that's not until 1994.

And right now, it's 1989.

In 1989, South Africa was still five years away from ending apartheid.

Five years away from holding their first election with universal suffrage.

Five years away from electing Nelson Mandela as their first post-apartheid president.

In 1989, Nelson Mandela was still in prison, where he'd been since 1962.

But in 1989, one of South Africa's neighbors was taking the leap into multiracial democracy.

Well, whether or not South Africa considered Namibia to be a neighboring country or a country at all, depends on who you ask.

The present-day nation of Namibia had been a German colony from 1884 until 1915.

During World War I, when everyone was a little preoccupied elsewhere, South Africa captured the colony, known as South West Africa.

In 1966, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution declaring that South Africa no longer had a right to the territory.

But South Africa continued illegally occupying the area that the United Nations now recognized as Namibia.

The conflict lasted over two decades.

The South African border war wasn't just about South Africa's desire to extend apartheid into this colonial territory.

It was inextricably intertwined with other conflicts in the region, things like the Angolan Civil War.

It was a modern consequence of the 19th century scramble for Africa.

It was the unraveling of a century of colonialism.

It was fueled by Cold War anxiety about communist guerrilla forces and Soviet influence.

And it was about white anxiety.

If black Africans were allowed to participate in government, if they were, God forbid, allowed to rule their own nations, what would they do with that power?

The whole world got in on the action, both officially with major powers sending material support to their preferred parties, and unofficially, with independent mercenaries and shadowy state-sponsored operations popping up all over Sub-Saharan Africa.

But by 1989, it was finally time.

The border war was over, and Namibia was going to have free and fair elections in November.

In April of that year, peacekeeping forces from the United Nations Transition Assistance Group arrived to oversee the process.

Namibia was going to be an independent nation, one without apartheid.

And this was a frightening prospect for those white South Africans trying desperately to hold on to power in an increasingly unsustainable form of government.

Now,

this next part might sound like a conspiracy theory.

I try to tread waters like this with immense care.

I nearly drove myself to madness trying to thread the needle of fact, fiction, and question marks when I talked about the Oklahoma City bombing a while back.

And when I started poking around this particular history, I'll admit I didn't have a lot of context.

I don't know the landscape here.

So sorting fact from speculation and sifting out the lies is a tricky prospect.

And at first,

I completely dismissed the idea that these neo-Nazi terrorists could have been acting on government orders.

That's tinfoil hat territory, right?

I saw the idea heavily insinuated in some reporting from the time period.

An article published in 1990 in an issue of Frei Wijkblad, a South African newspaper with an anti-apartheid stance, opened with this fairly explosive allegation.

They are fugitives accused of murder.

They come from South Africa, Britain, Namibia, and Zimbabwe.

They have one common characteristic.

They left a trail of destruction, death, and bloodshed in Southern Africa over the past decade, but cannot be prosecuted.

They are among the most wanted men in our neighboring states, but enjoy the protection of the South African government because they have worked, or still work, for the security forces.

But that's not proof, right?

Think about how often you see similar sentiments expressed when it comes to American far-right groups.

Allegations that this group or that one or whichever prominent white supremacist leader hasn't been prosecuted because they're being protected by the state.

And that's always a possibility.

Sure.

But that doesn't mean it's true.

But some of those men would themselves later claim that they couldn't be prosecuted for murders and bombings because they'd been acting on government orders.

And again, that's not proof.

I've seen that before too.

Sometimes people will say anything to avoid responsibility and that doesn't necessarily mean it's true.

I'd been chugging along, accumulating sources and taking my notes, translating old newspapers.

I subscribed to several South African genealogical databases.

I was really getting into the weeds here.

All under the assumption that there wasn't really a need to explore that that angle.

It could be true, but it wasn't something I'd be able to substantiate, and it's the kind of thing I'm not comfortable exploring without something to hold on to.

I don't want to abuse your trust by speculating wildly and getting reckless with the facts.

But then I realized this is a very unusual set of circumstances.

Normally, a government would never admit to state-sponsored terrorism.

They all do it, but nobody admits it.

And if you ever do prove it, it's nothing short of a miracle.

You need leaked documents and deathbed confessions.

But the South Africa of 1995 wasn't really the same South Africa that had existed until 1994.

This government wasn't admitting to its own crimes.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was an unusually transparent look at the nation's past,

and they admitted it.

There is an entire chapter of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission final report called Secret State Funding.

And according to the report, Axi-Contra 435, the group behind the attack at the UN offices in Aotio in 1989, is believed to have been entirely a creation of,

funded by, the South African government.

At least one of the men involved was later confirmed to have been an operative of the South African Civil Cooperation Bureau, an odd name for what was essentially government-sponsored death squads.

And I tell you that now, so you can draw your own conclusions later in the story, when things get a little murkier.

So just keep that in the back of your mind for now.

It wasn't long after the attack on Aotio that members of AxiContra 435 started getting arrested.

Although the group's name disappears from the conversation pretty quickly.

The men who'd carried out that attack were members of other groups too.

Specifically, they were all members of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, the AWB, led by Eugene Terreblanche.

The first to be arrested were two South African citizens, Arthur Archer and Craig Barker, and a German mercenary named Horst Klenz.

South Africans Daryl Stopforth and Leonard Wienendahl were arrested soon after.

By October of 1989, two months after the attack in Aotio, five men had been arrested.

Charges against Craig Barker were dropped early on and the charges against Arthur Archer were dropped after he agreed to cooperate.

And so in December of 1989, it's just three.

Wienendahl, Clenz, and Stopforth were officially charged with murder in a Namibian court.

The courthouse was a three-hour drive from the prison where the men were being held.

After the hearing, Leonard Wienendahl asked to to use the bathroom before they were loaded back into the transport van to return to their cells.

And this is one of those moments where it's useful to bear in mind that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission names Leonard Wienendahl as a known operative of the Civil Cooperation Bureau, those government-sponsored death squads.

And he's named as an operative of the CCB specifically in connection with these events in Namibia.

So with that in mind, Leonard Wienendahl goes to the bathroom of the courthouse.

And he somehow knows to take the top off the tank of a particular toilet.

Someone had left him a gift in there.

A pistol.

And he takes the gun out of the toilet and he tucks it away and he allows himself to be placed back in the van.

About three-quarters of the way through the drive back to the jail, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, The men insisted that they just couldn't hold it any longer.

They needed to stop to go to the bathroom.

And the two Namibian police officers agreed.

They pulled over and they led their three prisoners out to pee on the side of the road.

And then suddenly another vehicle appeared.

It stopped and two men got out.

And Vinadol produced the pistol from his hiding place and the two officers were overpowered by the three prisoners and their two accomplices.

Constable Ricardo van Wyck was shot in the stomach and later died.

The surviving officer was forced at gunpoint into the back of the van, which the prisoners drove half an hour off the main road before abandoning it.

And then they disappeared in the vehicle driven by their accomplices.

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X-Boom.

I couldn't even believe it was real.

Join me, Tatiana Siegel, executive editor of film and media at Variety, for a four-part tale of youthful ambition, artistic integrity, and the dark side of fame.

Just like my parents talked about they knew where they were when John F.

Kennedy was killed.

Pretty much everyone I know knows exactly where they were when River died.

Featuring new interviews with Samantha Mathis, Dr.

Drew Pinski, Corey Feldman, and more.

Listen to Variety Confidential on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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In a region as complex as the Bay Area, the headlines don't always tell the full story.

That's where KQED's podcast, The Bay, comes in.

Hosted by me, Erica Cruz Guevara, The Bay brings you local stories with curiosity and care.

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And they really did.

disappear.

Daryl Stopforth, Leonard Wienendahl, and Horst Klenz had murdered a UN security guard and a Namibian police officer.

They were supposed to have gone on trial in Namibia, but they vanished.

For a little while, anyway.

Just a few short months later, both Leonard Vienendahl and Daryl Stopforth came out of hiding.

They were home, in South Africa.

And South Africa had no extradition treaty with the newly independent nation of Namibia.

There were warrants for their arrest there, but there was nothing anyone could really do.

Wienendal said in a public statement a few months after his escape, I have now returned to my family, and I'm going to devote myself full time to the cause, as the revolution is here.

A photo of Wienendahl taken around that time shows him wearing his AWB uniform and holding his newborn son.

He'd named the boy Daryl, presumably to honor Darrell's Topforth, the man he'd just committed two murders with.

And there's an odd thing I keep seeing these guys do as I'm researching this story.

They have this strange fondness for giving interviews when they're supposed to be in hiding, on the run from the law.

When it was announced in September of 1989, a month after the attack in Aotio, that Leonard Wienandal had been arrested, a reporter in South Africa came forward with a pretty wild story.

While Wienandal had been on the run, he'd taken the time to sit down for a two-hour interview.

with a reporter.

And in that interview, he spoke openly about his membership in the AWB.

That fact alone wasn't really a secret.

He was Eugene Terreblanche's personal bodyguard, and he was the leader of the Johannesburg branch of the group.

But he also claimed there had been a split within Aquila, the militant arm of AWB,

with some members openly declaring their willingness and intent to die for the cause.

forming a sort of kamikaze unit that planned to carry out high-profile assassinations.

He also showed the reporter a small circular placard of sorts with a picture of a wolf.

The reporter, Yuhung Fuz,

just looked at it with disbelief and he said, there's no such thing as the white wolves.

And Vinodal smiled at him and replied,

believe me, they exist.

The white wolves probably didn't exist.

Not really, not then, anyway, not in any way that really means anything.

I guess they kind of did in the sense that if someone were to carry out a series of bombings and then call the newspaper to say that the white wolves did it, you sort of retroactively created the idea of a group that could be imagined to exist.

Because Fienendal would later be connected to an attempt to do just that.

But by most accounts, the White Wolves wasn't a terrorist organization that actually existed.

But in September of 1989, as he's sitting there with this reporter from the Sunday Times, everyone in South Africa had heard of the white wolf, at least in the singular.

Earlier that year, a former policeman who called himself the white wolf had been sentenced to death.

He was a former policeman because he'd been dismissed a year earlier after opposing for a photo holding the severed head of a black man who had died in a gruesome car accident.

He tried to submit the photo for publication in a police magazine, but they declined to publish it.

He'd joined AWB at just 16 with his father's support and encouragement.

He'd been sentenced to die for something he did in November of 1988.

One afternoon, a 23-year-old named Baron Stridem put on his custom belt buckle engraved with the words white wolf in Afrikaans.

He parked his car near a busy city square in downtown Pretoria and he got out and he started walking.

And then he started shooting.

On the day of the massacre he just walked for several blocks.

just shooting black people at random.

He murdered eight people and wounded 16 others.

And every survivor says the same thing.

He smiled the entire time.

Bradley Stein was just 17 years old that day, and he was on his way home from rugby practice when he saw Stridem.

He didn't understand at first what he was looking at.

This man with a gun must be a police officer.

He must be trying to catch a bad guy.

But then he saw Stridem walk up to an old woman carrying groceries.

And without saying a word, Stridem shot her in the head.

At that moment, a black teenager called out to Stein, beckoning him over to the bench he was hiding behind.

And the two teens hid behind the bench together, but Stridem found them.

He shot the black boy.

As Stein, who's white, cradled this bleeding stranger in his lap.

He looked up at Stridem and asked him, why?

Then I turned up to him and I said,

why are you doing this?

And he said, I dundat feritukums for watseit afrikaners, which means I'm doing this for the future of white South Africans.

Stridem never fired at a white person.

The shooting only stopped when a black taxi driver, a man named Simon Mukondalely, tapped Stridem on the shoulder while he was reloading.

He must have caught the killer off guard because as Stridem turned around, Mukondalely was able to grab the gun out of his hands.

As I was reading about Stridem's murders, it felt so familiar to me.

I've read accounts of a lot of mass shootings.

I've seen videos I wish I could forget.

I've wasted countless hours reading manifestos.

And there are plenty of similarities between white supremacist mass shootings.

There are a lot of common denominators when it comes to a young white man who carries out a racist mass shooting.

But this felt so terribly, eerily familiar to me.

It was inescapable.

It felt just like the Charleston church shooting.

It felt like Dylan Roof.

And back in 2015, several South African journalists covering that story, that American shooting, referred to Dylan Roof as America's white wolf.

So I guess I'm not alone in that feeling.

We talked briefly last week about the apartheid era South African flag patch in photos of Roof taken shortly before he murdered nine people at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015.

So we know he had a fondness for apartheid.

But I wonder if he was familiar with the white wolf.

So Invinandal is sitting there with this reporter, showing him this little picture of a wolf, this is what he's talking about.

He's telling the reporter that he's a member of this extremely militant, violent arm of the AWB, that they're planning to get a race war going before Christmas.

And he really wants the paper to run a story that will convince people that there are hundreds more barren stridems out there lying in wait.

And the reason the reporter didn't believe him is because it had been discussed extensively during Stridem's trial just a few months earlier.

There was no reason to believe any actual group called the White Wolves existed.

He was a member of AWB, that was fairly certain.

But when it came to the white wolves, it appeared to just be a pack of one.

Wienendahl was maybe just planting seeds of propaganda.

He was trying to capitalize on this intense fear and trauma surrounding Stridem's murders by convincing people it could happen again at any time.

But Leonard Wienendal had been telling the truth about at least one thing when he spoke to that reporter before his arrest.

There had been some splintering within the Afrikaner resistance movement.

Members of AWB had started forming increasingly violent breakaway groups.

Groups like the Order Vandidud, which translates to the Order of Death, and the Order Boerfolk, the Order of the Boer People.

And that name might sound familiar.

A violent fascist group calling itself the Order?

We've heard that one before.

Its founder would later say that he'd never actually heard of Robert J.

Matthews, the American neo-Nazi who founded a group called the Order in 1983.

It seems both men arrived at the name independently.

but for the exact same reason.

It was the name of the fictional white supremacist organization in William Luther Pierce's novel, The Turner Diaries.

And you might remember the name of the man who founded the South African version of the order.

Remember last week we were talking about the trial of Massimo Bolo and Fabio Miriello, the Italian fascist convicted of the Vitcommando bombings in 1980.

As the two men were led into the courtroom on the first day of their trial, One man in the gallery stood up and applauded for the bombers.

And that man was Pretoria City Councillor Pete Rudolph.

And so by this point in our timeline, Rudolph is a high-ranking member of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, the AWB.

And Pete Rudolph maintains to this day that he founded the order in 1989 with the knowledge and blessing of AWB's leader, Eugene Terreblanche, specifically so that AWB members could engage in more violent resistance without risking AWB itself being sanctioned or banned.

And if that's true, it's actually quite similar in that respect to the group of the same name in the United States.

When Robert Matthews founded the Order, he did so with the knowledge and blessing of William Luther Pierce, announcing the formation of the group in a speech at the annual meeting of Pierce's National Alliance.

And National Alliance benefited ideologically and financially from the Order's crimes, but they had the plausible deniability of having no formal affiliation with the group.

Just like Pierce, a national alliance, Terre Blanche and the AWB could sit back and enjoy the political benefit of their order's act of terror without the risk of appearing to have authorized them.

The Order Boroughfolk was definitely founded and led by Pete Rudolph.

But press clippings over the years occasionally name other men as the group's leader.

At one point, Nick Strydem, the father of mass murderer Baron Stridem, is quoted as the head of the Order.

In 1994, a South African TV news program aired an interview with a man claiming to be the leader of the Order.

I was perhaps as surprised as Pete Rudolph was to see Leonard Wienendahl staring back at me from the screen.

Rudolph would later tell the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Wienendahl had appointed himself as chief of staff of the order without his permission, and that such a position didn't even exist.

And he called Wienendahl, quote, a man fond of publicity with strong national socialist inclinations.

And he scoffed at the very idea that he would have let Wienendahl lead anything,

disparagingly referring to Wienendahl's habit of appearing in public in a khaki uniform, saying,

I despise a khaki uniform, let me tell you, because khaki is the color of the British.

But I guess the fashion police unit of the Nazi terror squad is really neither here nor there.

No one denies Wienendahl was a member of the Order.

In fact, when Wienendahl, Clennam, and Stopforth had escaped from custody in Namibia, it had been the order who picked them up on the side of the road.

there next to the still bleeding policeman.

The man driving their getaway car was Rudolph's chief deputy, Henk Bradenhan.

Rudolph claims the order was formally established in October of 1989,

but they didn't announce their presence to the world until February of 1990, when a small group of, quote, suspicious-looking white men vandalized the British Embassy in Pretoria.

Witnesses saw them walk up to the embassy gates and spray paint in Afrikaans,

the struggle begins.

And they signed the statement, Order Borafolk.

Police looked at the graffiti and said they'd never heard of the group.

One member spoke anonymously with the press and said they were allied with the White Wolves.

Stop settling for weak sound.

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Hit the town with the ultra-durable LGX Boom portable speaker and enjoy vibrant sound wherever you go.

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Bring the boom.

X-Boom.

I couldn't even believe it was real.

Join me, Tatiana Siegel, executive editor of film and media at Variety, for a four-part tale of youthful ambition, artistic integrity, and the dark side of fame.

Just like my parents talk about they knew where they were when John F.

Kennedy was killed.

Pretty much everyone I know knows exactly where they were when River died.

Featuring new interviews with Samantha Mathis, Dr.

Drew Pinske, Corey Feldman, and more.

Listen to Variety Confidential on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Hi, I'm Erica Cruz-Guevara, host of KQED's podcast, The Bay.

When something important is happening in the Bay Area, I want to know what it actually means for the people who live here.

In every episode of The Bay, we ask deeper questions, cut through the noise, and keep you connected to the community that you and I love.

Find new episodes of KQED's The Bay every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.

In April of 1990, the Order Borafolk took its first big step.

Pete Rudolph organized and led a raid on a South African Air Force base.

Carried out in collaboration with three young AWB sympathizers within the Air Force, Order members, including Leonard Wienendahl, stole a busload of guns and ammunition from the South African Defense Force.

Rudolph called the Pretoria News while on the run to take credit for the heist,

saying it was time for war.

Quote, I have now crossed the Rubicon.

The Boer now have a chance to arm themselves.

We are now going for the ANC's throat.

And keep those guns in the back of your mind, too.

I'll remind you.

But one of those guns shows back up.

In June, Rudolph recorded a half-hour long video declaring war against the government.

And he mailed copies to several news outlets as well as other right-wing groups.

I could only find a short clip of it.

I don't know why I looked so hard for the full video.

It wouldn't have done me any good.

It's all in Afrikaans.

But still frames from the video show Rudolph sitting at a desk, flanked by masked men carrying rifles they'd stolen from the military.

And the message was part press release, part warning, part call to action.

He's speaking to a variety of audiences here.

And for his fellow Afrikaner nationalists, his message was pretty simple.

It's not time to talk anymore.

And it is, quote, better to die in glory than to live in disgrace.

Within days of this video's release, the bombs started going off.

In late June and early July of 1990, bombs went off every

night.

A bomb went off at a bus terminal in Johannesburg, injuring nearly 30 people.

Bombs went off at both the home and business belonging to Clive Gilbert, a Johannesburg city councillor who was both Jewish and a member of the Democratic Party.

That same week, a synagogue in Johannesburg was bombed and defaced with swastikas and pro-apartheid slogans.

The office of the National Union of Mine Workers, a radical black labor organization, was destroyed by a bomb that went off overnight.

A bomb blew out the windows of the offices of the anti-apartheid weekly newspaper, Freiwitblad.

And the homes and offices of several members of the ruling National Party were targeted as well, accompanied by warnings that President de Klerk must stop all efforts to adopt moderate reforms.

And then the phone calls came.

Two phone calls to the offices of a pro-government newspaper.

The first caller spoke English, not Afrikaans.

A day later, a second call came in to the same paper, and this caller spoke Afrikaans, but he used the code word the reporter had given the previous caller to ensure he was speaking with the same group.

Both callers told the newspaper that the white wolves were responsible for the bombings, and that the bombings would continue if their demands weren't met.

Their primary demand was pretty straightforward.

They wanted President de Klerk to call an election.

His moves towards reform and concessions and negotiations with the ANC and his recent release of Nelson Mandela, these things were unacceptable, and they wanted the opportunity to elect a better white president.

But the group had two other strangely specific requests.

They wanted the white wolf himself, Baron Strydem, released from prison.

And they wanted the police to call off the manhunt for Pete Rudolph, who was at this time still on the run after claiming responsibility for stealing all those guns from the military and then sending the government a videotaped declaration of war.

But like I said, the White Wolves almost certainly didn't exist.

Not in 1990.

Not as an actual organized group, whatever that means.

For a group that didn't exist, though, they were very busy in 1990.

In February, shortly after Nelson Mandela was released from prison, letters threatening to assassinate assassinate him were received by newspapers, and those letters were signed, the White Wolves.

In May, when President de Klerk announced another round of apartheid reforms, including the repeal of the law that segregated libraries, the White Wolves put out a press release warning the president to watch his back.

In May of 1990, Three black activists with the African National Congress were run off the road by two white men.

Prince Makina and Simon Coba were murdered, but Xavier Lakote survived to testify.

He says before one of the white men started shooting at them, he'd asked if they'd heard of the white wolves.

Lakote said he replied that he had.

And just before opening fire, the man looked down at them and said, I'm going to show you just who the white wolves are.

And now in July, the white wolves are claiming responsibility for most, though not all, of the the bombs that had been going off every night for a week.

It's possible that some of the other incidents involving people claiming to be the white wolves were just people doing what Leonard Bienendahl had done with that reporter.

They were pretending.

They were acting on their own or in connection with some other group.

But they liked the way it sounded to say they were the white wolves.

They understood the kind of fear it would inspire and the kind of plausible deniability it would give their actual group affiliation for whatever they'd done.

And more importantly, they wanted to honor the white wolf, Baron Stridem.

I see a lot of parallels here between the way Stridem's murders so quickly achieved this almost religious significance and the way modern teregram culture canonizes mass shooters.

I didn't realize they'd been doing that for so many decades.

I don't know that it was ever conclusively proven who was actually behind every every instance of someone claiming to be the white wolves, but in at least one of those cases, we know exactly who it was.

The man who murdered Prince Makina and Simon Coba in May of 1990 was Peter Grunewald,

son of General Timi Grunnewald, South Africa's head of military intelligence.

Peter Grunevald fled the country after the murders, and he spent years hiding in Portugal.

When he was finally brought to justice, he testified that at the time of the the murders, he had been an employee of the Civil Cooperation Bureau, just like Leonard Wienendahl.

I'm not sure what conclusion to draw here, but the only two people I can say with conclusive proof were telling people that the white wolves were real.

Both turned out to be members of state-sponsored death squads.

But when it comes to those bombings in July, the police knew it wasn't the white wolves because they knew it was members of the AWB.

And we know, more specifically, that it was members of the closely aligned splinter group, the Order Borafolk.

There are a lot of reasons why we know that to be true, but just in case, here's Pete Rudolph himself saying it in an interview last year.

We blew up National Party offices,

we attacked

some of the trade unions,

and

it was becoming an open war.

And this was under the flag of the Order Buhrvolt.

Under the Order Buhrvolk, which was started on the 10th of October 1889,

in connivance and with the assistance of the AWB.

All three of the men who'd bombed those UN offices in Namibia in 1989 had reappeared in South Africa by mid-1990.

And all three were actively involved in the Order's bombing campaign that summer.

And when the police started making arrests in July of 1990, Horst Klens, Daryl Stopforth, and Leonard Fienendahl were three of the 10 men detained in connection with the bombings.

All 10 of those men had ties to AWB.

Several would later testify that they'd also been members of the Order of Death, a group that required members to commit a random, unprovoked murder as an act of initiation.

Now, I'm going to be honest with you.

I don't know what happened next.

I tried so hard to sort this out.

I love a day-by-day timeline.

But I think there are a lot of factors complicating things here.

I mean, first of all, it was 35 years ago.

Not every piece of news has been archived and digitized, and there's probably reporting out there that I just can't access.

And there are still the issues I talked about last week when it comes to locating source material in a foreign language with naming conventions and cultural context that I just don't have.

I've noticed a surprisingly casual attitude towards spelling and nicknames.

I mean, it was incredibly common across all of my sources for this story for someone's name to be spelled a handful of different ways pretty interchangeably, sometimes even within the same article.

And it seems like it might be normal in Afrikaans to refer to a particular individual using their full name or just their first and middle initial with their last name or some kind of nickname, even in very formal writing.

Again, totally interchangeably.

It took me a week to realize that Koos is a nickname for Jacobus, and one guy might be written about both ways from sentence to sentence.

I don't know, maybe this is cultural, I have no idea, but it really complicates the process of looking for information.

I've also noticed dates are often wrong.

I mean, a lot, like markedly, provably wrong, just not consistent from source to source, sometimes just offering information that isn't possible.

I mentioned last week that some of the dates in the Truth and Reconciliation report are definitely not correct.

Things like the year the Witt Commando trials took place are pretty easy to corroborate with newspaper archives.

And it happens over and over again.

The bombing of the Freiwijkblatt office is widely reported in later sources to have occurred in 1991.

The paper's own editor, Max Dupreez, even puts the date as 1991 in his memoirs, but that's not not true.

He spoke to a reporter from the London Times about the bombing the day after it happened, in July of 1990.

And Dubrays writes in his book that Leonard Wienendahl had confessed to having planted that bomb, which again could not have happened in 1991 because Leonard Wienendahl was in prison in 1991.

And the confession in question is actually very well documented because Wienendahl would later testify before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that he'd only confessed to that bombing because police interrogators had electrocuted his testicles

in July of 1990.

So sorting out a day-by-day timeline, which is again my preferred strategy,

really just wasn't possible here.

There is no consistently reliable source when it comes to when a particular event actually happened.

And I'm not kidding about that, the bit about Wienendahl claiming to have been tortured.

He applied to testify before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, not as a perpetrator, but as a victim.

He offered testimony about abuse he'd suffered after his arrest in July of 1990.

I then

experienced being shocked.

Then the current would come through my leg, then through my armpit,

then through my gentiles.

Sometimes they would come all three together.

While this was going, he shouted at me, why don't I call my God

to release me from the chain?

That clip comes from one of the weekly hour-long broadcasts that aired every Sunday from 1996 through 1998.

Every week, South Africans could tune in for the Truth and Reconciliation Special Report, a compilation of clips from the hearings that was presented by Max Dupreese, the newspaper editor whose office Fienendal admitted to bombing.

And Dupreese ends that segment of the show with his own commentary.

I'm looking forward to Mr.

Fienendahl's amnesty application hearing.

And perhaps our departments of justice and foreign affairs owe the public an explanation why he has not been sent back to Namibia to stand trial.

But back to the question of the missing facts.

Perhaps the biggest factor here is that some of this information just isn't there to find.

And I don't mean it's missing from the archives, I mean it doesn't exist.

These final years of the apartheid regime were chaotic.

Someone might get arrested for terrorism and then there just isn't ever any follow-up.

I may be searching for answers that aren't there.

Because sometimes cops would round up a bunch of guys and put a story in the newspaper newspaper and then, I don't know, they just aren't in jail anymore and there's never any more to the story.

Sometimes people escaped.

Two members of the Ordo Borafolk definitely did.

And sometimes people were quietly released because they secretly worked for the government.

And during this time period especially, The government had a strategy of politically targeted amnesty as part of this effort to cool tensions and advance negotiations.

There were these occasional releases of political prisoners.

They just pick a few guys on both sides of the conflict and let them go.

And unlike the later, more organized and thoughtful process of granting amnesty through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this,

at least to me, I could be wrong here, but this looked a little haphazard.

It doesn't look like these early 90s amnesty releases really involved any sort of long process of thoroughly accounting for what actually happened and documenting the specifics and getting statements on the record, getting people to admit what they'd done.

They just sort of let people go.

And one of the more egregious instances of this was the release of Baron Strydem in 1992, the man who laughed.

as he shot pedestrians at random, had served just four years.

And the release of political prisoners was a part of the ongoing negotiations between the National Party administration and the African National Congress.

Both sides were getting some of their people out of prison, and the ANC seemed generally supportive of the strategy.

But not when it came to Berend Stridem.

Cyril Ramaposa, the current president of South Africa, was the ANC general secretary back in 1992, and he issued their statement condemning the decision.

Our prisoners will not go out and commit these acts again, he said.

But there's no guarantee that the prisoners who hate black people will not come out and shoot more black people.

Baron Stridem didn't carry out another mass shooting after his release, not that I'm aware of, but he did continue to support and encourage far-right violence.

Shortly after his release, Australian journalist Alan Hogan interviewed Stridem about the murders.

On camera.

Not in a studio or his living room.

No, the interview took place as the pair walked together along the path that Stridem had taken that day.

And he's pointing out the locations,

each spot where he took a human life.

And he's laughing.

And he enthusiastically agrees that, yeah, if you gave me a gun right now, I'd do it again.

Right, then what?

Then I say, uh, shut another one here.

That's three sofa.

That's three sofa.

You see these couple of blacks sitting here now?

Yeah.

Would you like to shoot them?

Another, another times, yes.

All that to say,

the early 90s were a little chaotic.

So I'm comfortable saying I just don't know why it looks like no one was ever charged for those bombings in July of 1990.

I can tell you for certain that 10 members of the Order were arrested in the summer of 1990 after that series of bombings.

One was released after he agreed to cooperate.

Two escaped.

And Leonard Wienendahl, Daryl Stopforth, and Horst Klens were in jail.

originally held in connection with the bombings for violations of Section 29 of the Internal Security Act.

And they seemed to stay in jail for quite a while.

No charges were ever actually filed against them for those bombings in South Africa, but while they were in custody, the newly independent nation of Namibia filed a petition to have them extradited to face trial for those murders in 1989.

The Truth and Reconciliation Report notes in passing that they were never interviewed by Namibian authorities during this time period.

It doesn't say why, if they asked and weren't given permission or if they just never asked.

And I do have articles that were published in 1990 and 1991 that seem to indicate they remained in continuous custody throughout this time.

But after those first few months, The articles stop mentioning why they'd been arrested in the first place, and they only refer to the fact that they're still being held pending a determination about extradition.

By July of 1991, a year after they were arrested, both Wienendahl and Klenz were reportedly dangerously ill from an ongoing hunger strike, along with other incarcerated members of the Order Borafolk.

They were political prisoners, they said.

They'd only carried out the orders of the state.

They can't be prosecuted for that.

And they said they would continue their hunger strike until their demands were met.

News stories show Wienendahl was on a hunger strike as early as January of 91 and as late as August of 92.

So that can't have been continuous because he's still alive.

But for about two years, I can place him in jail and he's going on intermittent hunger strikes to protest this continued detention.

In April of 1992, a South African judge did rule that the Aotio III could be extradited to Namibia.

Stottforth and Wienendahl tried to appeal that ruling, but Horse Glens wasn't really participating.

He just kind of disappeared.

And when they were all released on bond in December of 1992 to await this final ruling, he disappeared entirely.

It would take another four years.

But in 1996, the Minister of Justice finally signed the extradition order.

Horst Klenz was otherwise engaged by then.

He was serving time for the plot we'll cover next week.

But Daryl Stutforth and Leonard Wienendahl were ordered to surrender themselves for extradition to Namibia.

But they didn't.

I can't figure out where Daryl Stopforth ended up.

I tried.

But I know exactly where Leonard Wienendal is.

Because just as he was due to present himself to the authorities to be extradited, he stole a car, crossed the border, and flew to the United Kingdom.

Some reporting says he initially entered the United Kingdom using a false passport.

probably because he was on Interpol's most wanted list, and that he didn't try to claim asylum until after he was caught.

But it's unclear.

The man that Eugene Terreblanche used to affectionately refer to as my little fanatic settled down with his family in Wisbeck, a town about 100 miles north of London.

He's the chair of the Wisbeck Rugby Club, and his wife Tracy is the treasurer.

The payday loan company he started after moving to England went into liquidation a few years ago.

I'm not really familiar with how anything works in the UK, and I really don't don't know how you could bankrupt a business that's pure extortionate profit, but that is what the paperwork appears to show.

There have been a handful of articles over the years asking why Leonard Wienendahl was allowed to enter and remain in the United Kingdom.

In 2003, a reporter tracked him down in his home in Wisbeck, and Searchlight magazine would later report that Wienendahl allegedly attacked the reporter, grabbing him and slamming him up against a wall, shouting, you're going to find yourself in a very negative position.

Subsequent attempts to write articles about Wienendahl don't contain quotes from him.

He and his wife are South African citizens, born in South Africa.

There's no evidence he actually applied for political asylum.

Corporate filings for his bankrupt payday loan company list his nationality as South African, which,

again, knowing nothing about British business, I assume means he did not seek British citizenship.

So So the UK is just willingly harboring a man who's still wanted for two murders in Namibia.

International extradition law can be a bit tricky, but ultimately, even if they couldn't or don't want to extradite him to Namibia,

why is he still in the UK?

They could deport him back to South Africa.

And presumably, the South African government would finish what they started in 1990 and send him to Namibia.

In February of this year, as Donald Trump started parroting white nationalist talking points about South Africa, Wienendahl made a flurry of online posts praising the American president.

Writing in one post last month, thank you, President Donald J.

Trump, not only for hearing the plight of my people, the Boer Afrikaners, but for boldly stepping up to stand with them in their hour of need and face of adversity.

When Jimmy Carter died in December, Wienendahl posted, he just died, so we're supposed to pretend he's a saint.

But Carter was instrumental in killing the free, prosperous state of Rhodesia.

Like I said, I can't tell you whatever became of Daryl Stopforth.

But we'll pick back up next week with Horst Clanz.

He was released from the South African jail in 1992, pending a decision on whether or not he could be extradited to Namibia.

Unlike Stopforth and Wienendahl, he doesn't seem to have participated in the legal battle to appeal that decision.

He went underground

and he doesn't resurface again till 1994, when he's arrested again.

This time, after a shootout with the South African police that left one of his young German mercenaries dead.

And that's where we'll find the woman who set me down this long, strange path.

It was Monica Huggett, who is graciously playing host for those foreign mercenaries.

Weird Little Guys is a production of CoolZone Media and iHeartRadio.

It's research, written, and recorded by me, Holly Conker.

Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.

The show is edited by the wildly talented Bury Gigan.

The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.

You can email me at WeirdLittleGuysPodcast at gmail.com.

I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.

You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.

And this week, you can reply to a post on the subreddit with any questions you'd like to have answered on an upcoming QA episode.

As always, don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.

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