Hendrik van den Bergh (police official)

Hendrik Johan van den Bergh (27 November 1914 – 16 August 1997) was a South African police official most famous for founding of the Bureau of State Security (B.O.S.S.), an intelligence agency created on 16 May 1969 to coordinate military and domestic intelligence for the government as well as to suppress political dissidents.

He was known as Lang Hendrik (Afrikaans: "Tall Hendrik") on account of his height (6 feet 5 inches (196 cm)).

Born in Vredefort, Orange Free State into an Afrikaner farming family, van den Bergh was a lifelong Afrikaner nationalist. He opposed South African intervention in World War II, and, with future Prime Minister John Vorster, joined the Ossewabrandwag ("Oxwagon Sentinel"), a paramilitary organization modelled on the Nazi SA which engaged in acts of sabotage against the South African government to undermine the war effort. Both men were detained by the government under wartime emergency laws for their activities.

After the war, van den Bergh rose rapidly through the police ranks. In 1963, he founded South Africa's first intelligence agency, the precursor to B.O.S.S. He and Vorster (now Justice Minister under Prime Minister H.F. Verwoerd) used new security legislation to crush growing resistance against apartheid.

Although van den Bergh denied B.O.S.S.'s use of hit squads against its enemies, he is nevertheless remembered for sanctioning the use of torture, assassinations, and other tactics against the government's enemies, and he once told a government commission, "I have enough men to commit murder if I tell them to kill. I don't care who the prey is. These are the type of men I have."

In the mid-1970s, the burgeoning Angolan Civil War between the pro-Soviet MPLA and the anticommunist UNITA factions, drew the attention of the South African government, which feared growing Soviet infiltration in the region. The government was divided on how best to counter the Soviet involvement, with Defence Minister P.W. Botha and Chief of the Army Magnus Malan advocating an all-out invasion, and Prime Minister Vorster (who had succeeded the assassinated Verwoerd in 1966) and van den Bergh favouring only a limited, covert operation. In the end, the latter option was chosen, and the South African intervention did not succeed, when South African forces, in sight of the Angolan capital, were repulsed by a fresh influx of Cuban troops. The United States, which had covertly backed the operation, was forced to withdraw its support when Congress vetoed the Ford Administration's request for funding for UNITA; as a result, South Africa was forced to withdraw.

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