Apartheid International

campaign bluster, hot air and empty words. Within a week, though, he'd signed an executive order banning travel to the United States from predominantly Muslim countries, sparking a wave of protests at airports and signaling that he intended to follow through on his xenophobic, anti immigrant campaign promises. A month into his pre tens of thousands of Americans in at least fifty cities around the country rallied for a protest on

President's Day, calling it not my President's Day. But that same week, half a world away, a very different march was taking place in Zagreb's city center. A few dozen men in black uniforms stood in formation, led by Drazen Klemenek, leader of the Croatian Fascist Party HSP. They chanted the slogans of the Eustasia, the Croatian fascist movement of the

nineteen thirties and forties. Alongside the Holocaust carried out by Nazi Germany, the Ustasia had undertaken a genocide of their own, operating their own concentration camps and slaughtering whole villages of Jews, Roma and Serbs. As those marchers assembled in the city square and the brass band finished playing, the men took an oath of allegiance to their Croatian homeland and and

to Donald Trump. Most of those marchers had empty hands, some held brass instruments, but at the front of the column several marchers held flags, the Croatian flag, of course, and an American flag to show their support for Donald Trump. But one man at the very front of the line was carrying the flag of the German Ultranationalist Party NPD.

The march's organizer, Drazen Klemenek, was arrested that day for shouting zadom spremni, which is the Croatian equivalent of yelling Siegheil in Germany, but when he did get a chance to speak to the press, he explained the presence of the German NPD flag. The man who'd been carrying it was Alexander Nydeline, a representative from NPD, and he was there to show his party's support for HSP. But that march in February of twenty seventeen wasn't Alexander Nydline's first

visit to the Balkans. In nineteen ninety three, nyde Line enlisted in the Convicts Battalion, a paramilitary unit of the Croatian Defense Council made up of prisoners and foreign mercenaries. Its leader was later convicted of crimes against humanity for his actions during the Bosnian War. Nydeline didn't stay with the unit for very long. In the years since, he's taken issue with being called a mercenary, arguing that he

never actually got paid. Because just before Christmas of nineteen ninety three and two other German mercenaries deserted from the Convicts Battalion. They took as many guns as they could carry and disappeared into the night. A few weeks later, those German mercenaries and those stolen guns turned up seven thousand miles away in South Africa. I'm Molly conger, and this is weird little guys. This is a story about Monica Stone. I think she may be our first weird

little guy who happens to be a woman. There was Dallas Humber, I guess, the voice of Taragram, but she wasn't the central character in that story, just the disembodied voice urging young men to kill. Weird little guy is a gender neutral term in my mind. I haven't been avoiding telling the stories of women in the white power movement. It's just that, for the most part, the very nature of their beliefs kind of prevents women from taking center stage,

even in their own lives. But this this is a story of a woman who has dedicated her life to the cause, and in her case, the cause is apartheid. Like all my stories, this is really only kind of about one weird little guy. And this might be the widest net I've ever cast trying to understand one person's life. The story covers decades and spans continence. There are bombings

and shootouts and murders. There's international gun smuggling, mercenaries and paramilitaries and war crimes, suessful assassinations and foiled terrorist plots. Their trials and prison breaks, and crimes left unpunished, some with extradition petitions left pending for decades with no hope of justice. There are some familiar landmarks, names of people and organizations I recognize, like David Duke and the Ku

Klux Klan and the Turner Diaries. But there are people in groups in this story that were new to me, characters we haven't met yet and may see again in future episodes exploring these fascist friendships across borders. But at its core, this is a story about Monica Stone. She isn't in all the parts of the story playing out all around her, but the context matters more than ever, because this week we're going to dig into a weighty idea,

the fascist international. I haven't forgotten where we started. Maybe you have. That's understandable. I left you hanging there for a week while I recovered from a stomach virus. But two weeks ago we were talking about white genocide. The

story began in Sacramento in twenty twelve. A group of neo Nazi skinheads was rallying at the state capitol in California to raise awareness of the plight of the white South African farmer in that episode, I picked apart this myth, the idea that white farmers are being slaughtered every day in a post apartheid South Africa, that white South Africans are in danger of being completely wiped out by a white genocide. That idea has been quite popular among white

supremacists around the world for some time. Norwegian mass murderer Anders Bravik devoted a few pages of his fifteen hundred page manifesto to it. When Dylan Rufe murdered nine people at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina in twenty fifteen, his Facebook profile photo showed him at the camera in a black jacket with two patches on the breast, the flag of Rhodesia and the flag of apartheid South Africa. I come across the idea pretty often in my work.

So many of my weird little guys are obsessed with the idea of a fully segregated society and the state violence against black people that comes with it. But that's where the idea lived. It lived on stormfront and on four Chan, and in manifestos and on Nazi podcasts. Those rallies in twenty twelve were pretty unique. The public display of the apartheid era South African flag at an American

political rally was unusual. It was unusual enough that it was mentioned in news stories three years later when the flag appeared again on Dylan Rufe's jacket. But like so many once fringe ideas, it's part of the mainstream political discourse. Now.

I won't rechread all of that. We talked about it in the last episode, but now the President of the United States is repeating the talking points from the flyers those skinheads printed out in twenty twelve, And I originally set out to just talk about those rallies as a sort of standalone story, this strange incident that seems to

have happened in total isolation. As far as I've been able to find, the group behind it had never put on a public event before, and aside from a poorly attended follow up in DC later that same year, they never did again. The website has been offline for years, and there's hardly any mention of the group at all anywhere.

A lot of white supremacist groups are short lived, so that's not really unusual, and this group, the South Africa Project, was pretty obviously just two people running a side project out of an Air Nations po box. But I can't let anything go, so I started to dig, and it became clear very quickly that there was a hell of

a lot more going on here than I thought. Back in twenty twelve, when those rallies took place, both the SPLC and the ADL had stories on their website explaining that those events had been organized by American neo Nazis. Both groups zeroed in on Morris Goulette, a longtime Arian Nations member and the man who'd given comments to the press as the organization's spokesman. Both outlets identified several local organizers of those assorted rallies. The Golden State Skinheads hosted

in Sacramento. Billy Roper headlined the rally in Arkansas. Rallies in Tennessee and Pennsylvania were hosted by members of Folksfront and so on. But in one single line in a blog post that isn't even on the ADL's website anymore, the events are attributed to a woman named Monica Stone in this passing mention crediting Stone with the idea for the rallies. The post notes that she was a South African immigrant and a longtime member of the Christian Defense League.

The CDL was a Christian identity group that grew out of the same milieu as the Aryan Nations in the sixties, but it never really achieved the same level of influence. But that's all there is. Monica and Louisiana. Monica from South Africa, Monica speaking at the Aryan Nations World Congress about the need for international solidarity between American neo Nazis and africanter nationalists. But Google gives you exactly nothing about this woman before or after this brief moment in time

in twenty twelve. This point, I'm locked in. I have to know more about this woman. How did she end up in Mandeville, Louisiana, a town of just ten thousand people that I've only heard of because it's where David Duke lives. So I started with the information that I have a name, hopefully it's her real name, a city,

and some potential known associates. If her longtime membership in the Christian Defense League is the only notable fact about her, maybe that means she was a very important member of the group, And lucky for me, it turns out she was the organization has or had, I guess, since it's defunct.

As far as I can tell, been run by a man named Robert K. Warner since the seventies, and when he took over, he moved its headquarters from California to Louisiana to be closer to his friend David Duke, and in addition into the Christian Defense League, Warner also ran a Christian identity church called the New Christian Crusade Church.

Corporate filings for the church show Robert K. Warner as an officer of the organization, which I expected, but in twenty eleven he filed an amendment adding someone named Monica Huggett as the church's chief financial officer, and he changed the address on file to a residential address in Mandeville, Louisiana.

Property records for Saint Tammany Parish show that a mortgage was taken out at that address by James Stone in nineteen ninety two, but after he died, the property was sold by his widow, and on the documents for the sale, she's listed as Monica hugget Stone. And that's the kind

of concrete paper trail I love to see. There's no doubt at all here that the Monica Stone behind those twenty twelve rallies is the Monica Huggot who married James Stone in two thousand and lived in Mandeville, Louisiana, two miles away from David Duke. So now I have a new name, Monica Huggot, and this is where I ran into trouble. Almost immediately, everything is in Afrikaans. Most of the English language material about someone named Monica Huggot is

about the renowned British conductor and baroque violinist. But that is an entirely different person who I am almost one hundred percent sure has never helped an Italian terrorist build a bomb. Violinists have to be very careful with their hands, you know. But they were a handful of extremely tantalizing clues that convinced me to power through the agony of

trying to translate blurry old PDFs. One of the first English Langua sources I found referring to a South African named Monica Huggett is the final report of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was authorized by President Nelson Mandela in nineteen ninety five

and it was chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The body's goal was exactly what it says in the name, to find the truth about what happened under apartheid and try to find a way to move forward as a nation.

The TRC had three central tasks to discover the causes in nature of human rights violations in South Africa between nineteen sixty and nineteen ninety four, to identify victims with a goal of paying reparations, and to allow amnesty for those who fully disclosed their involvement in politically motivated human rights violations. This wasn't a tribunal, this was a restorative justice process. They hoped to be able to provide amnesty

to people who were honest. Over the course of three years, the Commission heard testimony from over twenty thousand people, both victims and perpetrators. Monica Hugget did not, as far as I can tell, ever, testify before the Commission, but her name is in there. Specifically, it appears in Volume two, the seven hundred page portion of the report dealing with quote the Commission of gross violations of Human Rights, and more specifically, it's in Chapter seven Political Violence in the

era of negotiations and transition. Under the subheading links with international right wing groups, the report reads, the first link between ultra right terrorism and foreign agencies came to light in nineteen eighty two when mister Fabio Mariello, mister Massimobulo and mister Uni Genio's office, all white foreign expatriates known as the White Commando, were convicted of the nineteen seventy nine bombing of the offices of prominent academic doctor Jan Lombard.

Originally mister KuPS Vermullen and Miss Monica Hugget, a foreign right winger, were arrested with them, but Huggitt turned state witness and Vermullin was released after a few days. Hugget's name was subsequently linked to the shootout in March nineteen ninety four between the South African police and three German right wingers in the Donkerhook area. One German right winger, mister Stephen Rayes, was arrested, mister Thomas Kuons was shot dead,

and a third, mister Horst Cleans, later arrested. A fourth, mister Alexander Ndline, was later charged in the Cullen and

Magistrates Court for illegal possession of a firearm. And I think you can see why I was willing to invest the effort to find out more about this, because that's a hell of a thing to find under the first rock you turn over Italian terrorists bombing university offices in Pretoria nineteen seventy nine, German mercenaries getting into a deadly shootout with the police in nineteen ninety four, And there she is right at the center of two separate acts

of pro apartheid terrorism fifteen years apart. Now there are some problems here. First of all, her name is spelled wrong, only a little wrong. It's missing one of the teas. But Alexander Nydelin's name is spelled so incorrectly that you couldn't find this by searching for his name. The report calls him Alexander Niedneloin, which as far as I can tell, is not anyone's name or a real German name at all.

And the bombing of Professor Lombard's offices at the University of Pretoria happened in nineteen eighty, not nineteen seventy nine. It also describes Monica Huggett as a quote foreign right winger, which really threw me off at first. I've heard her talk. She sounds South African, and she's even said in multiple

interviews that she was born and raised there. The confusion in the report maybe because she had publicly identified herself as a member of the American ku Klux Klan, and that may have been interpreted as her being American, And by the time the Commission was starting their work, she had left South Africa and was living in the United States. They never actually had a chance to speak to her. I'm willing to cut them some slack on the details here.

They were close enough for government work, as my dad used to say, and they had a lot of work to do. But as my subsequent research shows, beyond a shadow of it out, Monica Huggett was born and raised South African. But keep those four Germans in the back of your mind for now. We'll see them again. Alexander Nydeline, you've already met the German NPD member swearing allegiance to Donald Trump at a Croatian Nazi rally in twenty seventeen.

According to blurry old scans of arrest warrants from nineteen ninety three, Stephen Rays and Thomas Kunst were the other two German mercenaries he deserted with just before Christmas that year, and just as an aside, I am admittedly not at all an expert on the Bosnian War, so it took me a minute to parse the letterhead on the warrants.

They were issued by the non existent country of the Croatian Republic of Hertzeg Bosnia, which explains why Nydelein had no problem re entering Croatia after fleeing as a fugitive all those years ago, and the fourth man forced Glens

he still wanted for murder in Namibia. Early on in my search for more information about this mysterious woman at the center of these two terror plots carried out by foreign neo Nazis, I found a master's thesis submitted by Mada Visser to the University of Pretoria in nineteen ninety nine. It's in Afrikaans but translated. The title is the Ideological Foundations and Development of the White Fascist Movements in South

Africa nineteen forty five to nineteen ninety five. After some truly agonizing trial and error trying to find a way to translate a three hundred page PDF without paying for something. The thesis was immensely useful, but every clue just raised more questions, and I was running into dead end after dead end trying to track down the primary sources in

the footnotes. I can find a lot of things, but digitize archives of forty year old newspapers published in another language in another country that might not even still exist at all. For all I know, I came up empty, and I was on the verge of total ners was collapse at the idea that there is information out there that is just not available to me. When I had another idea and I found an unlikely ally the Central

Intelligence Agency, That's right. A special shout out this week goes to the CIA, more specifically the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, which was operated by the CIA until it was renamed the Open Source Center in two thousand and five. Originally called the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service, it was authorized in nineteen forty one by President Roosevelt, and its original purpose was to record, translate, transcribe, and analyze propaganda radio programs

produced by the Access Powers during the war. Over the years, its mission grew to include peacetime operations, and they eventually added television and print media into the mix, collecting and translating news from around the world and disseminating reports for use by intelligence agencies and diplomatic and military organizations. It's basically just an international news aggregator for government employees. And look, maybe all those old South African newspapers do exist somewhere.

I found one. Not the one I was looking for, not one with real journalists and investigative reporting like I'd hoped. No, the only paper I could find a large catalog of digitized archives for was a paper called De Transfiller. It

was an African or nationalist newspaper. That paper once unsuccessfully tried to sue another South African newspaper for calling them Nazi propaganda, but it was such overt Nazi propaganda that the judge dismissed the suit and ruled that the editor of the Transfaller quote did make his newspaper a tool of the Nazis in South Africa and he knew it

end quote. So the Transvaaler wasn't exactly the resource I was hoping to find, But eventually I gave up trying to find old South African newspapers and something that was much easier to find were the unclassified daily reports from the Sub Saharan office of the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service. So just this once, I guess I will give a

reluctant nod to the CIA. So now I have some contemporaneous reporting that has been translated into English by someone who's presumably a professional and not a robot, and the pieces are starting to come together. I can start to see the picture here. This bombing campaign in nineteen eighty is starting to come into focus. In August of nineteen eighty, a newspaper editor in Pretoria received a letter on letter head bearing a symbol remarkably similar to the cross emblem

used by the American Ku Klux Klan. A group calling themselves the Vitt Commando or the White Commandos claimed responsibility for the bombing of Professor Jon Lombard's office at the University of Pretoria, and the group threatened further attacks, writing that people and organizations working toward integration would be warned first and then eliminated. The Vit Commando had formed just a few months earlier in May or June of nineteen eighty.

Sources vary. Monica Huggett would later testify that she joined the newly formed vit Commando after meeting Massimo Bolo at a meeting in Pretoria in June of nineteen eighty, as described in the memoirs of Ray Hill, a man who ended his lengthy career as a fascist organizer by playing

informant for the anti fascist magazine Searchlight. The meeting was a summit for leaders of the British fascist group National Front, the africaner nationalist group AWB, the far right South African Political Party HNP, and an Italian fascist group called Unido. So even though her involvement with vit Commando is the first time I can put her on paper involved in a terrorist organization, it was obviously not her first introduction

to the idea. She had to have been deeply involved with at least one of those fascist groups to have even been in the room where Massimo Bolo invited her to join his terrorist cell, and the group got started right away. Just two months after forming the group, the bombing of Lombard's office was already their third big public display. They'd started a fire at a drive in theater and fire bombed the Johannesburg headquarters of the Institute for Race

Relations in December. They claimed responsibility for the bombing of Professor F. A. Merritz's office at the University of South Africa, and they would carry out at least four more bombings

before members started getting arrested. The first four arrests came in early February of nineteen eighty one a government employee in Pretoria named W. G. Van Dyck, the director of the South African National Front, Alan Fotheringham, an Italian fascist named Massimo Bolo, and as the newspaper put it at the time, mister Bolo's girlfriend, Miss m. Huggett of Kempton Park. Now that's the only source I could find alleging a romantic relationship between the pair. It never comes up again,

so I don't know. And in the weeks that followed, police would arrest even more alleged members of the VIT Commando Fabio Miriello, an Italian born African citizen who'd emigrated four years earlier, kuz Vermulin, the leader of the World Apartheid Movement, and an Italian immigrant named Eugenio Zoppis and his wife Laura Zenenga. Those are all the names I could find in most of my sources. I found a

few more names in an unlikely place. Documents released by the Italian government as part of their investigation into the Bologna massacre, a nineteen eighty bombing of a train station in Italy willie you to have been the work of fascist terrorists, do list several additional names of Italians who were in South Africa at the time and believed to have been involved with the VIT Commando. But there's no mention of those extra Italians in the South African or

English language press, as far as I can find. As a matter of fact, there's no mention of almost any of those people. Ever. Again, only Mariello, Bolo and Zoppis actually faced charges. Marieloni Bolo were charged with sabotage the bombings and possession of a massive cache of weapons that had been stolen from the South African Defense Force, including fifty kilos of plastic explosives, sixty seven hand grenades, a couple of land mines, eight rifles, four pistols, a machine gun,

and five thousand rounds of ammunition. When Bolo and Mariello went to trial later that year, Monica Hugget testified against them. In exchange, she wasn't charged, she admitted that she had procured the bomb making manual for Bolo books that she'd ordered from her clan contacts in the United States. I was a little surprised to see a familiar title here.

One of the books she had sent to her from America was called The poor Man's James Bond, which is the same bomb making book that Dennis Mahon bought for the ATF informant that he was in love with after she expressed an interest in bomb making. What a Small World. Huggett also testified that she'd accompanied Bulow to Professor Lombard's office to scout out the best location to place the bomb.

She explained that Bulow's residence had become unsuitable as a workspace after too many of his friends moved in, so she rented a property under her own name that he could use to work on his bombs. On the stand, Huggitt explained that she's a political activist. She's a member of the American ku Klux Klan and the Vit Commando. Never intended to endanger any human lives now, for what it's worth not to give this woman the benefit of

the doubt. But despite the repeated threats to follow up with more violence, to take up arms, to commit actual acts of violence against human beings. No one was ever actually injured by a vit commando bomb. They went off in empty offices. I think she may have been telling

the truth. They were warnings. Huggett told the court that their goal was to wake people up to the dangers of integration, to send a warning that more violence was inevitable if this creeping, incremental progressive reform that people were talking about were to actually happen. She swore the group had no intention of actually hurting anyone or trying to

overthrow the government. By the end of nineteen eighty one, Mussimobolo had been sentenced to fifty two years, though forty two of those years would run concurrent with other portions of the sentence, leaving him with just ten years to actually serve, and Fabio Miriello was given nineteen years, but same deal. It was effectively just five, but Bolo didn't even serve those ten. He was released without any explanation that I can find, after just four years in nineteen

eighty five, and immediately deported back to Italy. I'm not entirely sure what became of Muriello, but Myightivisser's thesis says he was known to have reconnected with Monica Huggett after his release, and the pair both got involved with the South African branch of the American Neo Nazi religion, the Church of the Creator. As for Eugenio Zuppis, the young Italian immigrant was charged only with the theft of the weapons.

He'd been the one to actually steal them from the South African Defense Force, and he was also sentenced to five years, and he appealed that sentence to the court. So the following year, his lawyer was urging a judge to consider the mitigating factors. He's so young. He's just twenty three years old, and he was a brand new immigrant at the time, and he didn't speak any English.

He'd been manipulated by the much older Fabio Muriello. His lawyer went as far as to say that Eugenio Zuppas had joined the VIT Commando entirely by accident, and he had no idea of the true nature of the organization until after he was arrested. The article about the dismissal of his appeal only lays out what his attorney said, it's not clear from the reporting I can find if anyone contradicted those statements in court, because you might have guessed,

but it's not true. I mentioned earlier that the most complete list of names of those Italian fascists who were arrested in South Africa in connection to the vict Commando bombings was buried somewhere in two thousand pages of documents released by the Italian government related to the Bologna massacre. In August of nineteen eighty, the same month that the Vit Commando bombing started in South Africa, eighty five people were killed when a bomb went off inside the Bologna

Central train station in Italy. It is, to some extent kind of a mystery still. There were a number of trials spanning over a decade, and several members of an Italian and fascist group were convicted, but the group itself never accepted responsibility for the bombing. It is perhaps in

some ways akin to the Oklahoma City bombing. Legally we found the guy who did it, but there are a lot of questions we're never going to get answers to, and there are a lot of weird paths you could let your mind go down trying to find them, so without losing my sanity or dragging you into the incomprehensible depths. Suffice it to say, Eugenio'suppus was not an innocent, confused young man when he stole a small arsenal of weapons

for the vit Commando in nineteen eighty. In nineteen seventy six, he was one of fifteen members of an Italian fascist group who armed with clubs and chains, beat a young communist organizer to death in a small town outside of Rome. And, contrary to his lawyer's claims that he had by pure coincidence, met and befriended a fellow Italian right after he moved to South Africa, only to be manipulated by this new

friend into committee crimes. There is actually evidence that Zoppas had been sent to South Africa specifically to meet with Fabio Mariello. In the months before Zappas arrived in South Africa, a member of Italy's Black Order wrote Mariello that he was sending six members down very soon, with more to follow. In nineteen eighty four, the newspaper of the Italian Communist Party listed Zappas among the names of seventy six fascist

fugitives believed to have fled the country. Diplomatic records show the Italian government was requesting his extradition from Paraguay by nineteen eighty six, and I don't know what happened to him after that. In what is becoming a constant refrain, I do want to stress that I'm not an expert in South African history. I'm not a scholar of the apartheid era. I'm not a historian. Every week I have to gain some new specialized knowledge to try to give

context to the story I'm trying to tell. And there's only so much one person can sort out in a couple of days. So bear with me, because I do want to try to give some context here. This bit commando bombing campaign in nineteen eighty didn't come out of nowhere.

When Monica Hugget testified against the men she'd helped carry out those attacks, she said their goal had been to demonstrate that many white South Africans were opposed to the path of gradual concessions being made by the National Party, and I was confused by that. It will be another fifteen years before apartheid ended, and the National Party loved apartheid. What is she talking about? Apartheid is inherently violent. It

is a form of violence in and of itself. There is no peaceful or kind way to run an apartheid state. There is no nonviolent ethno state, and that's obvious. But the kinds of violence and the visibility of that violence change from year to year. I don't mean to say that things like the forced removal of Black Africans from their homes and their lands are not violence. It is every action carried out in service of implementing and maintaining apartheid was an act of violence. But some years were

bloodier than others. And while the political movement to end apartheid ebbed and flowed, two people have always and will always resist injustice. But in nineteen when those bombs went off, there was a growing awareness on all sides of the issue that something was going to have to change. Whether they liked it or not, The country was about to

experience some of the most violent years of apartheid. For those committed to maintaining the status quo and holding on to political power, that would mean making some targeted compromises and more importantly, doubling down on state repression. The Soweto uprising had made apartheid a PR problem. I think for most people, dead school children is more than a PR problem,

but for the National Party, that's what it was. In nineteen seventy six, thousands of students walked out of class in protest of a nineteen seventy four law requiring the use of Afrikaans in school. Students sang and held sign as they marched, and they planned to rally at a

nearby stadium. Words spread to other nearby schools and students poured out into the streets to join the march, and when they heard the police had blocked their intended route, one of the march organizers urged calm, telling the crowd, brothers and sisters, I appeal to you, keep calm and cool. We have just received a report that the police are coming. Don't taunt them, don't do anything to them. Be cool

and calm. We are not fighting. And when they encountered the police for the first time, for a moment it seemed cooler heads had prevailed on all sides, but the police weren't actually retreating. They were waiting for reinforcements, and just half an hour later, the first tear gas canister was fired into the crowd of children, and some of them ran, but most of them stayed facing the police, unmoving. According to several accounts, I found the children were singing

when the first shot was fired. The police opened fire with live rounds on the crowd of children. One of the first children to die that day was a twelve year old boy named Hector Peterson. The photo of his tiny, limp body in the arms of an older boy, with Hector's sister running beside him, was seen around the world. Black South African photojournalist sam and Zeema had captured the

true face of apartheid, and people were horrified. The violence spread like wildfire, and the worst of it lasted for three days. There was an explosion of internal resistance. White university students marched against the killings, Black workers went on strike. Riots broke out in black townships all over the country. Buildings burned, and when the dust had settled, hundreds were dead.

The small reforms introduced in the late seventies had nothing to do with the National Party softening its stance on apartheid, but the apartheid regime saw some advantage to reducing international criticism and disrupting black resistance. Amidst these tepid reforms, divisions grew. Some white South Africans, who had seen those pictures of children's corpses, now saw apartheid as what it was, a true evil. Others were repulsed by the violence, but seemed

satisfied with the gestures toward reform. People like Monica Huggett, were worried that these promised reforms, things like repealing the ban on interracial relationships, would set the country on a road to hell. In her testimony the trial for Mariello and Bolo, she laid the blame on her Italian accomplices, but made no apologies for her own motivation, saying, on the stand, I was opposed to integration. I still am.

The week Mariello and Bulo were convicted, American newspapers carried a four sentence wire story about the trial, noting that it was South Africa's first ever prosecution of white terrorists. How South Africa was entering its bloodiest decade of political violence. Someone had finally gone to jail for pro apartheid terror. But it's significant that they were only willing to prosecute those Italian men. There's hardly any mention at all South African woman who served as the point of contact for

these foreign terrorists. Many of the stories in South African outlets stress heavily that the group was foreign in origin, that its members were foreigners, that they didn't even speak Afrikaans, that they had no connection to any South African political organizations. But that assertion is complicated a little bit by an anecdote from ray Hill's memoirs. On the first day of the trial, as Below and Miriello entered the courtroom, a

man in the gallery stood and applauded for them. Natman Pete Rudolph was a former police officer, and at the time of the trial in nineteen eighty one, he was a sitting member of the Pretorias City Council and a member of the far right party HNP. He would eventually leave party politics behind and form a white supremacist group called the Order Bora Folk or the Order of the Boer People. He borrowed the name from the plot of the Turner Diaries. After Miriello and Bolo were convicted, the

VIC Commando ceased to exist. It was just one of countless short lived right wing organizations in a shifting political landscape. Groups formed and splintered and disappeared all the time. Sometimes there was even doubt about the actual existence of some group claiming credit for one attack or another, and a lot of groups had significantly overlapping membership. But the end of the vict Commendo was not the end of Monica

Huggett's involvement in pro apartheid violence, not by a long shot. Now, in my timeline of events, I lose track of Monica after nineteen eighty one. I can't say what she was up to for most of the eighties, but by the time I find her again in the record, she's a high ranking member of the africaner nationalist neo Nazi organization called the Africaner Veristanspavaging the Africaner Resistance Movement in English,

or just AWB for short. It was founded in nineteen seventy three by Eugene terre Blanche, and the AWB wasn't happy with apartheid. No, it wouldn't do at all. Apartheid was too left wing, it was too liberal, and there was too much risk to bore identity for them to be living in proximity to black Africans, even under apartheid conditions. They're secessionists, and they believe the only solution to the problem is a pure white ethno state, a folkstot or

the white South African. It's a little bit baffling that she was able to resume her activities retaining a fairly high level of prestige and responsibility, particularly when it came to her international contact after she, you know, turned state's witness against Maryellow and Bolo. Surely everyone knew she'd sold them out to save herself, but maybe her colleagues didn't

see it that way. Maybe she was important enough that they were willing to make that sacrifice to keep her on the outside doing whatever it was she was doing. I had hope to get through the end of the nineteen eighties in this episode, but I think we have to leave it here. In the mid eighties, our Italian mercenaries were in the wind after serving just a handful of years buying bars. I can't find Monica no matter how hard I squint at old TV news b roll

of South African Nazi rallies. But I think she's there somewhere. And next week, before we rejoined Monica in her own story, we'll pick up in nineteen eighty nine with one of our German mercenaries. Five years before shooting out with the cops just days before the nineteen ninety four South African election, Horst Glen's was trying to prevent a different African nation

from holding its first democratic, multi racial elections. He failed both times, but in nineteen eighty nine Klen's in his South African Nazi terror Celle, took two lives in a failed attempt to prevent Namibian independence. Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. Its research written and recorded by me Molly Conker. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was

composed by Brad dickerd. You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely and I almost certainly won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subredd end. Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my room guys.