THE HUNCHED figure in a pale blue suit dropped his bombshell like an afterthought. In 
the closing stages of a trial that has lasted 19 months, the old South African regime's chief 
assassin was testifying in an attempt to soften his sentence for 89 charges of murder, fraud 
and conspiracy, when he casually mentioned two weeks ago that a colleague was 
responsible for the 1986 murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme.

If true, killing Palme was the most audacious and outrageous action in the apartheid 
regime's long record of ugly deeds. South Africa had always been on the suspect list 
because of Palme's passionate support of the African National Congress cause, but there 
was never any evidence that South Africans were involved in the assassination, which took 
place in Stockholm. Now here was the  apartheid regime's top hit man, police colonel 
Eugene de Kock, volunteering the name of a   fellow underground operator, Craig 
Williamson, as the master planner of the assassination. Williamson has issued a statement 
denying the allegation; the Swedes say they are investigating.

"Why do you only tell us now?" asked an astonished Judge Willem van der Merwe.

"It slipped my mind before," replied de Kock, as though one murder was much like 
another -- and how could one be expected to remember them all?

But if the news startled the world, and the Swedish government, it caused only a brief 
ripple in South Africa. A series of court cases and the hearings of the Truth and 
Reconciliation Commission, which is post-apartheid South Africa's version of Germany's 
Nuremburg trials, have produced a steady drip of disclosures. But the country seems 
curiously unresponsive. It is as though the whites don't want to know, and the blacks 
assumed it already.

The Palme allegation remains unresolved. But there's nothing unclear, however, about 
some of the other evidence that has come out during the hearings and court cases. The 
much publicized "black-on-black" violence which ravaged KwaZulu-Natal Province in the 
run-up to South Africa's democratic election in 1994, the evidence shows, was largely 
instigated by the white security forces, who trained, armed and helped members of Chief 
Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party to carry out murderous attacks on 
supporters of the African National Congress.

Eugene de Kock admits to having been a key figure in this operation. He has admitted too 
to masterminding the bombing of the headquarters of both the South African Council of 
Churches and the Congress of South African Trade Unions in Johannesburg, as well as the 
ANC headquarters in London in 1982.

There is, of course, the question of whether de Kock is telling the truth. He has lied before, 
shamefully and successfully. By his own admission he appeared before a judicial 
commission in 1990 with a bandaged foot, having injured it during a killing raid into 
Botswana a few days before and managed to convince the judge that he had never in his life 
been involved in cross-border activities.

But de Kock's testimony now has the ring of truth. He has already been found guilty and 
has little to gain from further deception. His evidence at this point has been aimed at trying 
to soften his sentence by showing that he was but a cog in a vast dirty-war machine, and 
there is little reason to doubt that. The silence of those he has named as having authorized 
his killing raids, from former president P.W. Botha and members of his cabinet to a string 
of military and police generals, is telling.

There is something surreal about de Kock's trial in a wood-paneled Pretoria courtroom. 
Here is a decorated Afrikaner hero of yesteryear, who fought what he thought was a 
patriotic war to defend the Afrikaner volk (people), being tried by an Afrikaner judge and 
two Afrikaner assessors, with Afrikaner lawyers representing both the prosecution and the 
defense -- all on behalf of the new black regime. The only blacks in attendance are victims' 
relatives, observing from the public gallery.

De Kock himself hardly looks the Rambo figure he was once cracked up to be. He was 
licensed to kill, which he did with gusto and his colleagues nicknamed him "Prime Evil." 
But de Kock has grown paunchy and his thick-lensed spectacles, hunched posture and soft 
monotonous voice give the impression of a secret agent gone to seed. His lawyer says he is 
suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. Killing, apparently, is stressful work.

Now 47, de Kock has been in the killing business all his adult life. He began in the 1960s, 
fighting in a South African police unit sent to support Ian Smith's white minority 
government in Rhodesia. After that he transferred to Namibia and Angola where he learned 
the skill of turning captured black guerrillas against their own kind. He became a 
commander of the notorious Koevoet (crowbar) police unit, made up largely of turned 
Angolan freedom fighters who acquired a reputation for mass atrocities against 
civilians.

In mid-1985 de Kock returned to Pretoria, where he was given command of a special unit 
code-named C-10. Its task was to undertake covert operations against "enemies of the 
state" -- meaning supporters of the ANC. De Kock's first mission was to assassinate senior 
ANC activist Zwelimanzi Nyanda, brother of the present chief of staff of the South African 
National Defence Force, Lt. Gen. Siphiwe Nyanda. De Kock described how he had 
slipped across the border into neighboring Swaziland with members of his unit and lobbed 
26 hand grenades into the house where Nyanda was living, killing "five or six people" but 
only wounding Nyanda.

"I followed his blood trail," de Kock said. "When I caught up with him he turned around 
and I shot him in the head. I saw his hair whip up as the bullet hit him. It gave me a funny 
feeling."

C-10 operated from a farm called Vlakplaas, outside Pretoria. There de Kock and his 
fellow officers trained askaris -- captured ANC guerrillas turned pro-government soldiers -- 
to become highly skilled and ruthless killers. Over the next eight years they killed scores of 
people; De Kock said he didn't really know how many. Senior police officers around the 
country would telephone him and give him the names of people they wanted "taken 
out."

De Kock said he and his men mailed poisons and booby-trapped bombs hidden in pens, 
manuscripts, tape recorders and radios to ANC supporters living in Swaziland, Tanzania 
and Zambia. Again, de Kock revealed a fastidious streak. "I'm not a poison man," he 
said.

He also said he disliked killing women and children. On one cross-border raid into Lesotho 
in which his unit "eliminated" a dozen ANC exiles, including a young white woman and 
her colored husband, he found the couple's infant son had survived the hail of bullets. He 
told the court how he had locked the baby in an adjoining room, then stopped on the way 
home to telephone the Lesotho police and tell them about the baby.

De Kock was given the Police Silver Medal for bravery after that raid. When the 
commissioner of police, Gen. Johan Coetzee, pinned the medal on him at a secret 
ceremony, he quipped: "I don't know whether I should shake your hands, there's so much 
blood on them."

Life was not always grim at Vlakplaas. De Kock spoke of great braaivleis (barbecue) 
parties, especially on Friday nights when they threw the gates open for VIP guests and the 
Chivas Regal flowed freely. "We had only the best at Vlakplaas," he boasted -- all paid for 
out of a secret slush fund.

As the tales of death and sleaze and jollity rolled out at the hearing, one   theme has 
emerged which raised questions about the culpability not only of the old regime leaders but 
of some who are still politically prominent in the new South Africa -- such as ex-president 
F.W. de Klerk and Chief Buthelezi, who is now minister of home affairs in Mandela's 
coalition cabinet.

De Kock told how he and other C-10 officers trained members of Buthelezi's Inkatha 
Freedom Party in hit-squad methods at a secret camp near Ulundi, the capital of Buthelezi's 
Zulu tribal "homeland" during the apartheid era. He named a string of Inkatha leaders who 
assisted with the training.

He described how an arms factory was commissioned to manufacture shotguns that looked 
home-made, and how he delivered truckloads of these and other weapons to the ministerial 
compound in Ulundi, where Buthelezi was minister of police as well as chief minister of 
the "homeland."

This, clearly, was the genesis of the so-called Third Force alluded to by Nelson Mandela 
during the black civil war that ravaged the Zulu people and claimed more than 20,000 lives 
before the 1994 election. Mandela claimed that the government was instigating the violence, 
an allegation President de Klerk vehemently denied. The question now is, did South 
Africa's white Nobel Peace Prize winner know all along? "It's inconceivable that he 
didn't," de Kock told the court emphatically. "All my orders came from the top."

And Buthelezi? It seems even more inconceivable that he was not closely involved though 
de Kock has not implicated him directly.

More trials are due in the wake of de Kock's evidence. When his own case is over, he will 
testify again before the Truth Commission -- to which he has applied for amnesty in 
exchange for disclosure of everything he knows. He appears to be keeping more 
bombshells in reserve to impress the commission. Perhaps more information about the 
assassination of Olaf Palme is among them.

Allister Sparks is a South African journalist and a frequent contributor to The Washington 
Post.