Draft:Mike Geldenhuys

General Mike Geldenhuys (born Michiel Christian Wilhelm Geldenhuys) was the Commissioner of the South African Police (SAP) from 1978 to 1983 during the apartheid era.

Early career and the Security Branch

Before rising to Commissioner, Geldenhuys served as a Lieutenant General and Head of the Security Branch of the South African Police, the division responsible for internal security and counterintelligence work. In 1973, while in that post, he arranged for an ad-hoc police tactical team nicknamed the “Bliksems” to guard the Israeli delegation at the South African Games after Israel made its attendance conditional on guaranteed protection.

Following the Fox Street Siege of April 1975, a hostage crisis at the Israeli embassy in Johannesburg that exposed the police force’s lack of a dedicated tactical unit, the Security Branch recommended forming a specialist high risk unit. On 1 February 1976, Geldenhuys, still head of the Security Branch, officially authorised the creation of the Special Task Force as a police tactical response unit.

Appointment as Commissioner

Geldenhuys was appointed Commissioner of the South African Police in 1978. After taking the post he transferred command and control of the Special Task Force from the Security Branch to fall directly under the Commissioner’s office.

In January 1979, according to an account sourced from a Koevoet veterans’ organisation, General Magnus Malan of the South African Defence Force asked the SAP Security Branch to help gather intelligence against SWAPO insurgents in South West Africa. Geldenhuys, as the Commissioner, and Johann Coetzee, then head of the Security Branch, selected a police colonel to lead a small team for this task, an effort connected to the origins of the counterinsurgency unit later known as the Koevoet.

In early 1982 the Minister of Law and Order, Louis le Grange, informed Geldenhuys and Coetzee that the government had decided to strike at the African National Congress in the United Kingdom in order to demonstrate that ANC and South African Communist Party members were vulnerable there. This led to the bombing of the ANC’s London office on 14 March 1982. Geldenhuys opposed the operation, particularly the plan to send serving policemen to carry it out on British soil.

Later years

Geldenhuys was succeeded as Commissioner of the South African Police by General Johann Coetzee in 1983 In 2012, a scrapbook style biography about him titledVan Kaalvoetseun tot Kommissaris (From Barefoot Boy to Commissioner), compiled by Hanlie van Straaten and Hennie Heymans, was privately published in Sinoville, and a copy exists signed and dated by Geldenhuys that year.