Hendrik van den Bergh

General Hendrik Johan van den Bergh, SSA (27 November 191416 August 1997) was a South African police official most famous for founding 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 "Tall Hendrik" on account of his height. Biography Born in Vredefort, Orange Free State into an Afrikaner farming family, van den Bergh was a lifelong Afrikaner nationalist. He was opposed to South African intervention in World War II, and, with future Prime Minister John Vorster, joined the Ossewabrandwag ("Oxwagon Sentinel"), a paramilitary organisation 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 (later justice minister under Prime Minister H.F. Verwoerd) used new security legislation to crush growing resistance against apartheid.