Criminal - Ten Doors

Episode Date: August 28, 2020

Tim Jenkin was a member of the ANC (African National Congress). The organization had been declared unlawful in South Africa, seen by the white minority as a threat to public order. In 1978, Tim Jenkin was charged under South Africa’s Terrorism Act for disseminating anti-apartheid material and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Just before he was convicted, someone gave him a book called Papillon, by Henri Charrière, which he said “was really a manual of escape.” Along with two other incarcerated activists, Stephen Lee and Alex Moumbaris, he began to secretly collect materials and cash, following instructions from the book. Tim Jenkin knew that the only way to open the many locked doors between him and the outside world would be to find a way to make some keys. Lots of keys. Tim Jenkin’s book is Escape from Pretoria. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. We know now that they were following us for about a month prior to our arrest. We did notice strange things happening. But when you're working underground, you are, for most of the time, you're a bit paranoid. You kind of imagine that everyone is looking at you or knows what you're doing. And looking back after the arrest, we realized that they were following us for quite a while. In 1978, 29-year-old Tim Jenkin was active in the political efforts of South Africa's anti-apartheid movement. The country had been operating under apartheid for 30 years, a system that institutionalized racial segregation. The word apartheid means

apartness. And the government was controlled by a white minority. Tim Jenkins is white. He grew up in Cape Town. So I grew up under this situation where everything was divided. So spatially, cities and towns were divided. There were white areas and there were black areas. So we went to white schools and there were black schools in the black areas. Everything was separated. Even buildings had separate lifts for white people and for black people. Parks had benches for white people and black people,

and certain beaches were designated for black people, but most of the beaches were for white people. So I just accepted Part 8 because I didn't know any better. I just assumed that's the way things were. And then, when he was 21 years old, he traveled to the UK. He says everyone he met there asked him what he thought about the fact that he lived in a country that was so racially segregated. He says he was actually confused.

But then he started seeing programs on TV, shows that would never have been broadcast in South Africa about the consequences of apartheid. And at first I didn't believe these films that I was seeing. I thought it was all propaganda. But after a while and after reading books that I couldn't obtain in South Africa, I began to realize that this apartheid thing is something quite terrible, and I'd been living part of it, and really maintaining it in a sense,

and not understanding what black South Africans were suffering. He returned to South Africa and started studying sociology at the University of Cape Town. There he became friends with another white student named Stephen Lee and started sharing books that he had brought back from the UK, anti-apartheid books and political histories that were censored in South Africa. At this time, the most prominent anti-apartheid organization was the African National Congress, also known as the ANC. Nelson Mandela was a member of the ANC. By the 1970s, the organization was banned in South Africa. It had been declared unlawful, seen by the white minority as a threat

to public order. They operated underground and Tim and Stephen had heard that if you wanted to get involved you could try contacting their office in London. So the two of us traveled to the UK and simply went there and knocked on the door. And it was quite an amusing incident because the person who received us said, please just sit down there. And we waited and he went into his office and he typed something on a piece of paper. The piece of paper said, you should not come here. Please meet me at the cafe around the corner in half an hour. So that's what we did.

Tim and Stephen met with members of the ANC several times and they asked to be put to work back home in South Africa. They said, okay, you can go back and set up your print shop and we'd need to teach you various things like security

matters, how to conduct yourself in the underground. And they showed us a few other innovative devices for distributing leaflets and information. And one of these was what became called a leaflet bomb. It's not really a bomb. It was really just a kind of exploding device that would hurl hundreds of leaflets up into the air and then they would rain down on a crowd, a target crowd somewhere. So we went back to South Africa with this knowledge

and set up shop. They worked undetected for two and a half years, distributing thousands and thousands of leaflets all over the country, until March of 1978. So how were you, tell me about how you were caught? They just arrived one night at 2 a.m. in the morning. There was loud banging on the door. But there's not much you could do. We looked out of the window to see if we could jump out the window,

run away, but the place was surrounded with police cars and flashing lights. Hisasi still doesn't know how exactly they were caught, but they were both charged under South Africa's Terrorism Act. And in a sense, they saw us as traitors to our race because we were white, and they expected all white people to kind of back the system, or which they did, of course. Most whites supported apartheid. Even those who said they were anti-apartheid, but in practice did, of course. Most whites supported apartheid, even those who said they

were anti-apartheid, but in practice they weren't. They were happy to live their lives in South Africa and reap all the benefits that they could being white. So they called us terrorists and all kinds of horrible names. They were held in Cape Town to await their trial. They weren't allowed out on bail, but they could receive visitors. During one visit, Stephen's father brought them a copy of Papillon, a book written by a Frenchman who escaped from prison, not once, but twice. And this book was written in such a way that it was really a manual of escape,

what to do and what not to do, and how to pull off a successful escape. Even before his trial had begun, Tim says he knew he would be going to prison. He saw no way around it. And so he started taking notes from Papillon. He learned he should have money on him at all times, to make sure that once he escaped, he could actually move as far away from the prison as possible. He couldn't just ask his family to send him money, but he could ask for food and clothing. And in that way, we were able to smuggle out messages. We could write on bits of toilet paper,

sew them into the hems of clothing. And one of those messages was to send us money, and we explained how to conceal money inside groceries. And we requested also that they send us some cigars inside cigar tubes, little aluminium cigar tubes, which they did. And then we concealed this money inside these cigar tubes and inserted them, you know, don't want to go into detail, but in a certain body cavity to hide them,

and walked around with this money for three months inside our bodies. Tim Jenkin and Stephen Lee were both convicted. Tim was sentenced to 12 years in prison and Stephen to eight. Tim says he didn't mind the sentence. He'd already collected his travel money and didn't plan to be there long. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Tim and Stephen were both sent to a small prison in Pretoria, 800 miles away from home. Although the prison was small, it was within a larger prison complex.

Guards were everywhere. They were led through door after door, many of them made of thick steel and all locked tightly. There were only eight other men imprisoned at Pretoria Prison besides Tim and Stephen,

all white men, who had been involved with the ANC. Our prison, I wouldn't say, was five-star conditions, but compared to the black prisoners, our conditions were five-star. So, for example, none of us in that prison had been physically tortured, whereas that was very common amongst black prisoners when they got arrested. And they speak to us as human beings where it definitely wasn't like that. whereas that was very common amongst black prisoners when they got arrested. And they speak to us as human beings, where it definitely wasn't like that with black prisoners.

They had a very, very hard time indeed. And our situation was pretty relaxed. During the day, they worked in a carpentry workshop, making furniture for other prisons. And then in the late afternoon, they were locked back in their individual cells, all along one long corridor. So from 4.30, you were faced with this door in front of you. So each cell had two doors, an inner grill door, which was just a bar door, and an outer solid metal door. The inner door, the lock was right there,

and you could get your hand right around to the other side of it through the bars. So my first thought was, well, how do you open this lock? The keys that were used at Pretoria Prison in the late 70s were huge, metal, sort of blunt objects. Tim decided he'd try to make a key out of wood by sneaking supplies out of the carpentry workshop. But first, he'd have to figure out what shape and size to make the key. A lot of people think, how on earth could you possibly work out the dimensions of a key? But if you think about it, if you look at the actual lock, as I said, the lock was right there. The keyhole itself gives you some clues about the size of the key.

He stuck pencils inside the keyhole to determine the length of the key, and attempted to make impressions of the key's unique cuts by pressing pieces of paper against the interior of the lock. And that gave me the outline of a blank key. Next, he hid a few scraps of wood, a file, and some sandpaper from the carpentry workshop in a thermos, and smuggled them back to his cell. He worked at night, filing and sanding three pieces of wood, to try to create a key that would open the door in front of him. And the very first time I tried it, it worked.

Were you amazed that it had actually worked? Well, I'm amazed that it worked, but it just worked so smoothly. In fact, it worked so easily and so smoothly, I thought it hadn't worked and thought it had broken off on the inside. Then I realized it hadn't. And so I opened it and re-locked it, and there it was. Tim had successfully opened the inner door, but he was still locked in his cell by the steel outer door. So that was the next problem, was how to open a door when you're inside a cell

and the keyhole is on the outside. It's like being locked inside a safe with no access to the lock. How do you open it? But that was our next puzzle. So there was the door that you came in, and alongside it was a very small window opening into the corridor. But you couldn't put your hand out of that window

with a key and open the door because it was quite far away. And suddenly it occurred to me that why couldn't I just fix the key to the end of the broom? So if I made some kind of little crank mechanism hanging off the end of the broomstick and mounted the key in that, then I could use the broomstick to guide the key into the keyhole, and then simply crank it around. Everything was trial and error. He spent months trying to get the second key right, working for hours each night, while listening closely for the night guard. And then, one night, it finally worked. And then, of course, that changed everything,

because now, for the first time in the history of that prison, we could actually come out of ourselves and then begin to tackle the other barriers. Thank you. they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums,

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Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. Tim Jenkin was working with his friend, Stephen Lee, and one other man, Alex Mimboras. Tim says all of the incarcerated men at Pretoria Prison knew what was going on, but that he was never afraid anyone would tell on them. Some of the prisoners felt that simply by being in prison, in other words, prisoners of conscience, was sufficient that we were making a statement that everyone knew there were political prisoners and that we just simply had to make the best of our time in prison. But the three of us felt somewhat different. We felt that it was more important to see ourselves as prisoners of war and that we had a duty to get out of the prison. Now that Tim had made keys to get them out of their cells,

he and his two friends quietly started planning out the next steps. At first they thought escaping through the prison yard would be the most direct way out. But they eventually realized that simply walking out the front door might be safer than trying to sneak past searchlights and dogs and up and over the high walls of the prison yard. But to walk out the front door meant that they would have to unlock a lot more doors along the way. They didn't know how many, but they remembered there were a lot. They knew that there was only one guard on duty at night,

and if they could get a hold of his key ring, the problem of the locked doors would be solved. But then, with further investigation, we realized that he was actually locked into the prison himself. So when the day star left and he took over, he was locked into the prison. And his keys, he didn't have the keys to get out. And the keys that he did have were simply to allow him to move around the sections. And he couldn't even, in fact, open the cells. The usual night guard was Sergeant Francois Vermeulen. He was on duty almost every night of the week.

Tim says he preferred Sergeant Vermeulen to other guards because his movements were so predictable. Two doors were done, and the next door Tim needed to get through was at the end of a long hallway of cells. He tried the keys he'd already made, and the key for door number one opened door number three. He and his friends kept moving forward. Tim tried the existing keys on door number four,

but no luck. They'd have to make a new key. He made himself a key for the carpentry workshop, so he could sneak in to get tools when guards weren't watching. He made a key for everything, for the kitchen, the library, any lock he could study, he made a key for. Between door 4 and door 5 was the prison administration office.

If anyone saw them in that section, it would be immediately obvious that something was going on. Tim says that if they were caught, they'd be placed into solitary confinement. So they made a plan to attempt to open door five at night, when only the one night guard, usually Sergeant Vermeulen, was present. So the secret was to come out of our cells at night, at eight o'clock in the evening when he did a tour of the prison just to check that everybody's safe and everything's locked up and there's no problems. And we had a small window of about 15 to 20 minutes

where we'd come out, hide somewhere, so he would go upstairs, walk around, chat with the prisoners and so on. And we could come down out of our hiding place and then enter the admin section and work on the next door. Sergeant Vermeulen played records over the prison loudspeaker system every night. The same records, always in the same order. It was a way of telling time. When Tim, Stephen, and Alex heard the Blondie record, Parallel Lines, they knew that it was time to move. They hid in a small cupboard underneath a staircase. They had to try to hold the door closed from the inside, which Tim remembers wasn't easy. They had to try to hold the door closed from the inside, which Tim remembers wasn't easy. They waited to hear the guard leave his office and walk right over their heads,

up the stairs to check the cells as part of his rounds. We put dummies in our beds, which was really just our prison overalls, stuffed them with socks and other clothing and books and items and things and put them under the blankets just to make it look like the prisoner had gone to sleep. They practiced this many nights. One night, they lost their grip on the cupboard door and it creaked open, just as the guard passed by. Tim says he was sure they'd be caught, but somehow the guard didn't notice. As soon as the

guard had gone upstairs where the cells were, they'd come out of the cupboard and continue their work on door five, and then door six. They had about 15 minutes each night to work. They counted a total of 10 doors from their innermost cells to the front door of the prison. How many nights do you think that you were out of your cell working on this before you actually decided today's the day? Many. Many. Sometimes we would go down and we just couldn't get it right.

But we just kept doing it until we got through that door six and then that was the big breakthrough because then we got to door seven and we were out of sight of him. Door seven was again just a grill so we could dismantle that lock, take the dimensions from the inside and simply make a key for it. Door 8 was an electronic door, and we knew where the button for that was, so that was easy. That left 9 and 10, and fortunately we found that our keys for 9 worked, so we didn't ever really test door 10 with the final door,

but we didn't take it very seriously because it wasn't. It was just a sort of wooden door, and we thought that we would easily be able to pick it. They'd thought of everything, even putting together a version of civilian clothes, tailoring their prison uniforms, dyeing shirts different colors. They made hats for themselves out of surplus prison shirts. On December 11, 1979, they were finally ready to

escape. They'd been preparing for 18 months. They'd always practiced at night, when they heard that Blondie record and knew that Sergeant Vermeulen would leave his post. But they planned to begin the actual escape in a small window of time in the late afternoon, around 4.30, immediately after the day staff left. They turned off all the electricity in the prison to get Sergeant Vermeulen away from his post early. We had a key to the switchboard and simply turned off all the power and then hid in this small cupboard under the stairway. And then the prisoners were shouting for the night guard to come and turn the lights on again or to inspect what was happening. And then when the guard went upstairs, he walked right over our heads.

We came out of our hiding place, through the door four into the admin section, opened everything and closed it behind us. We opened seven, opened eight, opened nine, got to ten, and we were very confident that we would open it immediately, tried out all our keys, and to our disbelief, we couldn't understand why we couldn't open it. And we tried all our picks, and we tried all the keys we had, and we just couldn't open this thing. They knew there wasn't a guard outside right then.

But they also knew that a guard was scheduled to come on duty any minute. So they just started hammering at the final door. And we were getting very close to the time when the guard came on duty outside and just hacked away until eventually we were able to force the door open. And we had our civilian clothing and there were a lot of guards going home from duty from other prisons in this prison complex. And we walked right past a guard, he was just sitting there in his car. And he didn't bat an eyelid.

Just walked and walked, right past until we got to the main road outside. Then we crossed over that road and we had a vague idea where we were going. We were heading for Pretoria Railway Station where we thought we'd get a taxi. They asked to be driven to the Johannesburg airport. When you were in that taxi, were you thinking to yourself, I can't believe this has worked?

Or were you nervous? Were you thinking, if I can just get to an airport, if I can just get away from here? Strangely, we weren't nervous. We were just so elated, the feeling of coming out of a prison, of pulling off an amazing escape and getting away and here we are sitting in this taxi and, you know, we hadn't seen a tree even for several years and the third guy had been in there for like seven years already

and he even had trouble crossing the road. He hadn't seen anything further than the far end of the prison yard so he spatially was kind of a bit confused. And there we were, just three of us in this taxi, sort of laughing to each other and doing high-fives and stuff and just congratulating. I don't know what the taxi driver thought. Maybe he thought we'd just drunk and been to a party or something.

They got to the airport, but they didn't get on any airplanes. They split up, taking trains and buses out of town. Meanwhile, the prison guards and South African police couldn't figure out how the three men had managed to escape. When they inspected the interior doors in the prison, they found them undamaged, just closed and locked, like nothing had ever happened. Our own cell doors were still locked

the way they'd been locked the evening before. There was no breakages, there was no damage, there was no evidence. They had no clue. The only thing they could think of was that the night guard

had let us out. We'd bribed him or something like that. So they went and went around to his place and of course he was asleep already because he'd been, he was a night guard and he slept during the day. But they brought him to the police station and they started questioning him. And of course he said he didn't know, it was just as surprised

as them and they didn't believe it because they needed a scapegoat. Stephen Lee sent Sergeant Vermeulen's lawyer a written statement confirming Sergeant Vermeulen had nothing to do with the escape and he was eventually acquitted. But not before he'd spent nearly a month imprisoned in the same prison he'd guarded for 11 years. On January 2, 1980, the African National Congress held a press conference in Zambia. Tim Jenkin, Stephen Lee, and Alex Mumbarus appeared together and spoke about their escape. We feel that we committed no crime, you know.

In the eyes of the majority of the population, the criminals were the apartheid courts and the apartheid prison guards and so on. And there are not many escape stories where the prisoners get away completely and embarrass their captors like this. And it was a very technical escape and there was no violence involved. And the apartheid regime presented itself as invincible and there's no point in struggling against it because they had the security situation tied up. They boasted about how secure their prisons were and all that. And we embarrassed them.

Yes, it had an impact all around. Tim Jenkin lived in exile in London for 12 years. He remembers the day Nelson Mandela was released from prison, February 11th, 1990. Tim says he gathered with thousands of people in London's Trafalgar Square. There's Mr. Mandela, Mr. Nelson Mandela, a free man taking his first steps into a new South Africa. The apartheid regime was dismantled over a period of time from 1991 to 1994. And it was in 1994 that Nelson Mandela, as a member of the ANC, became the president of South Africa.

Tim Jenkin was part of his election campaign. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Susanna Robertson is our assistant producer. Audio mix by Rob Byers. Special thanks to Katie Davis. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com, where we'll also have a link to Tim Jenkins' book,

Escape from Pretoria. We're on Facebook and Twitter, at Criminal Show. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia from PRX. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults.

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