Donald Bell Sole (1934)

DONALD Sole, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 93, was South Africa's ambassador to West Germany and the US, and one of the founders of the International Atomic Ener-gy Agency. , He joined the foreign affairs department in 1937 and his first diplomatic posting was as third secretary at the High Commis-sion in London during World War 2. In 1944 Sole helped set up a meeting in London between South Africa's prime minister Jan Smuts and the Danish atom-ic scientist Niels Bohr, which was the genesis of South Africa's atomic energy policy. Smuts sent a message that he would be late because he was visiting General Dwight D Eisenhower. Sole was told to keep Bohr talking until he ar-rived. With only Physics I as a background he managed game-ly for more than half an hour. Fifteen years later he became chairman of the IAEA board of governors. In the 1950s he was in charge of South Africa's permanent mission to the United Nations in New York and in 1956 partic-ipated in drawing up a consti-tution for the IAEA which was to be based in Vienna. A year later he was sent to open South Africa's new mis-sion in Austria. He combined the role of envoy with that of res-ident representative to the IAEA. He was posted back to South Africa in 1961, where for the next eight years he was the second most senior civil servant in the department. He was told by prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd to prepare a white paper detailing how South Africa could get the British gov-ernment to transfer the so-called high commission terri-tories, what are now Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland, to South Africa. Verwoerd told him what to write but Sole told him he was going about it the wrong way and that unless South Africa could first convince the people of these countries that they would benefit from incorpora-tion, there was no way Britain would agree. Sole complained that Verwo-erd only ever talked at him, not to him. On this occasion Ver-woerd reminded Sole that he, He believed his job was to tell his political bosses the truth about the damage their policies were doing not Sole, was the prime min-ister, and that he, not Sole, would decide what to do and how to do it. As Sole had predicted, incor-poration proved to be a non-starter. Sole was the anchor man at the foreign affairs head office in Pretoria in the mid-'60s when South Africa appeared before the International Court at the Hague to fight attempts to de-clare its position in South West Africa illegal. It was touch and go and he had to tell Verwoerd that his gov-ernment's own behaviour at home was harming South Africa's case. One incident which particularly appalled him was an attempt to prosecute the Cape Town City Council for al-lowing coloured people to at-tend symphony concerts in the city hall. Verwoerd was unmoved. Sole, who never believed that Verwoerd's homeland policy would be viable, was "astound-ed" by the prime minister's "poor understanding of eco-nomics". He was a career diplomat of the old school, sophisticated, erudite and certainly no Nation-al Party apparatchik. He looked on many of its politicians with distaste and was often quietly appalled by their "boorish" be-haviour. He believed his job was to tell his political bosses the unembroidered truth of the damage their policies were do-ing to South Africa's interests, and often disagreed openly with their tactics. He was appointed ambas-sador to West Germany in 1969. In 1975 the Anti-Apartheid Movement broke into his em-bassy in Bonn and stole files detailing South Africa's nuclear links with West Germany. The files revealed that he had invited Germany's top military officer at the Nato headquarters to visit South Africa, including its nu-clear facility outside Pretoria. This led to reports of a "nu-clear conspiracy" between the two countries and focused me-dia attention on South Africa's nuclear collaborations with the US, Israel, France and Iran. Under intense media pressure Sole said the visit was sanc-tioned by the West German gov-ernment. He was promptly sum-moned by the government and told to admit this was a lie or face expulsion. Although it almost certainly had been at least tacitly sanc-tioned by the government, Sole was advised by Pretoria to issue a statement saying he had lied. He described the incident as the biggest blow to his morale he'd suffered, and the lowest point in his diplomatic career. In early 1977 he succeeded Pilc Botha as ambassador to the US. Botha became foreign affairs minister. In his tribute, Botha praised Sole's "intellectual in-tegrity" and "grace under pres-sure", and said Sole was his role model. The admiration was not en-tirely mutual. Sole blamed Botha for allowing the SA De-fence Force and National Intel-ligence to play what he felt was an "excessive" role in South Africa's foreign policy. Sole, who was born on De-cember 13 1917 in Graham-stown, and educated at Kingswood College and Rhodes University, is survived by his wife Elizabeth and four chil-dren. — Chris Barron ERUDITE: Donald Sole

SUNDAY TIMES, Review 1 29 May 2011 Page 3