A CIA tip off to South Africa’s apartheid regime which led to Nelson Mandela’s arrest and 27-year imprisonment was yesterday condemned as a “betrayal of our nation” by the grandson and heir of the former president.

Mandla Mandela called on US President Barack Obama to apologise and make a “full disclosure” of the events leading up to his grandfather’s arrest in 1962 and suggested that the US should face censure by the United Nations.

His comments came after a former CIA agent confirmed that he told the apartheid police how to find Mandela because he viewed him as a “toy of the communists”.

“Whilst we were always aware of the West’s role in overt and covert support for the Apartheid state (this) disclosure has put an end to decades of denial revealing the fact that the USA put its imperial interests above the struggle for liberation of millions of people,” said Mr Mandela, the former statesman’s eldest grandson who is also an ANC MP and traditional chief in the family clan.

“We call on freedom loving people of the world to come out in condemnation of this betrayal of our nation, the peoples of Southern Africa and all who suffered as a consequence of the USA’s support for the brutal apartheid state.”

Donald Rickard said he and his handlers believed Mr Mandela was “the world’s most dangerous communist outside of the Soviet Union” and he had no qualms about tipping the authorities off about his whereabouts in 1962, the height of the Cold War.

Mandela’s detention at a police roadblock in Howick, KwaZulu Natal was the catalyst for a series of trials, culminating in the Rivonia Treason Trial that would see him spend 27 years in prison. The CIA’s involvement in his detention after 17 years on the run has long been suspected but has never been confirmed until now.

Mr Rickard, the then US vice-consul in Durban, suggested that ANC informants told him Mandela was visiting the seaside city and said he told South African police when he learned the activist was due to return to Johannesburg.

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