© Getty Images

The arrest of Nelson Mandela -

On August 5, 1962, Nelson Mandela was arrested after the car he was traveling in was stopped by police just outside the town of Howick, about 54 mi (88 km) from Durban in South Africa.

© Getty Images

A drive interrupted -

Mandela, along with his driver Cecil Williams, a white communist theater director and underground member of the African National Congress (ANC), had been making their way from Durban to Johannesburg when they were pulled over.

© Getty Images

The most wanted man in South Africa -

At the time he was apprehended, Mandela was a fugitive from the apartheid regime and the leader of the ANC's newly formed military wing. He was also South Africa's most wanted man.

© Getty Images

Fund-raising and training -

Mandela had only recently returned from a two-month trip across Africa, where he had been raising money for the ANC's military campaign and receiving military training himself. He's pictured here on the left in Algiers with commanders of the Algerian National Liberation Front.

© Getty Images

Clandestine visits -

Among other countries Mandela visited incognito were Morocco and Ethiopia. In Ethiopia, the ANC's military chief attended the Pan-African Freedom Conference in Addis Ababa (pictured). It was also where he was given a Soviet-made Makarov pistol. This firearm, together with a fake passport in the name of David Motsamayi used by Mandela, was seized by police during the arrest.

© Getty Images

Why was Mandela so easily caught? -

For a wanted revolutionary, Nelson Mandela seemed unconcerned about the nationwide manhunt for him. He was cautious, but not overly so. Yet the ease in which the police caught up with him that Sunday afternoon suggested that the South African authorities had been tipped off about his whereabouts. The assumption would later prove disturbingly correct.

© Getty Images

Background leading up to arrest -

Nelson Mandela was well known to the authorities as a political activist and someone who embraced the idea of a multi-racial front against apartheid.

© NL Beeld

Arrested and put on trial -

In 1956, Mandela was one of 156 people arrested in a raid and accused of treason. He's pictured (third from left) arriving at the Johannesburg Drill Hall for preliminary hearings.

© Getty Images

The Treason Trial -

The so-called Treason Trial began in Pretoria on August 1, 1958, with 91 people on trial having been charged with high treason. It lasted until 1961, when all the accused were found not guilty.

© Getty Images

Life underground -

After he and his colleagues were acquitted in the Treason Trial, Mandela went underground and began planning a series of strikes. He was also asked to lead the armed struggle and helped to establish Umkhonto weSizwe (Spear of the Nation). Mandela is pictured wearing traditional beads and a bed spread during his time in hiding from the police throughout 1961.

© Getty Images

Visit to England -

On January 11, 1962, using the adopted name David Motsamayi, Mandela secretly left South Africa. He traveled around Africa and visited England to gain support for the armed struggle. He's pictured during a visit to London.

© Getty Images

Durban and anti-apartheid activity -

Back in South Africa on August 4, Mandela had a secret meeting with ANC leaders in Durban. The city was a hotbed of anti-apartheid activity and very much on the authorities' radar. It was after attending this meeting that Mandela and Cecil Williams were arrested. Fifty-four years later, in 2016, the UK's Sunday Times newspaper revealed that it was likely the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had tipped off the police about Mandela's movements. And the reason? South Africa's most wanted man had been identified as a "probable communist."

© Getty Images

Cold War backdrop -

Nelson Mandela's arrest in 1962 took place during the height of the Cold War. President John F. Kennedy had previously cast himself as a staunch opponent of communism and voiced support for the containment of the ideology as well as the reversal of communist progress in the Western Hemisphere.

© Getty Images

Fear of communism -

Mandela's capture occurred only a few weeks before the Cuban Missile Crisis, an event that further fueled an irrational paranoia about "Reds under the bed" and fear of the rise, supposed or real, of leftist ideologies in Western society.

© Getty Images

Violence and oppression -

It also took place amid a heightened atmosphere of fear and oppression in South Africa. In 1960, for example, demonstrations against anti-black pass laws outside a police station in the township of Sharpeville led to the massacre by the South African Police of 249 civilians.

© Getty Images

The fight against racism -

It was the racist apartheid system in his homeland, and for equality and freedom for all people, that Nelson Mandela—affectionately known as "Madiba," his Xhosa clan name—fought against.

© Getty Images

Time catches up with Nelson Mandela -

In 2023, more light was shed on the circumstances leading up to Nelson Mandela's arrest when Richard Stengel, a former editor of Time magazine, published an article titled 'Did the CIA Betray Nelson Mandela?.'

© Getty Images

'Long Walk to Freedom' -

Richard Stengel had interviewed Mandela in 1993 while working on his autobiography 'Long Walk to Freedom.' It was during these long and detailed taped conversations that suspicions first surfaced—voiced by Mandela himself—that the CIA might have been involved in his arrest.

© Getty Images

New information -

Stengel decided to reinvestigate the events of 1962 and their aftermath. New information unearthed included a 1986 news report in the Johannesburg Star revealing that a "retired senior police officer" had been tipped off to Mandela's whereabouts by an American diplomat at the US consulate in Durban. In 1963, according to the Star, the diplomat had revealed this nugget of information while drunk at a party at the Durban apartment of "Mad" Mike Hoare (pictured), a notorious Anglo-Irish mercenary.

© Getty Images

Confirmation of CIA involvement -

Four years later in 1990, an article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution appeared to confirm that the CIA was behind the operation to arrest Mandela. The article quoted former intelligence officials saying that the American intelligence community held the belief that Mandela and the ANC were secret allies of the Soviets and posed a genuine threat to the stability of the South African government. John A. McCone (pictured) was CIA director at the time.

© Getty Images

An ally of the West -

Apartheid South Africa was the West's most reliable ally against the Soviets, and the CIA regarded Mandela and the ANC as totally under the control of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, the US had recently signed a military cooperation agreement with South Africa, and the country was an important source of uranium and other strategic minerals. The CIA was not about to let regime change compromise this mutually beneficial alignment.

© Shutterstock

Further evidence -

Further evidence of the agency's clandestine involvement came in 2016 when a long-retired CIA officer named Donald Rickard revealed to British film director John Irvin (pictured in 1981) his role in the arrest, confirming he had been operating undercover as a State Department vice-consul in Durban. Rickard admitted this while speaking to Irving for his dramatized documentary 'Mandela's Gun,' which was released later that year.

© NL Beeld

Freedom of Information request -

Armed with this new information and in an effort to try and confirm what had long been rumored, Stengel, with the help of former colleagues at Time, filed a number of Freedom of Information requests with the Central Intelligence Agency. His requests, however, were denied.

© Shutterstock

Mandela after his arrest -

And what of Nelson Mandela after his arrest? At the end of the infamous Rivonia Trial on June 12, 1964, the ANC leader and seven of his fellow freedom fighters were found guilty of sabotage and sentenced to life imprisonment.

© Getty Images

Jailed for life -

Nelson Mandela spent over 27 years in prison, serving much of that time on Robben Island (pictured).

© Getty Images

Freedom! -

On February 11, 1990, he was released unconditionally, nine days after the unbanning of the ANC and the PAC (Pan Africanist Congress) and nearly four months after the release of his remaining Rivonia comrades.

© Getty Images

First visit to the USA -

In June 1990, four months after his release from prison, Nelson Mandela arrived in the United States. During the six-week fundraising tour for the ANC, he visited New York, Boston, Washington, Atlanta, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Oakland. The ANC leader is pictured on June 26 receiving a bipartisan standing ovation at the completion of his address to a joint meeting of Congress.

© Getty Images

First state visit -

Nelson Mandela made several additional trips to the US, doing so on a state visit in October 1994 as South Africa's newly elected president. He's pictured with US President Bill Clinton on the White House lawn.

© Getty Images

Still on the terrorism watch list -

In May 2005, he met with President George W. Bush, again in Washington. But it was only in 2008 that the former South African president was removed from a US terrorism watch list.

© Getty Images

Robben Island -

Nelson Mandela passed away on December 5, 2013. His death was mourned by millions around the world. Today, Robben Island is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Mandela's former prison cell (pictured) has been preserved for posterity.

© Getty Images

Nelson Mandela Capture Site -

Meanwhile in Howick, KwaZulu-Natal, the exact spot where Mandela was captured on August 5, 1962, is commemorated with a visitor center and a world renowned sculpture.

Sources: (Time) (BBC) (NPR) (South African History Online) (Alpha History) (Axios)

See also: The most sinister declassified CIA operations

© Getty Images