Why Mandela was on terrorism watch list in 2008

 The sticking point was, in Mandela’s case, ideological. In the mid-'80s, as activists in South Africa and
around the world began to agitate in earnest for Mandela’s release, the Reagan administration still
saw communism as one of its primary enemies -- and defeating communism as one of its foremost
foreign policy goals. That complicated the administration’s take on South Africa. The apartheid regime, it turns out, had supported the U.S. during the Cold War and had worked
closely with both the Reagan and Nixon administrations to limit Soviet influence in the region, as
Sam Kleiner chronicled in Foreign Policy last July. Meanwhile, the African National Committee, which Mandela chaired, was peppered with members of
the South African Communist Party. Even worse in the eyes of the Reagan Administration was the
ANC’s apparent friendliness toward Moscow: The ANC’s secretary general, Alfred Nzo, bore
greetings to the Soviet communist party congress in 1986. That was enough to inspire Reagan to
accuse the ANC of encouraging communism in a 1986 policy speech, and to rule that South Africa had
no obligation to negotiate with a group bent on “creating a communist state.” The Reagan administration wasn’t alone in this fear, either -- Margaret Thatcher’s conservative
regime in Britain shared Reagan’s “constructive engagement,” anti-sanctions views regarding South
Africa. (It probably helped that the U.K., like the U.S., was a major South African trade partner.)
Years later, former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney would write a memoir that detailed his attempts to persuade Thatcher and Reagan to take action in South Africa. All attempts, sometimes famously, failed: When we spoke on the telephone the night before I left for London, however, it became clear
that Ronald Reagan saw the whole South African issue strictly in East-West Cold War terms.
Over the years, he and Margaret continually raised with me their fears that Nelson Mandela
and other anti-apartheid leaders were communists. My answer was always the same. 'How
can you or anyone else know that?' I'd ask again and again. 'He's been in prison for 20 years
and nobody knows that, for the simple reason no one has talked to him -- including you.' Tragically for South Africa, the cloud of communism prevented the U.S. from acting for several
years. While the Reagan administration’s official goal was to end apartheid, and while it consistently
called for South Africa to free Mandela, the U.S. dragged its feet on the crucial issue of economic
sanctions. When a United Nations resolution came up that criticized apartheid, both the U.S. and
Britain pushed through amendments to weaken it. The Reagan administration also followed South Africa’s lead on characterizing the ANC, naming it a
terrorist group in the 1970s and forcing Mandela to get special State Department clearance to enter
the U.S. in 2008. (“It's frankly a rather embarrassing matter,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said at the time.) Eventually, of course, the U.S. did pass economic sanctions, which are widely credited for helping
topple -- at least in part -- the apartheid regime. Mandela went on to praise Reagan (as well as
President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev) for his role in ending apartheid. But it was Mandela’s outspoken wife, Winnie, who probably best expressed the frayed relationship
between the two world leaders -- and, for a  time in the ‘80s, between the anti-apartheid movement
and the United States. In 1986, after Winnie’s home was firebombed and burned down, the Reagan
administration offered her $10,000 to rebuild it. She refused. "This why our people are angry at the Reagan and Thatcher administrations in particular,” Winnie
Mandela said. “[They] continue to condone the activities of the South African government. If they
had any feeling for the downtrodden and oppressed majority of our country they would end their
policy of gentle persuasion. It appears their interests in this country far outweighs their so-called
abhorrence of apartheid."