South Africa has made a remarkable transformation of its intelligence sector from what had been a militarized, and highly repressive, instrument of internal control during the apartheid regime into a more transparent and democratically accountable civilian-led intelligence community designed to inform policy. Lessons learned from the South African case show that reform of the intelligence sector is a key element of the democratization process and that intelligence reform should begin earlier rather than later in the overall progression of democratization. However, operationalizing the legislative mandates of this transformation has proven to be more difficult than anticipated.