A former leading Eastern Cape human rights lawyer has confessed to being the agent who precipitated the Bulelani Ngcuka spy saga as well as the appointment of the Hefer Commission.
Over several days, Vanessa Brereton - in a hesitant tone and seemingly close to tears - provided details of her double life, which has left her with feelings of guilt and self-loathing, to Independent Newspapers. Her confession will shock anti-apartheid activists in the Eastern Cape and within the legal profession.
Until this week, even her husband and family did not know that the quietly-spoken former convent pupil had lived a double life as agent RS452.
However, the establishment of the Hefer Commission and the allegation that National Director of Public Prosecutions Ngcuka was agent RS452 gave her the opportunity to come into the open.
Brereton appeared for the defence in numerous political trials in the 1980s and won a deserved reputation as a fighter for the rights of the oppressed. But throughout that period, and until April 1991, she was an undercover member of the apartheid security police.
Now living a quiet suburban life outside London, Brereton is preparing an affidavit for the Hefer Commission. It will give details of her recruitment as an informer in 1985 and as an undercover police constable a year later, with the designation RS452.
On September 7, City Press carried a report raising the question whether Ngcuka had been a spy for the apartheid government's security services. It linked him to the codename RS452.
Within hours, former African National Congress intelligence operatives Mac Maharaj and Mo Shaik confirmed that Ngcuka had been suspected of spying. Then, within two weeks of that, President Thabo Mbeki appointed the Hefer Commission to probe these claims.
Brereton said she was part of Operation Crocus, a security police project aimed at infiltrating and collecting information about the "white Left". A number of other informers and agents were active in this.
They provided the information that the "hard men" - the various security police operatives - analysed and often acted upon.
Among the security police operatives was Karl "Zac" Edwards. He was a security branch captain at the time and had begun his career as an agent and operative for the Bureau for State Security (Boss) as R1653.
It was Edwards who recruited Brereton, as a fellow anti-communist, to spy on "leftists" such as Janet Cherry and Molly Blackburn. He was her handler throughout the six years of her involvement.
She supplied written reports to him about meetings of the white Left or dictated them at a number of safe-houses in and around Port Elizabeth.
Brereton would also regularly be invited to attend braais at these houses or at Boknesstrand, near Cape Padrone, where there was another house maintained for the use of the security police. The braais were usually attended by four or five senior security police officers, who would encourage her efforts.
She admits having enjoyed the attention and the accolades. But she also began to have doubts about the people she spied for.
"I began to realise that some of them were just petty thieves and worse," she said.
Initially, she had accepted the assurances given to her by security policemen - such as Edwards, Gideon Nieuwoudt and Nic van Rensburg - that they and their colleagues were not involved in anything brutal.
The turning point came in 1989 with the killing of three black security policemen and an askari - the name given to an ANC operative who had been "turned" to work for the apartheid state. They were blown up by a bomb attached to their car in Motherwell, which was detonated by Nieuwoudt.
"It was then, I think, for the first time I realised what I was really involved in; that these were people who would even kill their own," Brereton said.
She could not rationalise what she had done and could not speak to anyone about it, so she decided to try to bury the past. But it continued to haunt her.
"I began to think of other times, and other things began to fall into place," she said.
The fire-bombing of the Port Elizabeth Black Sash office and the theft of a R10 000 cheque from the office of the local crisis committee all began to assume a more sinister air. But she tried to block out the realisations.
Brereton said she had now come clean not merely to set the record straight about Ngcuka, but also to try to "expose more of the secrets of our hidden past".
All she could say of Ngcuka was that whatever he might have been, he was not RS452. "I was RS452 and I have had enough of the lies and deceit," Brereton said.
She was aware there were many compromised individuals such as herself who had been used and manipulated and who remained possible targets of blackmail and further manipulation unless they came clean about their past.
Brereton hoped her affidavit, and any testimony the Hefer Commission might require from her, would encourage others to come forward and "clear the air", in the interests not only of democracy but also of their emotional wellbeing.
Hefer Commission secretary John Bacon confirmed on Monday that he had requested an affidavit from Brereton and that the commission might wish to hear testimony from her. With Brereton unwilling to return to South Africa, the commission might travel to England.