Dashing Moe Shaik is dosing up on caffeine in his favourite Rosebank restaurant. The photographer is capturing his profile against the morning sun when two women next to us lean over and blurt "Who are you?"

Shaik brushes them off with a congenial laugh. If he told them, they'd think he was attempting a silly joke. I'm silently conjuring some worthy replies - "A spy? A spook? A secret agent?" - and I suspect he's on the same wavelength.

This 38-year-old "underground intelligence operative" perfectly fits the stereotypical image.

Brazenly bald - he shaves his head - he's wearing a muted green polo-neck, black jacket and impervious shades. As Africa Confidential editor Patrick Smith wrote recently "He looks more like a Hollywood detective than a Hollywood detective." [it be real]

These days though, he's not exactly undercover. On the contrary, one senses that Shaik, having spent too many years cavorting with shadows, is indulging his natural gregariousness to its full potential - which is why we're in Rosebank.

Shaik was a late-night clubber in his younger days - a "smooth operator" according to an old friend, and is known for possessing inhuman energy levels maintained by a rampant caffeine habit. "Long ago I developed workaholic tendencies and insomnia, which is partly the secret of my little success," he smiles.

His latest "little success" was his appointment this month as South Africa's Consul-General to Hamburg in Germany, having served as a senior official in the National Intelligence Agency since the political transition and before that, as an ANC intelligence agent. His penultimate position was that of co-ordinator of the National Intelligence Co-ordinating Committee (Nicoc), which oversees all the intelligence agencies and informs the Government of threats or potential ones to the country.

[Note The Defence Review and its Force Design had been completed. Bazan had been effectively deselected after being declared preferred supplier of the patrol corvette, but Helmut Kohl had just persuaded Thabo Mbeki to cancel the corvette tender and re-open it to also include a German bid. The Requests for Information (RFIs) for the new tender were issued on 1997-09-23. The bidders were advised in the RFI and its accompanying Combat Suite Element Costing and Description that ADS was expected to take a leading role in the supply of the corvette combat suite.

Just an excellent time for one of the family to go to Hamburg, which just happens to be the home of the German shipyard Blohm+Voss and the German Frigate Consortium.

Just a little shaking of the tree of family interests?

Whatta boy.]

Born in 1959 to a Durban-based Muslim family with strong Black Consciousness leanings, Shaik and his two brothers were catapulted from early youth into struggle politics. At 18, he was recruited by the ANC's intelligence stalwarts, later playing a key role in the organisation's biggest undercover operations.

The year 1985 was a bleak one. Shaik, his father and brothers were detained and in the same year, his mother died. During his nine months in solitary confinement, Shaik took refuge in the Koran, reading it 18 times - nine times in English and nine in Arabic.

After his release he went into hiding and continued to help build up the ANC's intelligence capacity in Natal. At one point he was sent to Berlin to do a three-month training stint, and on his return, having experienced the loneliness of exile, married his longtime companion and fellow comrade, Soraya.

In the late 1980s, while studying optometry at the University of Durban Westville, Shaik became engaged in Operation Vula, which conspired to set up Umkhonto weSizwe underground cells as a backup strategy in the event of the failure of negotiations.

A student contemporary remembers him as a "controversial, quite egotistical" character, deeply ensconced in the Natal Indian Congress "cabal", and says "A lot of people knew he was in the underground, but not that he had so much power."

In 1990 Operation Vula was exposed, key players killed or arrested, and the hunt for Shaik was on in earnest.

A year later the indemnities came through putting paid to what seemed to be an eternity of being on the run.

"I was living in one-room garages with 'JEC' (just enough clothes) so I could leave at short notice. When you were doing round-robins (skipping from place to place) you never collected junk ... everything had to be visible. You developed a minimalist lifestyle," he says.

Shaik's major concern back was taking care of his only "son" Gino, a border collie with an impressive record for attending ANC meetings and a penchant for marking his territory at the most inappropriate moments. Now nine years old, Gino was named after a "troublesome trade unionist" involved in a 1987 plan to set up an operations centre in Lusaka.

"The dog was being naughty, so we decided to call him Gino. In 1990, when my house in Sydenham, Durban, was raided, I kept it going for a year just so Gino could have a home."

Shaik's "round robins" took him to all the capital cities, except Bloemfontein and Pretoria. Prior to leaving for Hamburg he lived in the Johannesburg suburb of Parkhurst, commuting daily to and from Pretoria. "Somehow, I couldn't bring myself to live in Pretoria - I haven't internalised it yet," he says.

He leans back now, having outlined his biography in a rather jumbled sequence, and after ordering another coffee and lighting a cigarette, posits a cynical platitude "I've had quite an interesting life, hey?"

Shaik finally completed his optometry masters cum laude at the same time as helping formulate a new national intelligence paradigm at the pre-transition talks.

"I was never a careerist in intelligence. It was a moral obligation," he says. In retrospect, he assumed he'd never see this day, and the thought that he might end up back in Germany as a consul-general would have amazed him.

Shaik's upcoming mission is to get the German language under his belt "within six months", devise ways for South Africa to achieve a better penetration of the German market, develop a knowledge of opera and quit smoking.

A question mark hangs over Gino's fate (he may commute between Hamburg and Rome, where Soraya has prospects). But one thing's certain, Shaik won't be reading German spy novels. He says he's never liked that particular genre of literature.

With acknowledgement to Helen Grange and The Star.