Soon after Olivia Forsyth was unmasked as a security police spy on Rhodes University campus and in Cape Town, the most popular badge in town was one that read "I didn't sleep with Olivia Forsyth". Legend has it that very few men in what was then known as the "white left" dared to wear the badge.

I can happily and categorically state that I never met Olivia Forsyth, let alone slept with her. I have also never met Vanessa Brereton, aka Agent RS452, who apparently took a different approach to her job as a spy to that taken by Forsyth, the spy who took her honeypot role very seriously.

Vanessa Brereton posed as a human rights lawyer, and actively befriended and represented the very people upon whom she was informing. They included people like Janet Cherry, Mike Loewe, Glenn Goosen, Brian Bishop and Molly Blackburn. Did Vanessa Brereton report to her scuzzbag police master, Karl Edwards, that Molly and Brian were about to leave Port Elizabeth for Cape Town on that fateful night in 1985 when they were killed in a mysterious car accident?

Did the security police in PE arrange for their death, in the same way that they poisoned Simphiwe Mthimkulu and in the same way that they killed Matthew Goniwe, Sparrow Mkhonto, Fort Calata and Sicelo Mhlauli - the Cradock Four - on June 27, 1985? We will never know the answers, but we do know that Vanessa Brereton provided some of the answers to the puzzle that brought such events to fruition.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was supposed to bring some kind of closure to these questions. It was an incomplete and flawed process, albeit important. We heard answers to the deaths of the Gugulethu Seven. Yes, they were betrayed by an informer, a police spy, they were lured to their death in one of the most cynical of all police operations in the 1980s.

We heard the evidence of Eugene de Kok. We heard the evidence of the hard-eyed killers of apartheid. But we almost never heard the evidence of the men and women who infiltrated our ranks, the Olivia Forsyths, the Vanessa Breretons. There are many of them out there, and as much as I get urged by the men of the cloth to forgive them, I never can.

I cannot forgive the spies and the informers. I cannot forgive the men and the women who pretended to be who they were not. I can forgive the hard men and women. I can forgive Eugene de Kok. I can forgive Dolf Odendal, the Western Cape riot squad head. They were driven by their belief in apartheid. I cannot forgive those who spied for money, or prestige, or affirmation.

Vanessa Brereton seems to have spied because of a vague and woolly dislike of "communism". I know the people upon whom she spied. Some of them may have had a vague affiliation to communism, the majority of them were simply very nice people who shared a common loathing of apartheid. There can be no doubt that Vanessa Brereton indirectly contributed to the death of some of them, and brought down immense suffering upon others, even though she denies all knowledge of the police's dirty tricks. As Janet Cherry says, "I cannot imagine what her motivation was. She knew people were being tortured and killed, so she cannot say she didn't know what was happening."

She was the lover of, and recruit of, Karl "Zac" Edwards, a horrible piece of Eastern Cape work. He and his brother, Lloyd, terrorised the white left in PE and Grahamstown for years, taking a sadistic pleasure in their work. Brereton was their handlanger. The history of terror by the regime in the Eastern Cape is one of the nastiest there is. For Brereton to say she was innocent is like the Nazi SS commander saying he was only taking orders.

Vanessa Brereton is nothing more than a sad, sick, footnote in the history of apartheid. She deserves nothing more than that footnote.

I do not know whether or not Bulelani Ngcuka was a police spy. But I do believe that Mac Maharaj and the brothers Shaik have come up with a very clever smokescreen in an attempt to divert attention from their and Jacob Zuma's problems. Their tactics are not too dissimilar to those of the security police of old.

With acknowledgements to Tony Weaver and the Cape Times.