In an odd sort of way, the Hefer commission is like a super-miniaturised version of the nuclear build-up during the Cold War. Two tribes gear up for a showdown; they truly believe there is no other option and, perhaps more importantly, they believe in the righteousness of their cause.

But the more they gear up, the more the showdown becomes inevitable.

To everybody but them, the showdown is obviously unnecessary, wasteful, hopeless and senseless. But at the same time it is mesmerising. Watching the build-up, everybody except the two sides involved can see that at best, at the very best, the result will be a disaster. And it will be a disaster, not only for them but for everybody around them. In their own minds, both sides believe they can win but they cannot see how hollow and futile even victory would be.

Imperceptibly, the fight moves from being merely a possibility to being an absolute inevitability, so inevitable that the sides have no choice but to build up their nuclear arsenals even more. It is a classic snowball leaving you with a sense of "how did we get here?"

Through some skilled leadership and a lot of luck, the nuclear showdown never happened. But the showdown at the Hefer commission this week was, in its own miniaturised way, just as explosive.

It is significant that this is not a typical clash of characters from different political parties or even political ideologies. The combatants come from the same background and the same history and are even members of the same party.

How did we get here? In the grand scheme of things, the fight is not about who did what when, but about the content and shape of the new SA.

In a revealing part of his testimony, former transport minister Mac Maharaj said he struggled to understand why Scorpions chief Bulelani Ngcuka was doing what he was doing. "It was not the kind of thing that an ANC member would do," Maharaj said.

The fact of whether Ngcuka was a spy or not is therefore incidental to Maharaj. What he cannot understand is why Ngcuka was investigating members of the African National Congress (ANC). The presumptiveness of this approach is breathtaking, but to Maharaj, Ngcuka was pursuing an agenda, one that involved attacking members of the ANC with impeccable struggle credentials, like Deputy President Jacob Zuma and, well, like himself.

And this is the root of the problem. Ngcuka sees his job as the head of prosecution service in a classical way: to fight crime and corruption without fear or favour. For Maharaj, it seems as if he sees Ngcuka's job as being a fight against some more nebulous enemy, perhaps an extension of the fight that he himself fought against "the system" or the remnants of apartheid. But not against fellow members of the struggle.

It seems that the only way Maharaj could rationalise Ngcuka's investigation of him was that he was following an agenda of the old regime. Ergo, he must have been a member or participant in that regime.

So this is why Maharaj got his wires so crossed: he seems to have started at the end point and worked backwards. He began with the conclusion that Ngcuka was a member or allied or associated in some way with the old regime, and tried to make the facts fit his mould.

Maharaj did his case no good by admitting during cross-examination that his information was based pretty much entirely on the analysis of his old friend and comrade, Mo Shaik.

And Shaik's evidence was based on an odd, scrambled set of ascertainable facts mixed in with a lot of supposition and deduction. His evidence rests on three pillars. First, Ngcuka was investigated in the late 1980s by an ANC counterintelligence group in what was described as Project Bible. Second, that Ngcuka was miraculously able in the late 1980s, during all those successive states of emergency, to move into and out of the country effortlessly. And third, that even though he was evidently not spy RS452, the information he provided might have been included in the information that RS452 was providing in what is described as a "false flag" operation.

A "false flag" operation is a wonderfully convoluted concoction. It involves placing one source on top of another to disguise the bottom source, so that if the source is exposed, the real source at the bottom stays active and unexposed.

But little by little, the lawyers chipped away at these pillars. There was no documentary proof that Ngcuka was investigated. Shaik submitted documents from the extensive database in his possession even though all intelligence information was supposed to be pooled in the late '90s. But these documents reports from RS452 showed only that there was a source in the legal community somewhere in Eastern Cape. No proof was included that he came to any conclusion at the time about Ngcuka.

Not only that, but Shaik himself concluded that Ngcuka must have been at a meeting of the National Association of Democratic Lawyers in 1988 in Port Elizabeth. But evidently, he wasn't.

The passport issue is still to be investigated by the commission. The problem with this information is that it is based on information gleaned from a set of former apartheid agents you might hesitate to introduce in polite company. It seem incredible that Mo Shaik a staunch antiapartheid campaigner who spent just under a year in detention should ally himself with Steve Biko's interrogator. It brings new meaning to the old adage that my enemy's enemy is my friend.

The third pillar is the most complex. The logic is that before RS452's handler, Karl Edwards, joined police intelligence, the security branch, he worked for the National Intelligence Service (NIS), at the time spook central. There he met one Morris von Greunen, and "information provided indicates that BN (Ngcuka) was recruited by Morris von Greunen in the seventies as an NIS source", Shaik writes in his reconstructed report.

So, the theory goes, it was through this relationship that information provided by Ngcuka was passed from the NIS to the security branch and found its way into the data bank provided by the real RS452. Hey presto! A "false flag", a source on top of a source.

This seems a trifle too clever for the security branch , but there is a deeper problem. Von Greunen claims he never met Ngcuka, never mind recruited him. And recruiting him would be a neat trick, since he would have been 16 at the time, Von Greunen said in an affidavit presented to the commission.

But still Shaik persisted, adding his arsenal of allegations while promising to apologise if he is found to have been mistaken. For example, turned security branch member Dirk Coetzee had alleged there was a source in Griffiths Mxenge's legal office, where Ngcuka had once worked, Shaik said. This riled Ngcuka, who was very close to Mxenge and named his headquarters after Mxenge and his wife Victoria. But Shaik acknowledged he was not the one who debriefed Coetzee, and, once again, apologised.

Maharaj and Shaik have both cashed in a proud history of opposition to apartheid for the sake of what? Clearing their names, and the names of their kin? If that was the aim, it has not proved a resounding success.

Everyone knew during the Cold War that it would end in tears. And in the micro-war the Mac and Mo saga? By the time Shaik stepped off the stand, it did.

With acknowledgements to Tim Cohen and the Business Day.