Journalist and former anti-apartheid activist Mike Loewe puts Agent RS452's double life under the spotlight in an open letter to her.

So, Vanessa Brereton, you are spy RS452. You say you feel remorse and that you are glad to get it off your conscience, I am told.

You are hoping probably that your clients - more than 300 Eastern Cape activists who were beaten, tortured and held in jail for months, even years - will forgive you.

You say, I am told, that as their lawyer you retained strict confidentiality - that you never betrayed them to your boss, their torturer.

'You were completely unethical. There was no excuse'

Yet you were, presumably, in their pay. More specifically, you were paid by the man we are told was your lover, security police lowlife Karl Edwards, who today works as a "shrinkage control" expert in Port Elizabeth. A trumped-up store detective.

They call him a "spy-master". A bit glamorous for me. I remember him as a sneering, smarmy pr**k trying to get me and sundry to "just write down all the things your United Democratic Front friends and comrades told you" during an "interview" in Rooi Hel prison in Port Elizabeth in 1986.

I was a state of emergency detainee, he was the interrogator. The lawyer worrying about me and my 10 comrades back in the cells upstairs was his agent. You.

Not to worry, we knew we were on our own in those days.

Then two weeks later, Karl was back, this time screaming in a high-pitched voice about me having "broken my promise" to write for him. From there it was handcuffs and off to a dark cell in Louis le Grange Square for 20 days of solitary interspersed with two interrogation sessions.

Emerging from prison 83 days later, with a banning order in hand, there was my lawyer, you Vanessa, to meet us and look after us.

Well, I was small fry.

You were representing leading activist and underground African National Congress operative Janet Cherry, a young Cape Town intellectual who had tossed aside her Russian peasant skirts and a few kilos for the End Conscription Campaigns's funkier miniskirts. Janet spent over a year in detention - only securing her release once she dumped you as her lawyer.

And that's the sore point, really. They say your legal efforts in the Eastern Cape were not very good. Clients were left hanging, cases took for ever. Janet says she got more information about her efforts to win her release from the media than from you.

Sure, it helps that now we know that national prosecutor Bulelani Ngcuka was not spy RS452, and for that Cherry told me this morning she is "glad".

But what about the ethics of a lawyer defending all those people while collaborating with the people who are abusing them? Janet says: "You were completely unethical. There was no excuse. You must be accountable for what you did."

Janet's former close comrade and leading white UDF activist in PE in those years, Dominique Souchon, told me this morning: "She says she wasn't compromising her clients - ha, ha ha!"

And what about Mkhuseli Jack, the then-young strident voice of the consumer boycotts which he helped start in Port Elizabeth in the mid-1980s and which spread throughout the country like wildfire?

He was hung upside down on a bar, his hands and feet tied together while being given the "helicopter" thrashing.

Initially, Jack was prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt when the story first broke three weeks ago, when Ngcuka's spokesman, Sipho Ngwema, dropped the bombshell that RS452 was a white woman attorney from the Eastern Cape.

When I called Janet to say it must be Vanessa, she had no doubt. She and her comrades had supper, discussed it over red wine, and all came to the same logical conclusion.

Then came an e.tv slot where Mo Shaik presented his documents proving that RS452 was Ngcuka. The white former PE activists couldn't believe it when all they could see on the documents was reference to them and their meetings.

Ngcuka had never been part of their groups at the time.

But Mkhuseli - or "Khusta", as he is affectionately known - was not prepared to trust any speculation.

Yesterday, when I spoke to him, he conceded that it must be her. It's that kind of independent spirit which I appreciate about the Port Elizabeth activists.

So why did you do it, Vanessa? Let alone how.

Yes, it's good and well that you gave an outside journalist your sad story, all about your poor self-image, your unfulfilled sex life, your depression, your loneliness.

But hold on, go back in time. What was it like in PE in those days to have such a powerful, charming, security policeman as your lover? To know so much at a time when we knew so little?

Please, don't tell me you didn't find it thrilling, exciting, intoxicating.

That's the problem with history - it's all so easy to forget how power was wielded in those days; how easy it was to be vicious to those who were outside of the ruling minority; how easy it was to see your opponents as somehow less than human.

The picture I have gleaned of you down in Port Elizabeth goes like this. You were raised in a wealthy liberal family. Your father appears to have been a brilliant but gruff, perhaps austere, figure in your life. Your mother, by contrast, was arty, loved flowery bohemian dress, loved the theatre.

You have a sister, and they say both of you were "plain", but that you chose to accentuate that by going for drab browns, padded jackets - a severe, silent presence.

A schoolfriend at the highly enlightened private Holy Cross Convent swears you were bright and romantic. Your favourite author was Jane Austen.

Your principal was more than enlightened. She was radical. A beautiful woman who chose to be a nun, who secretly passed on struggle money to organisations, who once gave me and my freelance partner, Mbulelo Linda, R400 when we had nothing.

Hey, how come my interrogators came to me in detention bellowing about the "R400" in my Standard Bank account? Then there was your disability. You had a congenital hip displacement as a child and one of your loneliest times was when your parents left you in hospital to recuperate.

So you arrived on the scene at the Langa massacre, March 21, 1985. At a makeshift centre set up to try and find out how many were dead, injured or missing after the riot cops went berserk, firing and beating demonstrators.

Black Sash stalwart Molly Blackburn was there. You appeared, a fresh University of Port Elizabeth graduate, in your early 20s, arriving on the commendation of the good women of the Black Sash.

The region was going up in flames; police and then the army poured in. Detentions, shootings, beatings, weekly then nightly.

You appeared to rise up in political stature, leeching status off Durban lawyer Krish Naidoo, sent down to try and lend support to the suffering foot soldiers in PE's townships.

And you got all that paid anti-apartheid legal work. And it went on for years until the early 1990s, when you had worked your way into the Legal Resources Centre, which was fighting a critical battle against PW Botha and FW de Klerk's legal and security henchmen.

They say you spied on us all in the most amazing way. You said little and did less.

You would sit there as lawyers and activists hotly debated their strategy and tactics - saying nothing more than "yes".

They say the only time you got really excited about a case - and they remember seeing you running down the corridor for the first time in your haste - was when it was about money.

Oh, and bitchy, bitchy, when it came to chipping in at restaurants, your purse remained snapped shut.

They say now that you were lonely, pathetic, to be pitied.

But what about all those dresses that were brought to your offices that lay around in boxes and bags.

And the fact that you managed to buy and sell three houses, dispensing with the last one only recently.

Now they say it all comes together: an austere father to impress; a flighty imagination; a minor disability; a love of money; the fake love of an immoral security cop.

And so you fled. In about 1997, at the same time as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was about to be handed truckloads of documents from the old security establishment.

You had met a man who worked in the "human rights" field with a few children of his own.

This was during your regular trips to London to sort out money matters for the struggle. You met him at his mother's home, a B&B.

It doesn't seem like he knew about your double life in PE.

And yet, he seemed loyal. He hid you from me, saying you were "nowhere where you can find her".

Then a woman answered your phone in London and archly said: "She has no responsibility to you now. Please stop calling her." I love that twisted morality stuff, as though we, her former trusting clients, are in some way harming or inconveniencing her.

So, do we forgive you, Vanessa? We are asked to do so in the spirit of the settlement struck up by Madiba.

Should we ...

You carry on doing the right thing, for once, and we shall listen and take note of your humble submissions before Judge Hefer.

PS: As for your boss, Karl Edwards, in the court of public opinion there will be few who will care a jot about him and his miserable life.

What I would like to know is whether Karl is in any way blackmailing his old informers, some of whom might still be suffering and might also need to get it off their chest? - ECN

With acknowledgements to The Star and www.iol.co.za.