Bloemfontein : Even after all the hullabaloo over agent RS452 Vanessa Brereton's admissions, and her handler Karl Edwards's denial that Scorpions head Bulelani Ngcuka was an apartheid spy, African National Congress (ANC) intelligence operative Mo Shaik still has his suspicions.

In documents that will form the basis of his testimony to the Hefer commission later this week, Shaik set out his case.

His case is based on documentary evidence, but also a lot of supposition and deduction.

Shaik was the first to raise suspicions about Ngcuka within the movement while operating a counterintelligence operation in the late 1980s. His suspicions at that time were based on two intelligence reports included in documents that he says were leaked to the ANC in 1998.

The reports were written by Lieut Karl Edwards (as he was then), and the first details a meeting of the National Association of Democratic Lawyers (Nadel) that was held on January 29-30 at the Marine Hotel in Port Elizabeth.

It noted a "division between the Black Lawyers Association and the United Democratic Front (UDF) supporters".

Edwards noted in a section called "comments by source" that "despite the conflict in Nadel so far, the control of Nadel by the UDF faction would mean the emergence of an effective and dangerous front organisation controlled by the ANC".

The second document is shorter and details the establishment of the Henk van Andel Trust, which the report says was "possibly a front for the ANC".

In a reconstruction of a report he drew up at the time, Shaik says he applied a set of criteria to the reports. The conclusions were that the documents indicated that the source was a senior person involved both in the trust and in Nadel, probably from Eastern or Western Cape, and someone who had access to ANC thinking.

"The conclusion was reached that there existed a reasonable basis to investigate BN (Ngcuka) as a possibility."

Ngcuka was listed as a trustee of the trust, he was a lawyer and involved in Nadel, and he had attended the Nadel meeting.

But Shaik goes a lot further, saying that after 1994 new information had come to light.

Before Edwards began working for the Security Branch, he worked for the National Intelligence Service (NIS), Shaik says.

"During the time he worked for NIS, he was close to NIS members Morris von Greunen and Hennie Roodt.

"Information provided indicates that BN was recruited by Von Greunen in the 1970s as an NIS source."

This was known to Edwards and, when he was transferred to the Security Branch, he continued to handle those agents he had knowledge of during his time in the NIS.

The source was therefore being shared between two agencies as a result of the close relationship between Roodt and Edwards, Shaik's document says, and this explains why there were only two reports about agent RS452 in the ANC's database.

Ngcuka has denied that he was a spy.

With acknowledgements to Tim Cohen and the Business Day.