Bloemfontein - The tide began to turn against former transport minister Mac Maharaj yesterday when, under cross-examination at the Hefer commission of inquiry, he made a string of admissions that weaken his assertion that Scorpions chief Bulelani Ngcuka was an apartheid spy.

Bombarded with questions by lawyers representing Ngcuka, Justice Minister Penuell Maduna and the commission itself, Maharaj acknowledged, among other things, that apartheid agent RS452 was Vanessa Brereton and not Ngcuka, as had been alleged.

He also acknowledged that he had no information independent of that provided by former intelligence officer Mo Shaik to support his allegation that Ngcuka was a spy.

And he acknowledged that he was not even certain that Ngcuka was a spy.

In each of these acknowledgements, Maharaj hedged his answers, saying that he still believed an African National Congress report compiled in the late 1980s that contained the allegation had drawn the correct conclusion on the information available.

He said also that Brereton's recent confession that she was RS452 was not the end of the matter as the information provided by Ngcuka to the apartheid government could have been contained in reports written under RS452's name.

Documents indicated that apartheid-era security forces had used a system of "false flagging" to protect informants. This involved information from one source being filed under the name of another.

But collectively the crossquestioning revealed that Maharaj's implicit allegations were based on what he had been told rather than information he had himself ascertained, and that this information was deductive and suppositional rather than clearly conclusive.

At one stage, Maharaj said: "There is nothing in those documents that shows Ngcuka was a spy . The allegations arise from inferences from the facts."

Maharaj acknowledged that his conclusions were based on a reconstructed report drawn up by Shaik late last year, and that this report was the basis of an article in City Press that originally contained the allegation.

Maharaj also struggled to answer questions about why he waited until he was himself under investigation by the Scorpions before confirming that Ngcuka was investigated for being a spy by the ANC in the late 1980s.

He was repeatedly asked by counsel for Justice Minister Penuell Maduna why he did not direct his complaints about Ngcuka's abuse of power to the justice department, rather than addressing them to the ministry of safety and security.

Maharaj said this was the proper procedure in the case of reporting a crime.

With acknowledgements to Tim Cohen and the Business Day.