Bloemfontein - Who is Mr X? All that is known is that he has been named by two witnesses at the Hefer Commission as the informer responsible for the destruction of uMkonto we Sizwe's military operations in Natal in the early 1980s.

On Wednesday, Johannesburg attorney Patrick Ntobeko Maqubela, a former MK operative sentenced in 1982 to 20 years for high treason, told the commission that he knew perfectly well who had informed the security police about his secret activities and those of his MK cell, and that this person was not Bulelani Ngcuka, now national director of public prosecutions.

He agreed with evidence leader for the commission, Kessie Naidu, SC, however, that the identity of the informer should not be divulged to the commission.

Maqubela said it should not be revealed because, although the informer was now dead, he still had family members living in South Africa.

In any case, Maqubela said, it was an African National Congress party decision that "bygones should be bygones".

He told the commission that, in any case, the role and identity of Mr X was known to those who needed to know, including both Mac Maharaj, former minister of transport and member of the ANC's national executive committee, and Mo Shaik, a former ANC intelligence operative.

Shaik and Maharaj have claimed that Ngcuka was investigated by the ANC as a spy or informer. Neither has said anything about Mr X.

Naidu and Maqubela's decision not to divulge Mr X's identity was not questioned by the commission chairman, former acting chief justice Joos Hefer, nor by any legal representatives of the various parties.

Yesterday, in his evidence, Litha Myezo Jolobe, who was sentenced to four years' jail for refusing to give evidence against Maqubela - Ngcuka was given three years for the same reason - told the commission MK had instructed him in November 1981 to collect a parcel from a dead letter box (DLB) at the Architectural Library of the University of Natal.

"I was instructed in Swaziland," Jolobe's affidavit reads, "by my commissar in the underground, the late blank blank, to pick up a parcel (understood to be passports, manufactured by ANC operatives in South Africa)."

The parcel was not there at the designated time, so Jolobe "called blank blank from a phone booth, whereupon he re-instructed me to collect the parcel at about 5pm."

Jolobe - now a chief director of the department of housing in Pretoria - was arrested and taken to the 14th floor of the security police headquarters in Durban - known, he said, as "the panel-beating shop".

There, he said, he was so severely "panel-beaten" that he "succumbed" and said his commander was Maqubela. Jolobe agreed with Naidu it was "not necessary" to name his commissar - hence the name's being blanked out in his affidavit.

With acknowledgements to Estelle Ellis, Jeremy Gordin and the Cape Times.