As well as establishing lines of communication between Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela, the 'opening of the way' imported huge quantities of arms into KwaZulu-Natal

In a new book about Mac Maharaj, Padraig O'Malley writes extensively about Operation Vula, 'Opening the way', the underground operation which was initiated in the late 1980s to facilitate the return of exiled leadership into the country. Commanded by Oliver Tambo, the ANC president in exile, and Joe Slovo, the chairperson of the South African Communist party, Vula was one of the ANC's most effective operations. O'Malley writes that Vula was a sophisticated, secret arms-importation business as well as a propaganda and crisis-management operation in the mass democratic movement. Vula opened lines of communication between Tambo in Lusaka and Nelson Mandela, then in Victor Verster prison, and affected the course of the struggle. Maharaj, as the commander of the operation within South Africa, faced untold intrigue.

The story of Vula is complex: its narratives overlap, intertwine and run off in different directions. They are rich in tension, spiced with comrades' often not-too-kind comments about each other, ringing with the voices of strong personalities, a human drama as much as a political drama. And all under the nose of the Security Branch (SB), which boasted that no ANC operation was beyond its reach, while blithely unaware that it had been penetrated at the highest level. Information from its security files was going directly to ANC intelligence in South Africa, which fed it to Vula before dispatch to Lusaka.

In December 1988, four months after Maharaj and [Siphiwe] Nyanda had crossed the Swazi border into South Africa, Tambo wrote to Mac:

"We need a sustained, ever growing and expanding military offensive. But we are unable to take off in any significant manner. We hit one disaster after another, continuously, year in and year out, precisely because we sought to run before we could walk, and kept on walking.

"Vula must not follow the beaten path - it's a minefield. Vula must strike out on a new road - to lay the indispensable foundations for a viable armed struggle by first creating, building and consolidating a strong, resilient, extensive political network that is self-protective, absorb shocks.

"This is precisely the task Vula has started tackling with startling vigour and effectiveness. In the result much has been achieved but much, much more has yet to be done, especially in consolidating the ground already covered…"

Yet more than a year beforehand, Tambo had instructed Thabo Mbeki to meet with a group of Afrikaner "intellectuals" led by Willie Esterhuyse, a Stellenbosch University professor who had contact with PW Botha and other senior South African government officials.

The first meeting took place in October 1987. Over the following 18 months, the Afrikaners and ANC officials, the groups varying in size and composition, met on a dozen occasions at Mells House Park, outside Bath in Britain. On the ANC side, Mbeki and Jacob Zuma were the key players.

The Afrikaners would become proxies for the National Intelligence Service (NIS) in exploring opportunities for a negotiated settlement. The [ANC's] National Working Committee received briefings on the substance of these meetings, although it did not become privy to the NIS connection until October 1989.

Giving his benediction to both Thabo Mbeki and Maharaj in their endeavours reflected Tambo's holistic approach to the struggle. Like any good CEO, he understood that in a volatile political marketplace you diversify your political holdings. Prudence required him to plan for different outcomes.

Thus he had to plan for a seizure of power, as well as for a protracted armed struggle, ways of balancing the four pillars of struggle, strangling the regime through economic isolation, and a negotiated settlement. Each course of action had to be pursued. The various pursuits were interrelated: Maharaj's Vula and Mbeki's Mells House Park talks complemented each other.

Tambo orchestrated the efforts of both and he knew, too, as a result of the visits of Ismail Ayob and George Bizos to Lusaka, that Mandela was in contact with the South African government.

It has sometimes been insinuated that Mbeki opposed the armed struggle as early as the onset of the 1980s. If so, whatever misgivings he may have expressed about it in private were not consonant with his behaviour within party and ANC structures. As one of the six members of the SACP politburo, the party's highest organ, he had a role in formulating and approving "Path to Power", the party's blueprint for destroying the apartheid regime.

"Path to Power" was presented to the party at its conference in Havana in April 1989. Mbeki chaired discussion of the document and did so brilliantly, according to Joe Slovo.

"Path to Power" forcefully advocated seizure of power as a way forward, even as Soviet expansionism was visibly crumbling. It was adopted as the party's manifesto to great acclaim, much of it for the intellectual impresario who had conducted the proceedings with such panache.

At a pivotal meeting of the national executive committee (NEC) in February 1990, within a week of Mandela's release, when there was a wide-ranging discussion of how the ANC should proceed in such circumstances, Mbeki countenanced that "[we] need to correct [the] position that creation [of understanding] will make armed struggle unnecessary".

Nor did Mbeki at any time, either in the NEC or the politburo, or to Tambo or Slovo in private, convey reservations about Vula.

Moreover, after Mandela was released and had taken charge, he authorised that Vula continue its clandestine operations even though the ANC was then legal. Between August 1988 and May 1990 Vula embedded itself in Natal and to a lesser extent the Witswatersrand. Huge quantities of arms were imported and stored across South Africa, ready for the day of insurrection. Vula was probably the ANC's most successful operation. At one point, in response to a report from Maharaj on Vula's activities, Tambo enthused: "The report is remarkable for its scope and its detail. It gives a clear vision of the immense potential of the Vula concept but also its tremendous yield in terms of what has been achieved within a short period of time. To Adam [Mac] and Sylvester [Nyanda], Bravo!"

Vula established a direct line of communication between Mandela and Tambo at a delicate moment in the ANC's engagement with the white regime.

Within the mass democratic movement, a "core committee" was established, including Cyril Ramaphosa, Sydney Mufamadi, Reverend Frank Chikane and Father Smangaliso Mkhatshwa, who "set" the political agenda for Cosatu and the United Democratic Front in consultation with Lusaka via Maharaj. Maharaj smuggled a draft of the Harare Declaration to Mandela and whisked his comments and those of nine other internal leaders back to Lusaka within 10 days. Nyanda trained Umkhonto weSizwe cadres for a people's army - not for present deployment on the ground - and gave them a familiarity of the geopolitical landscape. Vula provided logistical and manpower support for the war in KwaZulu-Natal, and conveyed to Lusaka a copy of Mandela's memorandum to PW Botha before Mandela's meeting with him in July 1989.

In April 1989, Maharaj contained the frenzy that erupted when Mandela was perceived by some senior members of the mass democratic movement to be "selling out".

He provided feedback and analysis on the crisis around Winnie Mandela's involvement in the death of a child activist, a situation that would have caused immense trouble for Mandela on his release, pulling him between his wife and the mass democratic movement that had condemned her.

The accomplishments directly attributable to Vula were real and affected the course of the struggle.

After Maharaj informed Tambo that he could open a line of direct communication between Tambo and Mandela, Tambo withheld approval until Maharaj could satisfactorily assure him on two counts ("Firstly, exactly how would you ensure & be certain that the enemy was not picking up on the disclosure of your response to M [Mandela]? Secondly, how would you demonstrate to M the operation of the secret line and ensure in that in the process the enemy is kept permanently unaware?")

Within weeks Maharaj, who had first proposed opening a line of communication five months earlier, in November 1988, was able to convince the ever cautious Tambo to give him the nod.

Vula also compelled Lusaka to face harsh realities that challenged cherished shibboleths, but at the same time reinforced the need for operations like Vula itself. Vula had to try to disabuse Lusaka of some of its misconceptions about how spontaneous but chaotic youth uprisings could be used. The youth imposed their ideas of revolution, and infighting muddied the waters.

In the absence of a real MK presence, self-armed youth took it upon themselves to impose their rule in townships that by now really were "ungovernable".

The mass democratic movement was at the coal face. It got there not by following some battle plan handed down by the ANC in Lusaka, but by using the people - the grassroots and the instruments the masses used to organise themselves to disrupt, disorientate and engage the regime at street level and on the economic front. But it was vital that such efforts be co-ordinated with those of the ANC, and Vula played a significant role in that process.

The quality of the leadership in the mass organisations was always bothersome and, in one frank exchange, two pivotal UDF leaders bluntly told Tambo and Slovo that a broad-based leadership simply didn't exist.

Both Harry Gwala, a former Robben Island prisoner and veteran Stalinist leader of the SACP and the ANC in the Natal Midlands, and Govan Mbeki, who was released from Robben Island in November 1987, presented problems of a different kind. Gwala, once back in Natal after his release in November 1988 and disgusted with the derelict state of the political organisations, decided to remedy matters on his own terms. The Natal heartland was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting between the UDF/ANC and Inkatha, and Gwala declared a scorched earth policy on Inkatha.

Among all ANC leaders, Gwala came closest to being a warlord in his own right. He was not inclined to take orders from anyone. He ranted about a so-called Indian cabal, and ranted when he learned that Maharaj, an Indian, had been charged with setting up the ANC's underground.

Yet Gwala had to be brought into line. A working accommodation was reached between him and Maharaj, his "loose talk" halted. But, when he finally agreed to meet Maharaj, he did so in circumstances that maximised Maharaj's public exposure.

Govan Mbeki was the first of the Rivonia trialists to be released. He saw himself as the head of the ANC in the country. He immediately became involved with the UDF, its tactics and strategies. Lusaka gave him permission to set up structures in the Port Elizabeth region, but Mbeki, too, was his own man and began to extend his mandate to the whole country, without proper authorisation from Lusaka.

He established a National Collective and recruited national figures in the mass democratic movement. This presented Lusaka with problems. Mbeki was an icon of the struggle, especially in the Port Elizabeth region, to which he was now restricted. He was not someone who could easily be told what to do.

Members of the mass democratic movement - unaware of the constraints on his theatre of operation Lusaka was attempting to impose - would follow Mbeki's directions, believing them to have the imprimatur of Lusaka.

Since the Security Branch had Mbeki under surveillance at all times, his more militant actions endangered not only himself but the leadership of the mass democratic movement. He, too, had to be brought into line, but with great subtlety and sufficient deference.

The narrative of Vula and the role it played in the struggle against apartheid is chronicled in the communications (comms) transmitted, via London or Amsterdam, between Vula operatives and Lusaka.

To read them is to see they are part spy novel, part cartoon. There are mix-ups and foul-ups; there are ANC spies spying on ANC spies.

They expose the bureaucratic nightmare of ANC inefficiency in Lusaka, but provide riveting details of the setting up of a direct and secure line between Tambo in Lusaka and Mandela in Victor Verster prison. To succeed, Vula had to become an underground within the ANC itself. But also running through the Vula comms is a tangible sense of excitement: of being behind enemy lines and relaying its movements to the outside.

The comms between Tambo, Slovo and Maharaj are exercises in exquisite minimalism. The voices become interchangeable, harmony of language achieved, the ANC in exile speaking as if it were on the ground in South Africa, the mass democratic movement relaying the same messages to the masses.

Shades of Difference; Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa by Padraig O'Malley (Penguin, R240) will be available in stores on May 10

With acknowledgements to Sunday Independent.