The rumours started almost as soon as the cleaners had come in to sweep up after the victory party for Jacob Zuma.

Moe Shaik was surely the first choice as the president's super-spook, even though he had once told a journalist he considered being in intelligence "a moral obligation", rather than a career.

Now in his 50th year, Shaik not only still looks the part of the Hollywood spy, he's indeed shaping up as the viable successor to National Intelligence Agency (NIA) director- general Manala Manzini.

There should be no hard lines in leaving the job for Manzini, who prepared to pack up his things this week at the end of his contract. He took the post in the wake of Billy Masethla, the spy chief fired by ex-president Thabo Mbeki during the e-mail hoax saga which sent shudders through the ANC.

Once described by former minister of intelligence Ronnie Kasrils as "the perfect spy", Manzini has himself weathered controversies, not the least of which was an allegation by convicted drug trafficker Glenn Agliotti that he met Manzini and crime intelligence head Mulangi Mphego at a Sandton hotel with the intention of trying to secure indemnity ahead of upcoming criminal cases against him.

But for Shaik, the decision to accept what some would say is a poisoned chalice may not be tough for the obvious reasons. For one thing, if he cares about it at all, there is the public's understanding of him. Shaik was all but spattered by some media trying to wade their way through the interventions of some of the scoundrels and soothsayers who peopled Mbeki's presidency.

It's common practice now for many of those who once felt safe in defying the prospect of a Zuma presidency to embrace his associates, whom they once so easily vilified. This means that Shaik's detractors are having to re-examine the guilt by association charge related to his brother, Schabir, and, at times, Zuma. Surely those issues can have no bearing on whether he would make a good intelligence head. Instead, does he possess the right credentials for the job?

On a superficial level, Shaik is good-looking and offbeat. He's got no liking for tedious formality. You'll never catch him in mid-bluster, yet also never really off-guard. Enigmatic, he's been part of, or associated with, or on the periphery of, intelligence structures before and after 1994, inside and outside the country, for at least the past 20 years.

As a former diplomat, Shaik - who refused to go into exile during apartheid - understands the terrain perhaps even better than most who might otherwise qualify for the job. He knows paranoia, fear and the many guises of infiltration, having run operations and been an operative himself for the liberation movement, most notably Vula in the late 1980s.

His introduction to many South Africans, however, came around the time of the allegations of spying during apartheid against former National Director of Public Prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka, where Shaik and fellow Operation Vula leader Mac Maharaj were identified as leading the charge against him.

So the current atmosphere within the security cluster, where spies were seemingly pitted against each other to match party political purposes, may pose less of a challenge to Shaik than to many others. Manzini, who became DG in 2006, undoubtedly presided over an era of heightened paranoia, when it sometimes seemed as if the intelligence sector was losing its grip. A spy versus spy mood prevailed, which not only potentially presented a major security risk, but played specifically into the wider battles for internal power.

Insiders seem to agree that NIA and the South African Secret Service will probably be combined, facilitated by the necessary legislation, to support the tone of Zuma's administration. So if Shaik takes the job of spy chief, he will also be charged with creating a new infrastructure out of a troublesome past. The two entities would still be separate, say sources, but managed, politically, together in a move that could almost completely overturn agreements wrought around the first democratic election.

This would happen at the same time as the real security needs of the country shift, and come under scrutiny.

Jakkie Cilliers of the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) says the job of super-spook is indeed "a great challenge, not so much in terms of the existing legislation or the models adopted, but with the application of those models and the extent to which the intelligence community has been abused and misused for party political purposes. That really is the big issue that faces all of us."

But Cilliers believes the apparently partisan nature of recent spying in South Africa, which was seen to have divided the security cluster, will not pose a monumental problem for Shaik, whom he describes as "a modern spook".

"He certainly has a background for this, but the question for some people will be, will he be able to be impartial? Yet it is also true of all governments, as it is of the Zuma administration, that they would want to make sure they have the right people on their side. Thus, appointing loyalists to key security positions makes sense from that point of view. It's, in a sense, par for the course.

"What we do need is someone who recognises that we live in a globalised, interconnected world where the reality is that bad guys do not make the distinction of borders. So even though South Africa has some of the most advanced structures, politically and constitutionally, in the world, the application of those aspects in a changing international security arena is the challenge."

Should Shaik become the intelligence chief, his first serious task would be the World Cup, which Cilliers says may present "a substantive threat". So, too, organised crime. Yet these days there seems to be little agreement with Manzini's position on civic unrest around service delivery, or on the possible reasons for the xenophobic bloodshed. His belief, which was supported by many within the ANC, was that the violence had been deliberately unleashed and orchestrated ahead of this year's general elections, just as it was with so-called black-on-black violence before the elections in 1994.

Lauren Hutton, researcher in the Security Sector Governance Programme at the ISS, says there is now a great need "to find clarity around what issues to prioritise".

"It's more than time that NIA, at least, got to grips with the question of when is secrecy going to contribute to solving a crisis? We should know that half of the time, most of the problems we have are not security problems and that, instead, we should be framing them in socio-economic terms. If something is only a threat to the ANC, should it be taken up at the level of national intelligence?"

Hutton believes that Shaik's substantial experience may preclude him from such partisanship, even though his reputation in the media has been steeped in party-related matters for years.

"I think it would be taken up as a scandal the day he was appointed, but it would be just a flash. He would really have to examine what were the greater problems for the country, and he would surely know that. In the past, for the ANC, their own systems were based largely on counter-intelligence and protectionism. For obvious reasons, those structures had to remain very closed and so there was this very secretive mentality which certainly frames Shaik as a person.

"Yet if he took this post, there would be different demands, such as the problem we have with external intelligence and the setting up of early warning systems. That is a defined priority, and it ties into the positive interventions which have led to more collaboration between intelligence services on the continent.

"All of these would have to tie into other foreign policy objectives, which, under Mbeki, were more political. Under Zuma, so far, we believe there will be a far larger economic dimension to the activities of the intelligence sector."

Criminologist and writer Anthony Altbeker says Shaik may surprise his critics, if he took up the role. "It's far more important anyway that a president trusts his spy chief absolutely than whether the ordinary person is okay with them or not.

"Zuma has a democratic mandate and must use his apparatus in terms of that mandate."

With acknowledgements to Janet Smith and The Star.