The spy who spooked a nation

The wet tarmac sparkled on and off under the glow of the orange street light – on and off because, well, South Africa. And Eskom.

But, as Yuri pulled his trench coat tighter around him, the squally Joburg rain reminded him of his time in Vienna.

How he missed the Sasche torte and the Danube and the days of the Third Man when men were men and spies were spies.

His KGB station chief in the heady days of the late ’80s was a tough, shortish man called Vladimir Putin, who called the shots out of the Dresden office in East Germany. What a great guy.

Vlad had called him the other day with a simple brief: Go to South Africa to help Comrade Jacob’s people sort out their mess.

Jacob was about to leave for Moscow, for some medical treatment, Vlad said – although everybody knew this was code for lying low because he was under investigation back home.

Yuri had been one of the KGB people who helped train Comrade Jacob back in the ’70s, when he was being groomed to take over the ANC’s intelligence wing.

How they had laughed in the Moscow Spy Academy over that, Yuri remembered with a smile (what intelligence?).

They had struggled for days to understand what Jacob was referring to, in the arithmetic classes, when he said “eleventy”… But the South African had learned well the lessons of spycraft and covering one’s tracks using what the cousins in Washington used to call “plausible deniability”.

Make things as opaque as possible, the instructors had taught the Zulu man, using Winston Churchill’s famous words, ironically about the Soviet Union, that it was “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”.

The experienced Moscow spooks used the famous Russian babushka doll – where every time you open one, there is another, then another, almost ad infinitum – to show Comrade Jacob how to do it.

When the babushka doll demonstrator went missing as Jacob returned to Africa, the instructors realised he was light-fingered.

Yet even they were amazed – and grudgingly admiring – at his weapons grade pick-pocketing of an entire country’s entire piggy bank.

The way the ANC leader set up the State Security Agency as his own KGB was so masterful, it was being used in spy school in Moscow as a way to identify the world’s most gullible countries.

Yuri looked around. A man sidled up to him, with a copy of The Star under his arm. After glancing around furtively, the man said: “The geese are flying south for the winter…” “Bloody hell!”

Yuri responded, “I know you’re the journalist coming for his brown envelope! You’re two hours late and you got the wrong address…”

The hack glanced at his feet. Yuri went on: “We have to draw attention away from Zondo. So, you must go back to your newspaper and write stories that show Cyril Ramaphosa is being paid by Bill Gates, Doctor Surve should be the minister of health and everything else; White Monopoly Capital is putting hormones in the vaccines which cause erectile dysfunction and, most importantly, the South African National Editors Forum is taking orders from the Illuminati.”

After repeating himself seven times while the journo tried to make notes on his smartphone, Yuri asked: “Have you got all that? Scratching his head, the reporter replied: “But, Comrade, we are doing all of that already…”

Brendan Seery.

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