The sickening story of the apartheid ‘super spy’ who killed to order

Tymon Smith reviews Jonathan Ancer's new book, 'Spy: Uncovering Craig Williamson'

Long before Eugene De Kock's controversial appearance at last year's Franschhoek Literary Festival sparked outrage, another man with a shady past walked among South Africans whose lives he had destroyed.

A burly bear of a man with ginger hair, Craig Williamson had in 1980 been hailed by his Security Branch masters as the apartheid regime's "super spy". This after it was revealed that he had infiltrated the National Union of South African Students, the International University Exchange Fund in Geneva, the ANC in exile and even, according to his handler Johan Coetzee, the KGB.

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For many of the anti-apartheid activists he had worked with, Williamson's unveiling was a shocking betrayal. For others it came as a less of a surprise. Within Nusas there had always been those who found something a bit off about the former St John's boy who had been in the police before he joined the student movement. He claimed that this was simply a convenient means to avoid military service and, if anything, had shown him the brutality of the system and turned him against it.

While the information that Williamson gave to his handlers about the student movement and the ANC led to arrests, detention and torture, it was for what he did after his cover was blown by The Guardian in 1980 that he applied for amnesty to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

In 1982 he orchestrated the bombing of the ANC's headquarters in London. In 1982 he sent the letter bomb that killed Ruth First in Maputo. In 1984 he sent a similar bomb that killed Jeanette Schoon and her six-year-old-daughter, Katryn, in their flat in Lubango, Angola. Her two-year-old son Fritz narrowly escaped injury but was forever traumatised by the events, as was her husband Marius, who spent the rest of his life searching for justice for the deaths of his wife and daughter.

Williamson said he was upset by the death of Katryn but, within the context of the war he fought against the ANC as a soldier, Schoon and First were legitimate targets for assassination.

Jonathan Ancer's account of the life and times of Williamson makes extensive use of interviews with people who knew him. It paints a picture of a man who, even from his school days, was not particularly well-liked. Yet in spite of the occasional slip-up he managed to pull the wool over a lot of people's eyes for far too long.

He may not have been a super spy, but Williamson caused a lot of damage to the anti-apartheid movement - both through the paranoia and suspicion which his exposure led to within the exile movement and the attacks he carried out in the 1980s.

Marius Schoon died before the TRC granted amnesty to Williamson, who continues to live in Johannesburg. When Ancer finally meets his subject he's left with "a hollow feeling" after Williamson answers questions "like a good spy". As he leaves, Williamson jokes that maybe he'll see Ancer "at the book launch".

Were he to turn up, would he be asked to leave?

•'Spy: Uncovering Craig Williamson' by Jonathan Ancer, is published by Jacana Media, R260.

•This article was originally published in The Times.