If you'd been listening to the radio last week you may have heard angry former Rhodes students from the 1980s phoning in to ask tough questions of a woman whom they used to call their comrade. Olivia Forsyth was revealed as an apartheid spy in 1988 after returning to South Africa after two years of detention (including a seven-month spell in Quattro) by the ANC in Angola.The Security Branch claimed that she infiltrated the ANC in exile and that she was one of their most successful agents - a superspy in the vein of Craig Williamson, the man who had recruited her in 1981.To her leftist friends at Rhodes this came as a shock. In their eyes she had been a dedicated member of Nusas, fully committed to the fight against apartheid.Almost 30 years since the revelations Forsyth has written her account of what happened and why she did what she did.Sitting in the bar of the Hyatt Hotel in Johannesburg, I asked Forsyth about the difficulty of trying to reconcile how she felt about things 30 years ago and how she thinks about them now.She told me, "When you start writing it's amazing how much you remember. Writing some parts of the book was painful but I'm pleased I did it."In the time between the publication of the book and Forsyth's arrival in South Africa, several of her former Rhodes colleagues took to social media to express their dismay at a lack of contrition for her actions.While there's adisconcerting lack of awareness of what the apartheid government was capable of in Forsyth's account, she understands that 30 years later those she betrayed are still angry.She admitted she knew she "was going to take a lot of flak. Whether people want to be forgiving or not, it's my apology and they don't have to accept it . but I've done it and I'm pleased."The Truth and Reconciliation Commission did not provide a platform for spies to come forward, though there might have been a way for Forsyth to use that moment as a means to reach out to those she had betrayed, seeking some sort of forgiveness from them.At the time she was in an abusive marriage to a member of the Security Branch and suffered the accidental death of her infant daughter, after which she didn't think about the TRC.''I don't even think I watched it. My life went upside down and it was hell. This [book] is like my TRC."Perhaps if she had joined the intelligence services because she had been forced to or because she thought of herself as a Cold War warrior like Williamson, it would be easier to forgive Forsyth. But she joined because she was a 21-year-old woman in search of adventure, looking to travel the world. Instead she got sent to Grahamstown. She was not motivated by ideology: "They do say that the best spies are not the ideological ones."In her account once she was deployed to Rhodes and began working for leftist groups her eyes were opened to the evils of apartheid and she began to believe more in the ideology of the people she was spying on than the ones she was spying for.Why did she then not come clean?''That I could never have done, because they would not allow me to leave the police ."She decided instead that she would become a double agent, but the hall of mirrors she created was her undoing and ultimately Forsyth was not trusted by either the ANC or the apartheid government. Which begs the question: how can we trust her now?Agent 407: A South African Spy Breaks Her Silence is published by Jonathan Ball. R230..