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This
week Special Assignment's Anneliese Burgess interviews
that woman -- Vanessa Brereton -- in the British
capital. A former human rights lawyer in Port Elizabeth
during the eighties, Brereton was actually an undercover
security branch officer.
In
this frank interview, Brereton talks about why she came
forward to confess and how she kept this secret from her
family and friends for almost twenty years. She also
talks about the love she had for her police handler, how
she was recruited by him and how for six years, she
handed him information "because he made me feel
important".
It
is a story of terrible betrayal. On the one hand she was
helping the victims of police brutality. On the other
she was working for the very people inflicting it. Yet
she claims she never suspected that her masters were
involved in the torture and disappearance of so many in
the Eastern Cape at that time. Brereton's story is one
of complicity with what she today refers to as "a
brutal and oppressive regime". And yet she says she
did it all because she hated communism and loved the man
who recruited her.
This
interview is the only television interview that Vanessa
Brereton has given. It offers an extraordinary glimpse
into the murky world of apartheid undercover operations.
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