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Olivia Forsyth is not a character in some series or film on espionage. She was a real-life spy for the Apartheid government in the 1980s.
Sounds pretty badass doesn’t it?
She said she was a young, doe-eyed girl looking for an adventure. She started working for the South African Security Police in the hope of getting a post abroad, but unfortunately for Olivia, her travels took a slight detour. To Rhodes University in Grahamstown.
She was sent back to university to “study” (i.e. observe a growing group of lefties supporting and promoting pro-ANC structures). “Studying” at Rhodes meant that she was to report any radical student behaviour. She had to get in with them. Get to know them. Pretend to be one of them and gain their trust. Then turn around and feed vital information back to the Security Police.
Forsyth immersed herself in student politics, even managing to hold prestigious positions at the university, like on the Student Representative Council (SRC). For this, she was generously rewarded in rank, later becoming a Lieutenant in the Security Police.
She even had a handler, Oosie. The on-again-off-again relationship between these unlikely friends/lovers kept me entertained throughout this read. But there was not much to the “spy” work part.
I agree with Phillip de Wet’s article in The Mail and Guardian.
This is a memoir promising juicy details, especially as it labels Forsyth as South Africa’s most notorious spy. As de Wet notes, she was disappointingly more descriptive of the world around her than actual details of how exactly she betrayed her student comrades.
She claims that in 1985 she went to the ANC in Zimbabwe offering herself up to be a double agent. Instead she ended up in Quatro prison camp in Angola. Chris Hani and Ronnie Kasrils later intervened and transferred her to a safe house in Luanda.
But the question of truth-telling came up in many reviews on this book. The Financialmail says: “But worst of all, Agent 407 just doesn’t stack up. Forsyth’s claim that in Angola she went over to the ANC, that she betrayed her apartheid spy masters, is simply unbelievable.
And when she dedicates the book to Hani and claims that she at least did some good for the Left in the Eastern Cape, you wonder how such ramblings could go so unchecked.”
A lot of people took issue with this part of her story. Peter Delmar calls her out, saying that she should have just told the truth and apologised properly.
To me, the duplicity of living a life in the shadows seems quite disorientating. When are you truly yourself? What is really the truth in a world where you are playing so many contradictory roles? Forsyth operated under several names during her years as a spy: prisoner Thandeka, agent RS407 (codename Lara), ANC comrade Helen and alias Christine Smith.
Who knows what? Is there even one truth? Maybe Forsyth doesn’t even know for sure.
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