Apropos of Stanley Uys's and Lester Venter's tales of state bugging in the bad old days of the apartheid regime, and Tokyo Sexwale's comment that he and his friends now remove the batteries from their cellphones while they talk to each other: it's the old story, plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose as they say in French - the more things change, the more they stay the same. Already two years ago a grumpy ANC official was saying: "They're bugging everyone". At the head of all this, inheriting the dirty tricks department of die Groot Krokodil from 20 years ago, is the KGB- and Stasi-trained apparatus of the ANC Security Department and its Military Intelligence from exile. This is the real nexus connecting Ronnie Kasrils as Minister of "Intelligence Services" to Mbeki.

James Sanders's Apartheid's Friends. The Rise and Fall of South Africa's Secret Service (John Murray, London. 2006) is both relevant and premature here, premature in his reference to the 'fall' of the South African secret services. More accurately, Sanders should have written of the rise and rise of the state's secret spying apparatus, which morphed seamlessly from its apartheid to its post-apartheid era. The penetration of the one (the ANC Security Department in exile) by the other (its apartheid alter ego) was in any case a defining issue in exile with young, loyal, honest members of the ANC security staff from the 1976 generation at ANC headquarters in Lusaka as far back as 1980, when they approached the then Acting President, Oliver Tambo, urging an investigation of the Security Department, which they believed was compromised up to the top. Instead Tambo defended his Security chiefs. Their critics ended up in Quatro prison camp or executed.

Sanders's book contains a photograph of the former Sunday Times journalist Gordon Winter enjoying "drinks and information" in the early Sixties with Balthasar John Vorster, then Minister of Justice and later State President. Winter's method, as I knew him in 1962-63 when I was working on the Rand Daily Mail (and occasionally on the Sunday Times) in Johannesburg, was to collect photographs - often surreptitiously - of everyone he thought might one day make news of some kind. He revealed his moral stature when we were on an asssignment together, boasting he would angle the same story - say, the massacre at Sharpeville - completely differently for the two different international newspaper chains he worked for as a stringer, the Mirror in Britain (critical of apartheid) and one in West Germany (probably the Springer empire), which supported the regime. His much later autobiography, Inside Boss (withdrawn I think on libel grounds), was generally revelatory. Winter's state espionage career was hampered, though not terminated, by his arrest by the Murder Squad in Johannesburg after his pistol was found to have been used in the gangland shooting of a South African businessman, Thomas Waldeck, in 1965. Threatened with being charged, Winter's evidence helped get the arrested getaway driver, Lawrence Bradbury, a London Cockney, like himself, sentenced to death. Visited in the death cells in Pretoria Central Prison by British detectives, Bradbury provided information - leading to the commuting of his sentence to life - which enabled Scotland Yard to round up and smash a London criminal gang committed to the torture of all witnesses actual and potential.

At least from the early Sixties, when the Security policeman Gerard Ludi was simultaneously a journalist on the Rand Daily Mail and a member of the underground Communist Party, this kind of state penetration of the media has been a staple of South African sleaze. Nothing has changed, only the faces. So it goes. If one wished to get a sense of the mindset operating in the espionage system of the Mbeki state, it is not a bad idea to begin with Sanders's account of its apartheid forebears.