A government spy at UCT?

Stuart Saunders – UCT's vice-chancellor from 1981 to 1996, and a member of staff from the late 1950s – remembers interrogating a government spy in his office, in his book Vice-Chancellor on a Tightrope: A personal account of climactic years in South Africa (2000).

"A Mr Jerome Marshall was appointed as an administrative assistant on 1 February 1981. In April an official in the staff office sought to establish his pension number with the Associated Institutions Pension Fund in Pretoria. He was told that Mr Marshall already had a pension, and [was given] the number. The staffing official recognised the code of the pension number – it meant that Marshall had a police pension; so he phoned the pensions fund again, to confirm the number. When he mentioned that it was a police pension number, he was told that no such number existed! An official in the staff office then spoke to Marshall, who denied that he was a policeman. I asked to see him, and claimed to have incontrovertible evidence that he was a police spy; and I said that I would expose him. He jumped out of the chair and crawled on his hands and knees to the telephone connection behind the desk. After examining that carefully, he partially dismantled the telephone and started looking elsewhere in the room. After he had satisfied himself that there were no listening devices, he sat down once more. (I could have told him that very occasionally, my office was screened for 'bugs'.) He then confessed to being a police spy, and was overcome with remorse. Apparently he had been recruited while a student and had been on the police payroll for years. He alleged that there were a number of spies on campus, and that the police actively disrupted student meetings and sabotaged the cars of student delegates going to NUSAS meetings."

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