Public Relations blokes specialise in things like portraying the clear-cutting of ancient indigenous forests as ‘creating temporary meadows’. The reason they get away with this, says John Stauber, editor of the US-based PR Watch, is because journalism has become such a lousy profession.

After many years of building up his playing card business Harry Roscoe was looking at a golden dawn of legalised gambling in SA. He spurned offers of business partnership. Then suddenly a scam using marked cards from his factory was uncovered at Caesar’s in Gauteng. Or was it? It was Harry himself who organised the lie-detector tests.

De Crespigny undergoes the fight or flight spy test.

We’ve all heard about the British Airways London to Kenya flight that came within seconds of falling out of the sky after a lunatic passenger seized the controls. But what about the forerunner, when the world’s favourite airline’s least favourite passenger thwarted a charge on the cockpit by the Chinese light brigade? You haven’t read about it? Well, maybe that’s because it was linked to BA’s own insane dirty tricks campaign against Virgin Airlines and Richard Branson.

It was Thabo Mbeki’s man, Essop Pahad - today he’s Minister in the Presidency - who a few years back unleashed the party’s secret hounds on Cyril Ramaphosa and other contenders for high office in the government. But now Cyril must be smiling quietly to himself. Because, it transpires, the dogs are not as tame as Pahad might have hoped. Maybe that’s why he is feeding unlikely inside-the-presidency tales to his friends at the Sunday Times about a ‘bogus spy’ who, according to Pahad, has successfully ‘conned’ his way around the presidency for years.

Masterbond victims were abandoned by the SA financial establishment, which had had its snout deep in the Masterbond trough. It was left to Don MacKenzie, untrained as he was, to step into the breach.

In 1998 American airline executive Coleman Andrews rode in like the fifth cavalry to rescue SAA. Now he’s sneaking off early, the way he said he never would. And, we now discover, like he did just before the previous airline he headed collapsed. He’s also ducking our questions: and there’s so much we wanted to know. For instance: what exactly is his relationship to the consulting firm Bain, that gave SAA such lousy - and expensive - advice which resulted in the airline spending a sweet $600 million on unsuitable and outdated Boeing 737-800’s? Was the big yank yanking the chain of our national airline?

Denel paid R100 million bucks into a Swiss bank account for ‘advance commissions’ on a Saudi arms deal. The auditor general is said to be interested to know whether any South Africans shared in the spoils. We have the odd tip to help him.
For instance, we have learned about a rather large offshore investment by Mr Yusuf Surtee, Nelson Mandela’s famous shirt-maker, a pal of some Saudi arms dealers, and a curious entrant on the famous noseweek organogram. Both Surtee’s little R6m offshore dabble and that arms deal with the Saudi government have suffered some serious setbacks. Which raises a whole list of interesting questions - and even suggests some answers.