What drove a boy from Reefton to turn against his comrades in World War Two? How was a former boxing and swimming champion recruited as an agent of Imperial Japan? It's a story still shrouded in mystery more than 70 years later.

What drove a boy from Reefton to turn against his comrades in World War Two? How was a former boxing and swimming champion recruited as an agent of Imperial Japan? Did the British military conceal the true extent of the damage he did to the Allied war effort? And how did he meet his end in what a mysterious postcard described as a "watery grave"?

These questions, and many more, surround the murky mystery of Captain Patrick Heenan, one of the least understood traitors of the Second World War.

The Reefton Bastard

When Heenan was born, Reefton was a dilapidated place. It was 1910 and the gold rush days were over. Patrick was illegitimate, nobody knows who his real father was. He was named after an Irish Catholic called George Heenan who his mother, Annie, married shortly after his birth.

The family emigrated to Burma (Myanmar) in 1912 and shortly after arriving, George died. Annie was left to raise Patrick alone for the next ten years.

Maybe it was in these years that Heenan first started to develop a hatred for the British Empire. Colonial Burma was a deeply racist and repressive place, the famous author George Orwell worked as a policeman in Burma at the same time Heenan lived there and drew on that experience for one of his books.

"You hear your Oriental friends called 'greasy little babus', and you admit, dutifully, that they are greasy little babus. You see louts fresh from school kicking grey-haired servants. The time comes when you burn with hatred of your own countrymen, when you long for a native rising to drown their Empire in blood." - George Orwell, Burmese Days

When Heenan turned 12 he and his mother relocated to England where Annie paid for her son to attend the prestigious Cheltenham College.

Heenan's school years were deeply unhappy. Old school-mates said he was both a bully himself and a victim of bullying.

" didn't want to fall down that socio-economic ladder," explains Brian Farrell, a military historian at Singapore National University. "So there was some scrimping and saving to send him to schools that she really couldn't afford. As a result he was always the kid with the oldest, tattiest, most out of date shoes and clothes. got teased about it a lot."

Racism In The Ranks

Heenan's social isolation continued after he left school and joined the British Indian Army as a junior office…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details