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Dieter Gerhardt

The Gray Man

I

England, 1963. A tall, athletic man with big green eyes and a disarming smile boarded the train from Portsmouth to London. Twenty-eight and already balding, he was a rising star in the South African Navy, and had been seconded to the Royal Navy for training. He got off at High Street and made his way to Kensington Palace Gardens. The walk took about ten minutes. He entered number 5 Kensington Gardens, the Embassy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and asked to see a military man. He was sent to a waiting room and a few minutes later a short, slim, dark-haired man walked in and asked what he wanted. The South African offered to spy for the USSR.

The Russian listened quietly and made no comment, except to say he would speak to his superiors. The naval officer then left the embassy. The Russians – or any country, for that matter – don’t normally take ‘a walk-in’. Walk-ins are immediately suspicious. For all the Russians knew, he could have been a double or even a triple agent.

In 1963 the Cold War was in full throttle, and the Soviets and the West were gripped in an extraordinary spy dance. After the Second World War the rival intelligence agencies on both sides of the East-West divide had spared no expense in building their espionage capacities in an effort to penetrate embassies, government agencies, military personnel, political parties and, the ultimate prize, each other.

Following his visit, the South African naval officer didn’t hear from the Russians. After a month he got back on the train and once again made his way to the Soviet Embassy. This visit would prove more fruitful. Firstly, the Russians had investigated him and now probably knew things about him that even he didn’t know himself. And, secondly, he had arrived with significant material to put on the table. A former South African counter-intelligence chief, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the officer had returned with something hot; not ‘chicken feed’. In espionage jargon ‘chicken feed’ is intelligence that is accurate but not particularly useful, and especially not damaging. It’s fed to an opposition agency to try to establish a double agent’s credentials.

The intelligence the South African naval officer presented to the Soviets was not information the British would have wanted to end up in Russian hands. The Russians knew that the British – or the South Africans – wouldn’t have offered this information as a bid to get their man inside. They knew it was real. Only a handful of people ever knew what the information was, and only one of them is still alive. The former South African counter-intelligence officer’s best guess is that it was the design of a missile. Whatever it may have been, it was solid enough for Russia’s military intelligence agency GRU1 to recruit the naval officer. From that moment he became a spy. He had defected in place, which is spy slang for ‘decamping while on duty’.

It seems astonishing that the Russians would have trusted someone off the street. But it’s not about trust; handlers never trust anyone. The motto of Gregorii Shirobokov, who would become the young officer’s primary handler a few years later, was: I trust nobody except my mother … and she died ten years ago. It wasn’t the spy the Soviets needed to trust. It was the information he provided, and they had a verification process to check that the information was genuine. As a result they launched Felix, the code name for the operation. Felix, which means ‘lucky’ in Latin, was the new recruit’s middle name. Dieter Felix Gerhardt in fact turned out to be one of the most important, yet enigmatic, figures in espionage history, providing a trove of secrets to the Soviets in a spy career that lasted for twenty years.

South Africa, 2018. An old man in a black beanie and blue jersey strides confidently through the crowd. He is Dieter Gerhardt, South Africa’s master spy. He’s also the ultimate Gray Man, who displays a spy’s greatest skill: the ability to slip through crowds, and life, unnoticed.

I wasn’t sure how I would recognise the former commodore in the South African Navy, who had once been tipped as a potential head of the South African Defence Force. I had only seen grainy images of him from thirty-five years earlier when he was on trial for high treason. In those black-and-white newspaper photographs he looked at the world with a defiant, unflinching gaze.

I needn’t have worried. Gerhardt was easy to spot as he moved through the sea of Lycra-clad cyclists, sipping post-ride cappuccinos at Café Roux, a farm stall at the base of Chapman’s Peak in Cape Town. Most of the cyclists were not born when Gerhardt was at the centre of one of the biggest Cold War dramas. I stand up. Gerhardt extends his hand, which swallows mine.

‘Hello, Commodore,’ I say.

‘Actually,’ he replies, ‘it’s Admiral now.’

Beyond Wikipedia’s bare-bones entry there is very little information about Gerhardt in the public domain. He is notoriously averse to the media. Attempts to get hold of him through some of his former prison mates had been unsuccessful. When I sought the help of Ronnie Kasrils, who had appointed Gerhardt as a lecturer in the South African spy academy after 1994 when Kasrils was Minister of Intelligence, he told me to forget about it. ‘He will not entertain any interview and avoids publicity like the plague. That’s it, I’m afraid. Don’t waste your time,’ he said.2

When I interviewed Rear Admiral Peter Bitzker, who had been in Gerhardt’s navy cadet class sixty years earlier, he mentioned in passing that Gerhardt had a son called Gregory.3 An internet search revealed that one of the dozen Gregory Gerhardts was the founder of a web development company with offices in Switzerland and Cape Town. I looked at the Cape Town employees and discovered I had a connection with one of them. I then played vouching dominoes: I asked my connection to vouch for me to his friend. Then he asked his friend to ask her boss, Gregory Gerhardt, to vouch for her to his father. Bingo! I managed to get a meeting with Gerhardt, but now that I was face to face with him, it was clear he wasn’t overjoyed about our meeting.

‘Right,’ he commands gruffly. ‘Speak!’

I explain that I’m interested in his story. I want to find out what motivated him to become an agent, how he was able to lead a double life for so long, and how he managed to survive.

Gerhardt shakes his head. ‘The whole point about espionage is that it’s secret,’ he says. ‘I’m talking to you only to tell you that I won’t be talking to you.’ I understand that retired Soviet agents give their former principals an undertaking not to discuss their past with anyone. Gerhardt has only ever given one interview, to Ronen Bergman, the Israeli journalist who specialises in spy investigations. The interview, published in Haaretz magazine in 2000, received worldwide attention.

‘You’re a journalist,’ Gerhardt tells me. ‘Journalists and spies are similar; they both collect information to form a picture, to seek the truth. But I’ll let you in on a spy’s best secret: 95 per cent of the information you are looking for is in plain view; you just need to know how to find it. I never asked [President] PW [Botha] for the keys to the safe.’ In other words, I didn’t need Gerhardt to tell his story: I just had to use spycraft to get access to information and gather material. Digging through historical archives, trawling through South African, American, Israeli, British, German and Russian newspaper clippings, poring over reams of court papers and trial documents, analysing statements Gerhardt gave to various intelligence agencies, looking at a case study that Gerhardt presented of himself to spook recruits at the National Intelligence Academy,4 going through the CIA’s ‘approved for release’ documents, speaking to ex-members of the intelligence and counter-intelligence community, and former and current friends and an enemy or two,5 I managed to piece together the remarkable story of Dieter Felix Gerhardt – South Africa’s Invisible Man.

Dieter Gerhardt was born on 1 November – All Saints Day – in 1935 in Sea Point, Cape Town. His parents, Alfred Edgar and Julia Christine Emma Gerhardt, had settled in South Africa in the early 1930s. Alfred had served as a lieutenant in the Austrian army during the First World War. Afterwards he moved to Germany to study and there met his future wife whose father was a fruit and flower importer in Hamburg. When the Depression took a grip and Hitler began his rise to power, he suggested to his daughter and son-in-law that they seek a new life away from the impending conflict in Europe. They chose Cape Town.

Before arriving in South Africa, Alfred had received two doctorates, in architecture and engineering, from the universities of Berlin and Prague, where he had specialised in road construction, city planning and waterways. He was fluent in nine languages, was well read and had a good knowledge of history, culture and literature.6

The Gerhardts moved in 1937 to Pretoria, where Alfred got a job with the Public Works Department. When the Second World War broke out, tension between Alfred and his anti-German colleagues surfaced. Alfred resigned and set up a private practice as an architect. He started to identify with disaffected Afrikaners, who hated the British empire and refused to fight Germany on its behalf.

One morning in 1942, just as dawn broke, a team of plainclothes policemen arrived in several cars at the Gerhardt family’s home. Alfred was out in the garden. He was dragged back into the house for questioning. The house was searched but nothing of significance was found except for a map of Europe with small pin flags indicating the battle lines between Axis and Allied forces. This was enough for him to be taken into custody. Alfred was bundled into a police car, which drove off at high speed.7 Dieter Gerhardt, who was just 7 years old, witnessed the commotion and watched the officers haul his father away in handcuffs. The look of terror, confusion and unhappiness on his mother’s face as his father was led away remains one of Gerhardt’s strongest and most lasting impressions. She cried for three days.8

Alfred was interned in a camp in Koffiefontein in the Orange Free State as an enemy subject. Here he was imprisoned with other German nationals and Afrikaners sympathetic to the Nazis, whom the Jan Smuts government had rounded up. Some of the Afrikaner nationalists would go on to become powerful leaders in the National Party and its governments after the war. One of them was John Vorster, the country’s prime minister from 1966 to 1978 and another was Hendrik van den Bergh, the founder of the Bureau for State Security (BOSS).

It wasn’t only Gerhardt’s father who suffered from the pervasive anti-German sentiment. Dieter Gerhardt went to the German School in Pretoria. He and his fellow students faced hostility from children from nearby schools who called the German pupils names like ‘bloody Jerry’ and shouted at them to ‘go back to Germany’. The German children had to be ready to fight; it was a question of survival. For young Gerhardt, this was an environment in which he had to dissemble all the time. One of Gerhardt’s earliest memories was of being invited to a birthday party. He arrived at the child’s house and handed a present to the birthday boy, who took it and then told the ‘dirty little Kraut’ to go home.

Gerhardt was very close to his mother. With her husband away in custody, she was left with no income and battled to care for Gerhardt and his older brother. She turned the family Blackwood Street home into a boarding house.9 Many of the lodgers were short of money and Julia, whom everyone called Mutti (‘mother’ in German), was sympathetic and often let them off paying rent when they couldn’t afford it.

After the war ended Alfred returned home from the camp an extremely bitter man. He may not have been a Nazi when he went into the camp but he was one when he came out. Gerhardt Senior became chronically moody. He drank heavily and blamed everyone for his misfortunes, especially the hated British. He also turned on his family and started becoming emotionally and, at times, physically abusive.

Shortly after their third son was born, Alfred and Julia divorced. Subsequently Gerhardt did not have much contact with his father, who by then had secured a job as a civilian architect for the South African Defence Force (SADF), designing plans for defence buildings and units. It was a difficult time in the teenager’s life. He had street smarts and was physically tough but he ran wild and got into trouble with the authorities. When Gerhardt was 15 he and a friend, the son of the American military attaché, took a government jeep on a joyride. They were caught and charged, not with stealing, but driving a vehicle without the owner’s consent. Alfred intervened, and instead of being sent to a reformatory, Gerhardt received ‘six strokes of the cane’.

Gerhardt didn’t finish school but when he was 16 enlisted as a boy seaman in the navy. He was sent to the Naval Gymnasium in Saldanha Bay, a seaside village on the West Coast. Here Captain (later Rear Admiral) Chips Biermann took Gerhardt under his wing and became his role model.10

After the Afrikaner nationalists took power in 1948, they began muscling out English-speaking South Africans in key positions in the army and navy and replacing them with Afrikaners. Gerhardt was never an Afrikaner nationalist, but was considered an Afrikaner partly because he was not of English descent but also because of his father’s influential connections from his time in the Koffiefontein camp. From early on, Gerhardt was earmarked for a senior position in the South African Navy.

Gerhardt idolised Biermann, who encouraged him to complete his schooling. He used his second year at the Gym, where he was also a signals instructor for the new intakes, to study for his matric by correspondence. In 1954, after completing his cadetship and matriculating, the seaman was selected to join eight others to take part in a course for midshipmen – the grade above naval cadet and below sub-lieutenant. The course involved eighteen months of intensive naval training.

Rear Admiral Peter Bitzker was another member of the group. He was a German who had been repatriated during the Second World War and had returned to South Africa in 1948. According to Bitzker, the nine seamen composed the first unit of midshipmen to be trained after the end of the war. ‘Gerhardt was a large fellow with a prominent nose, which is why we nicknamed him Jumbo … after the elephant,’ recalls Bitzker. Gerhardt was also nicknamed ‘the Brain’, because he was extremely bright.

The seamen spent the year and a half at the Naval Academy in Saldanha Bay and did everything together – eat, sleep, train and socialise. They became a band of brothers. The weekends were spent diving for kreef (crayfish), playing rugby (Gerhardt was flank and lock) and getting up to no good. ‘The nine of us were very close and Dieter was a good mate. I remember one occasion when he was still in a sailor’s uniform, before he became an aspirant officer, he went to a funfair. He’d had too much to drink and on one of these swings he was overcome with vomit. He threw up diced carrots and peas on the spectators below.’

After eighteen months of training, the nine men qualified as sub-lieutenants. Gerhardt turned out to be a first-rate sailor, winning the sword of honour, the prize for the best midshipman. Although they then went their separate ways, they remained close: their paths often crossed over the years. Bitzker went into the executive, the fighting arm, of the South African Navy and Gerhardt went into the engineering branch and was sent to England to study at the Royal Naval Engineering College in Plymouth. It was a time of close military cooperation between South Africa and Britain. The British Navy helped train South African naval officers, and the two navies worked together on designs of warship and weapons systems.

In England, Gerhardt learnt about ship construction and qualified as a marine engineer, which was rare in those days. He also forged strong friendships with the multiracial group of students whom he lived with at Plymouth. While he was in England, Gerhardt met Janet Coggin at a wedding. He was 23, and she was 21 and was working in a refugee camp in Peterborough. She thought he was ‘terrific fun’ and ‘terribly attractive’.11 He fell for her immediately. She was ‘an English rose, with a peaches-and-cream complexion and a stunning figure’. She had blue eyes and a rich crop of auburn hair.12 ‘Her figure, too, was extremely well proportioned. A most attractive person – in fact, in my eyes breathtakingly beautiful. Her personality was warm and loving,’ Gerhardt once wrote.

Janet had been raised by her father, Maurice, a true English eccentric, who had been jailed as a conscientious objector during the Second World War. She was a dreamer, a gentle and reserved member of the country set. Gerhardt, on the other hand, was rough and ambitious, and his interests were centred on the sea. Despite their very different backgrounds, they hit it off from the start and, four months after they met, they were married at St Budeaux Roman Catholic Church in Plymouth. Maurice, a pacifist, was not happy about losing his daughter to a military man but he put on a brave face at the wedding ceremony, and gave them £5,000 worth of shares and the use of one of his three old Rolls-Royces.

Shortly after they were married Janet fell pregnant and the couple’s first child, Annemarie Julia, was born. They had been married for two years when they came to live in South Africa. At first they stayed in the naval quarters in Simon’s Town but Janet was miserable living among the naval families and they bought a house called Fiddler’s Green in Noordhoek, a scenic coastal suburb of Cape Town, about thirty kilometres by road from the Simon’s Town naval base.

Gerhardt was appointed the engineer officer of the SAS Natal, the navy’s survey vessel, and spent a lot of time at sea. Janet fell pregnant again and their second daughter, Ingrid, was born in 1960. While Gerhardt was spending twenty-five days a month at sea, Janet spent her time looking after her daughters, some cats, dogs and horses, which she rode on the white sands of Noordhoek Beach. But she wasn’t happy: she did not fit in with the other naval wives and, more importantly, South Africa’s unjust race laws didn’t sit well with her liberal outlook. At that point in their marriage, Gerhardt was an affectionate husband, keen on family outings and holidays and, to his wife, he seemed so ‘normal’.13

In 1963 Gerhardt returned to England to study advanced weapons and radio courses with the Royal Navy at the Maritime Warfare School. It was during this stay that he boarded the train to London to offer his services to the Soviets.14

What drove Gerhardt to spy? And why for the Russians? Unpuzzling the different possibilities of a spy’s motives is complex and there are usually multiple reasons why people become spies. Two possible motives that have been suggested for Gerhardt involve his father. The first is that Gerhardt became a spy as a form of retribution for the way his father was treated during the Second World War. This doesn’t ring true because he was interred by Jan Smuts’s United Party government, not the National Party. The second is that Gerhardt was not seeking revenge for his father but was, in fact, rebelling against him: he embraced left-wing politics because of his father’s right-wing views.

However, General Herman Stadler, the security policeman who led the Gerhardt investigation, believed his motive had nothing to do with his father but everything to do with money. It’s an accusation that keeps coming up. Gerhardt has never denied that he received payment from the Soviets. The GRU’s policy was to pay all their agents. They reckoned that taking the financial stress away gave their ‘assets’ one less thing to worry about. But Gerhardt rejects the accusation that his motive was financial.

Ronnie Kasrils, the former head of MK intelligence and Minister of Intelligence in the second Mbeki cabinet, is adamant that Gerhardt’s motivation was ideological, and that it’s ‘psyops trolls’ who spread disinformation about him.15 ‘Gerhardt spied out of idealism and a hatred of apartheid. The SADF and apartheid regime tried to spread a smear story that his motive was purely monetary. That was utter nonsense. It was a blatant attempt to hide their great embarrassment and discredit a thoroughly decent human being. Dieter and his [second] wife Ruth are clearly humanists who are revolted by racism and the exploitation of human beings. Nothing in their modest lifestyle has ever reflected a love of money or greed,’ says Kasrils.

Ronen Bergman, the Israeli investigative journalist and an authority on espionage, believes there is nothing to suggest Gerhardt wasn’t an ideological spy.16 ‘I’ve spoken to a lot of spies over the years – a lot – and there is always more than one motive. I didn’t get deeply into Dieter’s personality but there was nothing to contradict that his motive was at least partly ideological.’17 Dieter’s first wife, Janet Coggin, also believed there were a number of reasons why her husband became a spy, saying that he liked the way of life, the power and money, and the feeling that he was fooling people.18

The motives of people who become spies have been summed up by the acronym MICE: Money, Ideology, Coercion, and Ego/Excitement. Once in a session with South African spy recruits, Gerhardt went beyond the MICE framework and listed as an algebraic formula seven common characteristics that motivate people to be ‘Treacherous’: A + M + R + B + F + S + I > T. A is Access, M is Money, R is Resentment, B is Blackmailability (or coercion), F is Flawed Character, S is Self-Satisfaction (ego), and I is Ideology. Not all of these elements have to be present.

In Gerhardt’s own understanding, there were a number of both small and big incidents in his life that led to his boarding the London-bound train in 1963. It all started when, while studying in England, he lived, trained and socialised with people from a range of backgrounds, and started questioning South Africa’s racial policies. After he and Janet returned to live in South Africa, he had a confrontation with the man working in his garden, which had a profound impact on his thinking. ‘I was extremely angry and ready to give him a punch. He looked at me and said: “Moet dit nie doen nie, Baas. Ek is mos niks werd nie.” (Don’t do it, Master. I’m worthless.) This particular statement paralysed me. I was shocked and ashamed of myself. That evening I sat down and thought through the meaning of that statement. The man was 47 years old, separated from his family and had now reached a level where it appeared that everything, including his own self-esteem, had been lost.’19

Gerhardt also witnessed a so-called coloured woman carrying her sick child who was refused permission to board an empty ‘net blankes’ (whites only) bus travelling to Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town’s pouring winter rain.20 ‘I gradually came to the conclusion that what we were confronted with here in this country was an extremely inequitable political system.’21

In addition to these ‘small’ incidents, the ‘big’ events were the massacres at Sharpeville and Langa, which haunted Gerhardt. On 21 March 1960, at Sharpeville, a township south of Johannesburg, police shot into a crowd of thousands of people protesting against the pass laws, killing 69. When defiant crowds gathered in Langa, Cape Town, a few days later to protest against the massacre at Sharpeville, the police once again opened fire and killed three of the protesters. For Gerhardt the turning point came when he realised that he was part of the military establishment responsible for killing his country’s citizens.

But why the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics? Gerhardt, an agnostic with a Lennonesque approach to life (‘imagine no religion’), was not a Marxist and didn’t have any communist sympathies. There are two likely reasons. Firstly, he had been in the armed forces long enough to know that the United States and Britain were cooperating with South Africa’s military and helped the apartheid government survive. Secondly, Gerhardt had approached the South African Communist Party (SACP) leader Bram Fischer to discuss what he could do for the struggle against apartheid. The SACP was banned and operating underground. Fischer suggested that Gerhardt go directly to the Russians because they were the local Communist Party’s mentors. That is what he did.

For his first task the Russians told Gerhardt to buy a Minox camera, which was small enough to conceal in his hand, and photograph handbooks that came into his possession and leave the film in the back seat of an unlocked car – a small silver Hillman – parked in Kew Gardens. If he needed to meet with his handlers, he would send theatre tickets to the Soviet Embassy: the date of the show would be the date of the meeting, and the venue would be in Kew. He was told not to worry about money, which would be provided. His first attempt at photographs were not up to standard, but his photographic skills improved and over the next few months he was able to satisfy a number of Soviet requests for specific material on sonars, radars and fire control systems.

That was, more or less, the modus operandi for the next twenty years. Gerhardt would be given a list of ‘essential items’ of information that the Russians required, and he would then go in search of the material. They never told him how valuable the material was that he was providing or thanked him; they just gave him more tasks. Because Gerhardt was an agent in place he had certain advantages: there was no need for him to establish a legend – a spy’s cover story – which is always prone to weak links; he had access to information; and he was able to operate without a spy network.

Gerhardt received training in spy tradecraft and espionage techniques from the Soviets. He was taught to memorise information and to crack safes. He was trained to use miniature photography equipment: how to develop film and encode it in microscopic negatives that he would place in fullstops and commas in letters he sent to various European addresses. He was also given instruction in Morse code, using a scrambler phone known as a one-time pad, an encryption method that could be used only once; and he was taught how to send secret messages and decipher his orders. He learnt about the art of surveillance: how to do surveillance and, if he was the one being surveilled, how to detect that he was being watched and then shake off the tail. He also learnt how to cope during an interrogation and to confuse a polygraph test.22 Photographs were taken of him in various disguises, which were used to make false passports for him.23

Gerhardt returned to South Africa with his wife Janet in 1964. The eighteen months he had spent in Britain had made him a valuable asset for GRU, for the British trusted the naval officer and granted him access to its sensitive systems.24

When Gerhardt returned to the country Bram Fischer was arrested and put on trial for treason. One of the witnesses against Fischer was Agent Q018, Gerard Ludi, a member of South Africa’s Special Branch who had penetrated the Communist Party. As a result the Russians re-evaluated the South African security police’s capabilities. They decided there would be no local go-betweens: Gerhardt would work directly with his handler, Gregorii Shirobokov, who had been a spy in Nazi Germany in the 1940s.25

Gerhardt was appointed to a post in the navy’s Directorate of Technical Services as a weapons staff officer. It was at this time that he became privy to a piece of information that made him swallow hard. A call had come for two 114 mm gun barrels plus breech blocks to be sent to an Atomic Energy Board facility near Stellenbosch. The matter was considered so secret that it was to be ‘forgotten after completion of the delivery’. Gerhardt believes this call signalled the start of South Africa’s research into developing its own nuclear weapons. From that moment Moscow told him to keep an eye on any development in the nuclear field. The subject was so important that it was never mentioned again; it was just understood that one of Gerhardt’s essential ongoing tasks was to find out about South Africa’s nuclear capacity. Gerhardt had to compromise South Africa’s nuclear programme, without compromising himself.

In his new role Gerhardt was careful to avoid any sudden and unexplained influence, and not to draw attention to himself. He knew that to live his second life without raising suspicions meant that he had to live like his peers. Travelling in a fancy motor car would have been like rocking up in a Russian tank.

He would usually have three face-to-face meetings a year with his Soviet handler, two in a European country and one in South Africa. When possible Gerhardt would travel to Europe and then, using a number of false passports, make his way to Moscow for training and debriefing. It was during his first visit to Moscow at the end of 1964 that he met Shirobokov, his handler, for the first time in person. There was an instant rapport between the two men, and Gerhardt and Shirobokov developed a very good relationship. Shirobokov and his wife, a cryptographer, worked together as a team and made sure Gerhardt wanted for nothing. In between the intensive training sessions, discussions and debriefings, Shirobokov arranged for him to go to the opera, the circus, the puppet theatre, and the Bolshoi Ballet, and spoilt him, to give him a break from all the stress of his job. When they parted, Shirobokov (who was a fan of Agatha Christie) would warn Gerhardt not to take any risks, and then would chuckle.

It was a time of high pressure for Gerhardt, who was effectively operating in enemy territory and was in danger of getting permanent whiplash from looking over his shoulder all the time. After being a spy for three years, Gerhardt came home from leave and asked his wife to go for a walk with him in Newlands Forest. It was 1966 and the couple had been married for eight years. Janet had noticed that Gerhardt seemed more tense than usual and she was concerned about his strange behaviour. She occasionally wondered if he was mentally ill. At that point, she claimed, she didn’t suspect he was leading a double life.26 During the walk Gerhardt dropped an atomic-sized bombshell. He revealed he was spying for the Russians. ‘It’s hard to imagine now, I know, but I really didn’t have a clue at the time,’ Janet told a journalist three decades later.27

There was more. She said Gerhardt also told her the Russians wanted a husband-and-wife spy team, and that he’d been ordered to recruit her to be his courier. Although the revelation explained his strange behaviour, she didn’t believe him. He was always making up stories: she remembered how he would entertain friends about his love of fishing and then admit to her he’d never fished.

When she finally believed him, she chose not to turn him in, fearing he would be executed, and would leave her children fatherless. But she couldn’t stay with him. She divorced him in 1966 and moved to Ireland with their children, living in constant fear of the Soviet security services. This is Janet’s version of events, which she documented in a gripping book titled The Spy’s Wife published in 1999. Although she wrote that the book was true, she gave herself and Gerhardt different names and said he had spied for the KGB, not the GRU. According to a source who knew her, Janet had helped open Gerhardt’s eyes to the horrors of apartheid; and when his eyes had been opened, he realised he had to do something about the situation.

In 1967 Gerhardt was appointed to the navy’s human resource management unit with his mentor Chips Biermann, with whom he had developed a close friendship. They had been tasked to establish the navy’s submarine service and went to Britain to recruit specialists. Gerhardt, who served as the naval attaché at the South African Embassy in London, placed adverts in British newspapers seeking Royal Navy technicians to join the South African Navy’s submarine fleet. He received about two thousand applications. Many of the applicants were in sensitive posts in the Royal Navy with access to top-secret information. Gerhardt focused on those involved with Polaris, the UK’s submarine-based nuclear weapons programme, and kept his eye out for people who were disenchanted with the Royal Navy or short of money or both. He passed these names on to his Soviet controllers for possible recruitment as double agents.28

In December 1968 Gerhardt was given three weeks’ leave and left London for a skiing holiday at the Klosters resort in Switzerland. Here he saw a vivacious and attractive Swiss woman playing chess and was instantly smitten. The woman was 27-year-old Ruth Johr. She was struck by his kindness. Just as Gerhardt and Janet were very different, Gerhardt and Ruth were also total opposites: he’s close to 2 metres tall; she’s around 1.5 metres. He was a quiet, worldly wise naval officer; she was an extrovert, working-class secretary,29 but they bonded over their love of music, art and literature. After the holiday Gerhardt and Ruth started writing letters to each other. Ruth once opened one of his letters and found a plane ticket to London and an invitation to spend a weekend there. She accepted and their romance blossomed.

After the submarine service was established, Gerhardt was sent back to South Africa to take up a position as staff officer in the Directorate of Naval Engineering. This position gave him access to secret and confidential information, including details of the Sea Sparrow surface-to-air missile, the Exocet missile system, and MK-44 torpedoes. He began to send about ten rolls of special 35 mm film every four months to his handler.

In June 1969 Ruth joined him in Cape Town. The couple got married on 15 September at the Wynberg Magistrate’s Court. One rumour that has attached itself to the couple is that the Soviets had arranged the marriage and that Gerhardt’s bride was working for the Stasi, East Germany’s State Security Service; but not even General Herman Stadler, who would later be the investigating officer in the case against the couple, believed this.

Ruth became a housewife and, like Janet Coggin, was not happy in South Africa. She too found apartheid repugnant and wanted to return to Switzerland. And just as he took his first wife to Newlands Forest to drop the bombshell that he was a spy, Gerhardt took Ruth to Newlands Forest and confided in her that he was working with the Russians and playing a role to end apartheid. His courier problem would soon be solved.

Gerhardt was transferred to Pretoria in 1972 and appointed senior staff officer to the Chief of the South African Defence Force. As security regulations were lax, Gerhardt was able to access and photograph secret handbooks on weapons systems, confidential documents including information about the defence force’s budget, technical manuals, fleet orders, tactical instructions, motivations for new projects, minutes of meetings, reports from various attachés, and important NATO documentation, as well as details of coding machines. He also compiled his own reports on regional and domestic politics; general attitudes of the South African population; nuclear research and development; South Africa’s relations with other countries; the oil embargo; the arms embargo; and the country’s economic situation. Gerhardt was also the navy’s liaison officer with the precursor of the arms manufacturer Armscor, and obtained a list of all the navy’s weapons. According to Magnus Malan, when he was appointed Chief of the SADF he was told there was a possibility of a security breach at Armscor and ordered Military Intelligence to investigate Gerhardt. The report came back that there were no indications that Gerhardt was a spy.30

Gerhardt was, of course, also keeping his eye on South Africa’s nuclear effort. In 1974 Prime Minister John Vorster approved the development of the country’s nuclear weapons programme. The South African Atomic Energy Corporation (AEC) planned to build a uranium gun-type bomb and constructed a uranium enrichment plant, known as Valindaba, which means ‘about this we do not speak’ in isiZulu. The AEC prepared a test site at the Vastrap military base in the Kalahari, where engineers drilled two shafts into the ground in preparation for an underground test which was meant to take place in August 1977.

It is possible that following a tip from Gerhardt, who would have been aware of test preparations, the Soviet reconnaissance satellite Cosmos 922 was directed to pass over the Kalahari site on 3 and 4 July.31 Cosmos 922 detected some unusual activity, and a second satellite, Cosmos 932, was sent to take a closer look. It confirmed that South Africa was preparing to conduct a nuclear test. This prompted Leonid Brezhnev, head of the USSR, to send a message to US President Jimmy Carter, urging him to intervene, saying that a South African nuclear test would be a threat to international peace.

United States intelligence confirmed the existence of the test site. The CIA analysed Valindaba and concluded that South Africa could produce enough weapons-grade uranium ‘to make several nuclear devices per year’.32 The Soviet and Western governments were now convinced that South Africa was preparing for a full-scale nuclear test. In August 1977, the Americans warned South Africa that if it detonated a nuclear device or took any steps to acquire or develop nuclear weapons, there would be the ‘most serious consequences’.33 Although Vorster told the world to ‘do your damnedest if you so wish’,34 South Africa cancelled the test, but the nuclear explosive programme continued.35

In the meantime, the country’s counter-intelligence unit began to search for the leak within its own ranks. Gerhardt was on the list of possible suspects but he was crossed off because it was believed he wouldn’t have had access to the material that had been divulged.36 Nevertheless, the counter-intelligence search for a mole gave Gerhardt a severe case of ‘spotty underpants’ for months on end.37

In the 1970s South Africa and Israel collaborated over nuclear development. Half a century later, the extent and details of this relationship remain murky. Gerhardt had knowledge of the military ties between Israel and South Africa and provided the Soviets with a comprehensive list of Israel’s clandestine weapons development programmes38 and other information in the form of hard technical data – photographs, films, instruction manuals, research papers – which he thought would be particularly useful to Moscow.39

In 1975 Israel’s Minister of Defence, Shimon Peres, met his South African counterpart, PW Botha, in Switzerland. The two signed the first Israel-South Africa (ISSA) agreement, which was circulated throughout the South African military establishment. It landed on Gerhardt’s desk, and of course made its way to Moscow.40

The more senior Gerhardt became in the navy, the more information his Soviet handlers demanded. His list of essential material got longer and longer. The Russians were mostly interested in information about Britain, America and Israel, his target countries, but he also provided information on other countries. Gerhardt was valuable because, as a spy in place, he had access to technical data.

The Soviets supplied him with specially manufactured mini-cameras, which were easy to handle, took good-quality photos in low lighting conditions, and could store more material on a film. Most importantly they were very easily concealed: in a keyholder, a cigarette lighter or a hip flask, all of which were discovered when Gerhardt was finally arrested. These mini-cameras could be carried into the most sensitive places and it would only take seconds to film a country’s ‘most secret’ secrets and relay them to the enemy. There were times when even these extra measurements were not enough. Gerhardt then used a Super 8 movie camera, allowing him to take 2,000 exposures on one film. ‘The Moscow Centre proved to be responsive and ingenious when supplying his photographic needs,’ wrote General Stadler in his investigation notes.41

Moscow preferred to communicate with its operatives by broadcasting radio messages to them because even if the message was intercepted, the agent could not be identified. The messages to Gerhardt were delivered in Morse code. A communication schedule was set up between Gerhardt and Moscow. At 1.30 am on scheduled dates Gerhardt would wait by a radio with a tape recorder. He would tune in to a specific high frequency and wait for his call sign, which would be followed by a burst of beeps, which he would record. There were two phases of unravelling the burst of beeps. The first – the deciphering phase – was to transform the beeps, which were a series of five numbers, into letters. The second phase was to decode the letters, which Gerhardt would do using his personal code to match the letters and reveal the message that was being sent. The code could easily be broken without these two phases. The complex process would take Gerhardt about five hours to complete. The message received was either a task for him to complete or a question for him to answer or a schedule of some kind.

Gerhardt was reluctant to send messages back because radio transmissions could be traced directly to their source. As a result he wrote letters – this was in the days when South Africa’s postal service was more reliable. Messages in the letters were written in special chemicals so they would be invisible. To indicate to the recipient that there was a secret message behind the letter, Gerhardt would sign the letter with a specific code name, or write the date in a particular way or in a specific position.

In addition to invisible messages he also sent cryptic messages, which were made up of prearranged code words that only made sense to the recipient. A last technical form of communication used by the Soviets was the microdot, which Gerhardt would read using a miniature microdot reader hidden in a pencil.

His equipment would sometimes be collected directly from a handler using prearranged personal meetings, brush meetings, or dead letter boxes (DLBs) or drops. At other times it wasn’t possible for Gerhardt to send the volume of information he had acquired, and so Ruth became his courier. She didn’t know the details of what he was doing but she was by his side and was aware that the situation was dangerous. They were a two-person cell. She was given the code name Lyn. On the pretext of visiting her family she would travel to Switzerland with photographs, films and documents, and drop them off at a dead letter box in Zürich. Ruth’s clandestine missions could have come straight out of a James Bond novel. She wore a red scarf and the documents had to be in a red folder and, when meeting the agent at a prearranged venue, she had to use code words to confirm her identity.42

They would make their way to Switzerland, go to Heimplatz in Zürich and, on the last day of the month at 2.30 pm, wait for a GRU agent by the Gates of Hell, Auguste Rodin’s renowned sculpture that depicts a scene from Dante’s Inferno. The sculpture was a common place for Soviets to meet their agents, which seems oddly symbolic. In Dante’s Inferno the ninth circle of hell is reserved for ‘traitors, betrayers and oath-breakers’. The instruction was for Gerhardt or Ruth to carry a rolled-up newspaper with a red cover, and wear a tie or scarf that had at least one red stripe. The Russian agent would ask in English: ‘Seems we have met in Addis Ababa in 1970?’ And they would have to respond: ‘I am sorry. You must be mistaken. I was in Plymouth in 1970.’43 Only then would the exchange take place by simply swapping bags.

A similar password was used by Geoffrey Prime, the British intelligence officer turned double agent who passed secrets to the Soviets from 1968 to 1981. In his trial, it emerged that when he had a rendezvous with his contact, the agent would say: ‘I believe we met in Pittsburgh in 1968.’ Prime’s response was, ‘No, at that time I was in Berlin.’44

On 12 March 1977 Gregory Felix Gerhardt was born. He was named in honour of his father’s handler, Gregorii Shirobokov, and was given the code name Sea Breeze. Shirobokov became his secret godfather. On his birth Moscow Centre sent congratulations to Sea Breeze’s parents, Ruth Johr and Dieter Gerhardt.

Gerhardt was careful to separate his spying activities from his daily routine and job in the navy. His time for espionage work was between 1 am and 6 am; and he devoted 45 hours a week to it.45 He would have a shower and then head off to his day job. A senior officer in the South African Navy, a Russian spy, and a husband and father: he was, as the judge in his treason trial would later remark, riding three horses simultaneously, which is not easy to do when you are also constantly looking over your shoulder.

Gerhardt’s life had been on the line from the moment he entered the Soviet Embassy in London in 1963. From the very beginning he was dancing along on a tightrope and hoping he would survive. The death toll of Cold War spies was extremely high. Gerhardt once explained to a friend that leading a double life was a lot like driving on South Africa’s roads. ‘You just have to do it. You have to make second-by-second decisions because your only option is to survive. You drive, you take risks, but you keep going.’

One risk nearly got him caught. Gerhardt duplicated his colleagues’ keys to their safes and cracked the combinations on their locks, which were usually the person’s birthdate. This was before the advent of sophisticated passwords that demanded all sorts of variables. One evening he removed some documents he had taken from an officer’s safe, photographed them, and placed them back in the safe. As he was putting his miniature camera away, he looked up and saw a guard standing in the doorway.

‘You’re working late tonight, sir,’ the guard said.

Gerhardt froze. He didn’t know how much the guard had seen. Not much as it turned out. The guard offered to make Gerhardt a cup of tea. Gerhardt always kept good relationships with the guards. He knew that if he gave them a smile in the morning and asked, ‘How’s your wife and kids?’ and remembered their names, it helped create a trusting environment. So he drank a cup of tea with the guard.

All the while he was proceeding on this extreme journey, no one in the South African or the British navies suspected anything, and Gerhardt’s career continued to advance. In 1979, when he was 44, he took over command of the Simon’s Town Naval Dockyard, which meant a promotion to Commodore. It also meant that he, Ruth, Gregory and Dima, the family’s large black standard poodle, left Pretoria for Cape Town and moved into Pennington, the dockyard’s official residence.

Moscow wasn’t too pleased with the move. They had been very happy with the information flow from Pretoria and did not wish to see this change. Gerhardt thought the Pretoria output rate was not sustainable and was also conscious of the need to keep moving. The longer he stayed in one place, the greater the chance of being discovered. He thought it would be best to be stationed somewhere else for a few years before returning to the fruitful hunting grounds of Pretoria.

Besides, the dockyard was considered one of South Africa’s most important military installations, and he would have access to the navy’s intelligence reports. It also meant he was closer to his next promotion, chief of naval logistics, which would have given him even greater access to classified information. He would have the keys to the safe. And from there he would have been just a short step away from the position of chief of the navy.

The dockyard provided a bit of a respite for Gerhardt, who was now able to spend more time with Ruth and Greg. He walked with Dima around the dockyard and took an interest in the activities and welfare of his workforce. The workers adored Gerhardt and agreed that he was a good man to work for, if a bit eccentric.46 According to the book Simon’s Town Dockyard: The First Hundred Years, Gerhardt’s unconventional management motivated his staff and he achieved positive results. As for Ruth, she was a member of the Friends of the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra and chairwoman of the Naval Wives’ Association. She hosted regular dinner parties and was considered by the naval community as a great asset to the Commodore.

By November 1979, Gerhardt had been operational as a spy for almost two decades and the stress was taking a toll when he suffered a devastating blow. Annemarie, Gerhardt’s oldest daughter from his marriage to Janet Coggin, came to visit and then threw herself in front of a train between Clovelly and Fish Hoek stations.47 Gerhardt felt that because he was preoccupied with his clandestine work for the Soviets, he had failed his daughter in her hour of need. He was worn out, under extreme pressure and exhausted. He lived with a constant feeling of dread. He thought perhaps it was time to retire.

Over the years the paths of the nine midshipmen who had started their navy careers together in 1954 would cross. Towards the end of 1982 Rear Admiral Peter Bitzker returned to South Africa on home leave and met up with Gerhardt. He invited his old comrade for lunch. It was December. Gerhardt told Bitzker he was going to America to study for an advanced maths course at Syracuse University and was leaving South Africa on 31 December 1982. ‘I told him to wait a few days to celebrate New Year’s Eve with us in South Africa, but he said he had to go. I found that strange.’

II

According to a former South African counter-intelligence agent, the Americans knew about Gerhardt’s spying for some months. Spies are caught because of their own stupidity or they become tired of leading a double life and confess. Or else there is revenge involved: a resentful spouse or a lover who spills the beans. ‘The classic way, though, is that we – our service – have someone in place in another service. If you get an agent inside a service, that’s where you pick up information on what that service is up to and where they have agents. Contrary to James Bond movies, you don’t actually want to recruit some operational creature because he will always only have limited access. You want someone in the research and analysis directorate who is getting information, or someone in “administration” who works with records and has access to files – and if you get the report, you can backtrack to find out who the spy is. And that’s what happened to Dieter Gerhardt.’

According to the former counter-intelligence agent, someone in the GRU who had access to files became disillusioned with the Soviet Union and defected to the West, and was then being handled by the CIA. The double agent had been told to stay in place because that’s where he was most valuable. ‘You want him there for as long as possible. When he comes out he can only give you what he’s got in his head, but you want him to be there – in place – because there are other things you want to know and you can tell him what to look for. He wouldn’t have looked for it before because he wouldn’t have known what to look for it. The gold is right there, so the CIA would have told their defector to stay where he is and would have promised to protect him and his family and extract him when necessary.’

There are two obvious difficulties with having an ‘agent in place’. The first is using the information that you receive without compromising your agent. Aldrich Ames, the CIA counter-intelligence chief, disclosed to the KGB the identity of more than a hundred spies working for the CIA and FBI. This led to the execution of at least ten of them. While Ames remained an ‘agent in place’, it was difficult for the KGB to act against the spies he had revealed for fear of his being identified as the source of the leak.48

The second difficulty is meeting and debriefing your double agent, which is why it took a long time for the CIA to work out that someone with ties to the British Navy was leaking information to the Soviets. When they eventually worked it out, they told their British counterparts that there was a mole in their midst. Then the Brits had to go and find where the information was coming from, and they went looking for this spy in the UK. The British eventually tracked down the leak to a naval dockyard in Portsmouth. But then the flow of information stopped, because Dieter Gerhardt was already back in South Africa, and he was sending information to his handler which was being filed in some other place where the CIA’s double agent didn’t have access. But then Gerhardt returned to Britain, and the information started flowing again.

The British eventually identified the spy, a very senior naval officer, but it wasn’t Dieter Gerhardt. It was someone else. Those are the kinds of surprises that happen. There wasn’t just one agent spying for Russia in Portsmouth – there were at least two. The British quietly retired the spy they uncovered. A spy does more damage than just passing on confidential information. When a spy is exposed, the state or organisation is weakened in the eyes of the public and the news makes for demoralisation. It also creates mistrust, which is why spies who are unmasked are often put out to pasture rather than put on trial.

The British thought they had plugged the leak, but soon the flow of information continued and the Brits realised there was another spy. So it was back to the drawing board. A CIA counter-intelligence operative in the research and analysis division then launched a hunt for the mole. She went through all the documents and information the Soviet defector had provided and she came up with a name: Commodore Dieter Gerhardt. ‘She’s the one who nailed him to the floor,’ says the former counter-intelligence operative. The CIA didn’t believe her at first, but she was right. Once they had a name, the investigation really started.

Although it was the CIA who crunched the data and identified Gerhardt as the mole, someone within the Soviet system had given her the information that led to the discovery. It’s an entanglement of betrayals: a KGB agent betraying his government betrays a South African admiral betraying his government. But who betrayed Gerhardt?

The Soviet counter-intelligence machine, which assumes everyone is guilty until they can prove they’re innocent, followed the principle that when a wife is murdered, Suspect Zero is the husband. They investigated Gregorii Shirobokov, who had been Gerhardt’s handler for twenty years and who was his child’s godfather. After all, Shirobokov had access to Gerhardt’s information. He went through an enormous grilling but he was eventually cleared.

It seems there were at least two KGB defectors who provided intelligence that led to Gerhardt’s demise as a spy. One was Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB general who became increasingly disenchanted with the repressive communist regime and who was recruited by the UK’s MI6 in 1974. Seven years later the KGB sent him to London, which proved an intelligence bonanza for MI6. He rose up the KGB ladder to become the Soviet secret agency’s head of station in London. He was MI6’s Kim Philby.49 It is thought that Gordievsky provided the British with information that made them suspicious of Gerhardt.

However, Gerhardt’s unmasking has been attributed to KGB Colonel Vladimir Vetrov. Vetrov had also become embittered with the communist system. In 1965 the KGB posted him to France where he worked for Directorate T, a clandestine unit established to obtain technical and scientific knowledge from the West. In other words, Russian agents would steal the West’s technological advances to support their national defence. Vetrov supervised the evaluation of the intelligence collected by these spies, passing strategic information to Moscow. He then decided to offer his services to French intelligence, who in turn offered their mole’s services to the CIA. Between 1981 and 1982, Vetrov, who remained ‘a defector in place’, passed on thousands of secret documents, including a list of 250 officers from Line X, Directorate T’s vast network of spies across Europe, some of whom were stationed under legal cover in embassies.

Based on this information, the US launched a massive counter-intelligence operation to feed defective data and misleading information to the Soviets. The plan was ingenious because if the KGB discovered the Americans were sabotaging their efforts, they would reject everything their Line X agents around the world collected. Vetrov came to a sticky end in Russia. In February 1982, he and his mistress had an argument in his car and he stabbed her. When a policeman knocked on the window, Vetrov stabbed and killed him. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to twelve years in jail. While in jail, the KGB discovered Vetrov was a double agent, and he was executed in 1983.

While active as a double agent, Vetrov identified nearly a hundred leads to sources in sixteen countries, one of which led to the discovery of Gerhardt.

Now that the CIA had a name they set a trap. Felix’s luck was about to run out. On 8 January 1983 Gerhardt’s double life came to an end when agents from the CIA, FBI and MI5 burst through the door in a room at the Holiday Inn in New York. This is how the journalist Mervyn Rees, at the time considered the ‘Gerhardt expert’, reported the arrest in South Africa’s Daily Mail on Sunday:

It was a bitterly cold evening in New York. The snow was turning into black ice on the pavements of Ninth Avenue when Gerhardt arrived for an evening’s drinking at the Holiday Inn. His companion for the evening was a fellow student. Or so he thought. For unknown to Gerhardt, a Soviet defector had betrayed him to the West and the ‘student’ was, in fact, an undercover FBI agent. As the two men sat drinking Scotch on the rocks in a bedroom the door burst open …50

Rees wrote that a small army waited outside in case Gerhardt was foolish enough to make a break, but he just sat in the armchair, ‘too numbed even to talk’.

Gerhardt already realised he had ‘stepped into a pile of shit’ when he landed at JFK Airport a week earlier. Because he had been taught to read upside down, he was able to decipher the words ‘mala fide’ which the customs official wrote next to his name. In the previous six months there had been some indications that things weren’t all right: radio signals had been jammed or superimposed, so he struggled to decode messages, and there had been a surprise visit by a senior CIA official to the dockyard, which was unusual. He sensed the net was closing in, but what could he do? He couldn’t run just because he had ‘a feeling’.

So the words ‘mala fide’ at the airport had set him on edge, but even then he couldn’t turn round and return to South Africa. Although he realised he’d stepped into ‘a pile of shit’, he didn’t know just how deep it was. He hoped the authorities were only suspicious of him and they hadn’t actually discovered his true identity. He knew he was under surveillance in New York when he spotted two teams watching him. His strategy was to convince them that he was harmless, so he did things like leave the door to his hotel room unlocked. Days passed without anything happening and he thought, ‘Well, if they haven’t arrested me yet, perhaps they are not going to.’

He was wrong. Eight days after he’d landed at JFK and seen the custom official write ‘mala fide’ next to his name, Gerhardt and Patrick, a ‘friend’ he’d made, decided to meet for a drink in a hotel room. They had just sat down with a glass of whisky in their hands when the SWAT team burst through the door. Gerhardt didn’t move. He took another sip of his drink: the thought flashed through his mind that this was probably the last drink he would ever have. The FBI agent in charge said, ‘Hello, Felix.’ His heart sank. That’s when Gerhardt realised the information they had on him went back many years. He took another gulp of the whisky. ‘Hi,’ he said. He didn’t know what else to say.

The FBI agent hauled out a thick dossier from a briefcase, and told Gerhardt they had known about his activities for some time and indicated they were considering taking him up in their agency to use as a double against the Soviets – a classic ‘asset’ grab. The phrase ‘between a rock and a hard place’ came to Gerhardt’s mind. The FBI wanted to know if he was in the US on a specific mission and who he was supposed to meet. When he said he’d just come to study, they didn’t believe him. They searched his room and found a roll of special 35 mm film containing his most recent report and some South African material.

Gerhardt was cuffed, put in a car and whisked away to a safe house, where his interrogation continued. He was given a polygraph test but he knew how to confuse the machine. The person administrating the lie detector flew into a rage, and accused him of being a liar. Although they didn’t waterboard him, he has no memory of about three days during the eleven days he was held, and suspects the Americans might have drugged him.

In the meantime, back in South Africa his son Gregory had fallen off a desk and suffered a greenstick fracture on his right wrist. Ruth had gone for a surfing lesson and was sitting on the grass at Muizenberg beach when she was bitten by a tick and contracted tick bite fever.

Gerhardt hadn’t been in contact with them, which was not like him. When Ruth phoned the hotel where he was meant to be staying, the receptionist told her Gerhardt had moved hotels but said he had left the number of the place to which he had moved. Ruth phoned the number and the person who answered told her she had reached the Best Westin in New Orleans, but her husband wasn’t in his room. She left a message for him. A few hours later – 2 am in South Africa – the FBI forced Gerhardt to phone his wife back.

‘What the hell are you doing in New Orleans?’ she asked.

‘Oh, is that where I am?’ Gerhardt replied.

But Ruth didn’t grasp that anything was wrong. She told him about Gregory’s wrist and that she had developed tick bite fever. The FBI thought ‘tick bite fever’ was code for something and immediately cut the call. Holding onto a dead phone line, Ruth still didn’t realise her husband was in custody.

According to Stadler, it was Gerhardt who offered to turn and spy for the Americans to feed the Russians false intelligence. Gerhardt, however, told the journalist Ronen Bergman that it was the Americans who tried to ‘double’ him but he refused. He said he could no longer continue with the game: it was too much. Gerhardt was in fact relieved at having been caught. The weight of two decades of constantly looking over his shoulder, which had turned him into a bundle of nerves, was suddenly lifted.51 Gerhardt had been operational for so long that he wished to retire, even if his retirement was in a prison cell or at the wrong end of the hangman’s noose.

He knew he had to give them some information and revealed that after his stay in America he was to make contact with Vitaly Shlykov, codenamed Bob, at the Gates of Hell in Zürich. The Americans alerted the Swiss police. Shlykov was examining the Gates of Hell when officers of the Swiss Federal Police arrested him.52 He was carrying $100,000 in cash, false passports and spy gadgets. Shlykov refused to talk. One Swiss intelligence official said he wouldn’t even admit to the colour of the suit he was wearing.53 He was charged with espionage in a Swiss court and given a three-year jail term.54 The Swiss police also searched Ruth’s mother’s home in Zürich and found microfilm and forged passports.

But after a week of cat and mouse the Americans weren’t satisfied with Gerhardt’s answers. He overheard one of the agents say, ‘Throw him back to the dogs.’ The American agents informed their South African counterparts that they had caught Gerhardt, and when a senior agent in South Africa’s counter-intelligence unit heard about ‘this South African spying for Russia’, he smiled.

Two years before Gerhardt was arrested, Alexei Kozlov, a KGB intelligence officer posing as a German businessman in South Africa, was captured by South African counter-intelligence. He had been tasked with collecting information about South Africa’s nuclear weapons. He was held in prison for about eighteen months before he was exchanged for ten West Germans agents and a South African officer. When Kozlov was arrested, the counter-intelligence agent warned his superiors that the next spy they caught was going to be a South African; a boer. ‘They skinned me alive,’ the agent says, ‘and I almost lost my job, but then two years later we caught Mr Gerhardt – he was pretty close to being a boer. I didn’t say, “I told you so,” but I wanted to. I wasn’t surprised he got away with it for so long. I always knew it was only a matter of time before we caught someone like that.’

The Americans handed Gerhardt to the South Africans, and he was flown home, where Stadler was waiting for him at the airport. In his case study to the spy academy recruits, Gerhardt described Stadler as ‘a formidable and respected adversary’. In other words, Stadler was Moriarty to his Sherlock (or, depending on the side you were on, Sherlock to his Moriarty).

While he was returning to South Africa, the security police arrived at Gerhardt’s home at the Simon’s Town Naval Dockyard. Gregory had just fallen asleep when Ruth opened the door.

‘Good evening, Mrs Rosenberg,’ Brigadier Piet Goosen greeted her, in a grim reference to Ethel Rosenberg, executed with her husband three decades earlier for spying for the Russians. Ruth collapsed. She and five-year-old Gregory were then taken to police headquarters where she was questioned. Gerhardt had told her that if she was ever arrested, she must insist that she knew nothing. This is what she repeated over and over.

The next day, accompanied by Johann Coetzee, South Africa’s spymaster and head of the security police, Ruth was taken home to pack a bag. She saw that the authorities had turned the entire house upside down and even ripped up the yellowwood skirting searching for radio transmitters. Though they didn’t discover transmitters, they did find some deciphering material.

Gerhardt, who hadn’t shaved since he was arrested, had also been taken to the house. He had insisted that Ruth knew nothing about his spying. Afterwards he was taken to Pretoria Central Prison where, in an act designed to thoroughly humiliate him, he was stripped naked and searched. After hours and hours of interrogation he was taken through a series of doors and gates to a dusty prison cell. Exhausted, he was grateful when he saw a mattress. As he put his head down, suddenly a cacophony of noise started up. ‘Shit, here we go again,’ he thought, believing his interrogators were using white noise to deprive him of sleep in a tried-and-tested form of torture. However, he then discovered that underneath the mattress there were a whole lot of crickets having their evening chirp. The crickets didn’t last long.

For the next few weeks agents from French, British, German and Israeli intelligence services flew into South Africa and took turns interrogating him.55 The Israelis were worried and so were the British. MI5 panicked in the belief that, because of Gerhardt, Polaris was crawling with agents working for the Russians. Two senior members of Shin Bet, Israel’s secret service, flew into South Africa on 3 February to assess the damage Gerhardt had caused to their country’s national security.56 The journalist Ronen Bergman says the South African intelligence agents showed their Israeli counterparts a never-ending list of top-secret documents related to Israel which he had passed on. The list included a six-volume compilation, of 200 pages a volume, containing a comprehensive survey of the Israeli Defence Forces and their most clandestine weapons development programmes. ‘Gerhardt confirmed the worst to the heartsick Israelis: he had indeed conveyed the documents, originally prepared for the South African high command, to the Soviets.’57 The news got worse. There was a seventh volume.

The endless interrogation sessions left Gerhardt feeling disoriented. He was sleep-deprived and possibly drugged though he wasn’t physically assaulted. The most successful interrogators don’t use torture or brutal methods: they do their homework. They lead you in a certain direction, and set traps … and the traps close.

Gerhardt knew he had to give some information. So he gave his South African interrogators names to get them off his back. The people he named were not Soviet spies but were involved in corruption, fraud and embezzlement. Gerhardt had been collecting information for twenty years and had stumbled upon dirt he could use as ammunition. The people were investigated and, although they were cleared of spying, their corrupt activities were laid bare.

A week later President PW Botha held a dramatic press conference at which he announced that the commander of the Simon’s Town naval base – the navy’s golden boy – and his wife had been arrested. They were charged with the gravest of all political charges, high treason, a crime that carried the death sentence. It caused a sensation in South Africa, which was gripped by the fear of ‘total onslaught’ and rooi gevaar. The news of the Soviet spy also rocked the South African Navy to its core. For sailors, their whole world was the navy; it was their family. Even the ANC, an ally of the Soviet Union, was caught off guard. The organisation had no idea the Russians had an agent who was a senior officer in the South African Navy and were astonished when Gerhardt was arrested. ‘We were very impressed with the Russians,’ says Ronnie Kasrils, a senior member of the ANC and MK at the time of Gerhardt’s arrest.58 ‘We did not support him during his trial because we would not have wanted to compromise him.’

When ANC member Stephen Marais heard the security police had arrested a Russian spy, he was overjoyed, not at the arrest, but because ‘we had people right up there on our side [which] meant we would see freedom in our lifetime’.59 He says it gave a tremendous boost to the confidence of ordinary people involved in the struggle for the country’s liberation. Three years later, Marais would join Gerhardt in prison when he was sentenced to ten years for smuggling into South Africa the explosives that ANC guerrilla Marion Sparg then planted in police stations around the country.

According to General Stadler, Gerhardt was an extremely effective spy, who severely compromised the South Africa Defence Force and, in particular, the navy. In addition to the sensitive nuclear evidence he passed on to Moscow, including a claim that South Africa had acquired eight Jericho II missiles with special warheads from Israel, he also fed the Russians information about Operation Savannah, the defence force’s secret cross-border operation into Angola in the mid-1970s.

Hennie Heymans, a former Special Branch officer, military and police historian, and authority on South African espionage, says that Gerhardt was ‘our greatest spy’.60 According to Ronen Bergman, when Gerhardt’s interrogation was finally over, it emerged that he had given Moscow between 400,000 and 500,000 pages of documents containing ‘the deepest secrets of South Africa, Israel, and NATO’.61 For Bergman, Gerhardt was not a superspy; he was a mega-spy. ‘Dieter Gerhardt was in a different league. He was one of the most important spies in the Cold War. My main focus was on Israel, and of all the spies he did the greatest damage to Israel. He gave more information to the Russians about Israel’s secrets than any other spy.’62 South Africa’s Mail on Sunday gave its front-page story about Gerhardt’s arrest a massive, all-capitalised, bold headline of EXPOSED: THE BIGGEST SPY SINCE PHILBY.

In the seven-page indictment presented at their trial, Gerhardt and Ruth were accused of acting against the state with hostile intent and having worked to overthrow the government. The state argued that because the Russians were closely aligned to the ANC, this was a reason to convict the pair of high treason. The trial was held in camera, ostensibly because the evidence was considered a threat to national security but also because it would have revealed that the all-powerful apartheid state was actually vulnerable.

Gerhardt’s defence was that he was a spy but had worked for a country whose name he would not disclose to the court, but which he claimed was not hostile to South Africa. He testified that this country had instructed him to offer his services as a spy to the USSR so that the country could establish the Soviet Union’s interests in southern Africa. Gerhardt told the court he gave information to this unknown country, which converted it into disinformation and presented it to the Russians.

Ruth’s defence was that she had been an unwitting pawn. She said that at first she didn’t know she was being used as a courier, but then Gerhardt told her he was a South African counter-intelligence agent. She said she only started doubting her husband in about 1980: that’s when she believed in her heart of hearts he was a Russian spy. But as a result of threats of violence against her and Gregory, she continued to be his courier, and assisted him in typing up and sending secret letters and deciphering radio transmissions.

The 45-day secret trial ended on 29 December 1983 with Judge President George Munnik finding Gerhardt and Ruth guilty of high treason. The next day, the day before he handed down his sentence, Judge Munnik took the unusual step of calling a press conference to explain his judgment. On 31 December 1983, exactly a year after the Commodore flew out of South Africa to New York, Munnik told Gerhardt: ‘The crime you have committed is one of the most serious in the calendar … You abused the trust your country, superiors and colleagues placed in you. You went into this trade of treachery with your eyes wide open and as a military man you could not have been unaware of the consequences of what you were passing on, the damage it would do, but also you could have not been unaware of the possible consequences if you were caught. Your crimes are against the state, against the safety of the state and the people in that state and, as such, makes the circle of those affected the largest one possible in the context, the whole people of this country.’

Gerhardt’s freedom was taken away from him, but not his life, as he had feared. Judge Munnik said Gerhardt would have been hanged if the state had proved the information he passed on to the Soviets had led to the death of a single South African soldier. Gerhardt was given a life term, and Ruth was handed a ten-year sentence. Both were denied leave to appeal against their convictions and sentences.63 Even though the trial was held in secret, it was still a show trial and a guilty verdict was a foregone conclusion. Perhaps his lawyers saved Gerhardt from the noose but it’s possible that Gerhardt was spared because of his high profile and his usefulness to the West in case of future prisoner exchanges.

General Herman Stadler wrote in his case notes that in the wake of the Gerhardt saga the country’s various intelligence agencies did some ‘hard introspection’ because of the ease with which Gerhardt had spied. ‘We also had a hard look at our capabilities as far as counter-espionage, overt as well as covert intelligence gatherings, were concerned, and how we could bond together to make it more effective.

‘Questions were also raised, i.e. what about other Gerhardts? What about his “spy network”? Why had he been able to get away with his treasonable acts for so long? I do not think any government or its intelligence agencies would ever be able to state categorically that they do not have an agent of some sort in their midst. After all, the elaborate tradecraft measurements are specifically applied to prevent an agent from being exposed.’

Soon after he arrived in prison Gerhardt was informed that the South African Navy had stripped him of his rank and he would not be getting his pension. He missed out on the rip-off ritual, where the insignia of disgraced officers are torn off their uniforms in a ceremony of shame. Losing his rank, though, meant very little in comparison to his other losses: his freedom, his wife and his children – Ingrid and Tom, who were young adults living in Ireland, and Gregory. Gregory was just five years old when his parents were arrested – almost the same age as Dieter Gerhardt had been when he watched the police drag his father away to an internment camp during the Second World War.

Gregory was with his mother when she was arrested.64 Up to that moment his life had been idyllic. He used to walk through the dockyard with his dad and his dog Dima, who chased cats. He spent hours on the busy dry docks, inspecting the ships, submarines and workshops with their smell of creosote, grease and epoxy resin. He watched the sailors in blue-and-white uniforms, and ate boiled beef for lunch in the canteen. The office secretaries, especially Betty Foster, his father’s PA, adored him. He hiked at Silvermine, catching snakes and paddling in the dam, looking for tadpoles in the rooibos-brown water, or spent lazy days on Noordhoek Beach. But his carefree, sheltered life came to a halt the evening the security police arrived to arrest his mother.

‘I’ve only got one compacted memory of what apparently happened over two to three days: one civilian lady, two men arriving at our place, and my mother in a state of shock. As we left the house I spotted my father – he had a beard and was standing on the side of the house. Then we were driven off in a car. The separation on an airfield in Pretoria departing from a twin prop. An unknown couple that received me. Absolute disorientation and solitude,’ says Gregory.

The next day, when Ruth was taken back to their house at the Simon’s Town Naval Dockyard, General Coetzee told her that Gregory was going to be looked after by a dominee and his wife. She shouldn’t worry, ‘they were good people’. Gregory has only a few memories of the couple. ‘I remember very kind people, struggling to give me comfort. I remember their Citroën. What a strange car, I thought. I remember a farm, funnily enough that I was knocked over by a ram. There are only very few images left.’

He was there for a few weeks before he was taken to live with an uncle and aunt in Johannesburg. While his parents were awaiting trial, he went a few times to the prison. The visits took place through armoured glass. ‘I remember the nervous excitement, the tension, sadness, the desperateness of my mother seeing her own child and vice versa, both unable to give or take comfort. Hand on hand, separated by cold glass. The harsh contrast of vulnerable human beings and the interlocking, sterile containment system.’

Having to manage the aftermath of the arrest was a massive burden for his parents’ relatives and friends and it was subsequently decided that he would go to Switzerland. ‘Independent of political views and statements, I am grateful I had the initial support of my aunts and uncles. It was they who held me in trust until I found a stable harbour with my foster family, the Meneghins, in Basel, Switzerland.’ He was allowed to see his mother one last time in prison before leaving South Africa. ‘It’s the mothers who suffer most in a separation process,’ he says.

Ruth remembers Gregory being brought to the prison. A warder, in a small yet powerful gesture of humanity, allowed the boy to sit on his mother’s lap so she could say goodbye. In those few minutes Ruth tried to explain to her son why she was going away. Gregory had always been upset seeing black children selling newspapers when it rained. They were barefoot and shivered from the cold. He had also been distressed when he found out that Negro, a black man his parents employed, had been separated from his children. Ruth told Gregory that she had done something so that in future no children had to stand in the rain and sell newspapers and freeze and that people like Negro could live with their children. She told him that sometimes people had to do the right thing even if it meant making sacrifices. For her, though, the sacrifice was unbearable: she would be separated from her little boy.

When he arrived in Switzerland an aunt there was quoted as saying that it had been difficult to explain to Gregory why his parents had been put away but that his loyalty to them was unshakeable.65 He remembers the horrified expression on his aunt’s face when a bulletin about his mother and father was broadcast on TV and the reporter mentioned the possibility of his father being sentenced to death.

Gregory adapted quickly to the language and culture of his new homeland. ‘The sensation of pain and loneliness was repeated with every separation but usually settled after around three months. The patterns became familiar: from my biological parents to the dominee couple, to my dad’s brother’s family in Johannesburg when I was five, to my mother’s brother’s family in Zürich at the age of six, to my foster family in Basel when I was seven.’ His foster family – his new mom and dad – provided an unconditionally loving anchor in his life, free of political and personal contaminations. From being an only child he became part of a big family with three older brothers and a sister. There were lots of adventures, from the playground to boy scouts, carnivals and skiing holidays.

Over the years he was granted two visits and returned to South Africa to be reunited with his parents in the high security prison. ‘I remember the announcements at the intercom, the wait until the warders would open the massive prison gate, the security screening, several gates that had to be passed. The prison guards: left, right, on top, walking on a grid. The medical examination room where the meetings took place with both my parents. There was strict supervision, the precisely limited amount of time.’

The visits were brutal reunions, reigniting the hibernating parent–child relationship that had come to rest in another family and world. ‘Tension, tears, gladness, proximity, distance. I remember my dad, who was usually able to keep his cool and radiate some calm, in tears when I had a total meltdown myself being accompanied out.’

Gregory also wrote to his parents. They were allowed a specific number of letters per year, a specific number of words per letter. He wrote about everyday activities. ‘Mom and dad would write wonderfully crafted and encouraging things, and sometimes draw some beautiful pictures.’

As he grew older he started to gain a deeper understanding of South Africa’s complexities and his parents’ politics and why they were jailed. He learnt about apartheid and the Cold War and the Russians. ‘As one grows, one continues to assemble a puzzle, an approximation of personal and political motives and realities.’

III

From seaman (1952), midshipman (1954), sub-lieutenant (1956), lieutenant (1960), lieutenant commander (1964), commander (1968), captain (1972) and commodore (1979), on 1 January 1984 Gerhardt was given a new ‘title’: life-term prisoner number 2/3/2/6700.

He spent the first years of his sentence in virtual isolation in Pretoria Maximum Security Prison. A warder gave him two bags of hate mail from South Africans furious at his betrayal. It hurt him to know there was a powerful objection to his being alive. He never received the letters that his son Tom, who was in Scotland, wrote to him.

The warders weren’t enamoured of having a Russian spy in their care. One day some of them approached Gerhardt in the shower with the intention of assaulting him. Gerhardt said, ‘I’ve got nothing to lose. If I have to go I will take you with me.’ They left him alone after that.

Gerhardt’s motto was: I’m still alive. I still have options. He was determined to remain optimistic and not plunge into depression. He did a lot of exercise, jogging round the courtyard, stretching, doing yoga and lifting flower pots. He refused to let anyone interrupt him.

Gerhardt believed the Russians would come to his rescue. They tried. In 1986 an attempt to exchange Gerhardt and Ruth for Western prisoners failed. There was going to be a big spy deal in which forty incarcerated spies from Russia, America and South Africa would have been released. Gerhardt’s hope for freedom was dashed a second time when another East–West spy exchange failed to materialise in 1989.

After being sentenced to ten years in jail for smuggling explosives into the country, ANC member Stephen Marais joined Gerhardt and other political prisoners, including Carl Niehaus, Rob Adam and Roland Hunter, in A Section at Pretoria Maximum. Although Marais was confident liberation was around the corner and they would all be out within five years, Gerhardt was sceptical. Gerhardt very rarely spoke about his spying years, but it was clear to Marais that the stresses and strains of Gerhardt’s double life had had a profound effect on him. ‘Being such a small group in such a confined space for so long, some of us sometimes used to get on each other’s tits,’ recalls Marais. Some of the prisoners found Carl Niehaus difficult to live with. Niehaus and Gerhardt clashed: a friend of Gerhardt’s said that after his release Gerhardt confided in him that prison was one thing, but being incarcerated with Niehaus had been his real punishment.

Marais recalls that Helen Suzman was the only MP who dutifully came to visit them once a year.66 ‘There was quite a substantial record collection going back a long way, and also thanks to Aunty Helen. We took turns to choose a couple of records for evening listening, which would then be piped into our cells from the command room through the speaker system. It was always Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew that transported me out of my confinement.’

They also embarked on hunger strikes to protest against the prison conditions. Records show that during his incarceration Gerhardt was involved in three: for four days, seventeen days and, the longest, thirty-one days, which almost proved fatal, but he survived. When Gerhardt was taken out of prison to see a dentist or doctor, he would be shackled, and surrounded by armed guards, their guns trained on him.

His mentor and friend Admiral Chips Biermann visited him a couple of times. Biermann had given evidence at the trial and testified that Gerhardt was reliable and capable. He was shocked when he found out about Gerhardt’s arrest and told a reporter, ‘You could have knocked me down with a bleedin’ feather.’67

Gerhardt and Ruth would be allowed to visit each other in prison, but these occasions were infrequent. From the time Ruth entered the jail, she counted the moment she would be reunited with her son. Jansie Lourens, who had been jailed with Niehaus, says Ruth had a difficult time in prison.68 ‘She was the Commodore’s wife, who was used to being a good hostess, making small talk with the wives of naval officers, and suddenly she was in prison with a bunch of ANC women who were much younger than her,’ says Lourens, adding that Ruth came from a different background and mindset. She says Ruth suffered every single day from being separated from Greg. ‘I only really came to understand that trauma when I became a mother. Ruth had lived for Gregory – and then to be torn away from him was very difficult for her.’

In 1988 Ruth tried to take advantage of a deal President PW Botha offered to Nelson Mandela and other anti-apartheid activists: their freedom in exchange for renouncing violence. Ruth’s lawyers argued the offer should apply to any security prisoner, but the Supreme Court judge disagreed. He said Botha’s offer was not a binding obligation, but rather a promise to consider the release of security prisoners who had renounced violence.69 She didn’t have to wait too much longer, though. In May 1990, after negotiations opened between the government and the ANC, she was released on remission after serving seven-and-a-half years of her ten-year sentence. She went directly to Switzerland to be reunited with 14-year-old Gregory.

When Ruth was released, Gregory faced another painful separation, this time from his foster family, and a lengthy rapprochement process. It was something that he had anticipated eagerly and had wished for, but it wasn’t easy to prepare for emotionally, not for his mom, his foster mom or for himself. By then his foster mother was ‘Mami’ and his biological mother was ‘Ruth’. In a letter to his lawyer about six months later, Gerhardt, who was still in prison, wrote: ‘Ruth herself is more relaxed now – she is finding her feet in civil life – also gradually re-establishing her bond with Greg.’70

By the late 1980s the reform winds of perestroika and glasnost were blowing through the USSR and the end of the Cold War was in sight. The winds sent the Berlin Wall crashing down. Change was coming to South Africa too. In 1990, Botha’s successor as President, FW de Klerk, unbanned the ANC and the South African Communist Party and announced that political prisoners like Mandela would be released, without their having to reject violence. The prison gates swung open for Gerhardt’s comrades, but he himself was stranded in Pretoria Prison. The National Party refused to free Gerhardt and argued that he didn’t meet the political prisoner requirements because he hadn’t acted out of political conviction but from greed. This, they claimed, made him a mercenary, not a political prisoner. Magnus Malan, the Minister of Defence, accused Gerhardt of selling his soul for thirty pieces of silver.71

In a letter Gerhardt wrote from his prison cell to his lawyer, Kathy Satchwell, he called the state’s argument ‘spurious in the extreme’. He said the personal gain motive was a smear by the government to discredit him.72 ‘The facts are that the principals provided both Ruth and I with a generous expense account and small salary. For my first two years of operations it cost me money and subsequently until 1972 I barely broke even. It is conservatively estimated by myself that being activists cost Ruth and I well in excess of a million rands over the long period we were operational. That is not even taking into account lost earnings since our arrest in 1983 …

‘Other criticisms centred on our jet-setting and so-called “luxurious living style”. The jet-setting was associated with tasks which had to be accomplished for both principals and the SADF, which employed me on numerous overseas missions. Money spent on the “luxurious living style” was to ensure legend robustness (analogous in some ways to marketing expenditure by companies to promote their product).

‘That our approach was successful can be judged by the fact that I managed to get through no less than four positive vetting examinations by counter-intelligence in the 20-plus years of operations.’73

In October 1991, three months after the release of political prisoners, Gerhardt brought a Supreme Court application seeking an order for his release, or alternatively for an order reviewing the decision to refuse to class him as a political prisoner.74 He argued that at his 1983 trial the state had gone to great lengths to prove that Russia’s interest in South Africa was based on their support for the ANC and the Communist Party. The matter was referred to an Indemnity Committee under Justice Leon, which turned him down.

The journalist Charles Leonard arranged to visit Pretoria Central’s last political prisoner.75 Gerhardt had a tray of coffee and biscuits waiting for Leonard and told him that he spent his days tending red roses, writing letters and reading John Le Carré novels. He had just finished reading Le Carré’s non-fiction work about the Swiss Army general Jean-Louis Jeanmaire, a brigadier in the Swiss army who passed classified Swiss military secrets to the USSR from 1962 until 1975. Gerhardt told Leonard he believed his freedom was near.

Gerhardt was right. FW de Klerk had gone to the Kremlin to meet Russian Premier Boris Yeltsin in a bid to establish full diplomatic relations. On 27 August 1991 De Klerk announced that after some consideration he had decided to grant Gerhardt’s request.76 According to Magnus Malan, the Defence Minister, releasing Gerhardt had been a precondition for the restoration of diplomatic ties and the signing of a trade agreement between South Africa and Russia. It is thought that Vitaly Shlykov, aka Bob, the handler, courier and friend who had been sentenced to three years in a Swiss prison in the wake of Gerhardt’s exposure, had played a behind-the-scenes role in securing Gerhardt’s release. Shlykov served under Yeltsin as the Deputy Defence Minister from 1990 to 1992.

On 28 August Gerhardt woke up and, after breakfast, went to exercise in the courtyard as he had done for the previous 3,527 days of his sentence. The warder told him the Brigadier wanted to see him. ‘That’s nice,’ Gerhardt responded. He finished his exercise, had a shower and made the Brigadier wait for an hour. The Brigadier was furious when Gerhardt eventually arrived in his office, which gave the spy a tiny bit of satisfaction. Gerhardt wasn’t sure if the prison official was angry because he had made him wait or because he was being released; probably both. The Brigadier told Gerhardt the State President had ordered that he be released. ‘If I was the State President I would never release you. We have to give you some clothes and you can piss off.’

Gerhardt was taken to a National Intelligence safe house, where he was given lunch and a glass of wine – the first alcohol he had drunk since gulping down the whisky in New York a decade earlier. He was also handed a letter. He opened it and read:

Dear Comrade Dieter

It was with great joy that I received the wonderful news that the long ordeal of your prison sentence and separation from your family, has finally come to an end.

That the government continued to imprison you, along with many other comrades, despite their respective undertakings to release all political prisoners, was a source of great concern and anger.

I wish you a very happy reunion with Ruth and your children, especially with Gregory, who had to grow up without a father for so many years.

On behalf of the African National Congress I would like to convey to you and your family our appreciation of all your sacrifices in the struggle against apartheid. Allow me to also extend my warmest personal greetings. We hope that you will soon return to South Africa. There is still much work to be done. We look forward to seeing you soon.

Amandla!

The letter was signed by Nelson R. Mandela.77

Gerhardt wanted to phone his brother Michael but the authorities wouldn’t let him and took him straight to the airport to put him on a plane to Switzerland. Even though he was a South African citizen, he was effectively deported. The name on his ticket didn’t match the name on his passport and at every stop – he flew to Austria, Germany and then to Switzerland – the discrepancy had to be explained. Finally, the Gerhardts – Dieter, Ruth and Gregory – were reunited.

Ruth, who was stripped of her South African citizenship when she was released from prison, had found a job in Switzerland. Gerhardt, who was 58, was offered opportunities to sell arms, which he considered for about ten seconds, but knew they would either make him a multimillionaire or dead. He’d had more than enough adventure (or misadventure) for one double-life and decided to set up a less turbulent finance and trade company. He also offered to consult with companies about their security and safety.

After his release he wasn’t in a good psychological state. He found it difficult coming out of prison. He suffered from claustrophobia. He’d been in isolation for so long that he had to relearn how to communicate again. He felt like Rip Van Winkle: he’d been living in a sheltered environment without any outside news, and the world had moved on, but he hadn’t. He was disorientated, buildings had gone up while he was locked away, and the internet and cellphones had passed him by. He saw a psychologist in Switzerland and slowly started to adjust to being part of society again. Gregory says he and his dad, who both ‘hail from a rather authoritative-impulsive side of the personality spectrum’, had clashed but found a protocol for happy interaction.

Gerhardt returned to South Africa during the negotiation phase. Ronnie Kasrils took him and Robert McBride to lunch at a restaurant in the trendy Johannesburg suburb of Rosebank. Kasrils recalls the shock on the faces of customers who recognised this notorious trio. A few years later, when Kasrils was appointed Minister of Intelligence, he employed Gerhardt as a consultant to the secret service. One of his tasks was to lecture at the South African National Intelligence Academy. Gerhardt was highly skilled and had an excellent insight into the inner workings of the former South African Defence Force, especially the navy. According to Kasrils, of unique value in his teachings was the psychology of an agent: how agents should be recruited, assessed, run by handlers, and prepared for capture and interrogation. His contribution, says Kasrils, was invaluable.

Gerhardt applied to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for amnesty in the late 1990s. His application was successful and his rank78 was restored as was, eventually, his pension.

Today Gerhardt and Ruth live between Switzerland and Cape Town and have virtually disappeared from public life. When she’s in South Africa, Ruth volunteers at a community hospital in a township. The couple returned to Moscow to attend the 90th birthday celebration of Gerhardt’s handler, Gregorii Shirobokov, their son’s godfather. Gerhardt and Ruth – Felix and Lyn – have become a footnote in the country’s history and their contribution to South Africa’s liberation has gone largely unremembered.

In 2017 the South African Legion of Military Veterans published a post titled ‘Dieter Gerhardt – Tinker, Tailor, Soldier … SPY!!!’ on its Facebook page. The author of the post, Peter Dickens, wrote: ‘The jury is still out in veteran circles as to reconciliation on his actions selling British and South African Naval intelligence to the Soviet Union during the Cold War – many still grappling with the enormity of what he did and the damage it caused both the United Kingdom and, more specifically, South Africa.’ Comments from white South Africans that he should have been executed received scores of likes and hearts, with people suggesting how he should have been put to death. One wrote that Gerhardt would have the stain of a traitor ‘on his dark heart forever … and will answer to THE FATHER who will kick his filthy ass into hell’. There were about fifty anti-Gerhardt comments and only one in support of him, written by Samuel Gouza, who said: ‘This man did his part in the war and in my book I declare him a hero. He should get a medal for his bravery! God bless him!’ Gouza’s comment didn’t receive a single thumbs-up.

These people never knew Gerhardt, but Rear Admiral Peter Bitzker, who trained and lived with him for eighteen months as a cadet in the navy, and considered him a brother, said he was shocked to the core when he learnt Gerhardt was a Russian agent. It was the last thing he expected, and when it sank in he thought, ‘Bloody Gerhardt.’ ‘A mate of ours had become a traitor. We were betrayed more than the politicians, because Dieter was like a brother,’ says Bitzker. He says that when Gerhardt was unmasked the members of the unit felt he should have been executed. ‘It was treason. We weren’t officially at war against Angola. If we had been, he would have been tried under the military discipline code and executed – without a doubt.’ He says after Gerhardt’s cover was blown, the finger of suspicion was also pointed at his close colleagues. ‘The Ministry of Defence thought, “Well, what about Bitzker?” We were all under suspicion after that. It was a horrible time. We were terribly upset. It was very sad.’

Gerhardt could understand why his colleagues felt hurt, but he did not feel like a traitor or someone who betrayed the navy. ‘I was a political activist fighting the evil regime of apartheid. It was nothing personal,’ he said soon after his release.79

But for his first wife, Janet, it was all very personal. She said she found out in 1966 when she’d been married to him for eight years and he’d been on the payroll of the Russians for four of them. How does one make sense of a deceit as massive as this? How do you understand that the person you thought you knew so well, the person with whom you have three children, is someone you don’t know at all? How do you come to terms with deception of this scale; and, of course, how was it possible that she lived with him for so long and was completely blind to his secret life? In her memoir, The Spy’s Wife, Janet writes that the book is not a story of espionage ‘but, rather, one could say, of the effects of espionage on another – or, more correctly, on many’.80

In the first interview with Kim Philby after he defected to Russia, the journalist Murray Sayle asked him how he reacted to the charge that he was a traitor. ‘To betray, you must first belong,’ Philby said. ‘I never belonged.’81 Perhaps Dieter Gerhardt had never belonged either.