Commodore Dieter Gerhardt led a double life: he was a senior commander in the South African Navy, with access to ultra-sensitive information, and at the same time a master spy for the Soviet Union. Ronen Bergman
spoke to him On the morning of February 3 1983 an Israel Aircraft Industries executive jet landed in Pretoria. The two passengers who emerged from the plane were whisked to the headquarters of the National Intelligence Service. Following a short briefing, they were ushered into an interrogation room in which one suspect was seated; South African intelligence officials in the next room watched on closed-circuit television. The two Israelis were senior Shin Bet interrogators. They had been summoned urgently to South Africa to try to gauge the damage done to Israel’s national security by a top South African Navy officer, Commodore Dieter Gerhardt, who had been apprehended after 22 years as a master spy for the Soviet Union.
The South Africans showed the appalled Israeli agents a seemingly endless list of top-secret documents related to Israel, to which Gerhardt had had access in connection with his duties as the official in charge of armament development in the South African armed forces. Incredibly, the list included a six-volume compilation, 200 pages a volume, containing a comprehensive survey of the Israeli Defence Force and its most clandestine weapons development programmes. Gerhardt confirmed the worst to the heartsick Israelis: he had indeed conveyed the document, originally prepared for the South African high command, to the Soviets, and had added a seventh volume crammed with information he thought would be of particular interest to Moscow. As they interrogated him, the Shin Bet agents formed the impression that Gerhardt was talking freely, of his own volition, and that he was somehow relieved at having been caught. Seventeen years later, Gerhardt confirms that this was indeed the case: “It’s true, I definitely felt a sense of relief. I felt this tremendous burden, which had turned me into a paranoid bundle of nerves for 22 years, suddenly being lifted from my shoulders.” Since Gerhardt’s release from prison in South Africa, he has maintained silence about much of his espionage activity. This is the first time he has told the whole story. Gerhardt was born in Cape Town in November 1935, on All Saints Day. His father, Alfred Gerhardt, had emigrated from Germany five years earlier, and the family spoke German at home. In 1940, the elder Gerhardt was arrested as part of a sweep of South African nationalists who supported Germany in the war. Nearly the entire leadership of the apartheid regime consisted of his fellow prisoners, who were released with him in 1946. One of them was John Vorster. The surroundings in which Gerhardt grew up fired him with a deep loathing for the pro-Nazi racism that underlay the white supremacy ideology in South Africa. “I grew up in a German milieu, I spoke German and I attended a German school,” he explains. “The manifestations of racism around me, including on the part of my father, who was a member of a party that can only be called Nazi, had a decisive impact on my future actions. “My life story is a chain of betrayals and revolt against the system. First I came out against the British, then against my father, then against the church, when I declared I was an atheist in a very religious society, and finally against the whole system, when I turned to the Russians.”
He attended a high school for navy cadets and then joined the navy. During his service he was sent to study automotive engineering in Britain and on his return to South Africa was posted as an officer on a patrol boat. “I knew already then that I could not tolerate what I saw around me, that I could not go on living without getting out of the framework and fighting the apartheid regime, which I considered an illegal Nazi-fascist system.” At first, he says, he was uncertain about the form his struggle should take. “I had no intention of approaching the British, of course. The British had close ties with the regime and the United States did nothing for the blacks in my country. There remained one country, the only one that took a clear and determined stand against apartheid: the Soviet Union. “Secretly, I approached a number of senior figures in the South African Communist Party and told them I wanted to do my part for the blacks’ struggle. At first they asked me for marginal bits of information, such as the names and telephone numbers of officers. The realisation that I, Dieter Gerhardt, had effectively become a spy, suddenly hit me when they told me an order had arrived from Moscow: I was to remain in the armed forces and pursue my career.”
In short order, Gerhardt was removed from the responsibility of the SACP and handled directly by the GRU, Soviet military intelligence. Because of the military character of his activity, Operation “Felix” – the code name given Gerhardt – was not run by the KGB. The 18 months Gerhardt spent in Britain, in 1963 to 1964, attending advanced weapons courses, marked Felix as one of the GRU’s most valuable spies. The British trusted the young officer and granted him access to their most sensitive systems. “A senior officer in British counter- intelligence, with whom I became friendly, frequently lamented that they knew the Russians knew everything,” he says. Yet, in the course of fighting the apartheid regime, he caused tremendous damage to other countries, such as Britain, the United States, France and Israel. Why were they at fault? “At the beginning I asked myself whether Nato was also my enemy, and at a later stage whether Israel was the enemy,” Gerhardt replies. “The answer I gave myself was positive. From my perspective, every country that helped the criminal government in South Africa survive was a valid and legitimate target for my espionage activity.” >From Britain, Felix ostensibly went to Switzerland for a skiing
vacation; this was, in fact, the cover story for his first visit to the Soviet Union. He flew from London to Vienna, then to Budapest, and from there to Moscow, constantly switching planes and identities. A black Zil automobile took him straight from the plane to GRU headquarters.
On that visit, and the others that followed, Gerhardt was given intensive training in espionage techniques. He was taught to use miniature photography equipment, how to develop the film and encode it in microscopic negatives that he would affix to the periods and commas in letters he sent to various European addresses. He learned Morse code, surveillance and evasion methods, and was taught how to survive interrogations, including a special course on how to beat polygraph tests. Dozens of photographs were taken of Gerhardt wearing different kinds of clothing, in wigs, and with false beards and moustaches, and these photos were used for the many false passports he was supplied with over the years. Spying turned out to be hard work. “I estimate that I devoted something like 45 hours a week to espionage work, more than I spent on my real work in the army,” he relates. One of the means Gerhardt used to pursue a successful military career was by delegating authority to talented young officers he cultivated. His espionage activity, on the other hand, involved a large number of “procedures” that structured everything he did for the GRU. He presented, for example, a printout of emergency procedures that he received recently courtesy of the GRU archives: “State of emergency: If all arranged means of restoring communication fail, you or LIN [the code name for his wife, Ruth] come to Heimplatz, Zurich, near the sculpture Hollenporte by Rodin, on the last day of every month at 14:30. You will carry a publication with a red cover turned in a tube shape in hand. Your tie has at least one stripe of red colour. Our man asks in English: ‘Seems we have met in Addis Ababa in 1970?’ Your answer, in English: ‘I am sorry. You must be mistaken. I was in Plymouth in 1970.'” These complex procedures ultimately boomeranged on the Soviets. When Gerhardt was arrested, his captors discovered the negative containing the emergency instructions. A joint team of US CIA agents and Swiss intelligence personnel arrested the agent who had come from Moscow for the Zurich encounter. He was Vitaly Shlykof, code-named “Bob”, who was found to be carrying espionage equipment and five false passports. Shlykof spent 18 months in a Swiss jail; he is currently a senior official in the Russian project aimed at dismantling its nuclear stockpile.
While professing to have misgivings about the apartheid regime, Nato countries, particularly the US, France, Germany and Britain, maintained close military ties with South Africa. The Russians benefited indirectly from this co-operation. In the late 1960s, for example, the US supplied South Africa with sophisticated equipment for underwater
detection and identification, which was deployed around the Cape of Good Hope, along with advanced helicopter-fired Torpedo missiles and the Orion maritime intelligence plane. The parameters of these systems, together with their deployment sites and their areas of vulnerability, found their way to the Russians thanks to Gerhardt.
One of his major accomplishments was to obtain the full text of the secret Anglo-American document on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, which was evacuated, turned into a centre of intelligence operations and used to store strategic equipment. Gerhardt gave the Red Army up-to-date information on the development of Nato maritime intelligence mines (“smart mines”), specifications of the archetype of the French Navy’s Exocet missile and other French innovations, information on German helicopters and
missiles, and more. In some cases, Gerhardt sent information that seemed negligible in itself, but afterward turned out to be extremely valuable. In one such
instance he brought Moscow a lengthy Nato document containing a detailed description of the Soviet Union’s naval armaments. A joint GRU-KGB team examined the paper thoroughly, cross-matched it with other information and with names of officials with access to Warsaw Pact material, and eventually uncovered a large network of British spies in Czechoslovakia. The Soviets were particularly curious about everything related to nuclear weapons. South Africa began to develop an independent nuclear option in 1964. Even though most of the activity connected with the project was not carried out by the armed forces, Gerhardt, citing a variety of reasons, was able to get his hands on material relating to various aspects
of the nuclear project, and even to become involved in some of them. The overall code name of the nuclear effort, he told his handlers, was Kerktoring (church tower), adding that an ostensibly academic body in South Africa, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, which had access to research institutes around the world, actually played a central role in the campaign to manufacture an atomic bomb, and that 70 of the council’s senior scientists were engaged in developing the nuclear trigger mechanism. Gerhardt organised himself a visit to the project’s test field in the Kahalari desert, photographed what he saw and sent it all to the Soviet Union.
In 1977 there was a twist in Gerhardt’s activity in this sphere that was not co-ordinated with him. The Soviet leaders were extremely concerned about South Africa’s nuclear project, as a result of the information they received from Gerhardt and data picked up by their spy satellites. In August 1977 the Soviet ambassador to Washington came to the US State Department with a personal message from Soviet ruler Leonid Brezhnev asking President Jimmy Carter to intervene. Intervention also came from a different direction: South African counter- intelligence began a search for the source of the leak. Gerhardt: “In retrospect, I discovered that they drew up an initial list of possible suspects, on which my name also appeared. But I was quickly removed from the list. They reached the conclusion that there were certain elements of the material that had been passed to the Russians to which I had no access. “The method of operation I adopted from the outset proved its worth. I took care to transfer a great deal of information that I was not supposed to have. To get it, I would break into safes in the offices of other officers. I discovered that with a lot of patience and a little resourcefulness, it was possible to locate the key and the combination. It always consisted of numbers made up of the person’s birthday or his ID number. “On one occasion, late at night, I looked up from the safe in a certain office I had entered by means of a master key I had copied. I was appalled to see the night watchman observing me with great interest. My heart skipped more than one beat. Fortunately, I was very friendly with him. The excuse I came up with sounded reasonable and he went to prepare us both a cup of tea. We then spent a long night in small talk.”
“It was hell, there is no other word for it,” Gerhardt says in reply to the banal question of what it was like to be a spy. “On the one hand, the demands from Moscow centre were impossible. They always wanted more and more and more. There was no end to it. Very quickly you become a slave to the shopping list and you effectively lose control of your life. “I would call it controlled paranoia. Life is filled with small
moments of shock, moments in which you are certain that everything is lost, when everyone understands who you are, and arrest, interrogation, torture and execution are just around the corner.
“For example, one day there was a knock on the door of my office. I opened the door and standing there were the commander of the counter-espionage service and the commander of military intelligence. They had come without prior warning. They asked me to sit down and told me that a very serious problem had arisen. I told myself: here it comes, they are on to me. At the time I was responsible for liaison between the Armscor and the General Staff. And then they told me that the problem involved the tanks we were secretly smuggling out of India – they were concerned that the operation would be discovered. I made some sort of gesture in which I wiped away the perspiration and said, ‘Oh, is that all?’ Naturally, they did not think it was funny.” The prosecution in the trial called Gerhardt a traitor of the worst kind, who had no connections with the African National Congress and did everything for money, receiving
millions from the Russians. Gerhardt lives in a comfortable home in a quiet Basel suburb. He bought the house with money he was paid by the Russians. “In the first place,” Gerhardt says, “I object to the use of the word treason. If a regime operates contrary to basic norms, it is not legitimate, it lacks moral and legal underpinnings for its existence, and therefore it is impossible to betray it. Besides, what do you want them to say? In trials like that they always try to make it out that the spy is a homosexual, or a drunkard, or was driven by greed. With me they could not make the first two allegations, so they were left with the financial motive.
‘True, my handlers in the GRU told me from the start that their policy was to ensure that agents would not be ‘bothered’ by money matters. Whenever I needed something, whether it was something to do with espionage activity or personal needs, I received it without any problem. But to say that I did it for money is absurd. “In 1973 I made it clear to the Russians that they would have to see to my family’s future if I was caught. I was certain that I myself would be executed. I still receive a small pension from them, and that is all. All the rest comes from Ruth’s [his wife’s] salary and from the services I provide as a security consultant. I even refused to deal in arms sales for Russia, despite very generous offers I received from them.” Gerhardt’s house is part of an apartment complex built on the slope of a hill. A special rail car, run by remote control, brings the visitor from the bottom of the hill to the door of the desired apartment. During the interview, a blue-eyed, handsome young man came and went a few times. This is his son, Gregory (23), who sells art objects from Africa. His name was not chosen by chance.
to page 26 On one of Gerhardt’s visits to Moscow, in 1967, GRU personnel
introduced him to Gregorii Shirobokov, one of the Russians’ most experienced handlers of agents – he had been a spy in Nazi Germany in the 1940s. “There was instant chemistry between us,” Gerhardt says. “I was lucky to have such a talented and honest handler. I had complete trust in him. We worked together for 18 years. I call him my brother and during his lifetime I named my son for him.” Shirobokov even dared to criticise the Soviet regime. “Gregorii and I generally agreed,” Gerhardt recalls, “although the [Soviet] intelligence chiefs and the army did not always like my criticism of them. I was fiercely against the invasion of Afghanistan. They were angry at my intervention, and took it out on Gregorii.” At the time Gerhardt began his career as a spy he was married to Janet Coggin. They were formally divorced in 1967, but had separated six years earlier. Gerhardt, Shirobokov and the others at Moscow centre understood immediately that he needed a wife, and fast. “I simply could not bear the burden by myself, psychologically or technically. The work of preparing and encrypting the material was so exhausting that I found myself devoting more time to the clerical work of spies than to spying itself.” Russian intelligence set up a team of psychologists to find Gerhardt a suitable partner. He also began his own search. As it happened, he had stashed everything he would need to change his identity, including false passports and fake beards and moustaches, at a secret underground cache at Klosters, a Swiss ski resort. And it was there that he met, completely by chance, the woman who would become his wife. Ruth was an educated, attractive Swiss woman, and he decided that she was perfect for the role. He began to court her. At the time he was serving as naval attache in the South African embassy in London; he sent her a plane ticket for London. She was equally taken by him, and by the time he made his next annual visit to Moscow, they were already engaged. But the Russians, it turned out, had their own plans. “They had found someone appropriate, and when I arrived, they informed me, festively and with a knowing wink, that they had found my future wife, who was very suitable on all counts. I would meet her that afternoon, they said, adding that all the arrangements had been made for us to vacation together at a Caspian Sea resort. I said, ‘Just a minute, comrades, excuse me, but tell the lady I am very sorry, I have already found myself a wife.'”
Ruth and Dieter Gerhardt were married in a modest ceremony in 1969. “When we met, I told her my views about the apartheid regime. Before the wedding, I learned about her family background and her views, and I knew that the struggle against apartheid was in line with her opinions. Nevertheless, we – Gregorii and I – decided to let her in on the secret in stages. Each time I would unravel another part of the picture until I told her the whole truth.”
Even after eight years in a South African jail and many other troubles, Ruth Gerhardt remains lively, attractive, vibrant and brimming with energy. She laughs when she is reminded about how and why their relationship began. With a big smile, she relates how she acceded to Gerhardt’s request to join him in his espionage activity. She too underwent training in Moscow in the art of espionage and removed a heavy burden from her husband’s shoulders. On a visit to Moscow in 1968, Gerhardt’s handlers concocted a cover story for him. Supported by the appropriate documents, he was supposed to say, in the event he was caught and indicted for espionage, that he was an operative for the Mossad espionage agency or, as he says, “for the espionage service of a country that was then considered quite neutral and which South Africa viewed sympathetically”. He had names of Israeli handlers, places in Israel where he had supposedly trained and many more details. “In court, an account like that would have looked very different from espionage for the Soviet Union.”
Five years later he forged a true connection with Israel. Shortly after the 1973 war secret documents landed on his desk attesting to the military alliance that was being formed between Israel and South Africa. In light of this, he says, it was clear that his cover story was no longer viable. “To this day,” he asserts, “I do not understand why, of all the countries in the world, Israel decided to work precisely with the government that had the clearest Nazi traits, and whose leaders, headed by John Vorster, had declared openly their support for Hitler. It is simply beyond my understanding.” After the Yom Kippur War, the Israeli security establishment, Gerhardt continues, and particularly
Shimon Peres, decided that they had to obtain, as quickly as possible, tanks, planes and missiles, and to significantly enhance Israel’s long-term strategic capability. When the Yom Kippur War broke out, the apartheid regime declared its unreserved support for Israel, permitted Jewish citizens to transfer funds to Israel, and even supplied the Israeli Defence Force with Mirage warplanes. Gerhardt confirms that closer relations assumed concrete form in a secret meeting, held in November 1974, at a lakeside villa in Geneva, between Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres and Vorster and then minister of defence PW Botha. The agreement that was signed at that meeting has never been made public. “Following the meeting in Geneva and the signing of an agreement in principle for strategic co-operation,” Gerhardt says, “the military and the arms industries signed annexes to the agreement. Botha conveyed them for review by a number of senior officers, myself included. It was a massive document, consisting of hundreds of pages, with notes in Afrikaans in Botha’s handwriting in the margins. Afterwards the data analysts at Moscow centre asked me to translate those notes for them. “The document, known as ISSA, dealt with a mutual defence pact between the two countries, according to which each would assist the other in wartime by supplying spare parts and ammunition from its emergency stocks. Each country agreed that its territory would be used to store all types of weapons for the other country.”
‘The clause that outraged me most in the agreement was called ‘Chalet’. Within its framework, Israel agreed to arm eight Jericho 2 missiles with what were described as ‘special warheads’. I asked the chief of staff what that meant, and he told me what was obvious: atomic bombs.”
“I know no one will believe me,” says Yekutiel Mor, Deputy Director General for foreign relations at the Israeli Defence Ministry, “but there was no co-operation between us and South Africa in the nuclear sphere, not even by so much as a millimetre of the letter ‘n’ of nuclear. Yok, mafish, gornischt, nada, nothing. It’s all myths. They had their own nuclear programme, which they developed with or without the assistance of other countries, but entirely without us. We did not provide them with know-how or equipment and we did not produce tactical nuclear shells for them, and we did not use their territory for atomic explosions. It’s all fantasy.” After the signing of the secret agreement, Israel’s military industry signed a huge deal with Armscor, worth about $300-million, for the supply of a large variety of ammunition to South Africa over a period of five to eight years. Gerhardt is convinced that most of the ties between the two countries were forged with the quiet blessing of the US, which could not bypass its own official boycott of South Africa. Most of the top officers in the Israeli Defence Force and the senior officials of the defence establishment paid frequent visits to South Africa, and in some cases even accompanied its combat forces into Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Gerhardt says that crude anti-Semitism often underlay the surface affectations of friendship: “At the start of the relationship with Israel, it was clear to the heads of the government and the army that all the signs of Nazism would have to be concealed, along with the historic memory of support for Hitler. But behind the back of the new ally, the South African officers had no problem fouling their mouths with expressions like ‘dirty Jew’ or ‘fucking Jew’.” For the first time, Gerhardt reveals the methods by which arms were transported from Israel to South Africa: “We had a project code named ‘Safair’, funded by the army. An ostensibly innocent commercial airline was set up, called Aurame, which like the CIA’s Air America, transported secret cargo for us.” One of the large-scale joint projects in which Gerhardt took part involved the Canadian scientist Gerald Bull. Israel and South Africa participated in the development and production of a 155mm cannon and ammunition, based on a patent held by Bull, which enabled the range of shells to be augmented and their precision and penetrability to be enhanced.
Gerhardt: “The 155mm cannon was developed in Israel on the basis of American know-how and Bull’s patent. As far as I recall, it was a very good cannon, which generated great enthusiasm in South Africa.” For various reasons, Bull had a falling-out with his partners in Israel Military Industries and Armscor. He went to Iraq, where he began to plan a “super cannon”, which would be capable of hurtling shells across thousands of kilometres. In April 1990 Bull was murdered in Brussels. The international media and his family attribute the killing to Mossad agents. According to foreign press reports, aspects of Bull’s invention were part of a joint project of Israel and South Africa for the development of nuclear explosives. Gerhardt was not involved in the project, but “the Russians sent me anyway, to find out what was going on. I sent an ostensibly innocent letter to the chief of staff, and suggested turning the Bull project to non- conventional use. But he replied that this had already been taken care of by the Israelis and the South Africans.”
In mid-1982 the Gerhardt family began to be aware of worrying signs. A senior CIA official visited the navy base where Gerhardt was the commander (“What did this senior intelligence figure think he could find on my base?” Gerhardt wondered). Ruth Gerhardt had the feeling she was followed when she travelled to Switzerland to convey a delivery to the pick-up man there. There were other signs, which later proved to be strands in the noose that began to tighten around their necks.
At the end of 1982 Gerhardt went to the US to take part in an advanced course and took advantage of the opportunity to organise an intricate operation. He knew that some extremists from the religious extreme right, who were employed in the US defence establishment, had offered their help to the white minority government in South Africa. His plan was to enlist them to further his goals: Gerhardt would ingratiate himself with them by telling them he worked for South African intelligence, extract military information from them and convey it to the Soviets. Gerhardt: “My nerves were kaput in that period. The situation seriously affected my relations with Ruth. On the night before the trip, we had a terrible quarrel. She demanded that I not go. I demanded that she leave South Africa. We parted with a slamming of the door. At Kennedy airport I noticed the passport control official noting something after checking my passport. I can read upside down, and I understood he was marking me as problematic. The game had begun.” He was apprehended in a hotel room. “The door burst open to admit agents from the CIA, the FBI and the British MI6. One of them addressed me by my code name, Felix, and I knew the game was over.” Immediately after Gerhardt’s first interrogation in the US, notification of his arrest was transmitted to South Africa and Israel. Ruth Gerhardt was arrested the same night at their home in South Africa. “Good evening, Mrs Rosenberg,” the secret service agent said as he opened the door – alluding to the Americans Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed in the 1950s for spying for the Soviet Union. Gerhardt was taken to an FBI interrogation facility near Washington. “I felt like a dead man walking. It was clear to me that a death penalty awaited me in South Africa. At first the Americans tried to ‘double’ me – get me to keep working in order to feed the Russians misleading information. After I explained to them that I was no longer capable of continuing with the game, they only tried to get answers to a few questions that bothered them, mainly why I had come to the US in the first place. The polygraph expert despaired of me after a few days. He ripped off my electrodes furiously and shouted at me that I was a pathological liar and that I had been trained by the KGB on how to beat the machine.” About two weeks later, Gerhardt was moved to South Africa. “It was late at night. They placed me in a facility in a Pretoria suburb that was all electronic gates and cameras. I passed through eight electric gates. I was the only person in a complex of 18 jail cells. I had a mattress and one roll of toilet paper. The place had not been cleaned for months. Everything was covered with a thick layer of dust. I was exhausted. I felt like an animal that had been cornered. Suddenly horrific shrieks began. I thought, ‘Oh God, they are starting with the noise torture,’ but then I realised the cell was simply full of crickets. I neutralised them, as [PW] Botha [pictured above, with wife Elize] used to say when ordering an assassination, and I was able to sleep.” On January 26 1983 Botha convened a dramatic press conference in which he announced Gerhardt’s arrest. “On the first day, one of the interrogators tried to use force,” Gerhardt relates. “I told him that if he kept on that way I would commit suicide, and I would also make sure to take one of them with me. After that, it stopped. I have to say that the interrogation in South Africa surprised me by
its professionalism and its fairness. After a few weeks, representatives of foreign intelligence services began to arrive in order to question me about their spheres of interest. The French came and the Germans and the British and, of course, the Israelis, who were very sophisti- cated and serious, and definitely made a good impression on me.” It took very little to induce Gerhardt to confess – as though he was relieved to have been found out. “In large measure that is true,” he concedes. “I think that Ruth was even more relieved that it was all over. At the practical level, I co-operated with them because I had one last operation, one last sting, to pull off, and I needed time and calm to plan it. The moment they felt that I was co- operating, they relaxed the pressure a great deal.” His interrogators wanted to know the names of his collaborators and deputy agents in South Africa. Gerhardt adopted a method of “confessio interruptus”, each time exposing a bit of his activity in a manner that seemed natural to the investigators, but pulling back before revealing the big secret – the actual names of the other South African spies. Finally, after three months of questioning, Gerhardt “broke” and went all the way, providing the names of several officials, most from the Ministry of Defence and the state president’s
office, who were totally uninvolved in Gerhard’s espionage work but were tainted by corruption and immoral activity.
The interrogators now left Gerhardt alone for two months while they turned to deal with the other “spies”. As Gerhardt had foreseen, they understood eventually that he had fooled them, but in the meantime discovered improprieties and other misdeeds that proved highly embarrassing for Botha. But what truly embarrassed the regime was the fact that at the end of the interrogations conducted by all the parties involved, it turned out that Gerhardt had conveyed to the Soviet Union between 400 000 and 500 000 pages of documents containing the deepest secrets of South Africa, Israel and Nato.
On September 6 1983, exactly six months after Gerhardt’s arrest, he and his wife were charged, in a secret indictment, with high treason. The prosecution demanded the death penalty for both of them. Their trial, which lasted several months, was held in Cape Town behind closed doors and under heavy guard. Gerhardt was sentenced to life imprisonment, Ruth Gerhardt to 10 years in prison. “I was positive I would get the death penalty,” Gerhardt says. “At the time, executions were routine in South Africa, sometimes 10 a week. The judge wrote that if it had been proved that I had caused the death of even one South African soldier, he would have sentenced me to death. I have no doubt that the reason I did not get the rope was because of a deal with the Americans, who were looking ahead to an exchange of spies in the future, and agreed from the outset to send me back to South Africa only in return for a promise that I would not be executed.”
Ruth was released after eight years in prison, while Gerhardt was incarcerated for a total of nine-and-a-half years, four of them in total isolation and two in partial isolation. As the Americans had anticipated, Gerhardt was a key bargaining chip in every attempt to arrange an East-West spy swap, including the cases of Natan Sharansky and Ron Arad, but Botha refused to release him. Following the election of FW de Klerk as president in August 1989, Soviet intelligence circles believed that a new era had begun for South Africa. But before that happened a new era began for Eastern Europe. In a meeting between Russian president Boris Yeltsin and De Klerk in April 1992, the Russian leader stated that the condition for the renewal of diplomatic relations between the two countries and the signing of a trade agreement was the immediate
release of Gerhardt. In Pretoria, De Klerk encountered resistance to this idea from his intelligence chiefs, but soon showed his mettle and on August 28 1992 Gerhardt was released straight into the arms of two KGB generals. De Klerk decided to announce Gerhardt’s release publicly only after the master spy was out of the country. For the last time, Gerhardt donned the mask of the spy, travelling to Europe with a false beard and a few fake passports. He was reunited with his wife in Zurich, and from there they proceeded to Moscow, via Germany. In a final twist, the German passport officer was suspicious of his false passport and only Gerhardt’s resourcefulness saved him from another arrest. Over a cheese fondue in a fine Basel restaurant, Ruth Gerhardt looks smilingly at her husband. “It wasn’t self- evident that we would live together again,” she says. “Dieter was a different man after his years in prison, and I had also changed. It wasn’t easy for us, but we decided to give it a chance. In the meantime, even though Dieter is not an easy person, we are still together and very happy.”
Immediately upon his release, Gerhardt received a letter of appreciation and gratitude from Nelson Mandela, the future president of South Africa. Mandela offered him a position as a military adviser in the country’s armed forces, which Gerhardt politely declined. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission exonerated him fully. Looking back, he is asked, isn’t it true that he assisted the USSR when everyone knew about the terrible things the Soviet government did to its subjects? “To view the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire and the United States as the embodiment of all that is pure and decent is a bit naive, to say the least,” Gerhardt replies. “The Americans’ ambition for global hegemony, their entry into Vietnam and their involvement in dozens of other countries show a different picture.
“I was aware of all the problems of the Soviet Union, and I understand and accept the contentions of people like Sakharov and Sharansky. On the other hand, according to recent reports, six million blacks died as a direct or indirect result of the apartheid government and as a result of the assistance of countries like the United States and Israel, which helped that government to survive. The Russians were really the only ones who helped the blacks in South Africa.” Still, he sacrificed his career, he spent nearly 10 years in prison, he was ostracised by most of his friends. Was it worth it? “For my peace of mind, yes,” Gerhardt asserts. c 2000 Ha’aretzE