Betrayal. Jonathan Ancer
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