Betrayal. Jonathan Ancer

      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.