Betrayal. Jonathan Ancer
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