Betrayal. Jonathan Ancer
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,