Betrayal. Jonathan Ancer
In 1965 the KGB posted him to France where he worked for Directorate T, a clandestine unit established to obtain technical and scientific knowledge from the West. In other words, Russian agents would steal the West’s technological advances to support their national defence. Vetrov supervised the evaluation of the intelligence collected by these spies, passing strategic information to Moscow. He then decided to offer his services to French intelligence, who in turn offered their mole’s services to the CIA. Between 1981 and 1982, Vetrov, who remained ‘a defector in place’, passed on thousands of secret documents, including a list of 250 officers from Line X, Directorate T’s vast network of spies across Europe, some of whom were stationed under legal cover in embassies.
Based on this information, the US launched a massive counter-intelligence operation to feed defective data and misleading information to the Soviets. The plan was ingenious because if the KGB discovered the Americans were sabotaging their efforts, they would reject everything their Line X agents around the world collected. Vetrov came to a sticky end in Russia. In February 1982, he and his mistress had an argument in his car and he stabbed her. When a policeman knocked on the window, Vetrov stabbed and killed him. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to twelve years in jail. While in jail, the KGB discovered Vetrov was a double agent, and he was executed in 1983.
While active as a double agent, Vetrov identified nearly a hundred leads to sources in sixteen countries, one of which led to the discovery of Gerhardt.
Now that the CIA had a name they set a trap. Felix’s luck was about to run out. On 8 January 1983 Gerhardt’s double life came to an end when agents from the CIA, FBI and MI5 burst through the door in a room at the Holiday Inn in New York. This is how the journalist Mervyn Rees, at the time considered the ‘Gerhardt expert’, reported the arrest in South Africa’s Daily Mail on Sunday:
It was a bitterly cold evening in New York. The snow was turning into black ice on the pavements of Ninth Avenue when Gerhardt arrived for an evening’s drinking at the Holiday Inn. His companion for the evening was a fellow student. Or so he thought. For unknown to Gerhardt, a Soviet defector had betrayed him to the West and the ‘student’ was, in fact, an undercover FBI agent. As the two men sat drinking Scotch on the rocks in a bedroom the door burst open …50
Rees wrote that a small army waited outside in case Gerhardt was foolish enough to make a break, but he just sat in the armchair, ‘too numbed even to talk’.
Gerhardt already realised he had ‘stepped into a pile of shit’ when he landed at JFK Airport a week earlier. Because he had been taught to read upside down, he was able to decipher the words ‘mala fide’ which the customs official wrote next to his name. In the previous six months there had been some indications that things weren’t all right: radio signals had been jammed or superimposed, so he struggled to decode messages, and there had been a surprise visit by a senior CIA official to the dockyard, which was unusual. He sensed the net was closing in, but what could he do? He couldn’t run just because he had ‘a feeling’.
So the words ‘mala fide’ at the airport had set him on edge, but even then he couldn’t turn round and return to South Africa. Although he realised he’d stepped into ‘a pile of shit’, he didn’t know just how deep it was. He hoped the authorities were only suspicious of him and they hadn’t actually discovered his true identity. He knew he was under surveillance in New York when he spotted two teams watching him. His strategy was to convince them that he was harmless, so he did things like leave the door to his hotel room unlocked. Days passed without anything happening and he thought, ‘Well, if they haven’t arrested me yet, perhaps they are not going to.’
He was wrong. Eight days after he’d landed at JFK and seen the custom official write ‘mala fide’ next to his name, Gerhardt and Patrick, a ‘friend’ he’d made, decided to meet for a drink in a hotel room. They had just sat down with a glass of whisky in their hands when the SWAT team burst through the door. Gerhardt didn’t move. He took another sip of his drink: the thought flashed through his mind that this was probably the last drink he would ever have. The FBI agent in charge said, ‘Hello, Felix.’ His heart sank. That’s when Gerhardt realised the information they had on him went back many years. He took another gulp of the whisky. ‘Hi,’ he said. He didn’t know what else to say.
The FBI agent hauled out a thick dossier from a briefcase, and told Gerhardt they had known about his activities for some time and indicated they were considering taking him up in their agency to use as a double against the Soviets – a classic ‘asset’ grab. The phrase ‘between a rock and a hard place’ came to Gerhardt’s mind. The FBI wanted to know if he was in the US on a specific mission and who he was supposed to meet. When he said he’d just come to study, they didn’t believe him. They searched his room and found a roll of special 35 mm film containing his most recent report and some South African material.
Gerhardt was cuffed, put in a car and whisked away to a safe house, where his interrogation continued. He was given a polygraph test but he knew how to confuse the machine. The person administrating the lie detector flew into a rage, and accused him of being a liar. Although they didn’t waterboard him, he has no memory of about three days during the eleven days he was held, and suspects the Americans might have drugged him.
In the meantime, back in South Africa his son Gregory had fallen off a desk and suffered a greenstick fracture on his right wrist. Ruth had gone for a surfing lesson and was sitting on the grass at Muizenberg beach when she was bitten by a tick and contracted tick bite fever.
Gerhardt hadn’t been in contact with them, which was not like him. When Ruth phoned the hotel where he was meant to be staying, the receptionist told her Gerhardt had moved hotels but said he had left the number of the place to which he had moved. Ruth phoned the number and the person who answered told her she had reached the Best Westin in New Orleans, but her husband wasn’t in his room. She left a message for him. A few hours later – 2 am in South Africa – the FBI forced Gerhardt to phone his wife back.
‘What the hell are you doing in New Orleans?’ she asked.
‘Oh, is that where I am?’ Gerhardt replied.
But Ruth didn’t grasp that anything was wrong. She told him about Gregory’s wrist and that she had developed tick bite fever. The FBI thought ‘tick bite fever’ was code for something and immediately cut the call. Holding onto a dead phone line, Ruth still didn’t realise her husband was in custody.
According to Stadler, it was Gerhardt who offered to turn and spy for the Americans to feed the Russians false intelligence. Gerhardt, however, told the journalist Ronen Bergman that it was the Americans who tried to ‘double’ him but he refused. He said he could no longer continue with the game: it was too much. Gerhardt was in fact relieved at having been caught. The weight of two decades of constantly looking over his shoulder, which had turned him into a bundle of nerves, was suddenly lifted.51 Gerhardt had been operational for so long that he wished to retire, even if his retirement was in a prison cell or at the wrong end of the hangman’s noose.
He knew he had to give them some information and revealed that after his stay in America he was to make contact with Vitaly Shlykov, codenamed Bob, at the Gates of Hell in Zürich. The Americans alerted the Swiss police. Shlykov was examining the Gates of Hell when officers of the Swiss Federal Police arrested him.52 He was carrying $100,000 in cash, false passports and spy gadgets. Shlykov refused to talk. One Swiss intelligence official said he wouldn’t even admit to the colour of the suit he was wearing.53 He was charged with espionage in a Swiss court and given a three-year jail term.54 The Swiss police also searched Ruth’s mother’s home in Zürich and found microfilm and forged passports.
But after a week of cat and mouse the Americans weren’t satisfied with Gerhardt’s answers. He overheard one of the agents say, ‘Throw him back to the dogs.’ The American agents informed their South African counterparts that they had caught Gerhardt, and when a senior agent in South Africa’s counter-intelligence unit heard about ‘this South African spying for Russia’, he smiled.
Two years before Gerhardt was arrested, Alexei Kozlov, a KGB intelligence