Betrayal. Jonathan Ancer
He had been tasked with collecting information about South Africa’s nuclear weapons. He was held in prison for about eighteen months before he was exchanged for ten West Germans agents and a South African officer. When Kozlov was arrested, the counter-intelligence agent warned his superiors that the next spy they caught was going to be a South African; a boer. ‘They skinned me alive,’ the agent says, ‘and I almost lost my job, but then two years later we caught Mr Gerhardt – he was pretty close to being a boer. I didn’t say, “I told you so,” but I wanted to. I wasn’t surprised he got away with it for so long. I always knew it was only a matter of time before we caught someone like that.’
The Americans handed Gerhardt to the South Africans, and he was flown home, where Stadler was waiting for him at the airport. In his case study to the spy academy recruits, Gerhardt described Stadler as ‘a formidable and respected adversary’. In other words, Stadler was Moriarty to his Sherlock (or, depending on the side you were on, Sherlock to his Moriarty).
While he was returning to South Africa, the security police arrived at Gerhardt’s home at the Simon’s Town Naval Dockyard. Gregory had just fallen asleep when Ruth opened the door.
‘Good evening, Mrs Rosenberg,’ Brigadier Piet Goosen greeted her, in a grim reference to Ethel Rosenberg, executed with her husband three decades earlier for spying for the Russians. Ruth collapsed. She and five-year-old Gregory were then taken to police headquarters where she was questioned. Gerhardt had told her that if she was ever arrested, she must insist that she knew nothing. This is what she repeated over and over.
The next day, accompanied by Johann Coetzee, South Africa’s spymaster and head of the security police, Ruth was taken home to pack a bag. She saw that the authorities had turned the entire house upside down and even ripped up the yellowwood skirting searching for radio transmitters. Though they didn’t discover transmitters, they did find some deciphering material.
Gerhardt, who hadn’t shaved since he was arrested, had also been taken to the house. He had insisted that Ruth knew nothing about his spying. Afterwards he was taken to Pretoria Central Prison where, in an act designed to thoroughly humiliate him, he was stripped naked and searched. After hours and hours of interrogation he was taken through a series of doors and gates to a dusty prison cell. Exhausted, he was grateful when he saw a mattress. As he put his head down, suddenly a cacophony of noise started up. ‘Shit, here we go again,’ he thought, believing his interrogators were using white noise to deprive him of sleep in a tried-and-tested form of torture. However, he then discovered that underneath the mattress there were a whole lot of crickets having their evening chirp. The crickets didn’t last long.
For the next few weeks agents from French, British, German and Israeli intelligence services flew into South Africa and took turns interrogating him.55 The Israelis were worried and so were the British. MI5 panicked in the belief that, because of Gerhardt, Polaris was crawling with agents working for the Russians. Two senior members of Shin Bet, Israel’s secret service, flew into South Africa on 3 February to assess the damage Gerhardt had caused to their country’s national security.56 The journalist Ronen Bergman says the South African intelligence agents showed their Israeli counterparts a never-ending list of top-secret documents related to Israel which he had passed on. The list included a six-volume compilation, of 200 pages a volume, containing a comprehensive survey of the Israeli Defence Forces and their most clandestine weapons development programmes. ‘Gerhardt confirmed the worst to the heartsick Israelis: he had indeed conveyed the documents, originally prepared for the South African high command, to the Soviets.’57 The news got worse. There was a seventh volume.
The endless interrogation sessions left Gerhardt feeling disoriented. He was sleep-deprived and possibly drugged though he wasn’t physically assaulted. The most successful interrogators don’t use torture or brutal methods: they do their homework. They lead you in a certain direction, and set traps … and the traps close.
Gerhardt knew he had to give some information. So he gave his South African interrogators names to get them off his back. The people he named were not Soviet spies but were involved in corruption, fraud and embezzlement. Gerhardt had been collecting information for twenty years and had stumbled upon dirt he could use as ammunition. The people were investigated and, although they were cleared of spying, their corrupt activities were laid bare.
A week later President PW Botha held a dramatic press conference at which he announced that the commander of the Simon’s Town naval base – the navy’s golden boy – and his wife had been arrested. They were charged with the gravest of all political charges, high treason, a crime that carried the death sentence. It caused a sensation in South Africa, which was gripped by the fear of ‘total onslaught’ and rooi gevaar. The news of the Soviet spy also rocked the South African Navy to its core. For sailors, their whole world was the navy; it was their family. Even the ANC, an ally of the Soviet Union, was caught off guard. The organisation had no idea the Russians had an agent who was a senior officer in the South African Navy and were astonished when Gerhardt was arrested. ‘We were very impressed with the Russians,’ says Ronnie Kasrils, a senior member of the ANC and MK at the time of Gerhardt’s arrest.58 ‘We did not support him during his trial because we would not have wanted to compromise him.’
When ANC member Stephen Marais heard the security police had arrested a Russian spy, he was overjoyed, not at the arrest, but because ‘we had people right up there on our side [which] meant we would see freedom in our lifetime’.59 He says it gave a tremendous boost to the confidence of ordinary people involved in the struggle for the country’s liberation. Three years later, Marais would join Gerhardt in prison when he was sentenced to ten years for smuggling into South Africa the explosives that ANC guerrilla Marion Sparg then planted in police stations around the country.
According to General Stadler, Gerhardt was an extremely effective spy, who severely compromised the South Africa Defence Force and, in particular, the navy. In addition to the sensitive nuclear evidence he passed on to Moscow, including a claim that South Africa had acquired eight Jericho II missiles with special warheads from Israel, he also fed the Russians information about Operation Savannah, the defence force’s secret cross-border operation into Angola in the mid-1970s.
Hennie Heymans, a former Special Branch officer, military and police historian, and authority on South African espionage, says that Gerhardt was ‘our greatest spy’.60 According to Ronen Bergman, when Gerhardt’s interrogation was finally over, it emerged that he had given Moscow between 400,000 and 500,000 pages of documents containing ‘the deepest secrets of South Africa, Israel, and NATO’.61 For Bergman, Gerhardt was not a superspy; he was a mega-spy. ‘Dieter Gerhardt was in a different league. He was one of the most important spies in the Cold War. My main focus was on Israel, and of all the spies he did the greatest damage to Israel. He gave more information to the Russians about Israel’s secrets than any other spy.’62 South Africa’s Mail on Sunday gave its front-page story about Gerhardt’s arrest a massive, all-capitalised, bold headline of EXPOSED: THE BIGGEST SPY SINCE PHILBY.
In the seven-page indictment presented at their trial, Gerhardt and Ruth were accused of acting against the state with hostile intent and having worked to overthrow the government. The state argued that because the Russians were closely aligned to the ANC, this was a reason to convict the pair of high treason. The trial was held in camera, ostensibly because the evidence was considered a threat to national security but also because it would have revealed that the all-powerful apartheid state was actually vulnerable.
Gerhardt’s defence was that he was a spy but had worked for a country whose name he would not disclose to the court, but which he claimed was not hostile to South Africa. He testified that this country had instructed him to offer his services as a spy to the USSR so that the country could establish the Soviet Union’s interests in southern Africa. Gerhardt told the court he gave information to this unknown country, which converted it into disinformation and presented it to the Russians.
Ruth’s defence was that she had been an unwitting pawn. She said that at first she didn’t know she was being used as a courier, but then Gerhardt told her he was a South African counter-intelligence agent. She said she only started doubting