Betrayal: The secret lives of apartheid spies

By Jonathan Ancer

What does it take to deceive those closest to you? How do you lead a double life and not lose yourself? Is there ever a point of return? These are the themes – and more – that Jonathan Ancer explores as he tells the tales of some of South Africa’s most unusual and successful spies: from the navy superspy on the Russian payroll to the party girl who fell in love with Cuba, from the accidental mole in the heart of Pretoria’s war on the frontline states to the idealistic students used and abused in apartheid’s intelligence war. Their journeys into the shadow world of espionage raise questions about conscience, trust, forgiveness and the very notion of truth in a country that was at war with itself. From the author of 'Spy: Uncovering Craig Williamson', this new book gets under the skin of what it takes to betray those closest to you – and what it is means to be betrayed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: Aug 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780624083894

Jonathan Ancer

Jonathan Ancer is a journalist who has worked as a reporter at 'The Star', a features writer for magazines, the editor of 'Grocott’s Mail' and a crossword columnist for the 'Cape Times'. He has produced podcasts and is the co-founder of the.news.letter. He has won awards for breaking news, feature writing and creative writing, and is the author of the highly regarded 'Spy: Uncovering Craig Williamson'. Jonathan has four children, one wife and the largest collection of Billy Bunter books in South Africa.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Why spy?

I arranged to meet a former South African secret agent to talk about South Africa’s espionage landscape. When he insisted on using coded messages to communicate, I thought he was being unnecessarily paranoid. But a week after our meeting I turned on the television to news of the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal, the Russian spy who had defected to Britain’s MI6. A few hours later I received a message from an anonymous number. It read: ‘Now you know why I’m paranoid.’

In a scene straight out of a spy thriller, 66-year-old Skripal and his daughter Yulia, 33, were found slumped unconscious on a bench in Salisbury on 4 March 2018. They had been poisoned by a Russian military-grade nerve agent identified as Novichok. British soldiers in protective suits and masks combed the English cathedral town for clues, and investigators tried to figure out how the attack was carried out, and why.

The ‘why’ is probably a little clearer. Someone was sending a message: Betray us and we will find you and we will kill you. British Prime Minister Theresa May believed that that someone occupied a powerful seat in the Kremlin; someone like Russian President Vladimir Putin, perhaps.

Putin, a former KGB officer himself who went on to head up the FSB, the post-Soviet successor to the KGB, has made it clear what he thinks of traitors. ‘Traitors will kick the bucket. Trust me. These people betrayed their friends, their brothers-in-arms. Whatever they got in exchange for it, those 30 pieces of silver they were given, they will choke on them,’ he said in a television interview in 2010 after Alexander Poteyev, a colonel in Russia’s foreign intelligence service, defected to the West. Putin added: ‘How can he [Poteyev] look into the eyes of his children? Pig.’

Skripal was arrested in Russia in 2004 and sentenced to thirteen years in prison for spying for the UK, but was freed in a prisoner swap six years later. He retired to England to live a quiet life in Salisbury but, as he discovered, former spies do not get to live quiet lives. Unless they are former South African spies. When the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the 1990s presented an opportunity to shine a light on the dirty secrets of the past, spies did not have to come clean – and they didn’t. Most South African spies who operated during the apartheid era have scurried off into the darkness and remain undercover.

South Africa had thousands of intelligence agents working in various roles and in an assortment of agencies to protect the apartheid state. Hennie Heymans, a former Special Branch member who handled spies locally and abroad, said: ‘We gave our agents the assurance that we would never blow their cover or divulge their identity. Our promise still stands.’ There are many apartheid agents as well as agents who worked for the liberation movement who have yet to be unmasked, and most will probably remain in the shadows forever.

I have long sought to understand what motivates someone to spy. Accordingly I went on a quest to track down those spies who have been unmasked to ask them why. I wanted to scratch at their betrayal and explore how they managed to build relationships of trust, and lead double lives, how they maintained the boundaries between their real identity and their spy legend. I also wanted to know what they think now – a quarter of a century after the curtain came down on apartheid – of their treachery, if they even considered what they did to be treacherous.

The spies I write about are all white and, except for one, Mark Behr, English-speaking. Afrikaners were invariably considered suspect among the white left, so it was mainly English speakers who were recruited to infiltrate anti-apartheid organisations.

I didn’t set out to find only white agents. I found white spies for two reasons. Firstly, most black spies paid a much higher price than their white counterparts for their betrayal, and aren’t alive to talk about it. Whites who infiltrated the liberation movement and who were exposed got to live. Secondly, my quest was to understand what people thought about the choices they had made. The black apartheid agents were ‘turned’. In Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle, author Jacob Dlamini tells the story of ‘Comrade September’, aka Glory Lefoshile Sedibe, an ANC activist who, after being brutally tortured, turned against the freedom struggle and became an apartheid agent. For askaris, ‘turning’ was a choice between life and death, which, when you think about it, isn’t much of a choice at all.

The spies in my book all made conscious decisions to infiltrate a target group and pretend to be someone they were not. Some may have been manipulated and some may not have fully grasped the consequences of what they were doing, but they all made a choice to set out on the road to deception. Perhaps after they had started their journey there was no turning back, but they all chose to take that first step.

Not all of the spies featured in the book worked for apartheid. Jenny Miles spied for Cuba and Roland Hunter, an anti-apartheid conscript, became an accidental spy for the ANC when he found himself in Military Intelligence. A significant portion of the book is about Dieter Gerhardt, the South African senior naval officer who spied for the Soviet Union. He was the longest-serving South African spy (that we know about, at least), and was considered one of the most important spies of the Cold War. His life has been remarkable and his story is fascinating.

Although some of the spies I tracked down refused to speak, others agreed to talk to me about how they account for the choices they made, and what they think of a life spent lying. All the same, as the paranoid former secret agent warned me, don’t believe everything spies tell you; they are, after all, skilled in the art of deception.

CHAPTER ONE

Dieter Gerhardt

The Gray Man

I

England, 1963. A tall, athletic man with big green eyes and a disarming smile boarded the train from Portsmouth to London. Twenty-eight and already balding, he was a rising star in the South African Navy, and had been seconded to the Royal Navy for training. He got off at High Street and made his way to Kensington Palace Gardens. The walk took about ten minutes. He entered number 5 Kensington Gardens, the Embassy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and asked to see a military man. He was sent to a waiting room and a few minutes later a short, slim, dark-haired man walked in and asked what he wanted. The South African offered to spy for the USSR.

The Russian listened quietly and made no comment, except to say he would speak to his superiors. The naval officer then left the embassy. The Russians – or any country, for that matter – don’t normally take ‘a walk-in’. Walk-ins are immediately suspicious. For all the Russians knew, he could have been a double or even a triple agent.

In 1963 the Cold War was in full throttle, and the Soviets and the West were gripped in an extraordinary spy dance. After the Second World War the rival intelligence agencies on both sides of the East-West divide had spared no expense in building their espionage capacities in an effort to penetrate embassies, government agencies, military personnel, political parties and, the ultimate prize, each other.

Following his visit, the South African naval officer didn’t hear from the Russians. After a month he got back on the train and once again made his way to the Soviet Embassy. This visit would prove more fruitful. Firstly, the Russians had investigated him and now probably knew things about him that even he didn’t know himself. And, secondly, he had arrived with significant material to put on the table. A former South African counter-intelligence chief, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the officer had returned with something hot; not ‘chicken feed’. In espionage jargon ‘chicken feed’ is intelligence that is accurate but not particularly useful, and especially not damaging. It’s fed to an opposition agency to try to establish a double agent’s credentials.

The 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 who suffered from the pervasive anti-German sentiment. Dieter Gerhardt went to the German School in Pretoria. He and his fellow students faced hostility from children from nearby schools who called the German pupils names like ‘bloody Jerry’ and shouted at them to ‘go back to Germany’. The German children had to be ready to fight; it was a question of survival. For young Gerhardt, this was an environment in which he had to dissemble all the time. One of Gerhardt’s earliest memories was of being invited to a birthday party. He arrived at the child’s house and handed a present to the birthday boy, who took it and then told the ‘dirty little Kraut’ to go home.

Gerhardt was very close to his mother. With her husband away in custody, she was left with no income and battled to care for Gerhardt and his older brother. She turned the family Blackwood Street home into a boarding house.⁹ Many of the lodgers were short of money and Julia, whom everyone called Mutti (‘mother’ in German), was sympathetic and often let them off paying rent when they couldn’t afford it.

After the war ended Alfred returned home from the camp an extremely bitter man. He may not have been a Nazi when he went into the camp but he was one when he came out. Gerhardt Senior became chronically moody. He drank heavily and blamed everyone for his misfortunes, especially the hated British. He also turned on his family and started becoming emotionally and, at times, physically abusive.

Shortly after their third son was born, Alfred and Julia divorced. Subsequently Gerhardt did not have much contact with his father, who by then had secured a job as a civilian architect for the South African Defence Force (SADF), designing plans for defence buildings and units. It was a difficult time in the teenager’s life. He had street smarts and was physically tough but he ran wild and got into trouble with the authorities. When Gerhardt was 15 he and a friend, the son of the American military attaché, took a government jeep on a joyride. They were caught and charged, not with stealing, but driving a vehicle without the owner’s consent. Alfred intervened, and instead of being sent to a reformatory, Gerhardt received ‘six strokes of the cane’.

Gerhardt didn’t finish school but when he was 16 enlisted as a boy seaman in the navy. He was sent to the Naval Gymnasium in Saldanha Bay, a seaside village on the West Coast. Here Captain (later Rear Admiral) Chips Biermann took Gerhardt under his wing and became his role model.¹⁰

After the Afrikaner nationalists took power in 1948, they began muscling out English-speaking South Africans in key positions in the army and navy and replacing them with Afrikaners. Gerhardt was never an Afrikaner nationalist, but was considered an Afrikaner partly because he was not of English descent but also because of his father’s influential connections from his time in the Koffiefontein camp. From early on, Gerhardt was earmarked for a senior position in the South African Navy.

Gerhardt idolised Biermann, who encouraged him to complete his schooling. He used his second year at the Gym, where he was also a signals instructor for the new intakes, to study for his matric by correspondence. In 1954, after completing his cadetship and matriculating, the seaman was selected to join eight others to take part in a course for midshipmen – the grade above naval cadet and below sub-lieutenant. The course involved eighteen months of intensive naval training.

Rear Admiral Peter Bitzker was another member of the group. He was a German who had been repatriated during the Second World War and had returned to South Africa in 1948. According to Bitzker, the nine seamen composed the first unit of midshipmen to be trained after the end of the war. ‘Gerhardt was a large fellow with a prominent nose, which is why we nicknamed him Jumbo … after the elephant,’ recalls Bitzker. Gerhardt was also nicknamed ‘the Brain’, because he was extremely bright.

The seamen spent the year and a half at the Naval Academy in Saldanha Bay and did everything together – eat, sleep, train and socialise. They became a band of brothers. The weekends were spent diving for kreef (crayfish), playing rugby (Gerhardt was flank and lock) and getting up to no good. ‘The nine of us were very close and Dieter was a good mate. I remember one occasion when he was still in a sailor’s uniform, before he became an aspirant officer, he went to a funfair. He’d had too much to drink and on one of these swings he was overcome with vomit. He threw up diced carrots and peas on the spectators below.’

After eighteen months of training, the nine men qualified as sub-lieutenants. Gerhardt turned out to be a first-rate sailor, winning the sword of honour, the prize for the best midshipman. Although they then went their separate ways, they remained close: their paths often crossed over the years. Bitzker went into the executive, the fighting arm, of the South African Navy and Gerhardt went into the engineering branch and was sent to England to study at the Royal Naval Engineering College in Plymouth. It was a time of close military cooperation between South Africa and Britain. The British Navy helped train South African naval officers, and the two navies worked together on designs of warship and weapons systems.

In England, Gerhardt learnt about ship construction and qualified as a marine engineer, which was rare in those days. He also forged strong friendships with the multiracial group of students whom he lived with at Plymouth. While he was in England, Gerhardt met Janet Coggin at a wedding. He was 23, and she was 21 and was working in a refugee camp in Peterborough. She thought he was ‘terrific fun’ and ‘terribly attractive’.¹¹ He fell for her immediately. She was ‘an English rose, with a peaches-and-cream complexion and a stunning figure’. She had blue eyes and a rich crop of auburn hair.¹² ‘Her figure, too, was extremely well proportioned. A most attractive person – in fact, in my eyes breathtakingly beautiful. Her personality was warm and loving,’ Gerhardt once wrote.

Janet had been raised by her father, Maurice, a true English eccentric, who had been jailed as a conscientious objector during the Second World War. She was a dreamer, a gentle and reserved member of the country set. Gerhardt, on the other hand, was rough and ambitious, and his interests were centred on the sea. Despite their very different backgrounds, they hit it off from the start and, four months after they met, they were married at St Budeaux Roman Catholic Church in Plymouth. Maurice, a pacifist, was not happy about losing his daughter to a military man but he put on a brave face at the wedding ceremony, and gave them £5,000 worth of shares and the use of one of his three old Rolls-Royces.

Shortly after they were married Janet fell pregnant and the couple’s first child, Annemarie Julia, was born. They had been married for two years when they came to live in South Africa. At first they stayed in the naval quarters in Simon’s Town but Janet was miserable living among the naval families and they bought a house called Fiddler’s Green in Noordhoek, a scenic coastal suburb of Cape Town, about thirty kilometres by road from the Simon’s Town naval base.

Gerhardt was appointed the engineer officer of the SAS Natal, the navy’s survey vessel, and spent a lot of time at sea. Janet fell pregnant again and their second daughter, Ingrid, was born in 1960. While Gerhardt was spending twenty-five days a month at sea, Janet spent her time looking after her daughters, some cats, dogs and horses, which she rode on the white sands of Noordhoek Beach. But she wasn’t happy: she did not fit in with the other naval wives and, more importantly, South Africa’s unjust race laws didn’t sit well with her liberal outlook. At that point in their marriage, Gerhardt was an affectionate husband, keen on family outings and holidays and, to his wife, he seemed so ‘normal’.¹³

In 1963 Gerhardt returned to England to study advanced weapons and radio courses with the Royal Navy at the Maritime Warfare School. It was during this stay that he boarded the train to London to offer his services to the Soviets.¹⁴

What drove Gerhardt to spy? And why for the Russians? Unpuzzling the different possibilities of a spy’s motives is complex and there are usually multiple reasons why people become spies. Two possible motives that have been suggested for Gerhardt involve his father. The first is that Gerhardt became a spy as a form of retribution for the way his father was treated during the Second World War. This doesn’t ring true because he was interred by Jan Smuts’s United Party government, not the National Party. The second is that Gerhardt was not seeking revenge for his father but was, in fact, rebelling against him: he embraced left-wing politics because of his father’s right-wing views.

However, General Herman Stadler, the security policeman who led the Gerhardt investigation, believed his motive had nothing to do with his father but everything to do with money. It’s an accusation that keeps coming up. Gerhardt has never denied that he received payment from the Soviets. The GRU’s policy was to pay all their agents. They reckoned that taking the financial stress away gave their ‘assets’ one less thing to worry about. But Gerhardt rejects the accusation that his motive was financial.

Ronnie Kasrils, the former head of MK intelligence and Minister of Intelligence in the second Mbeki cabinet, is adamant that Gerhardt’s motivation was ideological, and that it’s ‘psyops trolls’ who spread disinformation about him.¹⁵ ‘Gerhardt spied out of idealism and a hatred of apartheid. The SADF and apartheid regime tried to spread a smear story that his motive was purely monetary. That was utter nonsense. It was a blatant attempt to hide their great embarrassment and discredit a thoroughly decent human being. Dieter and his [second]