Commodore Dieter Gerhardt Sentenced to Life Imprisonment

On 29 December 1983, Commodore Dieter Gerhardt, former Commanding Officer of the Simonstown Naval Base, and his second wife Ruth Gerhardt, were sentenced to life imprisonment and ten years’ imprisonment respectively, being found guilty of high treason on charges of spying for the Soviet Union.

Dieter “Felix” Gerhardt was born 1 November 1935 and joined the South African Navy after his father successfully persuaded Naval Chief Hugo Biermann to take the troubled teenager under his wing to try and instil some discipline in him. He graduated from the Naval Academy in Saldanha Bay in 1956, winning the Sword of Honour. In 1962 he attended the Royal Navy mine school in Portsmouth and completed the parachute training course at RAF Abingdon.

After his training in Britain, he was seconded to the Royal Navy. He started his spying career in his late twenties, while still a junior naval officer, by offering his services to the South African Communist Party (SACP) leader, Bram Fischer, who referred him to the Soviet Embassy in London. Immediately the “walk-in” was recruited into the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence), and he was instructed to continue his career in the South African Defence Force (SADF).

As part of his service in the Royal Navy, he trained at HMS Collingwood and served on HMS Tenby, and passed classified information about the weapons systems there to the Soviets. Among the systems he compromised through these activities were the Sea Cat and Sea Sparrow missiles. He was also responsible for passing the first intelligence information about the French Exocet missile to the Soviets.

While in London in the late 1960s, Gerhardt was able to interview Royal Navy Polaris submarine crews for potential candidates that the Soviet intelligence services could approach. It was also during this time that he met his first wife, British-born Janet Coggin, whom he married in 1958. Coggin said she became aware of her husband’s Cold War spying activities eight years later in 1966, but chose not to turn him in, fearing that he would be executed. She divorced him in 1966 and moved to Ireland with her children.

In 1973 Gerhardt married his second wife, Ruth Johr, a Swiss citizen, who, author Chapman Pincher claimed, was already a spy for the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). According to Gerhardt, he recruited her shortly after they were married. She travelled to Moscow to undergo training.

Gerhardt rose through the ranks of the naval establishment as his career progressed. Upon his return from training in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s, he served as the Naval Liaison Officer with the defence company that subsequently became ARMSCOR.

From 1972 – 1978, he was appointed as a Senior Staff Officer to the Chief of the SADF in Pretoria. In this position he was able to access South African Army and Air Force secrets and plans regarding the South African Border War. He was directly involved in Israeli and South Africa’s military cooperation, using this position in 1975 to pass Israeli secrets to the Soviet GRU, including details of the Jericho missiles from Israel.

Later in 1978, he was appointed Commander of the strategically important Simonstown Naval Dockyard. In this position, he had access to all the naval intelligence reports from the Silvermine listening post near Cape Town.

Gerhardt’s cover was finally blown by a Soviet double agent, Vladimir Vetrov (aka “Farewell”) and was arrested in New York City in January 1983 by the FBI. Apartheid President P.W. Botha announced his arrest to the world in a special press conference on 26 January 1983.

Judge George Munnik sentenced him to life imprisonment on 29 December 1983, while his wife Ruth received a 10-year sentence for acting as a courier. Gerhardt was released in August 1992 and he stated that, “I did not feel like a traitor…I was a political activist fighting the evil regime of apartheid. It was nothing personal.” His rank of Rear Admiral (previously Commodore) was restored in the SA Navy after 1994.

According to the apartheid SADF’s analysis, “the most serious damage that Dieter Gerhardt’s spying activities had caused was the loss of South Africa’s secret ORBAT (Order of Battle) information. Gerhardt had sold South African information and intelligence regarding the identity, strength, command structure and disposition of personnel, units and equipment of its military forces” to the Soviet intelligence services.

Gerhardt also had access to Silvermine, which was the secret underground electronic labyrinth and a highly protected military facility in apartheid South Africa. The facility was an electronic database that had the most modern equipment for observing and monitoring aircraft and ships in both the Indian and Atlantic Oceans.

In intelligence history, Gerhardt is regarded as a top-class spy, who caused enormous damage to the capabilities of apartheid South Africa, the United Kingdom, France and Israel. He particularly assisted in exposing the weaknesses of the racist regime’s military capabilities and the underhand deals that happened between the regime and its arms production and procurement partners globally.

Castro Khwela
Good day fellow Compatriots!