Dieter Felix Gerhardt (born 1 November 1935) is a former commodore in the South African Navy and commander of the strategic Simon's Town naval dockyard. He was arrested by the FBI in New York City in 1983 following information obtained from a Soviet defector. He was convicted of high treason as a spy for the Soviets for a period of twenty years in South Africa together with his second wife, Ruth, who had acted as his courier. Both were released prior to the change of government following the 1994 general election. Early life and education Gerhardt was born on 1 November 1935, in Berlin, Nazi Germany. Military training Gerhardt joined the South African Navy after his father successfully persuaded naval chief Hugo Biermann to take the troubled teenager under his wing to try to instill discipline in him; he graduated from the Naval Academy in Saldanha Bay in 1956, winning the Sword of Honour. In 1962, he attended a 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. Bram Fischer referred him to the Soviet embassy in London, where the "walk-in" was recruited into the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence branch, and instructed to continue his career in the South African military. Spy activities As part of his service in the Royal Navy, he trained at and served on , and passed classified information about the weapons systems there to the Soviets. Among the systems he compromised through these activities were the SeaCat and Sea Sparrow missiles. He was also responsible for passing the first intelligence information about the French Exocet missile to the Soviets. British journalist and security services specialist Chapman Pincher maintained that, while in London in the late 1960s, Gerhardt was able to interview Royal Navy Polaris submarine crews for potential candidates that the Soviets could approach. It was also during this time that he met his first wife, British-born Janet Coggin, whom he married in 1958. Coggin says 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, leaving her children fatherless. She says Gerhardt