Soviet double agent Vladimir Vetrov (given the codename "Farewell" by France's DST intelligence service) He was arrested at his hotel in New York City in January 1983 in a sting operation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation while he was taking a degree in mathematics at Syracuse University. The CIA interrogated him for 11 days, during which time he gave up one of his Soviet handlers, Vitaly Shlykov (codename "Bob"). Shlykov, who did not know that the Gerhardts had been arrested, was also arrested on 25 January when he travelled to Zurich under the alias "Mikhail Nikolayev" for a pre-arranged meeting with Ruth Gerhardt. He had in his possession $100,000 in cash that he intended to pay her; he did not disclose his real identity to Swiss authorities, and was sentenced to three years imprisonment for spying. The then Prime Minister of South Africa P.W. Botha announced Gerhardt's arrest to the world in a special press conference on 26 January 1983. Following his deportation to South Africa, Gerhardt and his wife were tried in camera in the Cape Town Supreme Court, with the prospect of a death sentence being handed down for high treason. In his trial, Gerhardt stated that the repulsion he felt towards his father's right-wing political beliefs drove him to fight apartheid by serving the USSR. According to Gerhardt, he deliberately attempted to sow confusion in the trial by stating in his defence that he had spied for an unnamed third country that was not hostile to South Africa. His first wife described him as a "traditional apartheid-accepting South African"; he had told her that he wanted revenge against the South African government for interning his father, a Nazi sympathizer, during World War II. Ruth Gerhardt claimed in her defence that she thought he was a double agent working for South Africa. Judge George Munnik sentenced him to life imprisonment in December 1983, while his wife Ruth received a 10-year sentence for acting as a courier. The judge said that he would have passed the death sentence on Gerhardt that the prosecution sought if the information he had passed to the Soviet Union had led to the death of a South African soldier. Ruth Gerhardt served her sentence together with Barbara Hogan and other anti-apartheid dissidents. In 1988, she attempted to gain her freedom by renouncing violence, and thereby take advantage of an offer made by PW