`Hi honey, I'm a spy'

When Englishwoman Janet Coggin had been married for eight years, her husband told her one day that he was a KGB spy, and that he had been spying even before they met. Dieter Gerhardt also told Coggin that he now wanted her to work with him, as a husband-and-wife spy team. This was in 1966, at the height of the Cold War. At the time they were living in South Africa, where Gerhardt was a high-ranking naval officer, and they had three young children. In a subtle display of nerve, Gerhardt had even named the family dog Boris.

"When he told me, in one sense I was relieved," Coggin says. "I had been afraid he was going mad and that our children would inherit that madness." She had found him secreted in the airing cupboard one day, when she opened it to put in some sheets. A missing matchbox had driven him to unaccountable fury. When she walked quietly into his study behind him one evening to fetch one of the children's toys, his reflex had been to jump up and tell her he would kill her if she ever crept up on him unexpectedly again.

"He was developing microfilm in the airing cupboard. There was a code number written on the matchbox. And he had been trained to kill, in seconds, anyone who came on him suddenly. He told me all this when he announced he was a spy." Coggin laughs thinly. "It's the sort of thing that wouldn't even make it into a spy film because it seems so overdone - I mean, honestly, developing microfilm in an airing cupboard!"

Gerhardt's revelation changed her life forever. For her, there was no question of co-operation, or of continuing their marriage. Coggin booked the next available passage to Europe, took her children with her, and arrived in Ireland to begin a new life. For years, she was completely silent about the details of her South African past, aware that any disclosures at all might lead either herself or her children into danger. In 1983, it was no longer necessary to hide the truth. Gerhardt was arrested by the FBI and found guilty of selling NATO secrets to the Soviet Union.

"The most important spy to be caught since Philby," ran the international headlines. Dieter Gerhardt was sentenced to life imprisonment, but released after 10 years, under the terms of an agreement between Boris Yeltsin and F.W. de Klerk. Since then he has been living in Switzerland. "I don't know what he is doing there now. Nothing would surprise me," Coggin says, and looks suddenly utterly haunted.

The author of three novels, Coggin has now written an account of her life as a KGB spy's wife. "I thought I would write about it in a novel," she explains. "I didn't want to write an autobiography, but when I had sent a few chapters to my agent, he told me that unless people knew it was true, they wouldn't be interested."

The resulting compromise, The Spy's Wife, is written in the third person, with the two central characters called Lilian and Carl.

The book-jacket makes it clear that this is a true story, but the fact is that the book would be a far more powerful read if written in the first person, either as Grantalike reportage or straight autobiography. Janet Coggin shelters behind her Lilian alter ego with prose less precise than that required by a first-person account. However, The Spy's Wife is still an extraordinary, jaw-dropping read by any standards: a before-and-after portrait of unwitting family members caught at the centre of a major espionage scandal.

When she came to Ireland in 1966, she rented a flat in Dun Laoghaire's Crosthwaite Park for herself and her children, and took a succession of odd jobs. She told no one of the real reason for the break-up of her marriage. "The only person I might have told was my father (to whom the book is dedicated), but he was getting old at the time and I was afraid that telling him would put his life in danger," she says sadly.

She recounts a surreal story in the book about going to see a Dublin fortune teller, who told her the exact story of her life. "You wouldn't believe it in a novel," Coggin marvels, shaking her head at the memory. "She knew it all, as if she could see right into me. And she ended by saying if I had stayed abroad, I would no longer be alive." However, moving across the world did not remove her from her past.

"If you do something you are told not to do, you will be wiped out," Gerhardt told her on one of his infrequent visits to Ireland to see their children. Gerhardt warned her that "an accident" could be arranged, such as a discreet push off a pavement into oncoming traffic, or from a railway platform.

By this stage, she already knew that an old acquaintance of hers from her time in South Africa had been murdered in what was presented as suicide: found dead from car exhaust fumes in a garage. She took the warning seriously. "I spent most of my years of motherhood being grateful for not being murdered, and of course at the same time hoping that I wouldn't be," she writes in the book's preface. "I still step back from railway platforms when trains come in," Coggin says, decades later, matter-of-factly.

It is clear from the book that her adored children were the centre of her existence, and kept her focused on the need for survival. Although she cannot leave them out of the book completely, she tries to protect them, presenting the three as a homogenous entity. We are not even told what sex they are, and if the writing is blurry about the Lilian and Carl figures, the children are portrayed in something like invisible ink. She omitted from the book the death of her eldest child at 21, which she reveals during the interview. "I just couldn't put that in," she explains simply.

She had been in Ireland for some years before realising that she was under surveillance, both by the gardai and by a South African man who moved into the apartment above hers. "For all I know, I'm still being watched," she says. For the past three years, Coggin has been a residential care-worker in Camphill community near Naas, a training college for children with learning disabilities. After her first stay in Ireland she spent seven years in Greece, where she taught English and was very happy.

There is a chilling reason behind Coggin's departure from Greece. One of the people who approached her looking for lessons was a military officer, who spoke fluent English, but who said he wished to improve his grammar. One evening, at the end of a lesson, he produced a sheaf of stapled pages and asked her to take it home and read it, and then explain it to him at their next meeting. The top sheet had NATO - Top Secret stamped across it.

"I have no doubt it was a trap that someone was setting for me," she says, looking out the window into the peaceful communal Camphill garden. "I gave it back to him straightaway, trying to keep calm. I never went back there again. I have no idea if the document was real, but the whole experience was terrifying. Could you imagine the implications, if I was found with a document like that anywhere near me - my word against a colonel, and with my past history? I would be in a Greek jail now, I'm certain of it." This incident took place less than five years ago.

The Spy's Wife is all the more remarkable for the fact that it contains not an iota of self-pity or bitterness about the events which fate has handed its author. In interview, Janet Coggin exudes grace and the generosity of spirit that belongs to those who have suffered much and survived to find their own peace. "When you've lived with something for so long, you get used to it," she says, and shrugs. "Writing the book has clarified a lot of things for me. I feel whole with the world again."

The Spy's Wife: A True Account of Marriage to a KGB Master-Spy by Janet Coggin, is published by Constable, at £16.99 in UK.