Czechoslovakia Sent a Spy to London. A Dutch Mother Thought He Was Her Son

The boy was born in Amsterdam on the twenty-fourth of August 1944 after a labour of twenty-four hours. She was alone. She named him Erwin, because it was not the name of anyone she knew. Six days later she carried him home to The Hague on a train that was strafed from the air on the way. Her father opened the door, looked at her and the baby, and closed it. Her mother watched from the window in tears.

On the seventeenth of January 1947 a Red Cross official knocked at the van Haarlem door in The Hague. Erwin was alive. He was in a home near Prague. A Czech couple wanted to adopt him. If she wanted him back she would have to repay the cost of his care: twenty-six thousand Czech crowns, more than a year's wages. Izaak turned the man away at the door. "Do not contact us again. This is the end of the matter."

Beside his name, in a state official's handwriting, are four words the staff had never seen before in the book: "Missing. Handover. Interior Ministry." No foster parents are named. There is no forwarding address. Nobody wrote down where the boy had gone.

The service wrote him up after a year. He was persistent and self-motivated, the assessors said, brave, able to suppress fatigue and to work at night. And then the other half: the personality of the subject is not yet stable, with a tendency to concentrate on himself, and a hysteric component with hints of infantile features. They kept him anyway. He was being trained as what the trade calls an illegal: an officer who lives abroad under a false identity, with no embassy to hide in and no diplomatic passport to save him if he is caught.

Then it sat on a shelf until a candidate fitted it. The boy they had picked had a particular use. He had been born in Amsterdam to a Dutch mother. A Dutch mother meant a claim to a Dutch passport, and a Dutch passport would draw none of the suspicion a Czech one would. Nobody, he said later, had ever tried to penetrate Holland, so the checks would be lighter. The service already held the boy's original documents from the children's home. In 1968, at twenty-four, the handler told him: "It has been decided. You are now Erwin van Haarlem." He learned the life by heart, he said, like a poem.

From 1975 on, on a schedule fixed in Prague, he sat down at a short-wave radio and listened for his messages. The method was as old as the Cold War. A station somewhere in Czechoslovakia broadcast a woman's voice reading groups of five numbers. Anyone in Europe with a cheap receiver could hear her. Only the man with the right sheet from a pad of random numbers, used once and then destroyed, could turn the groups into words. He kept his pads hidden. Over thirteen years the station would send him more than two hundred messages.

The Red Cross took up the search on her behalf. In May 1977 its tracing service wrote to a man in London, asking whether he was the Erwin van Haarlem born in Amsterdam in 1944, and whether he would allow his address to be released to his mother. "We hope you are the above mentioned." He read it in his flat, took it to the dead letter box in Hainault Forest, and asked Prague what to do. Prague argued about it for weeks. A colonel named Mráz, the deputy head of the illegals section, wrote a memo on the eleventh of May. "Why did she start to care?" GRAGERT, he noted, was not interested in family life or in closer contact with his mother.

There was champagne in his room. She asked to see his passport, and he showed it to her. He showed her the form she had filled in at Teplice in October 1944, which he said he had found among his adoptive parents' papers. She noticed one thing and put it away. His eyes were brown. She remembered her baby's eyes as blue. For the next ten years he was her son. He came to Holland; she came to London two or three times a year, and they spoke on the telephone every week.

He told them he was a Dutch Jew. Rita Eker remembered him as a normal bloke, slim, tall, fair-haired, always paying the women compliments. They gave him their files. Over the next six years he copied the names of their activists in Russia, their contacts around the world, and the home addresses of the members of parliament who supported them, and sent it all to Prague.

In June 1986 he went to Washington with a British delegation to a conference on Soviet Jewry. The archive that now holds his file quotes one more line from it. He built up contacts of intelligence interest, the file says, inside an ideo-diversionary organisation conducting active hostile activity against the Soviet Union. The archive adds, in its own voice, what that organisation was: B'nai B'rith, whose aim was to support the legal emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union, and which the KGB in the 1980s regarded as hostile.

On the tenth of March 1988 the head of MI5's counter-espionage branch, a woman named Stella Rimington, decided to move. He had worked out that he was being watched, and a man who knows he is watched may run. The operation was named Orlando. Special Branch, the police arm that makes the arrests MI5 cannot, would go in on the Saturday of the Easter weekend, during his morning schedule, so that they would take him with the numbers in his ear.

The result went through her, she said, like a plague. She drew the curtains for two days. Then she telephoned the superintendent in charge and told him she would not give evidence for the Crown. Erwin was her son and she would stand by him.

She looked at him while he said it, and he looked away first. What she saw, she said, were the cold, hard eyes of a professional liar: no remorse, no warmth, nothing. She went back to her hotel and telephoned the superintendent again. She would give evidence after all. From that day she did not call him Erwin. She called him The Liar.

Then Amlot said the thing that made this trial unlike the spy trials that had come before it in that room. "Although the Crown can point to the evidence of his communicating information to Czechoslovakia, we cannot establish what he was sending, or what he intended in the future to send." More than two hundred messages had reached the flat. The British had read one.

The judge told him to stand. "I use this name, even though I am convinced it was not yours at birth. You have been convicted by this jury on the basis of what can really be shown to be the most convincing evidence of a truly serious crime. I have no doubt that you are a devoted, disciplined and resourceful spy. I also have no doubt that had you not been caught, you would have done whatever your Czech controllers required of you in the years to come, however harmful it could be to our national interests. These interests and our freedoms we must jealously guard." Ten years. And a recommendation that he be deported when he had served them, which the Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, had already signed.

A nurse from 1947, shown a photograph of the man in the London dock, said: "No. That is not Erwin. He was like you, Johanna." A nursemaid produced an album with twenty pictures of a white-blond boy. And at Kolín the old neighbour, the Mauthausen survivor, told her about the cellar. "My blood feels like it is running cold," she said. "I feel such a bad mother."

"I stared at him and kept staring," Johanna said. "I looked into his deep blue eyes and saw kindness. He was staring at me too. I did not dare to hug nor to kiss him. I reached out for him, and he took my hand and kissed it, smiling at me." She had learned one sentence of Czech from the interpreter for the occasion, and she said it: I am very happy to see you. He had been Ivo for forty years.

That was his name. Václav Jelínek, born on the twenty-third of August 1944 in Modřany, a suburb of Prague, the son of a baker whose small business made pastry. One day before the boy in Amsterdam.

Three months later a Conservative MP who wrote spy books under the name Nigel West asked the Home Office in a written question on what grounds Erwin van Haarlem had been released and deported. The answer took four sentences and is in the parliamentary record. It uses the false name throughout.

Three years of interviews became a book in 2005, his own account, written with an admiring journalist from his private papers, and it sold. It opens with a line from a Czech novel about an outlaw who sits unrecognised in an inn while the men around him talk about him: for one of the greatest joys is not to seem, and to be.

His headstone is a grey granite book, lying open, with a gold crucifix down the spine. Across the top, in Czech: Life is a book you can read only once. On the left-hand page, in gold letters, Václav Jelínek, 23.8.1944 to 8.2.2022. On the right-hand page, in gold letters, Erwin van Haarlem.

The man who had been Erwin van Haarlem first died suddenly in June 2024, at seventy-nine, of his heart, and was buried near his village in Moravia by a Catholic priest. Asked, years before, who his mother was, he had said he could not answer. Reason told him to say Mrs Johanna. What he remembered most were the aunties from the home.