Desperate and given an ultimatum by her family, Johanna van Haarlem was left with no option, she had to give up her son. Little Erwin had been born to a Nazi soldier who’d forced himself on her in occupied Holland, and while Johanna had tried, by 1944, with the Second World War raging around her, she knew that for his sake she had to leave her baby at an orphanage. What followed was a tale of espionage and heartbreak.
Decades on, the International Red Cross reunited Johanna with Erwin, by then living in London and working as a waiter at the Hilton hotel. Except it was all a lie.
The man she met and treated as her son was in fact a Czech agent Vaclav Jelinek sent to Britain to spy on the establishment, even targeting the royal family and plundering nuclear secrets. He had been given her son’s identity - stolen by the StB, the Czech intelligence service, when the real Erwin was just a toddler. His code name was Agent Gragert. It was only when MI5 caught up with Erwin and raided his flat, catching him sending coded messages to his controllers, that the truth began to unravel.
Facing her ‘son’ in court was one of the hardest moments of Johanna’s life but she knew she had to stand up and reveal the devastating cruelty of losing her boy all over again. And it would be a moment that would spur her on to find the real Erwin, whatever it took. Here, in exclusive extracts from new book A Spy In the Family, by former Sunday Mirror editor Paul Henderson and fellow journalist David Gardner, we reveal Johanna’s quest to find her son…
Johanna made it to London in the early hours of 3 January 1978 exhausted from seasickness and shaking with excitement at the prospect of finally meeting Erwin. She crossed the world-famous, neon-lit Piccadilly Circus at the junction of Regent Street. She felt numbed, not by the freezing temperature, but by the decades of unknowing that had brought her there.
Johanna had no idea how the day would turn out. There would be no middle ground, she thought. In a short while Johanna would either be elated beyond anything she had ever experienced, or feeling a desperate sense of failure that would end everything she had dreamed about. A desperate sense of failure she knew only too well. Either way, it would be life-defining.
There was no turning back, she kept repeating to herself. Johanna had much to tell Erwin if she was ever to be given the chance. He would have much to tell his mother. She turned a corner into the Victorian grandeur of Queen’s Gate Gardens. Incredibly, Erwin spotted Johanna in the street. They weren’t supposed to meet until later that evening, but chance had intervened.
“Excuse me, but aren’t you Mrs. van Haarlem?” he asked. “I am,” said a stunned Johanna. “My name is Erwin van Haarlem. I am your son. I recognised you from the photos you sent me.”
She sobbed as they hugged in the cold. She felt the warmth of a son she had longed to see again since 1944. More importantly, much more importantly, he called her “mother”. It was a practiced lie, of course.
It was an important moment for him too. He needed to know that she believed him. She wasn’t to know, but had that first meeting gone differently – had she greeted him with suspicion rather than joy – then she might have paid with her life. His spymasters in Prague and Moscow had told him that on no account could his ‘legend’ be compromised.
For a decade he convinced Johanna he was her loving son, and spent time getting to know her and her second son Hans in Britain and Holland. Gragert had played the dutiful son while collating intelligence about the UYK’s Polaris nuclear submarines and President Reagan’s Star Wars programme in the States.
Then, in 1988. the authorities caught up with him, exposed his lie and Agent Gragert found himself in the dock with the woman he duped testifying against him.
Johanna could feel 12 jurors watching her intently from the silence in the high-ceilinged, wood-beamed Court No. 1 at the Old Bailey. A man in the public gallery coughed relentlessly but otherwise all the attention was on her. She felt like a late middle-aged woman who was foolish enough to believe there could be a happy ending when everything she had seen in her life pointed to the opposite.
She glanced up at the only eyes she was interested in, but he was looking away. He knew her story and had no interest in her now. The imposter she had known as Erwin van Haarlem sat in the dock as if he was in a Parisian café, with an air of disdain for his surroundings and especially for her.
When she heard he had been arrested in West London, she flew in from Holland hoping to help him, but now she was there to bury him, even if that meant being judged herself. She had been judged before and judged harshly. Nothing could ever be as bad.
“Mrs Van Haarlem,” said the prosecutor, leading her eyes back to his, “can you tell the court, in your own words, about your relationship with the defendant and how that came about?” She wanted to run, to escape, to be anywhere else but she stayed, just as she did at home as a young girl in The Hague when the Germans rolled in with their tanks and their certainty. Whatever happened there would be a price to be paid for telling her story. There always was.
She had been a teenage girl made pregnant in a devastating attack, but her religious zealot father Izaak van Haarlem had thrown her out of the family home, forcing Johanna to head east on a train with baby Erwin.
Johanna looked across the court and this time the fake Erwin met her eyes. There was no love there. It wasn’t that he hadn’t heard her story before – they had pored over it together countless times – but as she recounted it again, she thought she detected the slightest sign of guilt. It was so hard to tell. He was displaying that blank look she always took to be a protection from the past. Now she wasn’t so sure, it may have been more practised than pained.
It was only when he looked away that she recognised his expression for what it really was – contempt. After all that she’d been through, all they had been through, she still couldn’t believe that it had come to this. The film noir subterfuge of dead letter drops, one-time pads, ciphers, and codes the prosecutor described him as using in his work spying for the StB seemed more mundane in real time. What kind of secrets would a Hilton waiter really have to send over on a radio from his kitchen in Friern Barnet?
But the defendant had lost his arrogance since Johanna took her oath vowing to tell nothing but the truth and stood across from the dock to accuse him. Watching a mother’s heart breaking in front of them had changed the mood among the five men and seven women who would decide Gragert’s fate.
Johanna could feel the spy’s eyes boring into the back of her head as she walked slowly out of the courtroom. Everyone could sense that he had lost the room, even the judge. He had searched for Joanna’s eyes from the dock as she stood to leave, but this time it was her who looked away. She couldn’t bear to waste another moment on him. He was convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison but for Johanna it was far from over.
Johanna needed to find the real Erwin and try to make up for the decade she had lost to the spy’s lies. It was not to be a short search but, through a succession of clues she began to piece it together. The first came in 1991 in one of the “Ledgers of Despair”, the meticulously written records of the children in Czech orphanages.
One yellowing ledger contained a type-written list of 933 names. Erwin van Haarlem was number 10 on the list. The entry was brief but definitive. He was born in Amsterdam on 24 August 1944 and arrived in Olesovice in 1945. He left the home on 2 April 1949, aged four.
But there was an alarming comment written in Czech next to his name. It read: ‘Chybi Pred. MV’. It was an abbreviation which meant, said Vera, the interpreter: “Missing. Hand-over. Home Office.” Nobody knew what it meant but Johanna was another step closer and was told the names of nurses who had cared for Erwin who were still alive.
Along with reporter Paul Henderson, co-author of A Spy In The Family, Johanna found the nurses who gave details about her baby son’s early life. This information, coupled with more leads from sources in Prague, Johanna started writing letters to the authorities, pleading with them to tell her what had really happened to Erwin. Then, finally, there was success. Erwin was now Ivo Radek. And he was willing to meet her.
Johanna returned to Czechoslovakia and, on 27 November 1991, she found herself amid the splendour of the Grand Hotel Brno, waiting to see her son for the first time in nearly half a century. There were last minute jitters for Ivo and his devoted wife Zdenka. Johanna was also full of apprehension.
Finally, she was shown in to meet her son, who was smartly dressed in a white shirt and brown tie and a newly-pressed grey suit. Zdenka looked beautiful in a blue dress. This was a big moment in all their troubled lives, and everyone had dressed respectfully for the occasion. But Johanna wasn’t taking much notice of what anyone was wearing. She was transfixed by Ivo’s eyes – his blue eyes – staring back at her.
“I stared at him and kept staring. I looked into his deep blue eyes and saw kindness, expecting hope,” she recalled. “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. It was a glorious moment.
“Then I shook hands with his wife, Zdenka. She handed me a big bunch of flowers wrapped in nice present packing. Turning to Erwin and looking into his eyes, I said slowly, ‘Velice jsemrad ze te vidim’.” It was the Czech sentence her friend Vera had taught her. It means: “I am very happy to see you.”
They talked long into the afternoon and before Ivo and his wife left the Grand Hotel at about 3pm, he asked if they could all meet again at Christmas. The ice had been broken. “I have been very fortunate,” he told Johanna. “People give each other presents mainly at Christmas, but I got it early this year. And to top it all off, the most valuable. Now I have my own mother. What more can I wish for?”
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