The Soviet spy who even duped the woman who thought she was his mother

Telegraph

20-03-2025

She could feel the 12 jurors watching her intently as she entered the witness box of Court No. 1 at the Old Bailey. A man in the public gallery was coughing relentlessly but otherwise there was total silence.
All the attention was on her, a late middle-aged woman foolish enough to believe there could be a happy ending when everything she had seen in her life pointed to the very opposite. She glanced up at the only eyes she was interested in, but he was looking away.
Erwin van Haarlem sat in the dock as if he was in a Parisian café, with a healthy disdain for his surroundings and especially for her.
It was March 1989. A year earlier, when she heard he had been arrested in west London, she flew in from Holland hoping to help, 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.
Prosecutor Roy Amlot, his rosy cheeks at odds with the dirty grey of his wig, tried to catch her attention as she settled her mind back into the past.
'Mrs van Haarlem, can you please tell the court your full name?'
'Johanna Hendrik van Haarlem.'
'And Mrs van Haarlem, do you see the accused in this court?'
She nodded.
'Would you point him out, please?'
She pointed to the small, dapper man with a Beatles haircut and a sharp face sitting across the room in the vast wooden dock, a room within a room where the defendant sits on an equal footing with the judge. He showed no sign of recognition.
'Mrs van Haarlem,' said Amlot, 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 in 1940 when the Germans rolled in with their tanks and their certainty.
Whatever happened there would be a price to be paid. There always was.
Johanna looked across the court and, this time, he 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 she thought she detected the slightest sign of guilt.
She began her account. How she had been overpowered as a young, naïve teen by a German soldier and how her assailant had died at the front in Caen in 1944 just days after she'd discovered she was pregnant.
How her Nazi collaborator father had refused to allow her 'war product' baby into the house. How she had been forced to leave the baby son she'd called Erwin at an orphanage in Czechoslovakia.
And how, miraculously, more than 32 years later, the Red Cross had got in touch with her in Holland to say they had found Erwin living in London and asked if she wanted to meet him.
Johanna had spent a joyous decade thinking she had found the child she'd lost. He was invited to the Netherlands for a reunion with her family, his 'relatives', and Erwin, in turn, took Johanna and his 'brother' Hans on holiday. He also took them to shows and restaurants on their visits to see him in London.
As the years went by, their love for Erwin grew. But the relationship was strictly one-sided. In truth, Erwin was, in fact, Vaclav Jelinek, codename Gragert, a highly trained Soviet bloc agent who had been assigned Erwin's identity and who had agreed to the reunion with Johanna because it strengthened his 'legend'; the backstory that a spy creates for himself.
During his decade of deceit with Johanna, he had penetrated meetings at the House of Commons and a conference in Washington DC where the star guest had been the then US president, Ronald Reagan. He had also gathered intelligence on the UK's Polaris nuclear submarine programme and Reagan's Star Wars missile defence system, receiving accolades from Moscow and being promoted to Colonel.
After all Johanna had been through, all they had been through, she still couldn't believe that it had come to this.
The coughing had stopped in the public gallery and a woman in the jury with a kind face smiled at her. It was the first time she realised her own face was wet with tears.
'Would you like a break, Mrs van Haarlem?' Judge Simon Brown spoke quietly, as if they were alone in his chambers, and she shook her head. She knew that if she left the court she would never return.
Johanna became lost in her thoughts again, this time at the happy memories, the happiest in her life. He was looking down and studying his hands, hiding his expression. She knew there would be no shame but hoped at least for a little understanding.
There had been a shift in the courtroom that couldn't be described in a stenographer's notebook.
As hard as Amlot had tried to portray the defendant to the jury in a bad light, he had charmed them into having a reasonable doubt over the espionage charges against him.
Could such an ordinary, pleasant man really be a spy? 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, the Czech secret service, seemed as unlikely as a James Bond plot.
What kind of secrets would a waiter at a Hilton hotel (Jelinek's cover occupation) really have to send over on a ham radio from his kitchen in Friern Barnet? The suggestion that he would try and plant bugs in the furniture at Buckingham Palace was laughable. He even smiled when the idea was raised in court.
The Jewish community he was accused of betraying to the Soviets had also been his friends. They appeared more hurt than harmed. But, Jelinek had harvested important intel for his spymasters about the methods and names of the Jewish people seeking freedom from the Soviet Union. His information was used by Russian negotiators in nuclear arms talks with the US, at a time when human rights were traded for arms concessions.
All the time, the spy smirked from the dock as if he knew how ridiculous it was. But he had lost his bluster since Johanna took her oath and stood across from the dock to accuse him.
Watching a mother's heart breaking in front of them had changed the mood in the jury. Nobody was smiling anymore.
The prosecutor was hesitant to break the spell, but Johanna had once again become lost in the past. He coughed politely and she got the message and carried on.
Her world fell apart again, she said, when Scotland Yard called her home in Holland in April 1988 to say that her son had been arrested. He'd been caught red-handed sending secret messages to his spymasters behind the Iron Curtain. Panicked, she tried to contact him, but it was too late, he was already locked up.
Two Special Branch officers arrived at her home to take a statement, and she told them everything she knew. After all, nothing he had ever done had made her suspicious. He was the perfect son.
She was asked to take a DNA test. The results were damning. There was an extremely high possibility that he was not her son.
Confused and worried, Johanna decided to fly to London to see him for herself in Brixton Prison, where he was being held on bail having pleaded not guilty. She would be there for him the way her father never was for her. Unconditionally. She would help him prove his innocence.
But the look on his face told her the truth. The smile was gone.
'Will you tell me the truth?' she asked him, pleading for his love. 'Are you really my son... or did you steal his identity from the orphanage?'
He looked at her with those blank, cold eyes. Her baby's eyes were blue. His were brown. He didn't care if she knew. She was no good to him anymore. Johanna looked hard into the spy's lying eyes and her world collapsed again.
'There's no smoke without fire,' he said quietly. Then he turned away. A stranger.