The Soviet spy who deceived even his own "mother"

By: Paul Henderson and David Gardner / The Daily Telegraph
Translation: Telegrafi.com

He felt the eyes of the 12 members of the jury as he walked to the witness stand in Court No. 1 at the Old Bailey. A man in the audience section coughed incessantly, but otherwise there was total silence.

All eyes were on her – a middle-aged woman, foolish enough to believe she could have a happy ending, even though everything she had seen in life indicated otherwise. She looked up at the only person she cared about, but he was looking elsewhere.

Erwin van Haarlem stood in the dock, as if he were in a Parisian café, with great contempt for the circumstances and especially for himself.

It was March 1989. A year earlier, when she had heard that he had been arrested in West London, she had flown from Holland in the hope of helping him, but now she was here to bury him, even if it meant she herself would be tried. She had been tried before – and badly. Nothing could be worse than this.

Prosecutor Roy Amlot, his red cheeks contrasting with his gray wig, tried to get her attention as she tried to think back to the past.

“Ms. van Haarlem, could you tell the court your full name, please?”

"Johanna Hendrik van Haarlem".

“And, Mrs. van Haarlem, do you see the defendant in this courtroom?”

She nodded.

"Please, can you tell me who it is?"

She gestured to the small, handsome man with the bobbed hair and sharp face, who sat across the hall on a large wooden bench—a room within a room, where the defendant stands on the same level as the judge. He showed no sign of recognition.

“Mrs. van Haarlem,” said Amlot, turning her gaze to him, “can you tell the court, in your own words, about your relationship with the defendant and how it came about?”

She wanted to run away, to escape, to be anywhere else, but she stayed – just as she had stayed at home as a young girl in The Hague, in 1940, when the Germans came in with their tanks and security.

Whatever happened, there would be a price to pay. There was always a price.

Johanna glanced across the courtroom, and this time he looked back at her. There was no feeling of love there. It wasn’t that he hadn’t heard her story before—they had gone through it together, dozens of times—but she thought she detected a faint hint of guilt.

She began her story. She told how she had fallen prey, young and naive, to a German soldier, and how her captor had died on the front in Caen, in 1944, just a few days after she had discovered she was pregnant?

She told how her father, a Nazi collaborator, had refused to accept into his home the “product of war,” as he called him. She told how she had been forced to leave her young son, whom she had named Erwin, in an orphanage in Czechoslovakia.

And, he told how, incredibly, more than 32 years later, the Red Cross had contacted him in the Netherlands, to tell him that they had found Erwin living in London, and asked him if he wanted to meet him?

Johanna spent a decade filled with joy, believing she had found the child she had lost. He was invited to Holland for a reunion with her family, with his “relatives,” and Erwin, in turn, took Johanna and his “brother” Hans on vacation. He also took them to shows and restaurants during their visits to London.

Over the years, their love for Erwin grew. But the relationship was one-sided. In reality, Erwin was Vaclav Jelinek, codenamed Gragert, a highly trained Soviet Bloc agent who had been given Erwin's identity and who had agreed to reunite with Johanna because it strengthened his "legend" - the false story a spy creates for himself.

During the decade of the Johanna scam, he had attended meetings in the British Parliament and a conference in Washington, where the chief guest was then-US President Ronald Reagan. He had also gathered information on the program. Polaris of Britain's nuclear submarines and missile defense system Star Wars Reagan's [Star Wars], receiving praise from Moscow, for which he was promoted to colonel.

After everything Johanna had been through – after everything they had been through – she still couldn't believe it had come to this point.

The coughing in the audience gallery had stopped, and a woman from the jury, with a compassionate face, smiled at her. It was the first time Johanna realized that her face was wet with tears.

“Would you like a break, Ms. van Haarlem?” Judge Simon Brown asked in a quiet voice, almost as if they were alone in his office. She shook her head. She knew that if she left the courtroom, she would never return.

Johanna was lost in her thoughts again – this time in happy memories, the happiest of her life. He was looking down, looking at his hands, hiding his expression. She knew he wouldn't be ashamed, but she hoped for at least a little understanding.

A change had occurred in the courtroom that could not be described in the stenographer's notes.

As much as Amlot had tried to present the defendant to the jury in a negative light, he had managed to charm them, planting reasonable suspicion about the espionage charges against him.

Could such an ordinary, pleasant man really be a spy? Dark cinema-style narratives [film noir] involving the exchange of information, single-use decoding keys, ciphers and codes that the prosecutor described as having been used in his work for the Czech secret service (STB), seemed as implausible as a James Bond script.

What kind of secrets could a waiter at a Hilton hotel (Jellinek's cover job) send via amateur radio from his kitchen in Friern Barnet [a London neighborhood]? The suggestion that he had attempted to install bugging devices in Buckingham Palace furniture was laughable. He even smiled when the idea was mentioned in court.

The Jewish community, which he was accused of betraying to the Soviets, had also been his social circle. They seemed more hurt than harmed. But Jelinek had gathered important information for his superiors – about the methods and names of Jews trying to leave the Soviet Union. This information was used by Russian negotiators in nuclear arms talks with the US, at a time when human rights were being traded for arms concessions.

All the while, the spy smiled contemptuously from the defendant's seat, as if he knew how ridiculous it all seemed. But his arrogance had faded since Johanna took the oath and stood before him to accuse him.

Seeing a mother's heart break before their eyes had changed the atmosphere in the room. No one was smiling anymore.

The prosecutor hesitated to change that moment, but Johanna was lost in her memories again. He coughed a little, and she got the message – and continued her story.

Her world came crashing down again, she said, when Scotland Yard called her at her home in the Netherlands in April 1988 to tell her that her son had been arrested. He had been caught red-handed, sending secret messages to his superiors across the Iron Curtain. Horrified, she tried to contact him, but it was too late – he was already in prison.

Two Special Unit officers arrived at her home to take a statement, and she told them everything she knew. After all, nothing about his behavior had ever aroused her suspicion. He was the perfect guy.

She was asked to take a DNA test. The results were shocking. There was an extremely high chance that he was not her son.

Confused and worried, Johanna decided to travel to London to see him for herself, in Brixton Prison, where he was being held awaiting trial after pleading not guilty. She would stand by him – unlike her father who had never stood by her. Without conditions. She would help him prove his innocence.

But the look on his face told her the truth. The smile had disappeared.

“Will you tell me the truth?” she asked, begging for a sign of love. “Are you really my son… or did you steal his identity at the orphanage?”

He looked at her blankly, coldly. Her baby eyes had been blue. His were brown. He didn’t care if she understood. He didn’t need her anymore. Johanna stared long into his deceitful spy eyes – and her world collapsed again.

"There's no smoke without fire," he said in a low voice. Then he turned the other way. Stranger. /Telegraph/