John Stonehouse, My Father

by Julia Stonehouse

  The file shows that the Czechs intended to prevaricate over the purchase of the VC10s. In February 1967, Husak wrote a report about a lunch meeting, saying: ‘Right from the start he turned to me with a question: are you going to buy the VC10s or not? I answered in the spirit of your telegram to Petrane. The conversation then focused mainly on the problem of business law, which is the decision.’29 From this, it seems they’d made a decision in Prague to use ‘business law’ as a delaying tactic. The next month, one of the three first secretaries at the embassy, Colonel Josef Kalina, reported a meeting in which my father said if they didn’t want to buy the VC10 planes, that would be fine because the UK will sell them to Austrian Airlines instead. Kalina’s title as ‘first secretary’ was a cover for the fact that he was the residency chief of the StB, with eighteen personnel under him. His alias was ‘Karhan’.

  I’ve seen so many newspapers and websites repeat the notion that my father became a traitor for the money, yet his StB file contains entries that conflict with that idea. In October 1962 the file says: ‘His parliamentary salary of £1,750 a year is enough for him to reach a decent level for him and his family, including a decent apartment and a car.’30 In March 1967, Husak reports to Prague that my father’s salary is now £7,000 a year and, knowing he couldn’t spin the ‘he does it for the money’ line, writes ‘later when he drank a little more, surprisingly, he emphasised that money is just a “minor” reason for his cooperation with us, the main point is his ideological views. And from this point of view, his cooperation with us has lasted.’31 That is pure invention. According to the file, the first payment was made to my father over lunch at Hatchetts restaurant on the 21st December 1959, with Robert Husak reporting on the 10th that he would give him ‘£50 for Christmas present for questions in parliament’.32 I’ve been able to contrast and compare the subject of ‘cash for questions’ through the whole period of this file because every word my father ever said in the House of Commons is online at api.parliament.uk, and there’s no proof of any such arrangement.

  There is only one instance over a twelve-year period where the file mentions a specific question in the House of Commons. It concerned a visit to the UK by the foreign minister of Spain which, at the time, was still ruled by the fascist General Franco. On the 29th June 1960 my father asked: ‘Is the Foreign Secretary aware that the overwhelming mass of the British people of all political parties …’ (he’s interrupted by Tory MPs shouting ‘No’) ‘… despite the shouts from the benches behind him, are very unhappy indeed about this visit and its implications? Will he take this opportunity of denying that there is any prospect of any defence arrangements being entered into between this country and Spain, and any question of Spain being admitted to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation?’ When he was a teenager, my father’s parents had taken Spanish refugee children into their home in Southampton because of the peril the children faced in Guernica, and other towns in northern Spain, where Franco’s fascism was opposed and Franco’s air force had been dropping bombs, as part of the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. As a child I’d been taken by my parents to see Picasso’s painting Guernica, and fascist Spain was a live issue in our household. My father asking questions about Spain’s potential entry into NATO was completely in character, and needed no prompting from the StB. On 1st July, the StB file records that the Daily Mail and Daily Express had reported what my father had said in the House of Commons, but they say he asked the question because he’d been instructed to do so by agent Kugler on the 20th June: ‘I showed him a cutting from the Daily Express dated 18.6 about the Spanish Foreign Minister … and Kolon agreed to ask questions if they were short.’33 The ‘reward’ was £30. Someone who believes the word of a communist agent might think this proves my father took ‘cash for questions’, but anyone who knew my father would say he would have known of the intended visit anyway, and had his question lined up already. All this report really proves is that the StB were capable of back-dating a report and extracting cash from Central Office in Prague.

  The file shows that the StB were constantly complaining they were getting nothing from him. In June 1961 they were saying ‘the results for the last six months were minimal’, and ‘he had been without contact for several months’.34 In November, Captain Sochor reported: ‘some of his questions are not successful’, saying they ‘plan to deepen Kolon’s compromise’, noting ‘he isn’t a “foodie”, and doesn’t drink much’.35 Sochor says he ‘hands in hand-written reports with no espionage value’,36 but I’ve already discussed the only, single, hand-written ‘report’ – it’s 450 words long and there’s nothing to indicate it was written for them, and it certainly had ‘no espionage value’. Underneath a report dated 8th December 1961, there’s a handwritten note by someone who appears to be overseeing things: ‘Kolon is too accustomed to receiving fees from us without us making them dependent upon the quality of the reports. The source of the difficulty with cooperation is that we want high-quality information, which he is too lazy to get.’37

  In January 1962, the StB complain that my father ‘did not provide essentially any quality information’,38 and in July say, ‘Kolon did not produce any interesting information’ and ‘he could show more of his own initiative’.39 In a February 1963 report, the words ‘he did not show enough initiative’40 were underlined twice, with three exclamation marks added to the side. In March 1965 agent Robert Husak (alias ‘Hanc’) says ‘I’ve been calling his apartment since I came from Prague. The phone is either answered by his wife or not by anyone.’41 In October he says he couldn’t make contact with him at the Labour Party Conference – although they were ‘close a couple of times’.42 In January 1966, after being unable to reach my father by phone, they ‘accidentally met’. In May 1967, Husak writes that he wants to discuss ‘the inertia of the present connection and the transition to submit written reports in any form’.43 In July 1968, the Czechs were having a hard time making contact; they said that was because they didn’t know the phone number. Later that year agent Pravec went twice to the House of Commons, supposedly to make contact, but could only report that, ‘he looked at me in the gallery during PM’s question time’.44 Pravec reports in May 1969 that, ‘Attempts to contact him were unsuccessful. However, they provided a good picture of Twister avoiding cooperation in every way possible. In the meantime, I called his apartment eight times over 14 days, but always without results.’45 The following month, ‘just for peace of mind’, Pelnar says he ‘went to the House of Commons three times between 16–19 June at question time, but Twister was never there’.46 I’ve seen it written that contact between my father and the StB ceased when Frolik defected, but it’s clear from the file that making contact was an issue for the StB long before Frolik started his holiday on 23rd June 1969, which landed him in the welcoming arms of Richard Helms, the director of the CIA.

  On 20th January 1970, agent Karel Pravec (alias ‘Pelnar’, who defected to the CIA in 1980), wrote a seven-page report summarising the situation. Underlined in the report is the statement: ‘We’ve not had contact for one and a half years,’ and it also says that they ‘tried to contact him by phone more than 20 times. His wife constantly said he wasn’t at home, despite calling when they were sure he was at home, for example, very early in the morning.’47 Pravec says that despite giving him money, ‘his intelligence results were still practically worthless’.48 On the 19th October, Major Vaclav Cepelak writes that, ‘since the last assessment nothing has changed in the case’,49 and by the 5th of November, he’s had enough and writes: ‘Because of the fact that the use of compromising material against this person is questionable, I suggest the Twister file is sent permanently to archive.’50 And that’s where the file ends.

  There’s not a single piece of paper in the StB file that in any way proves my father was a spy. On the contrary, the file proves he wasn’t. It seems obvious to me what happened: the StB had to justify their cosy existence in London by inventing ‘agents’ and they benefitted from this by p
ocketing the cash they were supposed to be giving those agents. This is, indeed, exactly what Josef Frolik said they did at the London embassy.

  * Only once did the StB spell the road correctly, on page eight of a document dated 28th February 1963, but on page one they still spelled it ‘Aldwyne’, and on both pages they had the house number wrong as 22. In a document dated 4th November 1961, they reversed the usual meeting location numbers: default being Beal’s Restaurant and ‘II’ indicating the pub in Catford.

  † In January 1970 Will Owen MP was charged under Section 1 of the Official Secrets Act 1911 for communicating information calculated to be useful to an enemy, and receiving money from Czech intelligence agent, Robert Husak, for doing so. Owen pleaded not guilty to all charges, saying that while Husak had indeed paid him £2,300 over a period of nine years, none of the documents handed over to him were classified. For the prosecution, an officer from Special Branch told the court that Owen had confessed that he couldn’t be sure that he’d not told Husak classified information over one of their lunch-time meetings. The prosecution could not provide any documentary evidence, and nothing incriminating was found at Owen’s home. Judge Stephenson told the jury that suspicion was not enough to convict, and Owen was found not guilty in May 1970. Although cleared of passing classified information, Owen had admitted to handing the Czechs non-classified documents.

  19

  The Mountain and the Molehill

  The molehill was the inconsequential file created by the StB at the Czech embassy in London, and it grew into a mountain, that turned into a volcano spurting pyroclastic flow, that rushed down into the surrounding sea of media, causing a tsunami which engulfed my family. Some of the garbage swept onto the desks of three prime ministers – Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher – and wasted their time, along with that of their cabinet secretaries.

  The nonsense began in 1969 when Joseph Frolik, an StB agent of seventeen years standing, defected to the CIA. He’d worked for two years as a Labour attaché at the Czech embassy in London and told the CIA he was ‘90 per cent sure’ my father was spying for the StB, although he’d never had any dealings with him or seen his file. The media love to call Frolik a ‘spymaster’, but he was no such thing. He was a low-level operative who followed people around London trying to find the dirt on them, but once in the hands of the CIA, he was treated like a rock star. In his memoirs, The Frolik Defection, he gives details of how he was directed by a CIA agent to wait for a boat, with his wife and son, at a precise location on the Gulf of Burgas, on the Bulgarian shore of the Black Sea. The boat arrived, with two CIA agents, who took Frolik to Istanbul where a US Air Force plane was waiting for them at a US Air Force base in the suburbs. Frolik takes up the story of their arrival in Washington: ‘Surrounded by CIA men and the Secret Servicemen who had been assigned to guard me, I was hustled through customs to meet no less a person than Richard Helms, the head of the CIA himself.’1

  Soon after landing in Washington, Frolik was flown to London with a CIA agent, to be debriefed by MI5. He spent a week in the UK talking to members of the secret service, including Peter Wright, Martin Furnival Jones and Charles Elwell. On 4th August 1969, Elwell interviewed my father at 10 Downing Street in front of Harold Wilson and his parliamentary private secretary (PPS), Michael Halls, who took notes. My father went through all his dealings with the Czechs, including approaches by StB agent Robert Husak that he’d reported to David Purnell, his ministry’s intelligence officer, and to George Wigg, Wilson’s security liaison with MI5 and MI6. He met Elwell several times again so Elwell could go over the details, including the facts that my father had not accepted free holidays, party invitations, or presents of alcohol, and his passport showed no trips to Czechoslovakia other than those declared. By coincidence, Charles Elwell was from the family of a large tool-making firm in my father’s constituency, Elwell’s, and when my father was in Kladno he’d taken some of the firm’s tools, by way of promoting manufactured goods from his constituency.

  Frolik was debriefed in America by the CIA for three years, then encouraged by them to write his memoirs, which they first translated, then cut down, omitting the material embarrassing to them. They thought the British market would be more appropriate, given that Frolik had been based in London and had named three Labour MPs, one of whom – Will Owen – had been put on trial. The CIA passed the manuscript to a British ghostwriter, Charles Whiting, and in November 1973 Frolik moved to Yorkshire so they could work together. The publisher Leo Cooper was approached, and Whiting told him that Frolik had already been over to the UK four times since his defection, helping the British secret services with their enquiries. Cooper checked with the secretary of the D‑Notice committee, Admiral Farnhill, to make sure he wasn’t going to break any security laws.* MI5 would go on to make their own cuts of the manuscript. Cooper records that, ‘Frolik volunteered right from the off about Stonehouse,’ and according to David Leigh, author of The Wilson Plot, ‘News of Frolik’s planned disclosures began to seep around Fleet Street.’2 Leo Cooper was married to the author Jilly Cooper, and I expect they had many journalistic contacts to ‘seep’ this information to. One of them was Bernard Levin, a columnist on The Times, to whom Cooper told this: ‘Frolik’s material would make your hair stand on end.’3 Levin didn’t take up the story, but another Times journalist, Christopher Sweeney, did. That’s how my father came to choke on his cornflakes on the 25th January 1974, when he read ‘Defector reveals MPs’ part in spy ring’.4 Although his name was not mentioned here, so many parliamentarians had already heard the gossip about him he knew they’d make the connection. He was helpless: innocent but with no way to prove it.

  I’ve often read that my father wasn’t properly investigated by MI5 at the time of the Frolik accusation, but the investigating officer, Charles Elwell, was no pushover. Indeed, few people at MI5 were as fanatic at chasing down communists as him. Christopher Andrew writes that: ‘Shortly before Elwell retired, [in May 1979] he “abandoned bureaucratic niceties” and fired off a minute to the DG and DDG [director general and deputy director general] complaining that the Service was not paying enough attention to the threat of subversion: “The Communist threat has become more insidious because of the ‘blurring of the edges between Communism and democratic socialism’”.’5 Once retired, Elwell became involved in anti-communist think tanks and was the author of British Briefing, a newsletter that attacked left-wing MPs and trade unionists and was circulated to politicians and reporters. Each issue carried a note asking readers ‘to refrain from mentioning it, or its existence, or from direct quotation’. Elwell met his wife, Ann, at MI5, and she spent most of her career at the covert Information Research Department (IRD) within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which was tasked with disseminating non-attributable anti-communist briefings to a select group of politicians, journalists, broadcasters and opinion leaders.†

  Although Elwell had no proof my father was a spy, he might have used him as a pawn in the larger game of bringing Wilson into disrepute – for having appointed him, and then keeping him in a ministerial position after the spy accusation had been made. Elwell certainly had the establishment friends to spread the rumour to, while his wife had the media contacts. Gossip became rumour, and that became a dark, enveloping cloud of suspicion. It seems that many people in Fleet Street and the corridors of power, and members of the exclusive gentlemen’s clubs frequented by establishment figures, had become aware of the accusation years before Frolik publicly named John Stonehouse as a spy in the Daily Mirror on 17th December 1974. I’ve seen it said that my father didn’t have many friends in the Labour Party, but that was not the case in 1969, when Frolik first started the rumour. By June 1970, my father was out in the political cold, and not offered a shadow ministerial position by Wilson when Labour lost the election. Perhaps Wilson saw an association with him as too dangerous, given that Wilson himself was under attack from the right-wing establishment. And even an unsubstantiated rumour of being a
spy is politically hazardous because spying is treason and guaranteed to incur the wrath of every person in the country – right-leaning or left. Certainly something had changed Wilson’s mind about my father since 1968 when his government recommended my father’s appointment as a life-long privy counsellor.