Frolik wasn’t a good witness: he’d never seen the file or had any direct contact with my father; he lied about other British politicians and trade unionists, and changed his story all the time. One person who was well aware of this was John Hunt, cabinet secretary to three prime ministers – Edward Heath, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. On the 3rd June 1975 he wrote a long memo to Ken Stowe, PPS to Prime Minister Harold Wilson, updating him on the Frolik situation, prior to the publication of Frolik’s memoirs in July. The purpose of this memo was to inform the prime minister of issues that might arise in the form of Parliamentary Questions following publication. Hunt referred to the article in The Times on 25th January 1974, in which it was announced that Frolik was writing the book. This article started off my father’s year of madness, because he knew the book would regurgitate the false accusations of 1969, and take him out from under the cloak of suspicion and into the firing line. In a charmingly understated fashion, Hunt tells Stowe that, ‘We have obtained a sight of the text through somewhat unorthodox channels.’ Contrary to Frolik saying ‘the book is intended to be an authoritative account of the methods, techniques and targets of a communist Intelligence Service’, Hunt reports that ‘it is in fact an exaggerated and tendentious account of Frolik’s own career in the Czech intelligence service with the emphasis on the period (1964–6) when he served as Labour attaché at the Czech embassy in London. The book contains several references to politicians and other persons in public life. Few of them are named, but we can identify some of them.’ He writes ‘There is a reference to an unnamed homosexual Labour Minister who was “greedy for money” and another reference to an unnamed Labour MP involved “in some sort of homosexual trap in Czechoslovakia”. Both are believed to refer to Mr Stonehouse, and if these references are noticed the press may make the same deduction.’6 Hunt has either got things mixed up here, or the manuscript changed, but either way it was Will Owen MP who Frolik talked of as always ‘greedy for money’, and my father who – without naming him – ‘had been involved in some sort of homosexual trap’.7 I know from examining every page of the famous file, there never was a homosexual honeytrap, nor a heterosexual honeytrap or, indeed, any other form of compromise.
Frolik had made an allegation against the left-wing Labour MP Michael Foot, and Prime Minister Harold Wilson was informed by the director general of MI5, Sir Michael Hanley. Harold Wilson sent a reply through Robert Armstrong on the 4th July 1974: ‘The Prime Minister has his reservations about the story. He thinks it unlikely that Mr Michael Foot was in Brighton for the TUC conference in September 1965, because he had no interest in the trade unions until he was appointed Secretary of State for Employment earlier this year.’8
Frolik dedicated an entire chapter in his book to what he called ‘The Heath Caper’. Because the musically talented prime minister Edward Heath wasn’t married, some people assumed he was gay – including the StB. Hunt wrote to Stowe: ‘The book contains an extraordinary story of a plot to compromise Mr Heath. It says that he was not markedly heterosexually inclined, and that, although the Czechs had no evidence on which to base their assumptions it seemed worth trying to compromise him. The plot was to invite him to play the organ and then put him in a position where he would be open to blackmail and forced subsequently to feed the Czechs with top-level information. The book says that two years were spent in preparing the trap but at the last moment British counter-intelligence warned Mr Heath of what was afoot. This story appeared in rather jocular form in the Atticus column of the Sunday Times on 20th January, 1974, and Mr Heath then told me that he had never received any invitation to play the organ in Czechoslovakia and that consequently the suggestion that he had been warned off by the Security Service did not arise.’9
The BBC’s security correspondent, Gordon Corera, investigated this story in June 2012 by examining the StB archives in Prague and tracking down the ex-StB spy who Frolik said was behind the plan – Major Jan Mrazek. Supposedly, the plan was to get Heath to meet the Czech organist Reinberger in London, then lure him to Prague and entrap him in a homosexual honeytrap. With the help of archivists of the Czech security service and a translator, Corera examined hundreds of pages in the Mrazek files and correspondence between Prague and London. There was no file on Heath himself. In all this, there was no hint of a ‘Heath caper’, yet alone evidence. When Corera found Mrazek living twenty miles from Prague, then a man in his eighties, he said the Heath blackmail plan was ‘absolutely nonsense’. But Mrazek did have one recollection about Heath. Corera says: ‘He tells me that he was present at a meeting after the end of the Cold War when Heath told a Czech minister that the story had been created by a “British right-wing organisation” in order to undermine his position as leader of the Conservative party in the early 1970s.’ Corera says that ‘In the Cold War, hidden hands were frequently involved in memoirs written by defectors such as Frolik. Such books could be useful vehicles to score points and reveal who might have been on the other side’s payroll. And in the case of Frolik’s book there is evidence that people with links to the shadowy nexus between the intelligence world and politics were involved.’ Corera interviewed Frolik’s publisher, Leo Cooper, who told him, ‘he was sure the security and intelligence services had a hand in the book. He also recalls right-wing MPs, linked to the intelligence services, asking him if Frolik had material which could be useful for Margaret Thatcher in her campaign for the leadership of the Tory Party – although he recalls this being “dirt” about Labour and the Trade Unions.’ Corera adds that: ‘There is no suggestion that Mrs Thatcher was aware of, or involved in any of these machinations.’ Mzarek himself thought that George Kennedy Young was involved. Corera explains that he was ‘a former deputy chief of MI6 turned Conservative candidate who was particularly active on the right of the party, notably in trying to take control of The Monday Club – a right-wing Tory party pressure group. Mrazek met Young in the 1960s and believes this is why he was singled out to have been behind the Heath Caper. Young certainly disliked Heath intensely – as did others on the right who believed he had sold out and needed to be replaced.’10
Frolik went public with the spy allegation on the front page of the Daily Mirror on 17th December 1974, when my father was still missing, presumed drowned. It began: ‘Missing MP John Stonehouse was a contact for a Communist spy ring.’11 This caused such a furore that the prime minister, Harold Wilson, was obliged to refer to it later that day in the House of Commons. He said: ‘Publicity has recently been given to allegations that my right hon. Friend the Member for Walsall, North was spying for the Czechoslovak Intelligence Service at the time he held ministerial office. These allegations were first made by a Czechoslovak defector in 1969. With my approval, the security service investigated these allegations fully at the time. In the course of its inquiries it interviewed the defector, and it questioned my right hon. Friend about his contacts. Following its investigations the security service advised me at that time that there was no evidence to support the allegations. I am today advised that no evidence to support these allegations has come to light at any time since then. There is no truth whatever in reports that my right hon. Friend was being kept under investigation or surveillance by the security service at the time of his disappearance.’ Frolik was upset to be called a liar in such a public way, and about Wilson’s additional comment: ‘One must always face the possibility that defectors, when leaving a country where they previously were and finding their capital – intellectual capital, of course – diminishing, try to revive their memories of these matters.’
Frolik was stung by these remarks, which undermined his credibility and threatened his position with the CIA, upon whom he was totally dependent not only financially, but for his day-to-day security too.‡ A few months later, on 18th May 1975, Frolik was visited in Florida by a CIA agent and an MI5 officer called Mr Shipp, who’d gone there to ask him some questions. But Frolik was still so upset he wouldn’t talk. Two years later, on 16th March 1977, he wrote to Cz
ech émigré Josef Josten in London, referring to the Shipp visit, and the House of Commons statement by Wilson: ‘Three months later he [meaning Wilson] sent to the United States a high official M15 who conveyed to me the personal apology of the same Mr Wilson.’12 This implied that Wilson had changed his mind or lied to the House of Commons, and that my father was, indeed, a spy.
But it was all a misunderstanding. The Shipp visit is recorded in a 1978 letter from Cabinet Secretary John Hunt to MP Patrick Mayhew: ‘If Mr Wilson had asked for an apology to be conveyed there would have been a record of that instruction; there is none. The officer concerned is quite clear that he received no instruction and that he did not convey an apology from the Prime Minister. He did however express his personal regrets that the Prime Minister had referred to the possibility that defectors, finding their intellectual capital diminishing, tried to revive their memories of certain matters. His reason for doing this was that he found Frolik so angry about the statement that he was unwilling to grant the interview, and he therefore sought to mollify him. Soon after his return to this country the officer recorded what he had done and noted that he had described that particular remark by the Prime Minister as “unfortunate” (the American case officer who had been present at the interview recalled that a somewhat stronger adjective than “unfortunate” had been used). I think there was a genuine misunderstanding, and that Frolik assumed that an official would not have spoken in this way unless he had been authorised to do so.’13
Frolik had not been told about this ‘misunderstanding’ and nor had the recipient of his letter, Josten – and he’d started talking in London about the ‘personal apology’ Frolik had supposedly received from Wilson, via Shipp. The news reached the ears of three right-wing Conservative MPs, two of whom were ex-MI6: Stephen Hastings, Cranley Onslow and Peter Blaker. Armed with this new information or, rather, misinformation, the triumvirate headed for the House of Commons and demanded a full inquiry into the Frolik allegations, particularly against Stonehouse. On the 14th December 1977 at 4.55pm Hastings opened the batting: ‘The matters that I wish to raise concern the security of this country.’ By the time they’d finished, Frolik had been mentioned no less than 53 times. Hastings told the Chamber he had new evidence ‘of recent date – about a week ago to be precise – and it concerned the letter from Frolik to Josten’. He impressed upon the MPs that Frolik was reliable and should be taken seriously, saying that Frolik had met trade union leader Ernie Roberts and describing the events that had occurred ‘one evening, after they had had a lot to drink’. Then MP Hugh Jenkins interrupted to say, ‘On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I happen to know Mr Ernie Roberts, and I also happen to know that he is strictly teetotal. The story that he had had a lot to drink must be inaccurate, unless, of course, he was drunk on lemonade.’
The next day, the 15th December, The Times reported the call for an inquiry. The prime minister could anticipate questions being asked in the House of Commons on the subject, so that day his cabinet secretary, John Hunt, prepared a background note for him in which he refers to The Frolik Defection: ‘In many respects the book was an “improvement” on the account of his activities which Mr Frolik gave when he defected; and, when asked about the differences, he said that passages which were inconsistent with what he had originally reported (to the security service and to the CIA) could be ignored.’14 So it appears that even Frolik didn’t believe his own book. In the House of Commons, Callaghan said: ‘What has been happening recently is that Mr Frolik has been embroidering the original stories that he told when he was debriefed some years ago. It is a way of keeping himself in the public eye, and from time to time he manages to get some press interest and to catch one or two Conservative members.’ Stephen Hastings had retorted, unrepentant, ‘I make no apology whatsoever for raising this matter.’
The security services knew that Hastings et al. were wrong about the Frolik-Josten letter being ‘of recent date – about a week ago to be precise’15 because they had, somehow, acquired a copy of it in April 1977 – eight months earlier. And they knew that what was in it was based on a ‘misunderstanding’. In January 1978, the prime minister, Jim Callaghan, was reassured, via his PPS Ken Stowe, to learn from Robert Armstrong, permanent under-secretary of state at the Home Office that, ‘In his speech in the House of Commons on 14th December, Mr Hastings was relying mainly upon a transcript of a conversation between Frolik and Stott of the Daily Mirror, which was widely available in Fleet Street’16 (then the centre of the UK press industry). Stowe had attached a compliment slip to Armstrong’s letter before forwarding it to the prime minister, which said: ‘What is clear is i) that Frolik keeps on embroidering the same story and ii) that the security service (right-wing bias and all!) can find no substance in it.’17
The triumvirate of right-wing MPs was now joined by another Conservative MP, Patrick Mayhew, and he wasn’t going to rely on some letter, he was going straight to the source. So it was that in June 1978 Mayhew visited Frolik in America and recorded two three-hour conversations with him. On the 26th June 1978, the prime minister, James Callaghan, wrote to Mayhew saying: ‘Thank you for your letter of 19th June about John Stonehouse. I note that you interviewed Josef Frolik in Washington earlier this month, that with his consent you recorded this on tape and that you are ready to make the entire record available to me. I should be grateful if you would do this as soon as possible so that I may consider whether what he says provides grounds for further investigation and, if so, what form this investigation should take.’18 The next day, Mayhew’s secretary duly delivered the tapes to Number 10. On the 30th June, Mayhew wrote to the prime minister telling him that he was going to inform Mrs Thatcher, then leader of the opposition, about his conversations with Frolik. On the 11th July, Mayhew writes again to Callaghan about the six hours of taped conversations with Frolik – which he expected 10 Downing Street to transcribe: ‘Two weeks have now elapsed since you received the tapes of my interviews with Frolik, for which you asked, and more than three weeks since I sent you my letter of 19th June summarising why I believe that the matters affecting John Stonehouse that arise from these interviews ought to be the subject of independent inquiry. I now think it right to tell you that unless I earlier learn from you of your decision in this regard I shall table a question on 13th July’ – two days later.19 As well as having Mayhew on his back, Callaghan had to write to Cranley Onslow on the 28th June, thanking him for his letter of 7th June ‘about the allegations that John Stonehouse was a Czechoslovak agent’.20 On 2nd July Onslow wrote to the prime minister again, laying on more pressure.
Callaghan met Mayhew on the 12th July in the prime minister’s room at the House of Commons. It was 8pm, and I expect Callaghan would have preferred to be having dinner. Minutes were taken, and Callaghan told Mayhew that he’d only received the transcript of the Frolik interviews that day, and Mayhew replied that he ‘fully understood that the Prime Minister was very busy’, that ‘he was quite clear that there was nothing in what Frolik had said in relation to trade union leaders which was worth further investigation’, and that ‘He was concentrating on the Stonehouse aspect which, in his view, did need independent investigation.’ Mayhew told Callaghan that Frolik told him that, ‘much of his book that had been published had been written for him by a crooked publisher’. When Callaghan asked Mayhew what his opinion was on meeting Frolik, Mayhew replied that he wasn’t the shady character he’d expected, and that, ‘Obviously he was someone who had committed frightful crimes but he thought he was genuine in what he was now saying.’ Callaghan asked: ‘does Frolik say he knew Stonehouse was a spy?’ (his emphasis). Mayhew replied: ‘No: he said that Husak told him that he was going to approach Stonehouse – and said that he did so – and Frolik says that he does not know whether Stonehouse gave Husak any information.’21 Having pretty much destroyed his own argument, Mayhew then says ‘but’, and turns to what was said by another StB defector, Frantisek August. The meeting was left with Mayhew telling Callaghan that he�
�d be putting down a Parliamentary Question for the 20th July, eight days later, after the prime minister had been to the Bonn Summit in Germany. Mayhew was still being pushy and demanding.
By the 18th, the long transcript had been fully examined, and a letter to Mayhew drafted. It says: ‘I note that you say that you do not consider that it calls for investigation in the context of national security of any person other than Stonehouse, and I agree with you about this. [2] As regards Stonehouse the tapes add nothing at all to what the Security authorities already knew. I can quite understand that some of it may have been new to someone who had to rely on published material, but the Security Service had long sessions with Frolik on four occasions between 1969 and 1975, and several sessions with August.’ Point [3] then explains about the interview of Frolik on 18th May 1975 in Florida by the MI5 agent, Shipp (without mentioning him by name), saying ‘he did not convey an apology from the Prime Minister. What is more he made it quite clear to Frolik that he defended the Prime Minister’s statement that there was no evidence to support the allegations against Stonehouse. He did however describe as unfortunate the Prime Minister’s reference to the possibility that defectors, finding their intellectual capital diminishing, tried to revive their memories of certain matters. His reason for doing this was that he found Frolik so angry about this slight that he was unwilling to grant the interview, and he therefore sought to mollify him.’ Point [4] is that ‘Frolik told you that he had denounced Stonehouse to the Americans even before he left Communist territory. This seems to be true: very soon after Frolik’s defection and before he arrived in the United States, he said that although he had not seen any reports emanating from Stonehouse he was 90 per cent sure he was an agent of the Czech Intelligence Service. A few days later however he made a further statement in which he said that it was his impression that Stonehouse was either an agent or a confidential contact, though on this occasion he emphasised that his knowledge was tenuous.’ Point [5] was about Frantisek August: ‘August told us in the spring of 1975 that he had seen a file, which he firmly believed to have been about Stonehouse, in the 1950s. When August was first questioned by the Security Service in 1969 he said he had no knowledge of the recruitment of a British Minister. In the 1975 interview he asserted that he had reported in 1969 that Stonehouse had been recruited in the 1950s and had then referred to a file he had seen in Prague and which he believed to be that of Stonehouse, but there was no trace of this in the records made at the time. Confusion of this kind is common when defectors are interviewed over a number of years. It was not until November 1974, just after Stonehouse’s disappearance had been reported in the press, that Frolik said, for the first time without any qualification (and also without evidential proof), that Stonehouse had certainly been a Czech agent and been paid.’ The prime minister ends by saying, ‘I have decided that no purpose would be served by an independent inquiry’ and, rather to Mayhew’s chagrin, I imagine, ‘your tapes add nothing to our knowledge’.22
John Stonehouse, My Father Page 32
