My father was not only much maligned, but misunderstood right to the end of his life. My mother immediately sent a press release to the Associated Press and other news agencies detailing his political achievements, and saying we hoped they would not be forgotten in the obituaries. But, aside from listing the ministerial positions, his life’s work was overlooked. The papers wanted drama, and even newspapers that had followed the story from day one got the details wrong. Several said that Sheila had been involved in the runaway plot from the start. The Daily Express on the 15th, said: ‘It was two years later that police discovered the couple living in Australia.’2 The Evening Standard said: ‘His widow, Sheila, with whom he fled to Australia to start a new life under a fake name.’3 The Daily Telegraph said: ‘Stonehouse and his secretary, Sheila Buckley, plotted his disappearance off Miami Beach.’4 Newspapers from all over the world covered the death, and they got it wrong too. According to the South China Morning News, ‘Only last year Sheila Stonehouse, praised by many commentators for her staunch support of her husband throughout his troubles, divorced him on grounds of his unreasonable conduct.’5 The Hong Kong Standard said my father had disappeared in November 1974, ‘to evade an insurance fraud scandal’.6 The inaccuracies were manifold, large, small, important and unimportant, and in every newspaper.
There were only 50 people at the funeral. My mother didn’t attend, but sent a wreath of white roses with a card that read, ‘Go in peace, Barbara’. Sheila placed a wreath of white carnations on the coffin, with a card saying, ‘I love you, Sheila.’ There was one ex-MP, Bruce Douglas-Mann. In her eulogy, my sister, Jane, said: ‘He was a man of great courage and with the backbone to stand up for what he believed in.’ In mine, I said: ‘Making this world a better place because of our interaction with it is an aim we all should have. Yet, for most people, their sphere of interest extends only to themselves and their immediate family. It is a world of each man and woman for him or herself. This is the easy option, a comfortable life making critical comments from the cosy sofa. But if everyone were to have this self-centred attitude there would be no heroes and no life worth living. To me, my father was a hero – a source of pride and he taught me something invaluable: that the world can be changed if people talk enough and work together. His energy made changes and to know that change is possible providing one is prepared to do the enormous amount of work necessary to facilitate it is a vital cornerstone of my life. I can never say helplessly “what can I do?” because I know what I can do – like him, work with enormous energy at great sacrifice to myself. Until I am prepared to do just that, or until anyone else is, we are in no position to criticise this man who did just that for over 30 solid years. Over weekends and holidays, morning, noon and night. In a sense, he was killed by the human cruelty that he spent so many years trying to fight. He was wrong to suppose that his battle would ever be over because the monster turned when it saw he was down and lashed out, gleeful at finally being able to smash him to pieces. Those of us who experienced the daily horror of the 1974–5 period know only too well the profound ugliness that humanity can display and the only consolation is that now he is out of it and, at last, at peace. I send him my love and respect.’
18
The Famous File
In the file prepared on my father by the secret services of communist-run Czechoslovakia, the Statni Bezpecnost, known as the StB, there’s not one single secret. Not one. I’ve analysed every document in this famous file, and as the daughter of the so-called ‘foreign agent’, some people are going to think I’m partisan and will edit what’s in there, so I’ve no choice really but to tell you about everything in this file – thereby proving my father was not a spy.
I’ve heard the author of The Defence of the Realm – The Authorized History of MI5, Christopher Andrew, tell the British TV-viewing public that the file is over a thousand pages long, which sounds pretty big. What Andrew doesn’t explain is that half the pages are blank. The StB archivists processed each piece of paper, envelope, file cover and miscellaneous item in the file by photographing both their front and back, and the reverse sides are invariably blank. My father’s file contains 1,101 pages, but as that number includes 513 blank pages, 60 admin file-covers, blank forms and so forth, the file immediately reduces to 528 pages. Of these, sixteen pages are copies of a 1962 pamphlet for the London Co-operative Society presidential election, and some are just one-line memos or copies of other documents. When it all shakes down, the actual number of pages of interest is closer to 350, and these often relate to my father trying to sell VC10 planes to the Czech airline, CAS, or the twinning of his constituency of Wednesbury with the Czech town of Kladno.
Christopher Andrew does not seem to be aware that over the twelve-year period the StB held a file on my father they not once had our correct address. If he knew this, he might not confidently go about telling audiences about the system the StB devised to supposedly notify my father of meetings they wanted to hold with him. According to the file, they’d send my father a cutting from The Times newspaper, by post, showing the printed date. The meeting being called would take place a week from that date. The location was identified in the following way: by default it was Beal’s Restaurant at 374 Holloway Road, London N7; but if they wrote the Roman numeral ‘II’ by the date on the news cutting, that indicated the meeting would take place at the Black Horse Saloon, 169 Rushey Green, Catford, London SE6. This clandestine, spy-like arrangement might have looked good to their masters back at Prague HQ, but the StB would never be able to contact my father at the only address they ever had for us, ‘22 Aldwyne Road, N1,’ because we never lived there. The road is actually Alwyne Road, which a post delivery person would soon enough work out, but number 22 is a massive four-storey Victorian villa which, at the time these clandestine meetings were supposed to be taking place, was occupied by four families paying rent to the Northampton Estate – and we were not one of them.
The StB agents who compiled the file were professional liars. And they were not fans of the British because we betrayed them in September 1938 when, without the Czechoslovakian president Edvard Benes being invited, Britain, France and Italy signed a deal with Adolf Hitler, handing over a large part of Czechoslovakia to the Germans. This is known in Czech history as the ‘Munich Betrayal’. The Czechs had a volunteer army of 1 million men ready to fight, but ‘The Munich Agreement’, as the British call it, showed them they would have no allies, and they surrendered. The British said it was ‘appeasement’, and hoped for ‘peace in our time’, but all it did was entrench Hitler in Eastern Europe, and make us enemies in Czechoslovakia. After suffering Nazi occupation during the Second World War, the Czechs had to endure communism from 1948, under the authority of Russia. For the next 40 years the country lived a nightmare: the private business sector was totally banned; privately-held farmland was eliminated without compensation and replaced with collectivisation, with prosperous farmers being sent to gulags; religion was banned and the property of all religious orders confiscated; voluntary organisations were no longer allowed; the court system was purged; books were banned; and anyone who tried to leave was shot by the Border Guard (PS) – who were rewarded with a holiday and a watch for each dead body.
The Communist Party took control of the entire country, using the army, the uniformed Public Security (VB), the armed People’s Militias (LM), civilian informants – of which 40,000 were recruited between 1969–89, and for good measure they instigated a system of volunteer snitches, the PS VB, who were secret police informants. Watching over them all was State Security – the StB – a secret organisation that was the main instrument of political terror, rooting out opponents of communism and suppressing civil and human rights. As well as employees, it’s calculated that over 100,000 citizens collaborated with the StB.
The StB infiltrated all parts of society, including embassies, and their basic methods of control included kidnap, assassination, blackmail, intimidation and provocation. The Museum of Communism in Prague says: �
�The StB literally “manufactured” class enemies, spitting them out on a conveyor belt to then smash them to bits. StB investigation methods included physical violence, brutal beatings, electrical torture methods, night-time interrogations, extended solitary confinement, and sleep, water, and food deprivation. Physical violence was accompanied by psychological terror, humiliation, threats of the arrest of family members, and even faked executions.’1 Their physical interrogation methods included driving pins under the fingernails and kicking testicles until they burst. Psychological interrogation methods included the injection of large doses of the psychoactive drug scopolamine, after which anyone would admit to anything. The StB could send their victims to political trial based on false evidence, where the death sentences were meted out by the Communist Party rather than judges, or the lucky ones could get a lifetime in the uranium mines or gulags.
This was the charming organisation that the StB spies at the London embassy were part of, and the fact that commentators read their lies and swallow them, then repeat them as ‘evidence’, is completely absurd. The StB agents had to protect themselves and their families by playing the game of making up reports and filling the files, and falsifying documents was standard procedure. Some of them also tried to make cash out of the situation because after the currency devaluation of 1953 the Czech crown was worth peanuts. According to the defector Josef Frolik, his comrades used to joke that ‘One half of Czechoslovakia is spying on the other half!’2 and that was confirmed when Communist rule ended in 1989, and it was revealed the StB kept enough secret files on the citizenship to cover several football fields, piled many metres high. When Christopher Andrew accepts my father’s StB file on face value he insults not only my father, but the Czech people who had to endure this tyrannical organisation.
Inventing agents who don’t exist was a feature of StB life in London. Soon after he was posted there, Frolik was taken to a club called La Campanina by Major Jan Koska who ‘threw money around as if it was going out of fashion’. Frolik asked how the bill was going to be paid. Koska said, ‘Don’t worry about such trivia. The money will be arranged quicker than you can down that whiskey. Let me see now.’ Koska looked around the room and said, ‘You see that dope sitting on the bar stool there? … Well, he’s going to be our contact for this evening.’ Frolik then realised, ‘Koska would write a report, saying he had made an interesting contact in the club and it had cost him so much money to make the man’s acquaintance.’ Also present was Robert Husak, Frolik’s London boss, who features strongly in my father’s story, and it’s significant that he was party to this apparently routine method of extracting money from Prague in the form of financial rewards to ‘contacts’. Frolik writes ‘Thus I discovered that Koska, like little Fremr, was not averse to inventing agents and contacts in order to charge personal expenses to Intelligence Accounts. Later, for example, I heard that he had invented an English policeman who cost Prague £1,500 in bribes to cover Koska’s drinking bills.’ When Frolik returned to Prague in March 1966, he was chastised by his StB ‘chief ’, Lt. Colonel Vaclav Taborsky, for having spent too much time ‘fussing around with trade union leaders’. Frolik thought attack was the best form of defence and replied angrily: ‘You know as well as I do what is happening over there in London. Half of your men are crooks lining their own nests. Look at Koska, for instance, padding expenses all the time, inventing and paying agents who don’t exist. And you are covering up for these people!’3 Taborsky avoided Frolik’s gaze and, in a calmer voice, said to Frolik ‘Let’s forget it,’ and changed the subject.
In his book, Frolik called the Czech ambassador, Dr Trhlik, ‘a plotter and a pig, who continually tried to elbow his way closer to the trough, even if it cost the lives of others to do so’. He said his comrades at the embassy were ‘not only double-agents, lechers, drunks and crooks, but also former torturers and even murderers. Diplomats in name only … each seeking his own pleasures, protected by his privileged position and living as well as any member of the London jet-set on the money supplied by the hard-working man-in-the-street back in the “People’s Republic”.’ Going into specifics, he tells us that fellow agent Bohumil Malek was a ‘dummy’ who ‘did not have one ounce of sense in his whole body’, recounting how he picked up a typewriter and threw it at an irritating fly. Agent Fremr was another ‘dummy’, ‘whose brain had become addled by too much whiskey. He was continually drunk and when he was, he was often seized by an unexpected aggressiveness.’ The man tasked to ‘watch over them’ was Major Jan Koska, who Frolik describes as ‘a snake – a reptile hated by every other member of the Intelligence Collective’.4
The StB agents at the London embassy were a nest of vipers but my father had to have meetings with Czechs from the embassy – some of them StB, unknown to him – because, in the early days, he needed to organise the twinning of his constituency Wednesbury with Kladno, and later when he was minister of aviation he was trying to sell them VC10 planes. It’s pretty clear to see that the StB file blends the genuine meetings with invented meetings.
Having an StB file, in itself, is neither here nor there because every person from the West who travelled to Czechoslovakia during the communist era was checked out by the StB with a view to using them, and in this way acquired a file. In September 1957, my father went to Czechoslovakia as a board member of the London Co-operative Society, as part of a delegation. On this trip he visited Lidice – a place famous for having been obliterated by the Nazi SS in 1942 – and the nearby town of Kladno. His constituents had asked him to look out for a suitable town to ‘twin’ with Wednesbury, and as Kladno was also an industrial town, it seemed a good choice. He went to the Town Hall, established contact with the mayor, and the twinning began. There’s still a street called ‘Wednesbury’ in Kladno today. Travelling to Czechoslovakia, in itself, had no particular significance because my father visited every European country from Turkey to Norway, and went to Strasbourg and Paris regularly, meeting European parliamentarians and diplomats in his capacity as a member of the European Assembly and the Council of Europe.
The StB decided to keep an eye on my father, and see what use he could be to them in London. It looks as if they followed him one day and watched him walk along Alwyne Road in Canonbury, London N1, and walk into a house. Usually in England, roads are numbered with the odd numbers on one side, and the even numbers on the other, but on Alwyne Road they run sequentially. An StB agent probably thought they saw my father walk into the house next door, number 22, when he actually went into number 21. Perhaps the agent held back because he saw uniformed police on the street, which was commonly the case because opposite our house there were three low-level apartment blocks which at the time was section housing for policemen. And because this part of the road is a cul-de-sac, he may have feared drawing attention to himself by walking past the house to check the number, turning around, and walking back. In any event, the agent wrote our address as ‘22 Aldwyne Road’, making a mistake in the spelling of the road name, as well as getting the number wrong.
The StB agents in London referred to this address in reports back to Prague no less than 27 times, even once, in May 1961, to the leader of the StB, Minister of the Interior Rudolf Barak, one of the most powerful and dangerous men in Czechoslovakia at the time. (He was later arrested on the orders of the Politburo – proving that, in communist Czechoslovakia, nobody was safe.) The address is significant because it was supposedly used to call my father to meetings using The Times method of dated press cuttings and, surely, had my father been a spy, he would have given them his correct address – either at the outset of their so-called ‘relationship’, or when they all realised the wrong address was being used.* If, indeed, any press cuttings were ever sent to 22 Alwyne Road, they would end up in the mail of a fairly chaotic house occupied by four families, over-crowded housing being a feature of life in Britain following the damage caused by the Second World War. Sceptics might say, well, maybe someone at number 22, on seeing the envelope was addressed
to Mr Stonehouse, delivered it next door, but it would then be opened by my mother, who routinely dealt with our mail in her capacity as my father’s unpaid parliamentary secretary. I’ve asked her if she recalls any random press cuttings arriving at the house and she said that she does not and, anyway, she would have thrown them away because we had The Times delivered daily and would have no need of them.
We moved from 21 Alwyne Road in the summer of 1962, but the StB were still using the ‘22 Aldwyne Road’ address in February 1963. They didn’t seem to know where we were until almost two years later, December 1964, when they first mention a phone number for Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, where we’d moved to. The file first mentions Potters Bar as the place we lived in June 1966, but they never had a record of the address. And they’d be pretty stupid to use the phone because our phones were always bugged. I don’t remember a time when they weren’t. If my father was a spy, he would surely have warned the StB about the phone bugging, but there’s not one word about phone bugging in this file.
Our house at Alwyne Road was a meeting place for anti-colonial political fighters and my father and his friends were always under surveillance. All the talk over the years about MPs not having their phones bugged is laughable. Of course they were. When it started, it was quite primitive. We’d pick up the phone and hear nothing but a few taps. One day my mother picked up the phone and heard a conversation between Duncan Sandys – who was a minister in the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan – and another man. When my mother realised who he was she said, ‘I know you’re Duncan Sandys and recognise your voice because my husband is in the opposition party. We know our phones are being tapped and it looks as if yours are too.’ Both men immediately put their phones down. Of course, it’s impossible to know whether it was Duncan Sandys’ phone being tapped or that of the man he was talking to. As time went on, we’d hear a recording going ‘Scotland Yard Police, Scotland Yard Police’. My father once heard a man say ‘get that cat out of here’, and when he became postmaster general he went to the MI5 underground phone-bugging operation in Holborn and asked, ‘Where’s the cat?’ They asked back, ‘How do you know we have a cat?’ and looked at each other in shock.
John Stonehouse, My Father Page 28