The system the StB said they devised to call my father to meetings was supposed to be a two-way system, whereby my father could likewise send the StB a cutting from The Times. But there are no envelopes from him in the file, which they would have kept as ‘proof’ of his involvement. There are two cuttings from The Times with the same date, 22nd November 1960, which have articles about communist subversion on the Indian borders, and NATO as the fourth nuclear power – both of which the StB could have cut out for their own information-gathering purposes. The only other cutting from The Times which had a date, 18th February 1965, is hand-written on in a stranger’s handwriting, and this is about my father’s ongoing fight to stop the communists in the London Co-operative Society (LCS). The heading is: ‘New Group Aims to Reform London Co-Op – Ending Control by Communists – Mr J. Stonehouse’s Move’. It says: ‘Mr Stonehouse said he believed that communists, having failed in the trade unions, were making a special effort to infiltrate Co-operative societies.’ The StB knew very well that my father was actively anti-communist. There are no other dated cuttings from The Times. There are four scrappy non-dated cuttings, and two cuttings from a Swedish newspaper – again about the London Co-operative Society. That’s all the newspaper cuttings in this StB file, and they provide no evidence that my father was involved in this clandestine Times method of arranging meetings.
The StB agents at the embassy in London couldn’t go with a ‘communist sympathiser’ narrative to explain to their masters in Prague why my father would act as an agent for them because they knew he had an active dislike of communism and was in a long-term battle to prevent or curtail their infiltration of the LCS. And I know my father understood the nasty nature of communism and had not one iota of tolerance for it, because he made a point of taking me to see Janacek’s From the House of the Dead – not because I would enjoy this depressing opera based in a gulag, with an entirely grey stage set, but because he could give me a long lecture afterwards about the perils of totalitarianism.
In his ministerial career in the Labour governments led by Prime Minister Harold Wilson, my father had access to plenty of secrets about commercial and military planes, new technology, and secret communication networks. His positions were, in order, parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Aviation, parliamentary under-secretary of state for the colonies, minister of aviation, minister of state for technology, postmaster general and minister of posts and telecommunications. In this entire StB file the only document that could be called ‘technical’ is a small-format four-page leaflet produced by the Ministry of Technology and the Royal Aircraft Establishment about carbon fibres for the reinforcement of structural plastics. The information in it was already in the public domain, as shown by the references in the leaflet: two articles – from The Engineer dated May 1966 and Nature dated February 1967; and a book dated 1964. The Czechs could have picked this leaflet up from anywhere and, having been to the Farnborough Airshow myself a few times, I suggest they got it there.
Also not in this file is anything along the lines of new technology. In March 1967, when he was minister of technology, my father instructed the director of the royal radar establishment (the technology research department of the Ministry of Defence) at Malvern to find an alternative to the imported cathode ray tubes that were costing the Ministry of Defence a fortune. A working party was set up to achieve it. This led to the discovery of liquid crystal displays by Professor George Gray, to highly lucrative UK patents, and the development of flat screen technology. If my father was a spy, one might expect there to be some reference to this groundbreaking work in the StB file, but there is not. Indeed, there is absolutely nothing in this file to indicate my father was handing secret or sensitive information to a foreign power.
When interviewed in 1977 for Thames TV, Josef Frolik told the rather surprised interviewer, Peter Williams, that of the 40–45 people working at the Czech embassy in London only five were not spies. In Frolik’s time, 27 were StB intelligence officers, about ten were military intelligence and others state security or part-timers on special assignments.5 The spies didn’t advertise themselves as such and went under various diplomatic guises including consuls and attachés. One such person was Vlado Koudelka, who my father met thirteen months before the StB claim to have recruited him. It’s the first meeting recorded in my father’s file, and may well have happened. Instead of using a code name as they did later, the report of this meeting, unsigned but presumably by Koudelka, is headed ‘Stonehouse’, and says they ‘talked about the exchange of delegations between Wednesbury and Kladno – I will handle the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’.6 Over the twelve-year period that the StB kept a file on my father, there are only two items in my father’s handwriting, one of which relates to this meeting: it’s a short note on House of Commons paper, dated 8th October, and says ‘I am sorry I was unable to come along on Monday’. A short follow-up letter, dated 18th November 1958, is typewritten and signed, and suggests they meet the next day for lunch at the Hungarian Restaurant in Regent Street. The twinning of the towns of Wednesbury and Kladno proceeded from this time.
The second, and last, document written in my father’s handwriting is 450 words long, of which 130 words are brief notes on an interview given by a US diplomat, and the rest are biographical notes on two African politicians. There’s nothing secret in any of this information, yet the StB have taken the trouble to forge the cover note that accompanies it. All it says is, on one line, ‘from Paul Barnes’ and on another, ‘Harold Poulter Esq.’7 ‘Paul Barnes’ was the cover name the StB devised for my father and ‘Harold Poulter’ was the cover name for any StB agent concerned. It’s not in my father’s handwriting, but by fabricating this five-word cover note, they’re trying to make this inconsequential 450-word document seem very clandestine and important. It’s possible the document itself found its way into the file via Will Owen’s StB handler. Owen was a Labour and Co-operative Party MP who admitted to passing non-classified information to the Czechs for money.† Although usually categorised under the ‘Labour Party’, the Labour and Co-operative Party are a separate group within it, and as my father was also a Labour and Co-operative Party MP, Owen and he had reason to be in contact over Co-operative Party matters within the House of Commons. It’s possible that some of the other documents in this file came via Owen, especially as Owen was ‘handled’ by Robert Husak, and then by Josef Kalina, both of whom were StB agents in London who wrote reports that appear in my father’s file.
Another document in the file is five typewritten pages from a report my father was writing about the financial aspects of colonialism, in which he says: ‘Due to the domination of the economy by European Companies Africans could not control more than one seventh of the total commercialised production in the private sector.’ He also quotes figures from the United Nations Economic Bulletin for Africa, and writes ‘Under Belgian colonial control the resources of the Congo were developed primarily in the interests of corporations and financial concerns; and to a lesser extent for the welfare of the white settlers.’8 My father was very clear that colonialism was about financial gain, and asked questions in the House of Commons about this, including on the government interest in British Petroleum. As the government had a majority holding in BP, and those profits flowed back to UK government coffers and UK shareholders, it suited them to keep white settlers in positions of colonial government and power so the financial activities could continue unimpeded. Financial gain was underpinned by land-grab and white settlement which, in turn, was rationalised by rampant racism on the part of whites in Africa and the UK. My father challenged all elements of this exploitation on an almost daily basis, making himself enemies in the British and Colonial establishments.
On the face of it, the most damning item in the StB file is a letter addressed to my father dated 4th June 1959, from the Colonial Office, sent on behalf of the secretary of state of the colonies, Alan Lennox-Boyd. It says, further to my father’s letter of 30th April, asking if the Cze
choslovakians could have a consul in Lagos or a trade delegation to Nigeria, the answer was ‘No’. Nigeria was not yet independent, so at the time all enquiries of this nature had to go through the Colonial Office. Without knowing any background to this, it may look damning – why is my father trying to do the Czechs a favour? However, my father was a hornet in the hair of the Colonial Office and just about the last person in the House of Commons they were going to accommodate. My father knew that when he sent the request. In the month before that 4th June letter from the Colonial Office, my father had asked the secretary of state for the colonies no fewer than 22 challenging questions. They included these, on the very same day the Colonial Office wrote their reply: on African land being made available to Africans – ‘Can he say whether arrangements will be made for loans to enable co-operative farms to be developed on the unused land in the highlands?’; on the imprisonment of Africans in the Hola Camp in Kenya – ‘Is the Under-Secretary aware that the composition of this tribunal gives no cause for faith that there will be a full investigation?’; and ‘if he will give details of the detention camps now in use in Kenya, and the number of detainees in each establishment at the latest convenient date?’; and ‘Is the Under-Secretary aware that we continue to receive allegations about past and present ill-treatment of these detainees? In view of the considerable improvement in the political situation in Kenya, has not the time come for these men to be released or to have charges brought against them?’; on hospital conditions for Africans – ‘what action has been taken with regard to the conditions at the African Hospital in Lusaka?’; and on African political freedom – ‘if he will make a statement on the banning of the Uganda National Movement and the Uganda Freedom Movement and on recent events in Uganda.’
Alan Lennox-Boyd had reason to fear my father because my father knew all about what the Colonial authorities were doing in Africa, and they’d been sparring about it for a long time. In 1958 my father asked for an independent inquiry into the conditions at Kamiti Prison in Nairobi. On 18th December 1958, Lennox-Boyd refused that request, but allegations of British brutality continued, so a demand was made for an independent inquiry into conditions in all the prisons and detention camps in Kenya. On 20th January 1959, Lennox-Boyd replied that an investigation was ‘not justified’. My father then placed on the Order Paper of the House of Commons a motion asking again for an independent and public inquiry which gathered over 100 Labour and Liberal signatures but the Conservative Lennox-Boyd didn’t respond. So the Labour Opposition forced a debate, and on 24th February, the under-secretary, Julian Amery, said ‘The Government of Kenya and the Prison Service in Kenya is perfectly capable of keeping its own house in order and is doing so.’ A week later, eleven Africans were beaten to death by warders at Hola Detention Camp. My father contributed to a 1959 book, Gangrene, in which he said about this incident ‘They were acting, apparently, with the full approval of the Governor, the Kenya Government, the Colonial Secretary, and the Under-Secretary.’9 In a chapter called ‘From the Documents on Hola’, my father named the eleven victims and detailed the injuries that led to their deaths. He despised Lennox-Boyd and wrote in Gangrene, ‘Mr Lennox-Boyd has shown an intense loyalty to his officials and the Ministers in Kenya. Personal loyalty to such persons is not enough. The British Secretary of State for the Colonies owes a higher loyalty – to human justice and human dignity.’10
In 2012, after decades of trying, a small group of elderly Kenyans were given permission to take the British government to court. For years, successive British governments had tried to block these charges with the falsehood that no papers from that period of time still existed, and those lies are documented in the book The History Thieves by Ian Cobain. He also describes what they were trying to hide: ‘They detailed the way in which suspected insurgents had been beaten to death, burned alive, raped, castrated – like two of the high court claimants – and kept in manacles for years. Even children had been killed.’11 Papers have emerged showing that Lennox-Boyd knew what was happening to tens of thousands of detainees in those camps. Lennox-Boyd was lying in the House of Commons, and my father knew he was lying, and Lennox-Boyd knew my father knew that. Any letter from my father regarding the Czechs, or indeed anyone else, was going to be met with an attitude of non-cooperation. My father would have known that, so while on the face of it, this letter to Lennox-Boyd seems as if my father was doing the Czechs a favour, the opposite is true. The last person Lennox-Boyd was going to look positively upon was my father. If the Czechs asked him to write the letter, my father would have known the answer was going to be ‘No’. Perhaps that was the idea, because my father was vehemently anti-communist and helping them spread that ideology in Africa was the last thing he would want to do.
The file contains a postcard-type Christmas card with a photo of my sister and I dating from 1960 or 1961. Under the photo of me blowing a balloon and my sister holding her ears as if it’s about to burst, it’s printed: ‘Seasonal Greetings and All Good Wishes’ and under that, in handwriting, ‘Barbara and John’ and ‘Jane’ and ‘Julia’. Maybe my father sent it to the embassy in the normal course of seasonal pleasantries, or maybe there’s more to it. In his book, The Deception Game, Ladislav Bittman describes the operations of Department D, ‘Prague’s bureau of black propaganda’, and talks about the methods of collecting raw data for making forgeries, including this: ‘Intelligence officers abroad, authenticated as diplomats or representatives of various governmental organizations … send out a large number of Christmas greetings to their foreign counterparts and to important persons in general. As etiquette dictates, their greetings are duly answered, the answers signed, and the signatures sometimes written on letterhead stationery.’12 If our Christmas card was part of this deception, they would have been disappointed because it had no useful signature, but they still filed it away under ‘Kolon’s children’. The interesting thing about this Christmas card is that someone has written at the bottom, in a different-coloured blue ink, ‘deary Kolona’. Over the period of the file, the StB allocated my father four agent names: ‘Root’ which they used only once, Kolon, Katalina, and Twister. The word ‘Kolona’ is ‘Kolon’ with the grammatical suffix ‘a’ – which is one of the suffixes added to names in the Czech language. The word ‘deary’ is not Czech or Slovak, and is a word of endearment found in an English dictionary but which would never be used by an English person, unless they sold violets on the streets of 19th-century London. In other words, an StB agent has added these words to make it appear that it’s from an affectionate and friendly agent who recognises himself as ‘Kolona’. The agents liked to promote to Prague the notion of friendliness, saying in one report that a ‘motive for cooperation’ was my father’s ‘brotherly relationship with comrade Kugler’.13
The StB pumped up the file with anything they could lay their hands on, to make it look as if the file had something in it. From 1960, there’s an eight-page typed list of the proposed membership of the Monckton Report into the future of East African colonial countries – all of which was public knowledge, and could have been prepared by anyone. It doesn’t have my father’s name, yet alone signature on it. Again from 1960, there’s a typewritten itinerary of a trip my father took to East Africa – which could have come from anyone in the Labour Party. There’s a letter dated 12th October 1960 from an assistant of Joshua Nkomo, of the National Democratic Party of Southern Rhodesia, addressed to the Czech embassy, and with no reference to my father. Nevertheless, the StB chose to put it in his file. Indeed, throughout the file there are reports written in Czech on all kinds of political issues, probably gleaned from the newspapers or Hansard, and the aliases for my father are not incorporated into the typewritten text. Only later has an alias been handwritten at the top of the page, as if someone was allocating them in retrospect to an appropriate-looking file.
There’s a letter in the file dated 18th December 1959 which is a carbon copy of a letter to my father on plain, unheaded paper, stamped ‘Ernest Marple
s’ instead of a signature. This relates to a debate in the House of Commons on 9th December, when MPs were asking Marples, the minister of transport, about nuclear marine propulsion. Mr Awbery MP asked if the UK was in a position to compete with Western Germany, and my father asked, essentially, how the UK shipbuilding industry will be affected, and whether the minister was going to make a further statement. The letter in the file is a reply to these parliamentary questions and it is carbon copied and stamped because these were not personal letters, they went out to several people at the same time. It was just before the Christmas recess and Marples says: ‘Invitations to tender will be issued by my Ministry very shortly’, and, ‘I would, of course, have announced this in the House had it been possible. But the decision has only just been taken; I am therefore announcing it to the Press.’14 So, this is a letter following normal parliamentary procedure where a minister, as a matter of courtesy, gives the interested MPs an update to their questions. This is no secret, as the press are imminently going to be informed, and it had no urgency to it as, two years later, other MPs were pressing Marples to tell them when the tendering process will be complete. Nevertheless, it’s a curiosity as to how it came to be in the file, and why. If my father gave it to the StB, there was nothing in it they couldn’t have read in the newspapers the next day, so why even bother giving it to them? It’s a worthless piece of paper, but somehow it got in this file, and there’s the mystery. Maybe someone took it off my father’s desk at the House of Commons.
John Stonehouse, My Father Page 29