The heartless Cold War agent who tricked a rape victim into believing he was her long-lost son... so he could spy on Britain. And how, when his cruel deceit was exposed, the Mail helped find her real child

For more than 30 years, Johanna van Haarlem had been dreaming of the moment she'd be reunited with the son she'd last seen as a baby. And now, incredibly, the International Red Cross had tracked him down.

They'd already had an exchange of letters, in which Johanna had expressed her enduring love and sent him photos of herself. She was hoping to travel to London from her home in the Netherlands to see him at Christmas, she said.

Her long-lost son seemed less keen but did agree to see her – at 9pm in her West End hotel on January 3, 1978.

So much was riding on that one encounter, it was hardly surprising that Johanna, who'd been actively searching for Erwin for 20 years, found herself unable to sleep.

In the early hours, she left the hotel and went for an aimless walk through thick snow, passing Hyde Park and eventually turning into Queen's Gate Gardens. At that point, a young man approached her in the street.

'Excuse me, but aren't you Mrs Van Haarlem?' he asked.

By pure chance, Erwin van Haarlem, also out for a walk, had recognised her from the photograph she'd sent him. He opened his arms to hug her, calling her 'Mother'. Johanna was soon sobbing with happiness.

Then he asked her back to his modest rented room, showed her all his identity documents and opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate. Johanna's dearest wish – to have a loving relationship with her first-born – was at last coming true.

Or was it? In fact, even as he hugged her, Erwin had been coldly monitoring her reactions for any hesitancy in accepting him as her long-lost son.

Fortunately, there was none. Had Johanna expressed the slightest doubts, he knew he might have to silence her...

Johanna's remarkable story goes back to 1943 and her home in wartime Holland. Her father Izaak, who ran a thriving home renovation firm in The Hague, had strong pro-German sympathies and welcomed the Nazi occupiers with open arms, inviting German officers to lavish parties and even letting them use the family home as a command centre.

But when, at the age of 19, she was raped by a German soldier and became pregnant, her father reacted with outrage.

Dismissing the unborn child as 'a product of war', he insisted Johanna go to a mother-and-baby shelter to give birth, one of many that catered to the estimated 50,000 Dutch women impregnated by German soldiers during the five-year occupation.

When Johanna's baby, Erwin, was born on August 24, 1944, her father used Nazi connections to pack both mother and child off to German-occupied Czechoslovakia. Aware that the tide of war was turning, he didn't want to risk anyone knowing his daughter had a child with a Nazi soldier.

Once there, the Czechoslovakian Red Cross told Johanna to leave Erwin in an orphanage and return when she was able to support him. Weeping, she handed over the baby, then took a job at a Czech factory.

By early 1945, however, Czechoslovakia had fallen to the Russians and Johanna had no choice but to go home, leaving her child behind.

There had been one more chance to reclaim him. In January 1947, Izaak, Johanna's father, answered a knock on the door. It was a Red Cross official, asking if she was prepared to pay the money owing so far for her son's care in Czechoslovakia – a sum equivalent to an average year's salary. If not, the boy would be put up for adoption.

Izaak declined on her behalf. The following month Johanna was asked to sign documents that would release her son for adoption.

Distraught, she asked her father to advance the necessary money but he refused. 'Do as you are told,' he shouted, wagging a finger in her face. To Johanna's lasting regret, she signed.

In the 1960s, the Czech intelligence service, the StB, had singled out a young man named Vaclav Jelinek as a potential agent.

It was noted that Jelinek, who was doing his military service, was diligent, good-natured, had an analytical mind and an IQ of 138. These were all good qualities for a sleeper agent in the West.

Thus, in October 1965, he began several years of hard training, covering everything from setting up dead-letter drops to mastering different methods to kill.

A full ten years later, the trainee agent was finally judged ready for an elite assignment in London, where he was expected to live for decades undercover. He was given the codename 'Gragert', but would be known as Erwin van Haarlem.

It might seem incredible, but identity of the real Erwin, Johanna's long-vanished child, had been earmarked years before by Czech spymasters as potential cover for a secret agent – and then deliberately stolen. The StB had covered their tracks by ensuring there was no record of the real Erwin anywhere. He had vanished.

The real Erwin was half-Dutch, of course, and so entitled to a Netherlands passport that would allow a Communist spy easy access to the West.

Then, in June 1975, the fake Erwin finally arrived in London, eager to take up his first assignment: forging connections with the Royal Family and planting listening bugs in the furniture at Buckingham Palace.

Six months later, he admitted to his StB bosses – working with the Russian KGB – that the closest he'd come to the Royal Family was watching Trooping The Colour. He had managed to land a job serving cocktails at the Hilton but, predictably, agent Gragert could relay nothing of interest to his bosses.

Two years on, he received a bombshell letter from the Red Cross, saying his 'mother' Johanna wanted to meet him. There was consternation back in Prague, too, but it was decided Johanna might cause real trouble if he refused.

And if she smelled a rat?

Well, Gragert was a trained killer, whose overriding goal was to protect his cover...

Johanna could not have foreseen a better reunion than that first meeting in 1978.

There was just one small thing that gave her pause for thought: the baby she remembered had piercing blue eyes and the adult Erwin's were brown. They must have changed colour when he was a toddler, she thought.

For almost a decade, Johanna returned to London at least twice a year to spend time with the man she thought was her son.

He visited her annually in the Netherlands. On one occasion, Gragert treated Johanna and her other son, Hans, to dinner at the rooftop restaurant at the Hilton Hotel, and waited on them personally. And in 1978, Gragert bought 20 bottles of sparkling wine for a family party in Holland, attended by 30 of her relatives.

How fortunate he was, he told everyone there, to have been accepted by the family.

Another time, he serenaded Johanna with a heavily accented version of the Elvis Presley hit Love Me Tender.

Johanna was overwhelmed. She called 'Erwin' every week, and spent a total of about £13,000 on lavish gifts, driving lessons and hotel rooms when they travelled. Gragert's cover was working beautifully.

In 1981, Gragert persuaded his bosses to set him up as a dealer in miniature portraits, which gave him more time for his increasingly valuable – and destructive – espionage. He'd now been ordered to infiltrate British Jewish groups campaigning on behalf of refuseniks, the Jews who wanted to leave the USSR to resettle in Israel and elsewhere, but were being refused permission by the Kremlin.

So, Gragert became a valued male volunteer in the Women's Campaign for Soviet Jewry. He copied their files with a secret camera and passed on numerous names of Soviet Jewish activists and their supporters worldwide.

At least one Russian Jew who featured on one of Gragert's lists was arrested and sent to a Siberian labour camp. The charges against him included teaching Hebrew. It's likely there were many more.

As Gragert grew ever more trusted by UK campaigners, he visited the Soviet Union with a British delegation, meeting Jews in secret and of course passing every detail to Moscow.

He was even invited to the US, twice, where he was feted like a celebrity. He briefly met President Ronald Reagan and was personally thanked by Defence Secretary Frank Carlucci for helping Soviet Jews.

Gragert's penetration of Jewish pressure groups proved highly valuable intelligence to be traded by Russian negotiators in arms talks with Reagan's pro-Jewish administration. Human rights were traded for concessions on weapons.

Back in Moscow and Prague, Gragert's star was rising fast. In 1986, he was promoted to major, and given a prestigious Soviet award plus a medal 'for services to the defence of the fatherland'.

Then everything started falling apart.

Out driving one day in London, he noticed two cars following a few spaces behind. He used his training to lose them but several miles later they were back on his tail.

He begged his Czech superiors to pull him out, but Moscow decided Gragert was too valuable where he was. They now had him seeking classified information about the UK's Polaris nuclear missiles and Reagan's Star Wars nuclear defence project.

Johanna, too, was becoming a problem. She wanted to move to London to live with 'Erwin' – the very last thing Gragert wanted. After nearly ten years, maintaining the pretence of masquerading as her son was becoming almost unbearable.

Gragert became increasingly paranoid. From the windows of his flat one day, he saw men painting fences that didn't need painting. He noted a young couple out walking with a pram. The pram was empty.

In fact, British counterintelligence, who'd spotted Gragert meeting a suspicious member of the Soviet trade delegation in a pub, had been following him for nearly a year. By April 1988, Stella Rimington, then head of MI5's counter-espionage unit, had decided it was too dangerous to leave Gragert on the loose.

One morning, Special Branch officers burst into his flat just as he was taking down a coded radio message from Prague. A search also produced six one-time 'pads' – an encryption method using a disposable cypher – and some sensitive information about companies involved in the Star Wars defence project.

Yet Gragert, now an StB colonel, felt reasonably confident as he languished in Brixton prison. His identity certainly hadn't been cracked. It never occurred to him to refuse when he was asked for a blood sample.

Back in Holland, Johanna was shocked by his arrest. Her Erwin couldn't be a spy! She was going to do everything she could to help him, including giving a blood sample. 'It might help support his story,' she was told.

It did the reverse: DNA testing revealed there was only a one in 1,800 chance that Johanna and Erwin were related.

Brushing aside the scientific evidence, Johanna decided to ask Erwin outright if he was truly her son and that July, she met him in Brixton prison. As they hugged, she clutched him even closer to her than usual, then begged him to tell her the truth.

Gragert simply stared at her. With a lightning flash of certainty, Johanna realised she was looking into the cold, hard eyes of a professional liar.

'I didn't see any sign of remorse, not a wink, no warmth, nothing. He looked at me like this was the end,' she recalled later.

That very day, she volunteered to give evidence for the prosecution. And it was Johanna's testimony at the Old Bailey, as well as the evidence from Stella Rimington – who attended court disguised as an old lady – that sealed Gragert's fate. Sentenced to ten years, he was jailed in HMP Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight.

Yet, Johanna, now aged 64, was no closer to finding the real Erwin – which is when the Mail decided to try to help.

Even finding Erwin's last orphanage was difficult, as the StB had done its best to eradicate all clues. In the end, the breakthrough came when Mail reporter Paul Henderson toured Czechoslovakian orphanages with Johanna and found the retired nurses who had cared for Erwin. Still, no one knew his fate.

Paul gained more information from sources in Prague and helped Johanna write letters to both the Dutch and Czech governments. The Dutch then turned to informal contacts in the Czech government and at last Johanna received the news she craved: Erwin, now 47, had been found! His new name was Ivo Radek, he worked at a metalworks factory in Czechoslovakia and was married with two daughters.

A photo showed him to be blonde and blue-eyed and Johanna instantly recognised the distinctive forehead and thick eyebrows of his father.

He couldn't have looked more different from the spy who'd pretended to be her son.

Mother and son finally met again on November 27, 1991 at a hotel in Czechoslovakia.

Looking deep into his eyes, Johanna could see only kindness. Ivo kissed Johanna's hand and his wife gave her a bunch of flowers.

Then they talked and talked, she giving her incredible story and Ivo reassuring her he'd had a very happy childhood.

That Christmas, she and Hans, her other son, were invited to stay with their new family in Prague, the first of many wonderful visits.

Johanna had lost Erwin twice, the first time to war and the second time to despicable fraud, but she'd finally found her happy ending.

Today, Johanna still lives in Holland at the age of 100. Her adored son Erwin, now Ivo, died suddenly last July – a huge sadness to her. But Johanna is very much in touch with her daughter-in-law and granddaughters.

Gragert was stlill behind bars when Czechoslovakia ceased to be a Communist state. He had become an embarrassment to the new regime, but in April 1993 he was nonetheless repatriated after President Vaclav Havel asked Margaret Thatcher to help smooth the way for his release.

Jelinek – he'd gone back to his real name – had expected to be welcomed home as a hero. Instead, he was interrogated for three days, and money in his bank accounts reverted to the state.

Eventually he found a job as an interpreter for a bank, married at 50 and had a daughter. Jelinek died, aged 77 in 2022.

He had never expressed remorse for pretending to be Johanna's son.

Today, his imposing granite headstone, in a Prague cemetery, must be a source of puzzlement to anyone who pauses to read the inscription.

Shaped like an open book, it has the name Vaclav Jelinek written in gold on one side.

On the other, also in gold, is the name Erwin van Haarlem.

In death, as he did in life, he continues to deceive.

• © Paul Henderson and David Gardner 2025. Adapted by Corinna Honan from A Spy In The Family by Paul Henderson & David Gardner to be published on February 27 by Mirror Books, priced £20. To order a copy for £18 (offer valid until March 9, UK P&P free on orders over £25), visit mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.