Spy With No Name

Vaclav Jelinek

The Czech Cold War spy Vaclav Jelinek, a.k.a Erwin van Haarlem, lived two lives. The story begins in the Second World War, when the Dutch Mrs Joanna van Haarlem got a child with a German soldier. Joanna, who had Jewish roots, was shunned by her family and left the child with the Red Cross in Prague. No one ever heard of the child's whereabouts.

Years later Vaclav Jelinek, a young Czech man who just finished his military service, was approached and recruited by the StB, the Czech Secret Service. The StB decided to give him the false identity of Erwin van Haarlem and trained him over several years to become a skilled secret agent with a false - but existing - background.

As the - alleged - child of a Dutch mother,  Jelinek had both Czech and Dutch nationality and therefore acquired a Dutch passport at the Dutch Embassy in Czechoslovakia. In 1975 he arrived in Britain and started his spying career for the Czech StB and the Russian Secret Service. Meanwhile, Mrs Joanna van Haarlem found him through the Red Cross and finally was reunited with her alleged son in 1977.

More than ten years she believed to have found her lost son, until he was arrested in 1988 by British Special Branch detectives in his apartment while receiving encrypted shortwave messages from a numbers station. In his apartment they also found one-time pads, hidden inside a soap bar. Thes one-tima pads were used to decrypt numbers messages.

DNA samples later confirmed that he wasn't Joanna's son. Vaclav Jelinek never told his real name during the investigations or at the trial and the spy with no name was sentenced in 1989 to ten year imprisonment. He was released and deported to Prague in 1994.

Joanna finally found her real son who had changed his Dutch name in a Czech one at the age of 15. He knew nothing about the misuse of his name by the StB. Jelinek's story is a good example of infiltration under stolen identity during the Cold War.

BBC Magazine publish an excellent story on  Vaclav Jelinek with many details and photos. The story of Jelinek is told in a two-part radio program (in Dutch), with his mother (part 1) and an interview with Vaclav Jelinek himself (part 2).

More on one-time pads and numbers station on my website.