2 November 2021

████████████

Editorial Legal Director

Hachette UK Limited

Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ

Dear ███████

Re: Julian Hayes – ‘Stonehouse Cabinet Minister, Fraudster, Spy’

Julian Hayes has no evidence John Stonehouse was a “Spy”

On page 353 of Julian Hayes’ book he accuses my father of “treason” and of being a spy “with the capacity to betray further secrets”. But he knows as well as I do, as do other people who have looked closely at StB file 43075, that it doesn’t contain any classified documents or state secrets. Even while knowing this, Hayes still writes “secrets”. Please ask Julian Hayes where these “secrets” are in StB file 43075, and if he can’t provide an answer, I insist he remove this accusation from the book. You might think it doesn’t matter, the man is dead and can’t sue. However, this accusation damages me and his entire family, as well as my father’s legacy and reputation. 

Because Hayes has seen the contents of the StB file and, also, because he is a lawyer, his accusations are taken by readers as being a responsible account. His profession, and his support by reputable publishers, leads readers to think Hayes must be right. This is why your book is particularly damaging.

On page 360 Hayes talks about my family not believing the spy story then says “the evidence reveals otherwise”. But he has no evidence because none is there. I have written to you extensively about Julian Hayes’ strategic omissions in terms of documentation and have also referred you to Hayes’ misrepresentation of certain documents and reports in the StB file, in most cases providing you with copies of the original documents and/or translations of the StB reports to which they refer. My correspondence to date has included the following points:

8/10/21    Multiple StB documents state our address was 22 Aldwyne Road, but we never lived there. Not once did the StB have our correct address, which is significant because the file is full of reports saying they called my father to meetings a week hence by sending a cutting from The Times newspaper to his home address. Julian Hayes knows this because I emailed him on 20 July 2019 and told him so, but he has chosen to ignore this crucial information pertinent to his accusations.

8/10/21       Hayes states that, regarding agent ‘Kugler’, “several such envelopes bearing Stonehouse’s handwriting are contained in the StB files”, when no “such envelopes”  exist. 

11/10/21       Re. ‘cash for questions’, the Marples letter. Hayes has, first, ignored the physical properties of the letter which brings into question where it originated. Then he strategically misquotes the words stated by the minister Ernest Marples in the House of Commons; and then fails to disclose the nature of the letter with regard to attachments. In doing all this, Hayes leads his readers into believing that “papers”  were passed to the Czechs.

12/10/21 Hayes states my father “provided” the StB with “technical information”. I reproduce within this letter the only item in the file that could be called “technical” – a 4-page leaflet containing information referenced thereon as being from two periodicals and one book in the public domain, and there’s nothing in the file to indicate this leaflet came from my father.

12/10/21 I discuss in this letter the highly pertinent issue of forgeries. 

19/10/21 Re. ‘cash for questions’, Monckton. Hayes claims there is a “draft of the speech”  when no such document exists and, moreover, the StB source report itself does not say that. 

19/10/21 Re. ‘cash for questions’, Germany. Hayes invents the notion that “material relating to this was anonymously provided to Stonehouse”.

19/10/21 and 11/10/21: Every word my father said in the House of Commons, as well as his written questions are online, and this source provides not a scrap of evidence my father asked questions in the HOC “to assist the Czech cause”  as Hayes claims. 

20/10/21 Hayes has misrepresented in the title and throughout the text that my father was a cabinet minister, whether in government or the shadow government. This is for effect and to misrepresent documents he refers to.

20/10/21 Hayes has misrepresented an StB document with regard to dates, to promote his notion of “pressure” being applied; and also misrepresented the context. 

21/10/21 Hayes has omitted StB defector material certainly known to him that states the Czech StB agents invented UK ‘agents’ so they could pocket the cash they were supposed to be giving them. 

21/10/21 Hayes has omitted government records probably known to him that conflict with his assertion that StB defector August “substantiated”  defector Frolik. 

21/10/21 Hayes has omitted StB defector material certainly known to him that states that the Czech agents in London shouldn’t be believed.

25/10/21 Hayes has misrepresented minutes of a meeting as being “cabinet” minutes.

25/10/21 Hayes has omitted crucial information pertaining to the dates and context of the Monckton document and its supposed hand-over.

26/10/21 Hayes has omitted the significance of a supposed meeting venue.  

28/10/21 Hayes has misrepresented the “From Lee” document as relating to “cabinet discussions.”

None of the documents referred to in my previous correspondence provides “evidence”  of my father being a spy and the very fact that Hayes has felt the need to ‘doctor’ or misrepresent the documents in a variety of ways serves to emphasise that Hayes himself knows that his so-called “evidence”  is unworthy of that description. Within the correspondence I have also illustrated with the use of translations how Hayes has misrepresented StB documents in file 43075 that he has referred to.

There are thirteen ‘documents’ in the English language in the StB file, which extends over the years 1958-1970, and I have described or explained Hayes’ misrepresentation of nine of them in my previous correspondence. The majority of documents are dated 1958-59, a time before the StB said they recruited my father in March 1960. The remaining four documents are not specifically referred to in Hayes’ book as far as I can see and so they are not pertinent to my correspondence to you regarding his representation of documents; in my book I describe and explain all the documents. They include an itinerary of a trip to Africa, with no indication of whose trip this was, but possibly relating to my father in 1960; and five typewritten pages from the draft of a book, with no author’s name, possibly dated 1962. Both are typewritten and, if indeed they did originate from my father, there’s nothing to indicate they found their way into the file directly from him. They could have come from anyone in the Labour Party and, given this extract from page 353 of Hayes’ book, the candidates appear to be many: “It is clear that the Labour Party was riddled with informants and agents such as Lee, Knight and Skot, to name but a few. These were people who had access to the very highest level of political influence and information, so this is more shocking now than the Cambridge spy ring.”  This is a ridiculous claim, remarkable both for being unsubstantiated and overblown.

On pages 359-360 Julian Hayes accuses Ted Short, a former Leader of the House of Commons: “Research of the archives for this book divulged revelations about Harold Wilson’s Labour government of the 1960s and 1970s, for instance those concerning Ted Short, later to become Lord Glenamara, who had escaped any allegations during his lifetime … yet all the time he hid his alter ego as agent Skot with the StB”. [FYI: Short became Baron Glenamara, not “Lord”]. And on page 213 Hayes says of Ted Short “What has remained obscured was that he too had been conducting a secret life, engaged as an StB agent with the codename Skot.”  On page 11, Hayes accuses another former Labour minister: “Stonehouse was not the only politician on Koudelka’s radar; he had managed to turn Harold Wilson’s private secretary, Ernest Fernyhough” [FYI: Fernyhough was Wilson’s Parliamentary Private Secretary – which is an altogether different role]. On page 40, Hayes accuses the businessman and Labour supporter Rudy Sternberg: “It was only a matter of time before he was engaged by the Czechs under the codename ‘The Beginner’.” I hope Hayes is prepared to provide evidence for all these extremely serious allegations. Having a file, as such, is proof of nothing except that the StB agents were capable of creating files and having hopes. Lucrative fantasies, one might call them.

In the Stonehouse spy accusation story there is a distinctive line in the sand, the year 2008. Before this date the file had not been digitized and was not publicly available. Although the communist regime came to an end in 1989 and the entire StB records became open, as it were, there was so much material to examine it took the archivists until 2008 to get around to my father’s file, number 43075. 

Before 2008, people could say anything they liked about what was in the file, including the 1969 StB defectors Frolik and August and the 1980 defector ‘Affirm’ – all of whom Hayes refers to in his book. On page 138, Hayes says “Frolik’s intelligence on Stonehouse had been substantiated with the defection of another Czech operative, codename August, in late 1969.”  But Frantisek August didn’t claim to have seen the file when he defected in 1969 and only ‘remembered’ he had in 1974 when my father was missing, presumed drowned. MI5 didn’t believe this assertion for reasons I have fully explained in my letter to you of 21 October 2021, which includes references to the government sources. 

Josef Frolik said he had seen that there was a file, but didn’t know what was in it. This didn’t stop him inventing ‘intellectual capital’ that would buy him a cosy life in America at the expense of the CIA. In Frolik’s 1975 memoirs, The Frolik Defection, he doesn’t mention John Stonehouse by name but in a short 200 word passage which includes general comments about democracy, and presumed by some to refer to my father, Frolik wrote “The man in question was an MP who had been involved in some sort of homosexual trap.” There’s no mention whatsoever in file 43075 itself of a honey trap either homosexual or heterosexual, and as Hayes says on page 353: “There does not appear to be any evidence of a honey trap; if there had been, it is certain that the StB would have relied upon it to ’compromise’  their man when he wasn’t being cooperative. They didn’t, strongly suggesting they never had it in the first place.’  

However, Frolik’s (“fabled” as Hayes calls it on page 82) honey trap notion has had a life of its own. In my book John Stonehouse, My Father: the true story of the runaway MP, I write about Christopher Andrew’s book, the authorised history of MI5: 

“Excluding notes, index, appendices etc., The Defence of the Realm is 851 pages long, with about one-and-a-half pages on my father – in other words, not much. Ten of those lines are taken up describing (and misquoting) a sex scene from a novel my father wrote, Ralph. In this, there’s a honeytrap scene which Andrew says ‘may have drawn on his own experience’, and ‘if it is at all autobiographical, tends to support the claims in Frolik’s memoirs that Stonehouse had been recruited by the StB after falling victim to a honey trap during a visit to Czechoslovakia in the late 1950s’. Clearly it’s absurd to refer to a work of fiction as any kind of ‘support’ for an allegation of spying.”

Frolik’s made-up honey trap, designed to give himself ‘intellectual capital’ he could cash in with the CIA in 1969, is immortalized forty years later in The Defence of the Realm: the authorised history of MI5, published in 2009. It is obvious that Christopher Andrew couldn’t have seen file 43075 himself because he writes about a honey trap when no honey trap exists in the file. The only other information Andrew presents in support of his contention that my father was a Czech agent comes from another StB defector, ‘Affirm’, who in 1980 provided the secret services with these five items of information about my father, listed in bold as numbers 1-5 with my comments following:

1) He had the code name, ‘Kolon.’ True, but he actually had four code names and in ‘Affirm’s time, from March 1968 to some time in 1969, the StB used ‘Twister’ and before then ‘Katalina’, so why not refer to them rather than the earlier ‘Kolon’? 

2) He’d been recruited while an opposition backbencher. There’s no evidence for that; only that he’d been to Czechoslovakia for the Co-operative movement and they’d opened a file on him, as they did for every foreigner who set foot on the eastern side of the ‘Iron Curtain’. 

3) He was to provide ‘information from Parliament and Parliamentary committees’. Anyone could pay a few shillings to purchase the daily Hansard record of every word spoken in the House of Commons, as well as written answers, and there’s only one document in the file that could be minutes from a committee, and I have discussed this document in my letter to you of 25 October 2021.

4) He used the money to fund his social life. They had to say that because he’d not been compromised and they needed an excuse. 

5) They were disappointed by the amount of intelligence Stonehouse provided once he became a minister. Yes, because the ‘amount of intelligence’ was nil.

‘Affirm’ was the subject of a meeting at 10 Downing Street in October 1980, the papers regarding which are available to download for free from The National Archives, file PREM 19/360, and have been the subject of many internet and newspaper reports. The file is nine pages, and runs from 7 July 1980 to 6 October 1980. On 7 July Robert Armstrong writes to Margaret Thatcher that “The first question must be whether the information which he can provide is suitable for use in evidence, and whether it is possible to mount a prosecution.” On 11 September Armstrong writes to Thatcher saying “I understand that the new information has now been discussed with the Attorney General … It seems that he takes the view that the new evidence would not be sufficient to sustain a successful prosecution.” On 3 October Thatcher’s PPS writes to her “The attorney General has now definitely decided against prosecuting Mr. Stonehouse on the basis of the information supplied by a defector …” and a meeting is arranged. The proceedings are reported to John Halliday at the Home Office on 6 October: “The Attorney General said that he was sure that Mr. Stonehouse had been a spy for the Czechoslovaks but he had no evidence which he could put before a jury. The new information from the defector referred to in Robert Armstrong’s minute was not of the kind which would secure a conviction, and in any case the defector was not prepared to come to this country to take part in a trial.”

These documents are the source of Hayes’ statement on page 351 “confirming that Stonehouse was a paid informer from about 1962, providing information on technological innovations and aviation.”  The relevant document itself (Ref: A02538) does not use the word “innovations”  and the exact wording is “technological subjects including aircraft”. That detail aside, Hayes knows there’s no evidence in file 43075 that my father handed over to the Czechs this kind of information.

On page 352, Hayes writes about the meeting at which he, and nobody else, says Mrs Thatcher “listened intently.”  He writes (making the unsubstantiated assumption that ‘Affirm’ was Karel Pravec) “It was the consensus that information Pravec had provided irrefutably proved that Stonehouse was a spy.”  The papers in TNA file PREM 19/360 do not say that. The Attorney General said he “had no evidence which he could put before a jury” and the new information “was not of the kind which would secure a conviction.” None of that implies irrefutable proof. 

The Attorney General was Michael Havers who had overseen on behalf of the Director of Public Prosecutions the trials and appeals of two of the most notorious miscarriages of justice – the cases of the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven. In 1980 it was not yet known that eleven innocent people would spend between them 113 years in prison, with one death in custody, because of suppressed alibi evidence, discredited forensics, and even the suppression of the admission of guilt by the actual perpetrators of the crime. The cases were the subject of several reports and in 1989, in evidence to Sir John May’s inquiry into the Guildford bombing, MP Chris Mullin said of (now Sir) Michael Havers “The only hope of sustaining the original convictions was to rewrite the script from top to bottom. This Sir Michael and his colleagues proceeded to do with ingenuity and relish.” So this is the man, who when Attorney General in 1980, said “he was sure that Mr. Stonehouse had been a spy for the Czechoslovaks but he had no evidence which he could put before a jury.” If even Michael Havers, a man not averse to convicting innocent people on no evidence, couldn’t find in my father’s case any “evidence which he could put before a jury”, it is highly likely that no form of evidence was there. 

I would expect Hayes, as a lawyer, to know about Havers’ ignominious role in the Guildford Four and Maguire Seven cases but instead of raising that as an issue with regard to Havers saying “he had no evidence which he could put before a jury”, Hayes writes that ‘Affirm’s information had “irrefutably proved that Stonehouse was a spy.”  That is not what the 10 Downing Street papers say and Hayes has misrepresented official documents.

Hayes continues on page 352: “Pravec, who was safely ensconced in his new life in the US, did not wish to come to the UK to give evidence.” This is not an accurate account of what was said. On 7 July Armstrong wrote to Thatcher (Ref: A02538): “The new defector has not yet arrived in this country. When he does, he will be further questioned. He hopes in due course to move on to North America and settle there.” I suggest to you that Hayes doesn’t actually know ‘Affirm’ was Karel Pravec, and that his only source for this deduction was the 18 May 2019 Mail on Sunday article in which reporters surprised Pravec (‘Pelnar’) in New Jersey, USA. If I am wrong, and he has other reasons for stating categorically that ‘Pelnar’ was ‘Affirm’, perhaps he would like to let me know. (I hypothesize in my book that ‘Affirm’ was Josef Kalina, alias ‘Karhan’, for several reasons including the fact that ‘Pelnar’ wrote a report on 20 January 1970 saying “Have not had contact for one-and-a-half years”- which conflicts with ‘Affirm’ telling MI5 that he was my father’s controller “from March 1968 to some time in 1969”).

Hayes continues the paragraph on page 352: “Perhaps, not surprising, given the fate of poor Georgi Markov … poisoned by a pellet laced with ricin administered through the tip of an umbrella as he waited on a tube station platform.”  It is fairly well known that Markov was on Waterloo Bridge, not a “tube station platform,”  and the umbrella is thought to have been a cover, rather than a weapon. Obviously none of this is pertinent to the issue I am raising in this letter, but it just illustrates that in an 11-line paragraph Hayes can get several facts wrong, identify ‘Affirm’ as ‘Pelnar’, i.e. Karel Pravec, without any substantiation, and prematurely relocate him to America and, of much more importance, say ‘Affirm’ “irrefutably proved that Stonehouse was a spy,”  when that is not what the 10 Downing Street papers said.

Julian Hayes’ seems incapable of accurately reporting on source materials. Everything regarding my father has been twisted to create “evidence”  and the misrepresentation of documents occurs on far too many occasions and in too many circumstances for a pattern of behavior not to be observed. That behavior is the deliberate creation of a false narrative. 

For all the fuss that has been made of them by the media, none of the Czech defectors provided any proof my father was a spy, and even ‘Affirm’ provided very little basic information, some of it conflicting with what is actually in file 43075. But in 1980 ‘Affirm’ could say whatever he wanted because the communist regime was still solidly in place and file 43075 unavailable to the British secret services to check, and it would be another twenty-eight years before the file was digitized and available to anyone else. But the file is now available to me, to Hayes, and anyone who cares to look at it, and we can check what ‘Affirm’ said to UK secret services against what is in the file, and can also see how it relates to a) the 10 Downing Street papers of 1980 and b) what Christopher Andrew wrote in The Defence of the Realm. 

This brings us back to StB file 43075, the ultimate source. And that file provides no proof either – no matter how much Julian Hayes tries to ‘doctor’ the documents in that file, or the StB reports in that file. Unless Hayes can provide any information further to that contained in his book, any substantiating documents, any evidence, any proof whatsoever that my father was a traitor to his country, then I insist you remove from the Julian Hayes book and title the assertion that my father was a “Spy”. 

Yours sincerely,



Julia Stonehouse