After the activities of Kugler and Hanousek there was a three and a half year gap when no StB agents claimed to have paid my father. Then agent ‘Hanc’ (Robert Husak) made three claims: £1,500 on 10/8/66; £750 on 8/5/67; and £200 on 5/8/67. The defector Josef Frolik placed Robert Husak at the Campanina Club in London when extracting money from the accounts department in Prague was described in his memoirs, The Frolik Defection pages 80, 113-14). This is an extract from my book, with quotes from Frolik: 

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!’ Taborsky avoided Frolik’s gaze and, in a calmer voice, said to Frolik ‘Let’s forget it,’ and changed the subject. 

Vaclav Taborsky, codename ‘Majer’, was London Residency Chief of the Czechoslovak Intelligence Service from December 1956 to April 1959 so it seems the falsifying of ‘agents’ and payments to ‘agents’ could go to a high level.

I have written to you previously about Robert Husak who invented the preposterous notion that my father would have met him at St Ermin’s Hotel – the very epicentre of the British secret services, not to mention a favourite meeting place of parliamentarians who could relax knowing an extension of the parliamentary division bell had been installed at the hotel so they could be alerted when they needed to take the ten minute walk to Parliament and vote. The hotel was also regularly frequented by senior civil servants, diplomats, reporters, etc. My father was trying to sell the Czech national airline, CSA, the VC-10 commercial aircraft (along with many other airlines at the time) and had taken an official government sales trip to Prague in September 1965. Robert Husak was a contact at the Czech embassy for these sales matters and that’s why my father had to meet with him on occasion. That gave Husak the excuse to fabricate meetings that never occurred, as he did with the 29/12/65 St. Ermin’s Hotel meeting. If Husak could fabricate meetings, he could also fabricate payments made at ‘meetings’. 

After Hanc’s last claim on 5/8/67 there was a three year gap when no payments were claimed before the file was closed by Mjr. Vaclav Cepelak on 5/11/70. So, over the 11-year period from when they said they recruited my father in January 1960, payments were not claimed during seven of those years and only claimed during the four years when three agents felt themselves in a position to do so. That indicates that requests for payments did not originate with my father, but with three specific agents: Kugler, Hanousek, and Hanc.

Hayes doesn’t question in his book why payments were only claimed by three agents and not, for example, by ‘Hovorka’ (Maj. Vlastimil Kroupa), Sochor, ‘Malena’ (Capt. Josef Minx), ‘Pelnar’ (Karel Pravec), or ‘Karhan’ (Col. Josef Kalina). By default, he allows his readers to think payments were claimed by all the StB agents, over a long period of time. This allows him to make my father look guilty when the evidence shows that Kugler, Hanousek, and Hanc were the guilty ones.

Hayes weaves the narrative throughout his book that my father needed StB money to pay for a lavish lifestyle including “privately funding his children’s schooling” (page 75). For the record, my sister and I went to William Tyndale Junior School and Mount Grace Comprehensive, plus my sister spent two years at Parliament Hill – all state schools. 

Yours sincerely,



Julia Stonehouse