Indeed, he ‘disappears’ Mr Hill’s evidence on page 332 where he says that with my sisters evidence “the Stonehouse defence was complete” and then on the next line “Sheila’s defence followed.” Hayes cannot say he doesn’t know about Mr Hills evidence because it is in the summing up of Judge Eveleigh, to which Hayes refers on page 339: “He used the summing up to enhance the prosecution case and undermine the defence”. An extract from that summing up is reproduced below, showing that the customs officer Mr Hill said he “did not see a blouse, a black slip or any ladies shoes or any article of ladies clothing.”

TNA File J 82/3714 - 4 August 1976, page 34:

By omitting crucial evidence Hayes has acted like a prosecution lawyer, rather than a writer intent on giving an honest account of the story to his readers.

Another example of mala fide concerns the address where the StB agents incorrectly said we lived. According to sixteen documents in the StB file (all having the prefix 43075_43075_000_: 0029/0043/0341/0363/0367/0375/0389/0391/0393/0407/0415/0427/0435/0541/0579/0585) between 9/1/61 and 28/2/63 the StB agents ‘Kugler’ and ‘Hanousek’ called my father to meetings by sending dated cuttings from The Times newspaper to “22 Aldwyne Road” (the supposed meeting being a week hence and the location determined as Beals restaurant by default or if the Roman numeral II was written by the date, The Black Horse pub in Catford.) But we never lived at “22 Aldwyne Road” and Hayes knows this because I told him so in an email on 20 July 2019, it is said in my book published around the same time as his hardback, and I reiterated this point in my letter to Maddie Modford on 8/10/21. The honest thing to have done at this point is amend the paperback text to incorporate the truth of the matter – the StB agents never once had our correct home address and so their reported method of calling my father to meetings simply would not have worked. The StB agents made it up – they were lying – on sixteen occasions. 

To admit this would undermine all Hayes’ descriptions of meetings with ‘Kugler’ and ‘Hanousek’ so he tries to get around the truth by saying on page 28 “Communication was to be conducted via newspaper clippings on political affairs sent to Stonehouse’s home address.” Hayes knows full well we never lived at 22 Aldwyne Road yet he doesn’t mention that inconvenient truth – inconvenient, that is, to the narrative he has determined to write. I call that mala fide. 

Hayes knows there were only three StB agents who claimed to have paid my father money – ‘Kugler’, ‘Hanousek’, and after a three and a half year break an agent associated with the first two who, as Hayes says on page 42, “Husak being the man at the embassy who would be brokering the VC10 deal” (while my father in his ministerial capacity was trying the sell the Czech national commercial airline the VC10 plane). So the claim Hayes makes that my father received money from the Czechs is based on the reports of two agents who couldn’t have called my father to meetings using an incorrect address, and an StB agent posing as a commercial broker who my father had no choice but to meet. There is no evidence my father received cash from these three spies other than their reports saying so. 

Ignoring the truth of the matter – we never lived at “22 Aldwyne Road” – Hayes writes on page 39 “The Czech’s hopes of re-engaging Stonehouse had been proving fruitless. They had endeavoured to contact him using the newspaper code, a plan that was thwarted by their failure to update Stonehouse’s address in their records. No doubt the new occupants at the address in north-west London had been rather bemused to receive the cryptic newspaper clippings in the post.” Nowhere does Hayes say the truth – a) we never lived at the only address the Czechs ever had for us, b) that wrong address was never changed by either my father or the Czech agents during the time ‘Kugler’ and ‘Hanusek’ said they were using it and c) you can’t “update” an address that is wrong in the first place – you correct it, and they never did. The StB never once had our correct address – but Hayes doesn’t tell his readers that.

Thank you for cutting the Koudelka text from page 25 as requested because it is false: “Several such envelopes bearing Stonehouse’s writing are contained in the StB files, clearly proving this procedure was used on later occasions.” This falsehood will also need to be changed or an addendum added in the hardback edition of the book, as well as the in the ebook and audio version. As will all other changes. 

Thank you for cutting the words “minutes of committee and cabinet meetings” and “shadow cabinet” in paragraph three of page 28, as I requested on 20 and 25 October 2021. However this entire paragraph is problematic. First, you have kept in the word “abundance” before “of documents in Stonehouse’s verified handwriting, including letters, envelopes…” There are precisely two documents in my father’s handwriting in the StB file and I reproduced and explained them in my letter to you of 12/10/21. Two is not an “abundance”. I see that in the paperback edition Julian now has: “an abundance of documents in Stonehouse’s verified handwriting including letters, envelopes addressed to a property in Lancaster Gate, registered at that time as part of the Czechoslovak embassy”. These are those envelopes, and they are forgeries. 

Hayes refers to “verified handwriting” on page 28 and “handwriting expert” on page 354 and in the Acknowledgements thanks “handwriting experts”, plural, but he does not give the name/s of the experts. At this point I think it is incumbent upon you, as General Counsel, to establish whether handwriting expert/s were indeed employed by your author, and verify whether any such expert confirmed these two envelopes to be in my father’s handwriting. I maintain there are only two documents in my father’s handwriting (ref letter 12/10/21). One of these was given a forged cover note as I wrote in my book (P/B page 279). Hayes has now added to page 28 “which was addressed to Harold Poulter Esq, demonstrating the subsequent use of the agreed procedure” and because I maintain that 5-word cover note is a forgery I believe it is your responsibility to also check any handwriting report for that (StB ref: 21968_43075_020_0019, reproduced below). Even though it is only five words, and the StB had original Stonehouse writing to copy from, it still has handwriting elements which my father never used:

It’s not an important point but Hayes had added that the Lancaster Gate address was “registered at that time as part of the Czechoslovak embassy” and I wonder whether he just made that up. It’s not important because the address was certainly used by StB agents; I question whether Hayes has tried to make it look here as if he has actually done some deep research. It’s amusing more than anything else. 

Keeping to the problematic third paragraph on page 28, Hayes refers to a “report on the Monckton Commission.” Please refer to my letter dated 25/10/21 for full details on this document and its supposed hand-over, which is so ridiculous it descends into the realm of farce. Your readers again are not being given an honest account. 

On page 24 you have not made any corrections following my letter dated 11/10/21 relating to Ernest Marples, despite me explaining fully therein how Hayes has disingenuously spun the StB yarn into a narrative that suits his purpose.

Thank you for cutting on pages 46-7, as per my complaint 28/10/21, “the conversation centered on the cabinet discussions on NATO” and “Stonehouse informed Lee that he had been involved in discussions” because the source document only says “we exchanged thoughts about NATO” and my father was not in the cabinet and therefore not privy to cabinet discussions. Will Owen (agent ‘Lee’) was a Labour and Cooperative Party MP and later admitted in court to having passed the Czechs non-classified information. One has to ask, of course, why was it necessary for Owen, an agent for the StB, to report on the thoughts of man who the Czechs said was their agent? Surely if Stonehouse was an StB agent he could have just told them his thoughts directly.

In my letter of 22/10/21 I complained that Hayes has written “any document would be typed anonymously using an uppercase font. Stonehouse continued to provide intelligence” because this gives the impression that documents in uppercase font exist in the file, which they do not. The honest thing for Hayes to have done is say that no such documents exist in the StB file but that doesn’t fit with his narrative and so both he and you, given the opportunity to clarify the facts to the reader of the paperback, simply ignore my complaint. I consider these words misleading and the persons being misled are, of course, your readers. 

In my letter of 20/10/21 I gave you the link to see for yourself that John Stonehouse was never a cabinet minister: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_government,_1964%E2%80%931970#List_of_Ministers. Yet, for the purpose of exaggerating his access to sensitive information, you have insisted on keeping this notion alive in the paperback. I see that on page 58 you have amended the sentence “and gained a full place in the Labour government cabinet” to “a post affording him a place in Wilson’s cabinet” but this change still pushes the notion that he was in the cabinet. And you have not changed on page 59 “With his elevation to postmaster general and position in the cabinet he was also appointed to the Privy Council” and “particularly cabinet ministers”. (These being just two of many other ‘cabinet’ references still in the text). Julian Hayes is confused partly, I assume, because cabinet ministers can be appointed to the Privy Council but in my father’s case that happened in 1968 because of his services to export and it was unrelated to a cabinet position. Postmaster general was not a cabinet position. Hayes knows this himself because on page 71 he writes “while he was now a cabinet minister, he would only be required to attend if there was business directly relating to his department to discuss.” There were very few occasions when John Stonehouse reported to the cabinet, and ‘reporting to’ does not equate to “position in the cabinet” or “cabinet minister”. Your author’s propensity for exaggeration, hyperbole, misdirection, misinformation, and mala fide start with the tile of your book. 

Omission is another Hayes ploy and you have ignored my complaint about the omission leading to factual inaccuracy on pages 138, to which my letters of 21/10/21 and 2/11/21 refer: “Frolik’s intelligence on Stonehouse had been substantiated with the defection of another Czech operative, codename August, in late 1969, who had also seen records referring to Stonehouse in the StB archive”. Hayes knows perfectly well that August did not substantiate Frolik because Hayes has seen file PREM 16/1848 in The National Archives (and I know that because, although he never references any statement, he refers on page 351 to other contents of that file). That file shows that MI5 did not believe August when he said in 1975 that he had seen a Stonehouse file because he didn’t mention it in his 1969 debrief. In the letter extract shown below from file PREM 16/1848 the Prime Minister Jim Callaghan explains this to Patrick Mayhew MP:

What this extract also shows is that defectors, like certain authors, exaggerate their intellectual capital when they think, or know, a person is dead and can’t sue.

On page 352 you have not amended the text despite my letter of 2/11/21 giving a full account of the 1980 meeting to which Hayes refers. In both editions of his book you have the text: “It was the consensus that the information Pravec had provided irrefutably proved that Stonehouse was a spy.” Below, find extracts from the original documents in The National Archives file PREM 19/360. The first is dated 11 September 1980 and is from a memo to Margaret Thatcher. As you can see it says “the new evidence would not be sufficient to sustain a successful prosecution.”

The following extract is dated 6 October 1980 and is from Thatcher’s PPS to John Halliday at the Home Office: 

Again, we hear from the original documentation that the AG had “no evidence which he could put before a jury” and the defector’s information was “not of the kind which would secure a conviction.” This is contradictory to Hayes assertion that “It was the consensus that the information Pravec had provided irrefutably proved that Stonehouse was a spy.” There was no proof. And everyone present at these meetings knew that. Whether the AG was “sure” he was a spy or not, he had no proof of that. And, as you probably know, the AG at the time was Michael Havers who was a man not reluctant to charge and convict people on little or no evidence, as I wrote to you in my letter of 2/11/21:

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. 

Please refer to my letter of 2/11/21 for further information about this 1980 meeting, and also see there what this defector actually said – and as you will see his information was vague and contradictory to information in the StB file. You can also refer to the entire TNA file PREM 19/360, as it is a free download. 

It is completely outrageous that you have failed to correct text on page 354, to which my entire letter of 12/10/21 refers: “and in return Stonehouse provided them with technical information (some documents are indisputably in his handwriting, as confirmed by a handwriting expert). That information, however, could easily have been obtained through other means.” In my letter I reproduce the only document that could be called “technical information” and as you can see it contains information already referenced as in the public domain, and anyway available from multiple sources. Certainly there is nothing classified or secret about it and, indeed, as Hayes knows perfectly well, within this entire StB file there is nothing classified or secret. What he has done here is nothing short of a malicious juxtaposition, as I wrote in my previous letter: 

‘This is a malicious juxtaposition “… in return Stonehouse provided them with technical information (some documents are indisputably in his handwriting, as confirmed by a handwriting expert.)” which leads the reader to believe there is proof in the form of handwritten documents that “technical information” was handed by my father to the Czech spies. This is an outrageous assertion and entirely false.’

We keep coming back to the issue of handwriting experts and you will surely appreciate that I have evidence contrary to Hayes’ assertions in that regard. This is one matter that will be raised at the televised spy trial I am now involved in, and to which Hayes will be called as a prosecution witness, bringing your book as his evidence. If he is not prepared to appear himself an actor can play his part. Hachette’s response to my complaints will also form part of the proceedings because it’s important for the public to realise that even when a closely involved and informed person raises genuine fully-referenced complaints, publishers such as yourselves refuse to correct the mistakes. 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/05/itv-john-stonehouse-drama-fiction-daughter

https://www.expressandstar.com/news/politics/2023/01/04/john-stonehouses-daughter-calls-for-tv-trial-of-runaway-mp-to-settle-spy-claims/

‘Fake news’ is a serious social menace and is not the result of the internet or AI but goes much deeper than that, being embedded in publishing as well as other ‘serious’ media. 

Hayes has deliberately not given references because had he done so people would be able to see, as I can, that he manipulated source documents to support a narrative that is not an accurate rendition of events. It is pretend non-fiction and as well as being emotionally damaging to the entire Stonehouse family it exploits the reader who thinks they are paying for the truth. 

Hachette need to decide whether they are willing participants in this exploitation and I suggest you start with the so-called handwriting experts. If there are any reports I shall need to see them.

I have made certain complaints but they are by no means all that I could have made regarding this book or may do in the future.

I shall be posting this letter on my website www.juliastonehouse.com, to join all others sent to you. If you think I have been unfair or have myself misrepresented facts then please let me know so I can take any such contested information off my website until we resolve the issue between us.

Thank you.

Yours sincerely

Julia Stonehouse