21st October 2021

███████████

Editorial Legal Director

Hachette UK Limited

Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ

Dear ███████

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

StB Spies – Omissions and Errors

When a person writes a non-fiction book they decide not only what to put in it, but what to omit. In the case of the StB spies, Julian Hayes has omitted what I consider crucial information. The defector Josef Frolik provides an example. In the index of Hayes book, Frolik is referenced for pages 31-6, 40, 53-8, 62-70, 73-4, 79, 80-1, 86-7, 106, 118, 138-40, 142-3, 206, 304, 350-1, 354 and 355. His memoir, The Frolik Defection, is indexed for pages 138-9 but it also appears on page 34. Four chapters in Hayes’ book largely concentrate on Frolik: 4-Florian; 7-Baco; 19-Revelations; and 49-The Final Frolik. For your information, Frolik had never met my father or seen his file.

Hayes has certainly read Frolik’s book, yet he has decided not to include Frolik’s accusations that the StB spies at the Czech London embassy were inventing agents who didn’t exist, and lining their own pockets. I reproduce below a section from my own book so you can see some of what Hayes has omitted. I took all the information in the following passage from The Frolik Defection and in my book it is of course fully referenced:

“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.”

Hayes mentions Frolik’s return to Prague at the top of page 54, but has decided to omit the conversation he had with Taborsky. 

I can understand why Hayes has omitted the material quoted above – it does not suit his narrative - but I do find it extraordinary that Hayes should change the date of the publication of The Frolik Defection and then create a narrative around that invented date. Please see page 138 where Hayes says The Frolik Defection was published “in autumn 1974”. The first edition was in fact published in July 1975. But with Hayes’ newly invented date, he has created an entire story. For your information, my father disappeared in Miami on 20 November 1974 and was arrested on immigration charges in Melbourne on 24 December 1974. On page 139, Hayes writes:

“The timing of the publication was ideal for the opposition to put Wilson and his government on the back foot. Conservative MP Norman Tebbit planned to take advantage by tabling a question for the prime minister on the subject.”  (For your information, this was a written question answered on 19 December 1974: Mr. Tebbit asked the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs if he will make a statement on the progress of his discussions with the United States Government concerning the disappearance of the right hon. Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Stonehouse).) “The government’s tiny majority had been reduced to two with the loss of Stonehouse, and the resulting press allegations, now aggravated by the publication of Frolik’s book, put the prime minister under increasing pressure to comment. The media hummed with speculation surrounding Stonehouse’s disappearance, whether it could be connected with the book’s publication, whether he really was a Czech spy, and if he had been under surveillance at the time of his disappearance. The matter irritated Harold Wilson immensely. He considered that the issue had been lain to rest back in 1969. Recognising that the matter of Frolik’s book and Stonehouse’s disappearance had to be dealt with, discussions were held between Wilson and members of the cabinet, and agreement was reached that he should specifically address parliament about the matter. On 17 December Harold Wilson stepped up to the dispatch box …”

I have underlined where Frolik’s book is mentioned. The narrative relates to events that occurred seven months before that book was published. What actually happened is that on the 16^th December 1974 the Daily Mirror reported that ‘Missing MP John Stonehouse was under constant security watch before he disappeared’, and on the 17th, they wrote ‘Missing MP John Stonehouse was a contact for a communist spy ring, according to a high-ranking Czech intelligence agent.’ It was precisely at this point – 17^th December 1974 – that Frolik and the spy allegation against my father went public, and that is why Harold Wilson felt obliged to address the HOC on that day. (Frolik was prepared to name my father when he thought he was dead, and couldn’t sue, but did not name him in his July 1975 book, when he knew he was alive). 

In the following quote from page 138 Hayes refers to “codename August” who was in fact Frantisek August, an StB agent who was stationed at the London embassy between December 1961 and October 1963, and defected in 1969, the same year as Frolik. Hayes writes: 

“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.”  

This is completely untrue. When August defected in 1969 he did not mention Stonehouse at all. He only ‘remembered’ there was a file after Stonehouse disappeared on 20 November 1974 and was presumed drowned. August thought he could increase his intellectual currency with the secret services, however, MI5 never believed August’s 1974/5 assertions so they were not “substantiated”. I think Hayes must know this because on pages 350-1 he refers to MPs Stephen Hastings and Patrick Mayhew and the source documentation relating to them at this period in time and on the subject of Frolik and August is The National Archives file PREM 16/1848 – which also records that the Prime Minister, James Callaghan, informed Mayhew of the following:

“August told us in the spring of 1975 that he had seen a file, which he firmly believed to have been about Stonehouse, in the 1950s. When August was first questioned by the Security Service in 1969 he said he had no knowledge of the recruitment of a British Minister. In the 1975 interview he asserted that he had reported in 1969 that Stonehouse had been recruited in the 1950s and had then referred to a file he had seen in Prague and which he believed to be that of Stonehouse, but there was no trace of this in the records made at the time. Confusion of this kind is common when defectors are interviewed over a number of years. It was not until November 1974, just after Stonehouse’s disappearance had been reported in the press, that Frolik said, for the first time without any qualification (and also without evidential proof), that Stonehouse had certainly been a Czech agent and been paid.”

Mayhew had been calling for an independent inquiry into Frolik’s allegation that my father was an StB agent and I admire the prime minister for soothing Mayhew’s pride with the diplomatic statement that ‘Confusion of this kind is common when defectors are interviewed over a number of years’ when he knew that MI5 knew that August was trying it on. By the time August’s memoirs were published in 1984 he’d completely dropped his invented Stonehouse fantasy and had not a word to say about him.

On page 351 Hayes writes about Patrick Mayhew’s six-hour tape recording of his conversations with Frolik in America and TNA file PREM 16/1848 shows that those tapes were given to the prime minister to be transcribed and the day he received the transcriptions, 12 July 1978, he met with Mayhew at the House of Commons. The ‘Note for the record’ shows that Callaghan asked Mayhew “does Frolik say he knew Stonehouse was a spy?” (his emphasis). Mayhew replied “No: he said that Husak told him that he was going to approach Stonehouse – and said that he did so – and Frolik says that he does not know whether Stonehouse gave Husak any information.” Hayes makes no mention of this in his book but, if he did so, it would conflict with his narrative because it shows that Frolik knew nothing and Husak “was going to approach Stonehouse” when, according to the earlier ‘handler’, agent Kugler, he had already been approached and recruited. What Frolik said raises the question, was Kugler lying?

Hayes has read The Frolik Defection so he knows what Frolik said about his comrades at the London embassy, for example: ‘a plotter and a pig, who continually tried to elbow his way closer to the trough, even if it cost the lives of others to do so’; ‘not only double-agents, lechers, drunks and crooks, but also former torturers and even murderers. Diplomats in name only … each seeking his own pleasures, protected by his privileged position and living as well as any member of the London jet-set on the money supplied by the hard-working man-in-the-street back in the “People’s Republic”’; a ‘dummy’ who ‘did not have one ounce of sense in his whole body’; another ‘dummy’ whose brain had become addled by too much whiskey. He was continually drunk and when he was, he was often seized by an unexpected aggressiveness’; ‘a snake – a reptile hated by every other member of the Intelligence Collective’. These are the charming people who occupied the Czech embassy in London, the source of the reports that Hayes refers to, apparently believing every word they said. Or perhaps he has chosen to believe them, even while knowing the disparaging comments Frolik and many others have made about the StB agents, for the simple reason that he can cash in on it. 

Yours sincerely,

Julia Stonehouse