In 1977, Johanna van Harlem finally found her son Ervin, whom she had abandoned as a baby 33 years earlier. She immediately went to London to see him. What followed was an incredible story of deception and heartbreak.
It was a cold Saturday morning in April 1988 when a van full of detectives pulled up outside Erwin van Harlem's building in north London. The art dealer, 44, lived alone in sleepy Friern Barnet.
The Dutchman's building was at the center of an investigation led by the British intelligence agency MI5. They suspected that Van Harlem, described by his neighbors as a "freak", was not in the art business at all but a sinister foreign agent.
Van Harlem was hunched over the radio in the kitchen. Like every morning, the radio was tuned to the mysterious "numbers station". A woman's voice was heard saying numbers in Czech, followed by the sound of Morse code.
Detectives from the anti-terrorist unit of the London Metropolitan Police raided his apartment at 09:15. Van Harlem tried to lower the antenna on the radio. There was a clearing. When he opened the drawer and grabbed a kitchen knife, a policeman overpowered him and shouted, “Enough! It is over!"
Among the easels and paintings, detectives found tiny code books hidden in soap, strange chemicals and car magazines that later turned out to contain messages written in invisible ink. Investigators suspected that Van Harlem was not actually from the Netherlands but was spying for the Soviet Union.
Van Harlem claimed his innocence at the police station. After ten days, things got weird: a woman who claimed to be the arrested man's mother came to visit. Johanna van Harlem was a Dutch woman about sixty years old. She claimed that her son was not a spy, but an honest Dutchman - a child she abandoned in 1944 and found 11 years ago. Confused detectives let her visit the suspect.
"Tell me, I hear all these strange stories. You're not a spy, are you?” she said.
Erwin showered Johanna with gifts, and basically he was getting tired of the relationship with the fake mother, whom he considered a Nazi.
"There's a saying that where there's smoke, there's fire," Van Harlem answered her. "But this time it's not true. Too much smoke and no fire. I have done absolutely nothing to harm England."
Joanna breathed a sigh of relief. “But why all this?” she asked.
“Don't ask me. Ask them".
And then he noticed a red dot on her forearm. A blood test showed, almost certainly, that they were not related. Johanna van Harlem burst into tears as her world collapsed.
On February 1989, XNUMX, at London's Old Bailey, prosecutor Roy Almot told the jury that the defendant had stolen her son's identity.
"If he knew all along, what he did to her is cruel," he declared.
The trial was followed by great media attention. Exotic beauties came forward with a story about love affairs with a spy. But the most wounded victim stood on the witness stand, the tragic Dutch woman, Johanna van Harlem.
On March 1989, 10, Erwin van Harlem was sentenced to XNUMX years in prison for espionage. "He is probably the first person to be tried at the Old Bailey under an alias," a senior Scotland Yard officer told reporters. "The spy without a name", as the journalists called him, took secrets with him to his cell.
After months of negotiations, I met Ervin on a spring day in Prague in 2016. Although he had lived as a free man for the past 23 years, spies are notorious for not talking. Van Harlem, who was introduced to me by Czech journalist Jaroslav Kmenta of the Black Chronicle, came to the restaurant in an elegant blue jacket. After carefully checking my identity, he began his story, in accented English.
It began on August 23, 1944, when Vaclav Jelinek was born in Modrani, a village near Prague. His father ran a small bakery there until the communists took over. Young Jelinek joined the army and, as the Cold War intensified, rose to a position in the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He dreamed of military daring and excitement. However, he was given grueling shifts and difficult jobs.
One day, his superior caught him learning German words instead of guarding a checkpoint in the snow. They took him to the office, where he expected punitive measures. Instead, they introduced him to two members of the Czechoslovak secret state police, Statni bezpečnost (StB), a spy agency that was directly responsible to the Soviets.
StB agents studied his file and found out that Jelinek is defiant, a womanizer, highly intelligent, prone to violence, a patriot and likes to take risks. In other words, perfect for a spy. After extensive training, they decided he was ready to begin a secret mission abroad, to spy on the West.
The StB combed through its files on missing persons and assigned Jelinek a false identity - a Dutch boy left in an orphanage in Prague at the end of World War II. That child was born just one day before Jelinek.
"Your new name," they told him, "is Erwin van Harlem."
He applied for a Dutch passport and arrived in London by train in June 1975. For a young man from Prague, it was a foreign city teeming with traffic, fashion and danger. He took a job in the restaurant of the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane, Mayfair, hoping to spy on the royal family down the road at Buckingham Palace.
At night, he exchanged coded messages with his homeland via radio. One of his first ideas was to try to plant eavesdroppers in the Queen's furniture, but he and his bosses realized that this was technically unfeasible.
The spy's career was going smoothly until the end of 1977, when he received a disturbing message from Prague: "MOTHER IS TRYING TO FIND YOU IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA WITH THE HELP OF THE RED CROSS. IF THE RED CROSS FINDS YOU, THEY SHOULD MAKE A MEETING.
He read the message over and over again. In October of that year, Van Harlem received a letter from Johanna van Harlem. The Dutch embassy gave her his address, she wrote. She couldn't wait to see him. As instructed, the spy politely replied in November, attaching several photographs. The letter began with "Dear Mother." When he sent a cordial invitation to visit London, she immediately set out.
Johanna woke up early on January 1, 1978, in a hotel in the west of London. She had stage fright. She planned to arrive early and check Ervin's address. However, she saw a familiar young man across the street.
"Are you Mrs. Van Harlem?" said the spy.
"Yes," she replied.
"Hello mother, this is your son".
They hugged in the street. Johanna stepped back to look at him. Tears streamed down her face.
"Your father didn't have such dark hair," Johanna said, studying him. Then she noticed that he was shorter than his father.
Not long after the emotional "reunion", Johanna invited Erwin to meet the Van Harlem family in the Netherlands. When the spy arrived at her bungalow in early 1978, he shook hands with the family members in turn. He was studied as a specimen in a zoo. A niece approached Van Harlem and measured him from head to toe.
"He's got nice Van Harlem legs," she told the crowd.
The fact that he had a Dutch, Jewish mother served Van Harlem as an even stronger cover in London. His main task was to gather information about Jews who were kept in the Soviet Union despite requests to emigrate, and who became political pawns in the peace negotiations during the Cold War. It also collected information on underwater sonar sensors, which alerted NATO to the movements of Soviet submarines.
Van Harlem was awarded the USSR Medal for outstanding intelligence feats at a private party held in his honor in Prague.
"He moved around a lot," Johanna later told a Dutch radio station. "From that small apartment I was in, to a bigger, more luxurious one...I had no idea why he was moving so much. He was getting better, by his clothes, shoes and flats you could see that he was on the right path".
Erwin showered Johanna with gifts, including a Wedgwood vase, a gold sapphire ring, and a gold coin. However, he was basically getting tired of this relationship with the "fake" mother. In his mind, she was a Nazi and a collaborator of foreign soldiers. He remembered the trip to Holland to introduce Johana to a girl - pretending everything was fine.
In a Dutch restaurant, folk music was playing and the guests were dancing. Johanna got carried away, he said. A man swooped on her on the podium and the spy suddenly saw her as a girl dancing with Nazi soldiers.
He was seething with rage. “He's at it again. It will never change. He's 60 years old!” One of the men pulled Johana close and winked at his friend. Van Harlem almost exploded.
After some time in London, Van Harlem's phone rang. It was three in the morning.
"Dear son, I needed to hear you," Johanna said. Van Harlem assumed she had been drinking. "I'm going to sell the house and move to London. We will live together," she told him.
"I totally understand why you're upset, Mom," he told her. “Of course it would be wonderful to live together, especially after fate prevented us from being so in the past. Mom, you know what? Let's go to bed now and think about everything overnight. I will call you tomorrow".
He slammed the receiver down, but he couldn't sleep. He was getting more and more worried about her behavior. He simply could not afford to burden him. His life depended on it. However, he didn't have much of a choice - he was stuck with her.
On her next visit, mother and son were driving through Golders Green in north London when Van Harlem forgot to let a vehicle pass. The other driver braked suddenly to avoid a collision.
“Sorry, mate!” Erwin said politely, waving.
Johanna angrily said "Why are you apologizing. You are so indulgent, so soft! A typical Slav!"
Van Harlem was shocked. "Well, he had the right of way."
"The right of precedence! Right of way!” she repeated.
Clutching the steering wheel, the spy seethed. "You will pay me for this with interest," he thought. But he never got the chance to do so.
One afternoon in the fall of 1986, Van Harlem noticed two vehicles following him and performing maneuvers he recognized from spy training. He realized they were following him.
He had left his job at the Hilton, having worked his way up from waiter to assistant sales manager. He presented himself as a freelance artist and art dealer, and paid cash for a modest flat in Friern Barnet.
It should be the last place anyone would look for a foreign spy, but it soon became a hotbed of deception. There was a technician who came to "fix" his phone, a new postman and dedicated window cleaners who came not weekly, but daily.
Van Harlem noticed that something strange was happening.
Shortly thereafter, in April 1998, that mysterious van pulled up outside Van Harlem's apartment.
Johanna van Harlem heard about the arrest on BBC radio. Investigators came to her apartment and asked her to testify at the trial against the spies.
"When we finally came face to face, I felt hurt. I didn't see any sign of remorse, he didn't even blink, no warmth, nothing," she said about the trial. A part of her was in denial, still searching for her son's affection. "He showed me the cold and looked at me like it was the end," she said.
Van Harlem was sent to Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight. After five years, the end of the Cold War and the hunger strike, he was released and deported to what had by then become the Czech Republic.
I asked him if he ever had any sympathy for Johan.
"I had no pity," he said.
“She was quite dominant and I had to put up with her. Sometimes I had enough of her," he added, describing many real-life mother-son relationships.
During the five years he spent in the cell, he said, one thing about his case remained a mystery to him. Johanna's statement about how she found him. "She told me, without me even asking her, that she herself, of her own free will, started the whole action, trying to find me."
Was it a coincidence that her motherly instincts were awakened only a few months after he applied for a Dutch passport? Who else could have inspired her to look for a son, and why? We may never know because Johanna van Harlem died in 2004. However, the spy has his own theory.
"We thought she was being led by MI5 or the Dutch security services," he said.
Is it possible that Johana was also a spy? Although it seems unlikely, in this world of concealment and deception, anything is possible.
Johana was raped by a Polish Nazi soldier
During the first meeting, Johana told Ervin her life story in one breath.
She grew up in The Hague, and was an 18-year-old virgin when she met his father on a train in November 1943. Gregor Kulig was a Nazi. He was a 23-year-old blue-eyed, handsome Pole. At a party four weeks later, he raped her.
When her father found out she was pregnant, he exploded. "You are a sinner!" he told her. He ordered that the child be taken to a distant city and put up for adoption.
Sad and desperate, Johanna took a train to Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1944. After trying to survive there as a single mother, she went to an orphanage in the Prague area of Holešovice. Sobbing, she kissed little Ervin and returned to Holland alone.
Her father, a Jew who joined the Nazi movement to protect the family, destroyed the adoption papers and forbade her to ever speak about her son.
For years, letters arrived from the orphanage asking Johanna to take over the child. They remained unanswered. Now Johana has found a son. When they drank the champagne, he took her hand.
“You have to believe. I am your son,” he told her.
Translated by: A. Šofranac
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