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The Last Great Cold War Espionage Story
Travis Elborough in conversation with Paul Henderson
Presented by: The Sohemian Society| 0 | LONDON: The upstairs function room at the Horse & Groom pub (Great Portland Street) |
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| P | Wednesday 5th November, 2025 |
| N | 6:15pm |
Event information
“A Spy in the Family” is the first book to reveal the full, astonishing story of “Václav Jelínek”, aka Erwin van Haarlem, using previously unseen documents from the UK, the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic.
Johanna van Haarlem looks across the Old Bailey courtroom to the hawk-featured man in the dock. There is no expression on his face. No remorse. And certainly no love. For over ten years, she had believed he was Erwin van Haarlem, the son she gave up for adoption as a baby in the chaos of Europe in World War Two. She’d embraced him into her family and showered him with all the love he’d missed as a child. Then she lost her son a second time when the police told her the man she now faced in court was an imposter.
Apparently his real name was Václav Jelínek. But Special Branch, MI5 and even the judge who sentenced Erwin van Haarlem to prison in 1989 as the last Soviet Bloc agent of the Cold War had no clue to his real identity – he was the spy with no name.
Using the name Erwin van Haarlem, he was ordered by his masters to spy on the Royal Family and the Labour Party, to infiltrate Jewish groups and plunder the West’s nuclear secrets.
But his biggest betrayal was to the woman he tricked into believing she was his mother for more than a decade.
Paul Henderson is an author and award-winning investigative journalist. While Editor of the UK’s “Sunday Mirror”, he received the London Press Club “Sunday Newspaper of the Year Award” for campaigning journalism in 2018. As the “Daily Mail”s Chief Investigative Reporter and the “Mail on Sunday”’s Investigations Editor he was highly commended in the British Press Awards for filing revelatory despatches from China, Albania and Libya. As a US correspondent, he covered the Virginia Tech massacre, Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign and Bernie Madoff's $64.8bn Ponzi fraud.
Described by “The Guardian” as “one of the country’s finest pop culture historians”, Travis Elborough is the author of many books, including “Wish You Were Here: England on Sea”, “The Long-Player Goodbye, Through the Looking Glasses: The Spectacular Life of Spectacles” and “The Atlas of Vanishing Places”, winner of Edward Stanford Travel Book Award in 2020.
Venue information
LONDON: The upstairs function room at the Horse & Groom pub (Great Portland Street)| 0 | 128 Great Portland Street London W1W 6PS |
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| ` | There is no wheelchair access. The venue is a short walk from Oxford Circus Underground Station. |
