In the early 1970s he was recruited and trained by the StB intelligence agency to infiltrate the United Kingdom. He was given the codename Gragert and provided the identity of Erwin Van Haarlem, a child who had been abandoned at a Czech orphanage by his Dutch mother in 1944. The real Erwin’s mother had had an affair with a Polish Nazi and became pregnant. Her father forced her to give up the baby for adoption.
Decades later, the man known as Van Haarlem was operating with great success in London. Although he worked as a waiter at the Hilton hotel, he was able to gather information on NATO’s system for tracking Soviet submarines and visited the British Admiralty’s Underwater Research Unit. Then, an unexpected complication arose. Johanna Van Haarlem came looking for her long-lost son.
With the help of the Red Cross and the Dutch Embassy, she was able to learn her son had emigrated to London. She wanted to reconnect with him. Erwin’s handlers in the StB told him to reunite with his “mother” to maintain his cover.
For the next ten years he faked his way through a relationship with Johanna, buying her gifts and bringing her to London for visits on many occasions, all while continuing his collection mission. But secretly he burned with anger at a woman he saw as a Nazi collaborator who was putting him at great risk. Nevertheless, he kept up appearances, even reuniting with his extended “family” in Holland.
In April 1988 it all came crashing down. London Metropolitan Police arrested him after a long investigation with MI5. His cover was so solid that he was tried under his alias as the UK government could not ascertain his real name. Erwin went to prison for five years and his mother realized after a DNA test that he was not her son and had known it all along. Afterwards he admitted he never felt the slightest compassion for the woman who thought him to be her long-lost son.
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