Paul Henderson and David Gardner discuss A Spy in the Family

Paul Henderson and colleague David Gardner — who worked for the East London Advertiser and Ilford Recorder newspapers more than 40 years ago — started their investigation during the Old Bailey trial in 1989 of an art dealer who Special Branch and MI5 had arrested in north London as a Soviet spy.

The man was caught red-handed in a raid on a flat in Friern Barnet transmitting coded messages to his spymasters in Prague and Moscow with a shortwave radio set.  

He called himself Erwin van Haarlem and claimed his mother was living in the Netherlands — but it was all a lie.

Paul Henderson… one-time East London Advertiser reporter who went on to edit the Sunday Mirror and Sunday People (Image: Paul Henderson) Now 36 years on, the two journalists who followed his trial have collaborated in a true-life thriller published this week, A Spy in the Family, about the web of deceit.

“What unfolded at the Old Bailey was an extraordinary story of espionage,” Paul told us.

“The prosecution’s star witness was Johanna van Haarlem, who told how the man in the dock had cruelly deceived her for 13 years, claiming to be her son.”

David Gardner, who tracked the Soviet spy alongside Paul Henderson (Image: Paul Henderson) The spy had stolen the identity of Johanna’s son Erwin who she had left in an orphanage in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia during the Second World War — the only way her baby could survive.

He was jailed for ten years for espionage — but still refusing to reveal who he really was.

The ‘spy with no name’ intrigued the two journalists now on his case.

Paul had begun his career when he left school in 1969 to join the East London Advertiser in Mile End as a 17-year-old apprentice reporter.

Johanna van Haarlem and the spy who posed as her son for 13 years (Image: Paul Henderson) Lawrie Huddlestone was the editor who had been running the paper for four decades.

“He told me I would be a good journalist because I was useless at maths,” Paul recalls. “That was borne out by my school report.”

Paul, now 72, who went to Stepney Green Comprehensive and now lives in Loughton with his wife Katherine, moved on to Fleet Street after leaving the paper and teamed up with David on the spy case for the national press.

Johanna van Haarlem during the Second World War (Image: Paul Henderson) “We were assigned the van Haarlem story by our news editor,” he added. “It was an incredible story that gripped the front pages. A story like this would sell papers.”

His pal David, now 64, originally from Brentwood, began his career with the Newham and Ilford Recorder group. They met up in Fleet Street on that major spy story.

David recalls: “What unfolded was a story of espionage. The man in the dock had tricked Johanna that he was her son — but had stolen his identity from orphanage records in Czechoslovakia.”

A Spy in the Family by Paul Henderson and David Gardner (Image: Paul Henderson) David, now working in Washington DC, had been a Fleet Street crime writer and foreign correspondent filing dispatches from war-torn Beirut and the Gulf War.

Paul, meanwhile, went on to be editor of the Sunday Mirror and Sunday People. He received the Sunday Newspaper of The Year award in 2018 for exposing the Telford child sex scandal. 

But who was ‘the spy with no name’? The art dealer was identified years later as Václav Jelínek.

It was only after MI5 arrested him in 1989 that Johanna van Haarlem finally accepted he was not her son — just a cold-hearted professional liar.

The two journalists later helped Johanna, now aged 100, find her real son — living close to the orphanage where she left him in 1945.

A Spy in the Family is now on sale in bookstores and online at £16.39 hardback or £9.99 on Kindle.