FORMER Newham and Ilford Recorder reporters Paul Henderson and David Gardner have written a wartime book that tells the incredible story of a mother, the son she was forced to give up for adoption, and the spy who, decades later, infiltrated her life with a devastating lie.

The non-fiction page-turner, A Spy In The Family. is on the shelves in the UK from Sunday March 2.

Paul, who lived in Central Park Avenue, East Ham, when working for the Newham Recorder, was a staffer at the Daily Mail when the Spy With No Name case made national headlines in 1989.

David, who worked for the Ilford Recorder, covered the Old Bailey trial after the spy calling himself Erwin van Haarlem, was exposed in a raid by Special Branch and MI5 on a flat in Friern Barnet, north London.

Van Haarlem was caught red handed sending coded messages from a shortwave radio beginning an investigation by Paul and David, who were then Daily Mail reporters. “What unfolded at the Old Bailey in 1989 was an extraordinary story of espionage,” said David.

“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 to remain undercover.

” The defendant had hijacked the identity of Johanna’s son Erwin van Haarlem who she had left in a Czechoslovakian orphanage during World War Two so he could survive.”

Paul was sent to Holland where he interviewed Johanna van Haarlem and then travelled to Czechoslovakia to find her real son Erwin. What happened next is a gripping story told in the book.

After working in the US as a foreign correspondent Paul became Executive Editor of the Daily Mirror and Editor of the Sunday Mirror and Sunday People.

 David Gardner worked as a foreign correspondent in the US for 26 years and is now based in Washington DC where he is bureau chief for the Daily Beast.

Paul said:: “My early days working for local papers and surrounded by amazing journalists in Newham, Stratford and Tower Hamlets gave me the experience and ability to move onto national newspapers.

“There are amazing surprises in the pages proving truth is stranger than fiction.”

A Spy In The Family is published by  Reach and is on sale at bookstores including Waterstones and WHSmith, as well as online platforms including Amazon.

Additional info about the story.

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 10 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 Vaclav Jelinek.

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.

It was only after British intelligence caught the spy red-handed sending coded messages to Prague from his London flat that Johanna was finally forced to accept that the charming art dealer that she thought was Erwin was a professional liar. She had wanted so much to believe that he was her son that she had ignored one crucial clue that gave him away – his eyes were brown, and her baby’s eyes were blue.

A Spy In The Family reveals the incredible untold story of the mother who lost her son twice.

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