Communist spy at the heart of the BBC
Cilla lookalike ran the Slovak radio section during Cold War
A BBC executive worked as a Communist spy at a critical moment in the Cold War, the Mail can reveal.
Terezia Javorska, the director of the BBC World Service’s Slovak section, supplied handlers with intelligence about journalists’ sources and the broadcaster’s methods of reporting ‘developments in the USSR’.
She also spied on refugees who had fled persecution behind the Iron Curtain, many of whom worked for the BBC. Experts believe Javorska to be the first known case of a foreign intelligence agent infiltrating the corporation since the start of the Cold War.
Her secret role saw her exchanging code words about film directors and arranging meetings at opera houses by sending signals hidden in postcards. She impressed spy chiefs, who praised her ‘ aptness for conspiratorial conduct’.
Former BBC journalists who worked under Javorska, who bore a remarkable resemblance to singer and TV star Cilla Black, told the Mail they had never suspected their ambitious boss.
But they recalled she often opposed them broadcasting reports that included opinions critical of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia.
Codenamed Agent Vora, Czechoslovak-born Javorska was a churchgoer who lived in a stucco-fronted apartment in Kensington, west London.
But she agreed to betray her new country for ‘ ideological motive and patriotic sentiment’, according to declassified Czech state Cold War Security Service Archive files obtained by the Mail. The daughter of a Slovak farmer, Javorska moved to the UK in 1969 as an au pair before taking a social sciences degree at the University of London. She joined the BBC on graduation in 1976 and later became head of the Slovak section.
Colleagues at the World Service HQ in London’s Bush House described her as ‘attractive and voluptuous’ but said her fierce Slovak nationalism and strident manner made her unpopular.
An agent for the ruthless Czech StB Security Service posted to London recruited her at a cocktail party in the mid 1980s. A cable sent back to Prague noted: ‘She has access to internal information regarding the British mass media coverage against the socialist Eastern Bloc countries, and political news.’
A file from 1985 noted: ‘To date we have held 13 meetings with her during which she handed over information about Czechoslovak adversary emigres... and also the state of affairs in the Czech and Slovak sections of the BBC.’ When her handler returned to Prague, she gave him two books, Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister, based on the BBC comedy series.
After Communism collapsed in 1989 she continued to run the BBC’s Slovak section until it closed in 2005. Professor Anthony Glees, an intelligence expert at the University of Buckingham, said: ‘She would have been a very important asset for Communists at a critical time in
‘Attractive and voluptuous’
‘Betraying dissidents’
the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was trying to keep its grip on its satellite states.
‘As a BBC journalist she would have been trusted, but all the time she was betraying journalists and other dissidents... potentially putting them at risk.’
Javorska remained in her Kensington flat, now worth £1.5million, until three years ago when she was injured in a car accident and is now in a care home. Her family declined to comment.
A BBC spokesman said: ‘This is the first the BBC has heard of these historical allegations, which we will take seriously.’