Journalist and communist spy Terézia Javorská. (source: Daily Mail website)
A Slovak journalist who went by the name of Terézia Javorská worked as a spy for the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia while working for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in London, the recently declassified Czech archive files from the Cold War era show.
Daily Mail, a British tabloid daily, broke the story at the end of last year.
A BBC spokesman said: “This is the first the BBC has heard of these historical allegations, which we will take seriously,” a BBC spokesperson told the daily.
At a time of supplying the communists with information about how the BBC reported on the situation behind the Iron Curtain, Javorká headed the BBC World Service’s Slovak section.
Agent Vora
Javorská also spied on political refugees who had fled persecution by the communist regime and worked for the BBC.
“Security experts believe it to be the first known case of an agent from a foreign intelligence agency infiltrating the corporation since the start of the Cold War,” the daily writes.
The BBC executive, who resembled English singer and TV presenter Cilla Black, used Agent Vora as her code name.
In meetings with her handlers from the Czechoslovak embassy, she “used M&S carrier bags to signal potential danger, exchanged code words about film directors and arranged rendezvous at opera houses by sending signals hidden in postcards”, the daily adds.
Her former BBC colleagues didn’t know that their boss, ‘a regular church goer’, had been a spy. They described her as ‘attractive’ but also ‘unpopular’ for her nationalism. According to them, she frequently didn’t like reports critical of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia.
From au pair to communist spy
Javorská was recruited to become a spy by the Czechoslovak State Security Service at a party in the mid-eighties. By that time, she had already been working for the BBC for several years.
The farmer’s daughter moved to Britain in August 1969 to initially work there as an au pair. She joined the BBC after her university studies, in 1976.
Javorská continued to work for the communists and provided them with ‘interesting information’ until the collapse of the regime for an ‘ideological motive and patriotic sentiment’. After this period, she still continued to head the BBC’s Slovak section. It closed down in 2005.
“Agent Vora shows that these regimes didn’t just want to control their own media, they also wanted to control ours,’ Professor Anthony Glees, intelligence and security expert from the University of Buckingham, told the Daily Mail.
According to the Czech website Hlídací Pes, 73-year-old Javorská is in a coma. She has been living in a care facility following a car accident for the past three years.
