First came a birthday card, then love letters each more amorous than the last.
But it was only when the BBC’s celebrated foreign correspondent John Simpson received suggestive photographs of their author that he began to wonder whether it was all too good to be true.
It was 1983, the height of the Cold War, and in one photo discovered in an archive by The Mail on Sunday the beautiful young woman from then-communist Czechoslovakia is draped provocatively across a sofa, a copy of Playboy magazine close by.
In another, as Simpson would recall years later, she leans forward ‘bosom first’ conveying ‘the definite promise of more to come’.
Pictured: Anna, the hotel receptionist from Czechslovakia posing alongside a copy of Playboy magazine, in one of the photographs received by BBC reporter John Simpson
And in a third she sits by a phone, her hand poised over the receiver as if beseeching him to call.
Some weeks earlier, when he had first met Anna in Prague, Simpson experienced what he termed ‘a coup de foudre’ – or thunderbolt – and when he returned to London he responded to her letters with warm missives of his own.
His marriage was crumbling and he was approaching 40, an age, he noted, when ‘men are more given to self-flattery than most’.
But surveying the photos now spread before him, he realised he was ‘in too deep’.
And he was right. For the woman he called a ‘madonna from a Slavic icon’ turned out to be Agent Anna of the StB – the Czech intelligence service – and she was attempting to ensnare him in a honeytrap.
Simpson was reminded of the episode when Jeremy Corbyn’s dalliance with a StB spy made headlines last month. As The Mail on Sunday reported last week, the BBC’s World Affairs Editor, 73, delivered an abridged account of his encounter with Anna to listeners of Radio Four’s Today programme. Sounding amused, presenter Sarah Montague declared it fascinating stuff.
Yet the complete story is more intriguing still – and, had they known of it, might have served as a salutary warning to Corbyn and other politicians targeted by the StB.
Intelligence experts in the Czech Republic have told The Mail on Sunday the operation against Simpson was extremely carefully planned.
Karel Pacner, who has written extensively on the StB, said: ‘The goal was to blackmail him and then quite possibly use him to identify Labour MPs for possible cultivation and recruitment.’ As it was, he added, Simpson escaped Anna’s clutches ‘just in time’.
In his account last week, Simpson claimed that in 1983, when he was already a seasoned globe-trotting correspondent, he had ‘never heard the expression “honeytrap” before’.
But this rather contradicts his own account of the episode, written 16 years after it happened in his book Strange Places, Questionable People.
Then he recalled that while flying to Prague – just hours before first meeting Anna – he warned his BBC colleagues that ‘honeytraps’ were commonly used by the StB. Lecturing his team on the possible dangers awaiting them, he added that ‘we should all be careful of the women we come across’.
John Simpson, pictured with his wife Dee, said he was reminded of the episode when Jeremy Corbyn’s dalliance with a StB spy made headlines last month
He recalled warning colleagues that the StB was highly efficient and had been entrusted by the Russians with spying on Britain. ‘There were all sorts of ways in which this could be done, but the most common was the good old-fashioned honeytrap,’ wrote Simpson in the book.
Arriving at their ‘concrete-slab’ hotel near Prague’s centre, he was greeted by Anna.
He wrote: ‘As we checked in my eyes met the violet eyes of the receptionist: a madonna from a Slavic icon. There was more than a touch of animal magnetism.’
Over the next ten days, they barely spoke more than a few sentences to each other. ‘But she had registered the look,’ observed Simpson.
Unlike the Prague of today – a popular, vibrant tourist destination – the city he encountered was closed and foreboding, in the grip of a brutal totalitarian regime. It would be another six years before the collapse of communism brought freedom.
Because of its proximity to a building that housed companies permitted to trade with foreign firms, the BBC’s hotel was frequently used by visiting businessmen. Staff traced by The Mail on Sunday who worked there at the same time as Anna in the 1980s recall it was well known that some receptionists were StB informants and possibly even agents working undercover.
One former kitchen worker said: ‘They were chosen because they were front of house and had direct dealings with the foreigners. We avoided them because we didn’t want to become involved with the secret police.’
Some of the rooms were fitted with hidden microphones and monitored 24 hours a day.
‘Anyone considered of interest might be given one of these rooms,’ said Mr Pacner.
Whether Anna directed Simpson to one is not known. Certainly the StB kept a close watch on him during his stay.
Ostensibly he was covering a conference organised by the World Peace Council, at the time considered by the Americans to be a KGB front organisation.
But as Simpson suspected, the event was little more than a ‘Nato bashing’ exercise, and instead he took the opportunity to report on human rights abuses, interviewing members of Charter 77, a leading dissident group, among them playwright Vaclav Havel, the future first president of the Czech Republic. Simpson recalled that each evening his team had to slip out of the heavily guarded hotel to ‘get into our little hired car and lose the tail which the StB put on us; usually by overtaking a bus and then turning suddenly into a side street and switching our lights off’.
The veteran broadcaster, 73, said he welcomed the amorous approach from a woman called Anna at a vulnerable time in his life. Pictured: Simpson with his current wife Dee
To the StB’s chagrin, he reported on the first demonstration against communism since the period before the Soviet invasion of 1968, as well as a meeting between Charter 77 and CND delegates in a park on the outskirts of Prague.
Several secret policemen, he recalled, hid in trees and themselves filmed what unfolded.
Eventually the Czechs had enough and ordered him to leave the country. He said goodbye to Anna and headed home.
Some weeks later, going through his post at BBC TV Centre, he came across an envelope with a Prague postmark. It was a birthday card from Anna and ‘carefully worded to mean everything or nothing’. She must have known his birthday, he mused, because he handed her his passport when he checked in at her Prague hotel.
He responded ‘in similar style’ and ‘soon the reply came, a little warmer. I replied at a similar temperature’ and at some point Anna suggested meeting in Hungary.
Owing to his marriage breakdown, he was ‘vulnerable’ and only too keen to persuade himself that Anna liked him for himself, ‘rather than for some devious purpose of her own’. Simpson said of one letter from Anna: ‘I was, it seemed, the only man who could understand her private thoughts.’
Simpson recalled that he then received a heavily accented phone call from a London-based man called Mr Blanco, later unmasked as a Czech agent.
‘There was a definite nudge in the voice, a sort of “you-naughty-dog-you” note,’ wrote Simpson.
The mysterious Mr Blanco said he had a ‘special envelope’ for Simpson. ‘He gave me his phone number and told me that he worked in import-export; and when I laughed he hung up, a touch offended,’ wrote Simpson.
But Simpson had given him his address, and later the pictures were delivered. They unnerved the BBC man – and examining one picture through a magnifier, a friend saw the reflection of someone else in a glass lampshade.
It disproved Anna’s claim that she had taken them herself, and Simpson knew what had to be done.
He alerted MI5 and was soon visited by a man in a ‘shiny suit’ who claimed to be from the Ministry of Defence.
Simpson said that after looking at a picture of Anna the man said: ‘I say, she’s a bit of a stunner.’
The suit, Simpson said, explained that he was being set up – and outlined a likely scenario. He revealed that someone from the BBC’s language services had also been invited by a Czech girl to meet her in Hungary. The couple were in bed when her husband, or someone claiming to be her husband, burst in and then fell and hit his head.
John Simpson, the BBC’s World Affairs Editor, has revealed how he almost fell for a ‘honeytrap’ set by a glamorous Czech spy at a time when his marriage was in trouble. Pictured: Simpson with his then-wife Diane and their two children in 1973
Simpson said he was told that a security officer then arrived saying they would have to charge the BBC man with attempted murder unless he obtained the addresses of families of people who had escaped from countries behind the Iron Curtain to work for the BBC in London. He agreed.
It was more than a year before he broke down and admitted all this to one of his colleagues.
A few weeks later, with the love letters having dried up, Simpson received an update from MI5. He recalled they sent a ‘rather attractive young woman’ to see him and over a BBC lunch she explained that they hadn’t previously known about Mr Blanco. She said he had now been expelled from the UK.
To his credit, Simpson – who married his second wife Dee in 1996 – has always been open about his brush with both the StB and MI5, and many years ago recounted the story in a literary magazine before repeating it in his book. ‘Neither the StB nor MI5 ever got in contact with me again,’ he said. ‘But it did occur to me to wonder why, exactly, MI5 had chosen to send an attractive young woman round to see me.’
When he returned to Prague in 1989 to cover the fall of communism he found Anna still working at the same hotel.
At first she didn’t recognise him, then she coloured pink and ‘turned and headed away from the desk fast’. He waited a while but she didn’t reappear.
Today the hotel is in many ways little changed from the 1980s, save the absence of StB agents.
Anna, of course, has long gone and Simpson said last week that he never knew her full name.
But a former restaurant manager, who worked there for 42 years, said that he recognised her. Sometime after the 1989 revolution, though, she disappeared – ‘just like the secret police’.
Are you Anna, or do you know of her and her whereabouts? Contact our reporter at ian.gallagher@mailonsunday.co.uk.