LETTER FROM CENTRAL EUROPE

The news caused a stir in both Prague and Bratislava. Terezia Javorska, a journalist who worked for the BBC World Service's Slovak section from 1976 until its closure in 2005, was allegedly an agent of the StB, the Czechoslovak communist intelligence service. This is the assertion made by the British tabloid Daily Mail in an article dated December 31, 2023, which was picked up by several Czech and Slovak media.

Drawing on Communist secret police archives recently declassified by the Czech Republic, the newspaper pointed out that the Slovak, who became known as "Agent Vora," moved to the UK in 1969 as an au pair before studying social sciences. She was allegedly recruited at a party in the mid-1980s by a StB officer who happened to be a diplomat at the Czechoslovak embassy in London.

While she initially feared the risks involved – two Czechoslovak agents had been expelled from the UK in 1984 – her "ideological motivations and patriotic feelings" eventually got the better of her, according to archives consulted by the Daily Mail.

"We had 13 meetings with her, and she gave us information about Czechoslovak opponents emigrating to the country and their activities, as well as the situation within the BBC's Czech and Slovak sections," reads a December 1985 archive cited by the British tabloid. In August 1987, she was promoted to full "agent" because of her discretion and the quality of the information she provided. The documents state that she "verbally expressed her willingness to collaborate consciously with the Czechoslovak intelligence services."

Some of her former colleagues in the UK expressed astonishment to the newspaper, describing a woman who went to church and lived in upmarket Kensington, but who resisted the idea of broadcasting content critical of the Czechoslovak communist regime. Others recounted how her Slovak nationalism and the way she asserted her point of view "made her unpopular" with the editorial staff.

"I knew her very well and, to be honest, the information that she could have been, or was, a StB agent does not surprise me very much," Jan Bednar, a Czech journalist with the BBC from 1985 to 1992, told the independent Czech media Hlidaci Pes. "She was a strange, divisive person; she wasn't very popular with her colleagues." After the fall of communism, she is said to have supported the Slovak nationalist leader Vladimir Meciar, leading the journalist to conclude: "She was a Slovak nationalist."

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