BELGRADE, THURSDAY

HE STANDS OVER six feet tall, has two passports, is the ultimate dashing foreign correspondent and was almost honey-trapped by the Czech Secret Service in 1983. His name is Simpson, John Simpson, the BBC man with a voice so smooth it could pass for triple distilled whiskey.

And now he confesses that he had a two-year relationship with a deep-cover Communist agent in the Corporation’s World Service at the height of the Cold War. Are British Intelligence curious?

“You bet they are,” says Walter Munch, who worked inside the East German Stasi for MI6 during the 1960s and 70s. “They’re saying she was recruited at a cocktail party in the mid-1980s. That she left Czechoslovakia in 1969 and went straight from a British university to the BBC Slovak service. Sounds like long-term penetration to me – if you’ll excuse the pun, ha, ha. How many agents did the Czechs send after the Russian invasion in ’68, all claiming to be bona fide refugees? Russia used to deliberately cause trouble just to get agents into the West.”

Mr Simpson, who was married with two young daughters at the time of his relationship with Terezia Javorska, says the spy was neurotic and that precluded a long-term relationship.

“Perhaps the pressure of her situation made her so,” insists Munch. “Betrayal is a hard burden, no matter what your inner convictions. I know. Mr Simpson’s article in the Daily Mail, explaining everything, seems as much an attempt at distance as anything else. Get your version in first before someone else finds out. He says she wasn’t recruited till after they parted. Perhaps. He says she was probably pressured. Perhaps. She’s now in a coma, following a traffic accident. Convenient. I’m sure the readers of the Daily Mail will be sympathetic.”

It was the Daily Mail that actually found the file that dished the treachery. And it appears that Ms Javorska, who is Slovak, and a Catholic to boot, used M&S shopping bags to communicate with her Czech secret service handlers.

“Simpson says he almost fell for a Czech honey trap in 1983, when his first marriage was failing,” Munch remarked. “This shows that the Czechs were definitely interested in him then. Perhaps they knew his domestic problems all too well. And if they were so interested in him in 1983, isn’t it possible they were interested in him in the previous years when he was with Ms Javorska? Agent Vora, as she was known. If there is a single photograph, or even a memory, of Mr Simpson carrying an M&S shopping bag in the 1980s, then he will have questions to answer.”