Now living in a £800,000, five-bedroom home that could easily be mistaken for one of the properties featured in hit crime drama series The Sopranos, Karel Pravec appears to have put his spying days behind him

The Mail on Sunday tracked down Karel Pravec to a sleepy suburban street in the American state of New Jersey – a world away from Czechoslovakia of the 1960s.

Now living in a £800,000, five-bedroom home that could easily be mistaken for one of the properties featured in hit crime drama series The Sopranos, Mr Pravec appears to have put his spying days behind him.

The 88-year-old was at first stunned into silence when The Mail on Sunday confronted him with his past at his front door.

After demanding to know how this newspaper had unearthed details of his alleged secret meetings with the Labour grandee, Mr Pravec was shown a dossier of secret files that laid bare his past association.

Still on the doorstep and hunched over a Mail on Sunday laptop screen, the former spymaster bowed his head and appeared dumbfounded as he scrolled through the cache of declassified files. After pausing for a moment, Mr Pravec looked up and, in a thick, gravelly Czech accent, tinged with a slight American twang, said: ‘I’m not discussing what happened in the 1960s. This is all a very long time ago and I won’t talk about any of it.’

When pressed further about his past life, Mr Pravec, who has lost none of the quick-wittedness typical of a Communist agent operating in London, said solemnly: ‘Do you think if I was a good spy I would answer any of your stupid questions?’

Little is known of exactly how Mr Pravec found his way to suburban America. But it seems that as relations between East and West worsened, Mr Pravec became disaffected with the Communist regime.

According to a biography by his son Karel, an experienced Brazilian jiu jitsu black belt who fights under the moniker Silver Fox, Mr Pravec was forced to flee Czechoslovakia in 1980 after he denounced Soviet rule. Nearly 40 years later, Mr Pravec and his family appear to have blended seamlessly into American society.

Their enormous US house, about 20 miles north of New York City, is nestled in an acre of land and surrounded by forest.

With its double garage and typically American postbox at the front, no one would suspect that the occupant once compiled detailed reports for the Soviet regime. Mr Pravec seemed shocked that the MoS had managed to track him down.

Little is known of exactly how Mr Pravec found his way to suburban America. But it seems that as relations between East and West worsened, Mr Pravec became disaffected with the Communist regime

When pressed further about his past life, Mr Pravec, who has lost none of the quick-wittedness typical of a Communist agent operating in London, said solemnly: ‘Do you think if I was a good spy I would answer any of your stupid questions?’

Locals said Mr Pravec and his wife had lived in the house for years, and that he was a quiet and mild-mannered man.

It is hardly surprising that Mr Pravec chose to relocate his family here. With several schools in the area and a high street filled with diners, the town offers a slice of typical US life.

With a population just shy of 8,500, it is the perfect place to escape a past that could have been lifted straight out of a John le Carré novel.

One resident said: ‘They’re a friendly couple but keep themselves to themselves.

‘We know that they came over here from Czechoslovakia but he doesn’t really talk about what went on before that.’

‘This is a very peaceful town,’ another neighbour said. ‘We are friendly but we don’t pry into people’s lives. We certainly respect people’s privacy.’

Penny pincher nabbed handler's strawberries - and flew in to rage at waiter's £2 cover charge

By Mark Hookham

He may have been seen as a champagne socialist during the New Labour years, but 30 years earlier Czechoslovakian spymasters painted a very different picture of Geoffrey Robinson, reporting that he appeared to be a penny-pincher.

An intelligence report reveals that at meeting in a restaurant in July 1967 between Robinson and Karel Pravec, his Czech intelligence handler, Robinson ‘got angry’ that waiters had added a £2 cover charge to their bill.

He may have been seen as a champagne socialist during the New Labour years, but 30 years earlier Czechoslovakian spymasters painted a very different picture of Geoffrey Robinson, reporting that he appeared to be a penny-pincher

He insisted that they should not get a tip and picked up the ten shillings that had been left on a plate by Pravec.

‘Although he was holding the money in his hand up until the time they parted, he did not return it to Comrade Pelnar [Pravec],’ the report states.

‘At the next meeting, he apologised for taking the money and not returning it but did not return it even then, showing pleasure when Comrade Pelnar declined to take the money.’

Nevertheless, Pravec ordered strawberries for dessert and pretended not to want them

The handler meticulously recorded ‘noteworthy’ incidents involving money but a report detailing meetings in 1966 and 1967 shows that the Czech spies had not been able to confirm that their informant had an ‘interest in material gain’.

Pravec, however, appears to have engineered scenarios to test how his informant would react. During the July 1967 meeting, Robinson finished his main course and insisted he did not want any more to eat. Nevertheless, Pravec ordered strawberries for dessert and pretended not to want them. ‘Karko [Robinson] ate not only his own portion but also Comrade Pelnar’s, without first asking Comrade Pelnar’s permission,’ an intelligence report notes. The Czechs assumed their informant’s ‘financial situation was not too good and that it prevented him from having an active social life’.

During a visit by the pair to the Pigalle club in Piccadilly, Robinson ‘showed a lively interest in gambling’ but while his handler played roulette, Robinson opted to ‘play on the gambling machines at six pence a time’.

Meanwhile, the files show that Robinson told his handler that he was getting married in Malta in 1967 and was planning to stop off briefly in Italy on the way home.

‘He literally said that he didn’t have enough money for a longer trip,’ a report notes.

During a night out in October 1966, Pravec discovered that he did not have enough money to pay a bill and the entrance fee of a nightclub where he wanted to take Robinson.

He borrowed £3 from his informant, which ‘was all the money Karko had on him’. ‘At the next meeting, when Comrade Pelnar repaid him the sum, Karko pretended that he didn’t want the money, but then held open his jacket pocket so that Comrade Pelnar could put the money in,’ a report in the files adds.

The perfect gift for a bon viveur: a gallon of whisky

Karel Pravec knew that a surefire way of gleaning information from a loose-lipped informant was with copious amounts of alcohol.

The intelligence files claim that Geoffrey Robinson grew to trust his Czech handler during boozy lunches and dinners and nights out in pubs and clubs.

A report of Pravec’s early encounters with Robinson detailed the informant’s ‘tendency to drink’, along with his ‘tendency to boast’.

The pair first met over drinks at a pub at the 1966 Labour Party conference in Brighton, where Robinson introduced the Czechoslovakian spook to Labour MPs, including the then Defence Secretary Denis Healey. Pravec noted that Robinson ‘drinks almost exclusively whisky with ginger beer, and in considerable quantities at that’.

Pravec noted that Robinson ‘kept himself together quite well’ until the last whisky ‘when there was a sudden change and he started showing signs of mild drunkenness, closing the eyes from time to time, speaking loudly and gesturing widely (other than that, however, he restrained himself)’

A few weeks later, the pair had dinner together at the Maison Prunier restaurant in London, at which Pravec told his spy bosses that Robinson ‘got rather drunk’.

He added: ‘I had to make an effort to keep up with him to an acceptable extent. He drank several double shots of whisky with ginger beer (even after dinner instead of cognac) and, as part of dinner together with me, two bottles of wine.’

Pravec noted that Robinson ‘kept himself together quite well’ until the last whisky ‘when there was a sudden change and he started showing signs of mild drunkenness, closing the eyes from time to time, speaking loudly and gesturing widely (other than that, however, he restrained himself).’

At a meeting three days before Christmas in 1966, Robinson ‘very willingly’ accepted a gallon of whisky as a gift from Pravec.

And at a later meeting, he asked his handler for a few bottles of whisky because he knew that Czech diplomats could buy them for a heavily discounted price.

Spy expert: 'Robinson knew he was sharing intelligence with agents...'

By Abul Taher in Bratislava

A leading Cold War expert last night said declassified files obtained by The Mail on Sunday provided evidence that Geoffrey Robinson knew he was passing information on to a Communist intelligence agent.

Cold War ghosts haunting Labour There is a long list of Labour MPs and officials caught up in alleged spy scandals. The most high-profile claims swirled around former Labour leader Michael Foot. KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky claimed Foot received payments and was an agent. Foot, who died in 2010 aged 96, denied it. Last year it was reported that Jeremy Corbyn had meetings in the 1980s with a Czech StB spy. Mr Corbyn denied the claims. MP John Stonehouse was accused in the 1960s of spying for the StB. He disappeared, presumed drowned, in November 1974, but was later found in Australia. In 2010, National Archives papers revealed that he had indeed been a paid spy. Bob Edwards, a West Midlands MP from 1955 to 1987, was identified by Britain as a KGB informant. He was later honoured by the Soviet Union. Advertisement

Dr Daniela Richterova, a lecturer in intelligence studies at Brunel University in London, said that if accurate, the documents from the archive of the StB, the Czech secret police, appear to disclose that Robinson ‘was consciously making a decision to share sensitive information with the Czech intelligence service and the Russians.’

Dr Richterova is a highly regarded expert on the StB and has pored over the secret police’s archive to research other MPs who were spying for Czechoslovakia, including former Labour Government Minister John Stonehouse.

Dr Richterova last week examined the Karko file, detailing the StB’s handling of Geoffrey Robinson between 1966 and 1969. A Czech-speaker, she studied both the original documents and the English translations.

She confirmed that she had previously come across Karel Pravec, Robinson’s Czech handler who was codenamed Comrade Pelnar, during her own research, and that other files show that he was getting information from ‘at least one other British informant during that time in London’. She said: ‘The documents appear to me to be genuine.

‘If accurate, it is clear that Robinson knew that Pelnar was not a straight-up diplomat, he knew he was an intelligence agent.

‘He was consciously making a decision to share intelligence with the Czech intelligence service and the Russians.’

She added: ‘Governments rightly expect their employees not to pass sensitive information to their adversaries. From what we know of Robinson, he consciously provided such information to Britain’s Cold War adversaries – Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union.’

Dr Daniela Richterova, a lecturer in intelligence studies at Brunel University in London, said that if accurate, the documents from the archive of the StB, the Czech secret police, appear to disclose that Robinson ‘was consciously making a decision to share sensitive information with the Czech intelligence service and the Russians’

Dr Richterova said it is not clear how important the StB spymasters in Prague regarded Robinson.

‘His handler Pelnar thinks he is a very good asset, but officials in Prague were sometimes sceptical of Robinson, as they thought he tended to exaggerate or sometimes lied.’

The academic confirmed that the StB had assigned Robinson ‘DS’ status – one level down from a full agent – but with no access to equipment capable of sending coded messages.

She added it was ‘probable’ that MI5 might have become aware of what Robinson was doing but she added: ‘It also cannot be ruled out that he was put up to this by MI5.’