On November 18th the BBC broke the story of how John Johan Stonehouse, a British MP, faked his death during the Cold War, bringing the bizarre tale back into the public eye.
In the 1960s, Stonehouse reportedly worked for the Harold Wilson government, had three children with his wife and lived a very happy life. There is even talk that he might one day become prime minister on behalf of the Labour Party. But in 1969, a defector from Czechoslovakia claimed the country had recruited Stonehouse as a spy, and Stonehouse’s political scandal unfolded. When Labour lost the general election in 1970, Stonehouse decided to devote more time to business interests.
In 1971, when the Bangladesh Liberation War broke out, Stonehouse became a familiar figure to the local people, devoting himself to the country’s cause. After the war, he was granted Demographics of Bangladesh status and asked to help set up a trust bank for Bangladeshis in Britain. But Stonehouse was dismayed when the bank’s approach was later criticised in the British press and investigated by the official fraud squad and then the Department of Trade and industry, scaring away most of its customers, decided to cheat death to escape all this.
He reportedly forged a passport application in the name of a dead foundry worker, Markham, and packaged the new identity as a globe-trotting export consultant, he has bank accounts in London, Switzerland and Melbourne. Then he created a second identity in the name of the late Milden. To pave the way for a fake death, Stonehouse also transferred large amounts of cash into his new identity’s bank account. On November 20,1974, Stonehouse was in Miami, Florida, carrying out his death-defying plan. He was swimming in the sea when a pile of clothes was found on the beach. “I was convinced in my heart it was a drowning accident,” his wife, Barbara, said at the time, when Stonehouse had actually moved on.
Embarrassingly, Stonehouse’s death was accidentally revealed just before Christmas that same year. Melbourne police reportedly targeted Stonehouse for several bank cards under his false identity and arrested him on suspicion of being another notorious aristocratic assassin, Lord Lukken, stonehouse, whose “Perfect mask” has been debunked and forced to confess, blames “Split personality” for his actions. In 1975, Stonehouse was deported and brought home. In August 1976, Stonehouse was sentenced to seven years in prison for theft, fraud and fraud, during which he suffered three cardiac arrests. He was released three years later after recovering from heart surgery. Stonehouse died in 1988 while preparing to appear on a television show.
Stonehouse, the report said, had denied in an interview that he was a Czechoslovak spy. However, Professor Andrew, a cambridge-based intelligence historian and one of the few people to have seen the Stonehouse archives, wrote in his 2009 history of British intelligence, stonehouse did Slovaks for Czechoslovakia. In the 2023, Stonehouse’s story was filmed in the British media as a television series of the same name.