Man Utd icon’s dad blackmailed into turning into spy secretly turned ‘double agent’
There is usually plenty of drama surrounding the Premier League games that take place every weekend.
Goals, red cards, debatable offside calls (even with VAR in place), hope, despair, glory and ruin. But, sometimes, nothing can compare the spectacle we see in between the white lines to the narratives going on outside of them.
Take, for instance, Manchester United legend Peter Schmeichel. He is one of the best top-flight goalkeepers in English football history and certainly one of the best in the Premier League era.
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He won five titles, three FA Cups, was part of the 1999 Treble-winning side after their Champions League success over Bayern Munich, was involved in bust-ups with club team-mates along the way and also won the 1992 Euros with Denmark for good measure.
His son, Kasper, even went on to be a professional keeper as well and was part of Leicester‘s incredible 5,000-1 Premier League success in 2015-16. But there is more to the Schmeichel family than meets the eye. Peter, who turned 61 earlier this month, also has a family history some people may not be aware of.
(Image: Manchester United via Getty Images)
The former keeper says his Polish-born father, Tolek, was blackmailed into becoming a spy during the Cold War. Tolek, who was a pianist, met Peter’s mother Inger in Poland in the late 1950s but in order to move back to her native Denmark, he was forced to cooperate with the then Communist Polish government.
“You have to think back to that time, the Cold War,” Schmeichel told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs host Lauren Laverne back in 2021.
“If you had any contact with a westerner then they kept an eye on you. Once they realised that my father wanted to leave [Poland] and go to Denmark they were trying to force him.
(Image: Getty Images)
“My father was a musician. He was educated in the music school in Poland. He is nothing other than a musician. But they wanted him to spy on Denmark. That was the condition for leaving Poland: that he would spy on Denmark.
“And my father didn’t want to do that, but eventually he realised that if he didn’t agree he would never leave Poland, so he agreed and got sent out to Denmark via Berlin.”
But the former United keeper insists his father would never have spied on the Danes, and in fact did completely the opposite.
He added: “At the time they were building the [Berlin] Wall as well. So he experienced all that. He was completely paranoid and didn’t know what to do. So what he did when he came to Denmark, eventually, he reported himself.
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“They [the Danish] had no clue. They did not know what to do with this guy, because obviously he was very low level. They put him in a prison cell only for a few days until they realised, ‘Well, we might be able to spy on Poland.’
“He didn’t want to do that either but he agreed because he would get out and go and see his wife and hopefully be around for when his first child was being born. In a way he became a double spy, a double agent.”
Schmeichel was then asked if he believed Tolek did much spying during his childhood. “I really do think nothing,” he said. “I don’t know where he would have found out anything that would have been of interest for anybody, any service in Poland that they couldn’t find out themselves.
“Once he hit Denmark his life was work, work, work.”
