by Douglas Boyd
Whether Zacharski is involved with them is hard to say. As befits a master spy, he simply disappeared after the scandal that brought down the Oleksy government, first travelling to Switzerland, where he was rumoured to have salted away substantial sums. One certain thing is that he left Poland one step ahead of prosecution for flagrant mismanagement of Pewex, i.e. corruption, and illegal trading in imported motor vehicles. Where are you now, Marian?
It seems that Poland will never know peace for long, simply because of its geographical position. The Russian withdrawal from the country after the implosion of the USSR in 1989 left a number of channels embedded in Polish security organisations and a number of ‘illegals’, who were not known to the Polish security services. So delicate is Poland’s relationship with Russia that a GRU officer lived under deep cover for at least ten years as a salesman dealing in telescopic sights for hunting rifles, and was only identified as Tadeusz J. when he appeared in a court closed to the public in December 2010 after being arrested by Agencja Bezpieczenstwa Wewnetrznego (ABW), the current Polish counter-espionage service. As part of his cover, Tadeusz J. had married a Polish woman. Cryptographic equipment and a cutting-edge communications system – transmitting direct to GRU Centre in Moscow and concealed in professionally adapted, commercially available electronic devices – were found in his home when he was arrested after a struggle in February 2009. His feeble defence that he had bought these ultra-hi-tech devices in a street market was rightly rejected by the court, which sentenced him to three years’ imprisonment and a fine equivalent to £10,000. The full extent of his mission was unknown, but it is thought to have had something to do with the now discarded US plans for an eastward-facing missile shield to be built in Poland, over which the Kremlin was hostile.6
On 5 June 1989 the Polish people voted by an overwhelming majority to place its government in the hands of Lech Wałesa’s Solidarnosc party, which took power in the city for which the Warsaw Pact had been named.
Hendryk Bogulak was apparently a humble driver employed at the Polish embassy in Paris, who also had family troubles and was about to be sent home when he drove to the US embassy and turned himself in, disclosing seventy agents of Polish Intelligence working in the West. He also disappeared below the horizon after being granted US citizenship and a new identity.
Western counter-intelligence organisations belatedly came to recognise the danger of giving asylum to immigrants from Eastern Europe. As one example, in 1977 Denmark had a Polish community of some 25,000 people and another 20,000 Poles visiting relatives there each year. How many sleeper agents there were among them is unknown. A Polish diplomat who was also an active officer of the GRU was declared persona non grata by Copenhagen after attempting to activate one sleeper whose function was to provide in-country assistance to Polish spetsnaz units in the event of the Cold War becoming hot, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. Unactivated sleepers were referred to by Danish counter-espionage organisation Politiets Efterretningsjeneste (PET) as ‘the quiet Poles’.7
Many of them, like the Warsaw Pact sleepers sent into the USA and Britain, decided that they preferred their new lifestyle, got married to Danish women and had children. One Polish neighbour of the author who came to France during ‘the socialist years’ and was allowed to bring his wife and two children with him just smiled and stayed silent when asked by the author how this had been arranged.
It is interesting to see how the vast and formerly powerful state security organisations of the satellite states handled the collapse of communism in 1989. In Poland a foxy-faced, sharp-eyed lawyer, convicted dissident and supporter of Solidarnosc named Andrzej Milczanowski was appointed to purge the UB. When he asked a head of department to show him all the department’s files, he was handed a few sheets of paper. ‘Is that your whole archive?’ Milczanowski asked in exasperation. ‘Yes,’ the officer replied said with no apparent embarrassment.8 It eventually became clear that the whole UB had gone on autopilot at the beginning of the year, when its informers and agents inside Solidarnosc realised the degree of public support Walesa’s movement had gained and therefore initiated a programme of destroying anything that might incriminate the service in the eyes of its future masters.9
However, the UB’s external espionage was, to Milczanowski’s mind, too important to disband, because that would be the equivalent of unilateral disarmament. Instead, he selected UB officer Gromoslav Czempinski – recalled from his American posting in 1976 after a defector gave the FBI names of all the UB officers in the USA – to join a committee that would decide which desk officers and agents to keep and which to fire. Like most compromises, it did not give the hoped-for result: officers with no black marks against them were retained, although were more likely to be just idle than sympathetic to the new regime; conversely, many officers with good track records were fired because they appeared to be hostile to it. In the end 400 out of 1,000 officers were ‘let go’.10
Notes
1. For a comprehensive exposition of Russian expansionism, see Boyd, Kremlin
2. ‘Territorial evolution of Poland’, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_Poland
3. See D. Boyd, The Other First World War, Stroud, The History Press 2014
4. Article in the New York Times, 22 January 1991
5. Article in the Independent, 25 January 1996
6. M. Day, ‘Poland Discovers Russian Sleeper Agent Living in Country for 10 Years’, Telegraph, 23 December 2010
7. Section by P.H. Hansen in A.K. Isaacs, ed., Immigration and Emigration in Historical Perspective, Pisa, Plus 2007, pp. 145–7
8. Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, p. 423
9. Ibid, p. 390
10. Ibid, p. 424
15
THE STB VERSUS THE CZECHS
AND SLOVAKS
Crossing the German–Czech border today, drivers are not even asked to slow down at the multi-lane checkpoint. There are presumably concealed surveillance cameras logging all the licence plates, but no frontier police to be seen. On either side, verdant meadows and woodland stretch away to the horizon with no sign of the watch-towers and barbed wire that cut this country off from the free world during the Cold War. The visitor is struck by how small Europe is, and how close are its capital cities: the shortest route from the German border to the outskirts of Prague is just 45 miles – half an hour in a fast car. Even for a slower Nazi Panzer tank, that was too close for comfort.
Although in small towns there are signs of the ‘socialist era’, like a once-subsidised communal dining room with a yellowing and outdated menu still in the window, the uninformed tourist driving into this green and pleasant land with its relaxed, well-dressed and prosperous-looking people would not guess that for four decades they or their parents lived under a ubiquitous secret police force run by the Státní Bezpecnost (StB) – a state security organisation suppressing all internal dissent and whose First Directorate, or První Sprava, was, like that of the KGB, charged with external espionage, targeting the Western democracies. Yet this was the description of his homeland written in 1974 by První Sprava officer Josef Frolik after his defection to the West. It was, he said:
one huge concentration camp, a human cage encircled by barbed wire, guarded against [its inhabitants’] escape by minefields and machine guns, and watched over by an all-powerful secret police … a state where everything is secret, false and prohibited (unless expressly authorised) and where one sleeps with one eye open, always waiting for that ominous 4 o’clock-in-the-morning ring at the door-bell which indicates the arrival of the secret police.
It was (and still is) a state which has been converted from the one-time ‘America of Europe’ to one where one cannot obtain razor blades which are sharp, refrigerators that cool, automobiles safe to run; where scores of official lackeys must give their consent before your child can attend a high school or you may go off on a week’s vacation.1
Whether one comes today to the Czech Republic to drink the best beer
in Europe – the generic pils got its name originally from the city of Plzen, where it was first made, and the Budweiser brand was produced originally in Ceske Budejovice, whose German name was Budweis – or to gaze at the Baroque, Gothic and Art Nouveau architecture of Prague and be enthralled by Mucha’s stained-glass windows in St Vitus’ cathedral, today’s democratic parliamentary republic has worn many masks in the past. On the street, people’s faces here are not Slavic, but European. Their country’s problem, as in buying a house, is location, location, location. In the First World War, the Czechs were vassals of Austro-Hungary and therefore enemies of the Western Allies. In the 1930s they were allies of the West, but we betrayed them to Hitler in what they refer to as first zrada Západu, or Western betrayal. After that war, a second Western betrayal handed this young country – it was only founded in 1918 – to Stalin on a plate, for it to become the oppressive society described by Frolik.
During the First World War, Czech expatriates led by Edvard Beneš in Europe and Tomáš Masaryk in the USA formed the Czechoslovak National Council to gain leverage with the Western Allies for l’après-guerre at a time when 1.4 million of their compatriots were obliged to fight in the uniforms of the Central Powers against those allies. After the end of hostilities on the eastern fronts, eight months before the armistice on the Western Front, a number of civil wars erupted in the resultant power vacuum and some 100,000 Czech and Slovak volunteers fought Trotsky’s Red Army across what had been the Russian Empire, all the way to Vladivostok on the Pacific.2
In 1918, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismantled, the Czech and Slovak peoples were allotted a space to share on the map of Central Europe. It was thought they were too few in number to have a country each – although Denmark gets along fine with fewer. But then Denmark is a peninsula open to invasion by land only from the south, whereas the Czechs and Slovaks were surrounded by potential enemies. The two peoples had in common a history as former vassals of the Habsburgs, the Czechs owing allegiance to Vienna and the Slovaks to Budapest. Their languages are very similar, but educated Czechs also spoke German while the Slovaks had Hungarian as their second language. Slovakia was predominantly rural, whereas the Czech lands in the western half of the new country were culturally in step with Western Europe and contained most of the new republic’s industries. On paper, as US President Woodrow Wilson saw it, the two halves of the new-born country were complementary and marrying them fitted in with his belief in ‘the right to self-determination of nations’ because it gave them independence from the former imperial powers of Europe. However, creating a new state is never as simple as that.
Czechoslovakia after 1945.
The allotted space on the map was christened Czechoslovakia, and Tomáš Masaryk was declared its first president on 28 October 1918 in Prague, capital of the brand-new country. The Slovaks rallied to the joint state two days later, but the process was not finalised until the Treaty of Trianon in June 1920 carved up the defunct Kingdom of Hungary and left Czechslovakia with a population of 13.5 million inhabitants and over 70 per cent of the industries of the old Habsburg Empire, largely in the German-speaking Sudetenland. The ethnic minorities in Czechoslovakia were not happy – in addition to the 3 million Germans, there were 500,000 Hungarians, 400,000 Ruthenians and 100,000 Poles in Tešín – but a system of parliamentary democracy like those in Western Europe worked reasonably well; the young republic was the only democracy left in Central and Eastern Europe after 1933. It was also ranked world tenth in industrial output by 1938, which explains why Hitler, proclaiming that all German-speakers were Ein Volk, which needed Ein Reich and Ein Führer, grabbed the industrial heartland of Czechoslovakia on the pretext of rescuing the 3 million Sudetenlanders from oppression – and thus tested the waters for his planned European war. After the Munich Agreement signed by Britain, France, Italy and Germany in September 1938 saw Czechslovakia lose most of its industrial wealth and all Czech-speakers expelled from the Sudetenland, which was annexed into the Reich, Hitler knew nobody could or would prevent the continental war on which he was intent.
Seeing the writing on the wall, Beneš resigned and sought asylum in Britain, to watch the destruction of his republic from a safe distance as the fascist governments of Germany and Italy then forced the Prague government to cede one-third of Slovakia to Hungary. Poland also annexed Slovak territory, leaving what was called ‘the Second Republic’ an unviable rump state. In March of 1939 Slovak priest and politician Josef Tiso declared Slovakia independent of Prague, clearing the way for Hitler to seize the lands of the Czechs as his ‘protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’ while the easternmost element of the Second Republic, called Ruthenia, was occupied by Hungarian troops.
The dream of the young nation was over, as was the peace.
The London Czechs formed a government-in-exile, recognised hypocritically by the British government in July 1940. During the Second World War, émigré Czechs fought the common enemy in Allied uniforms, but Tiso saw it his priestly duty to declare for the Axis powers. As a result of Hitler’s invasion of the USSR and Beneš’ compromises with Czech émigré Communists in Britain, Stalin also recognised the London government-in-exile and Beneš made an agreement with him on 8 May 1944, under which all Czechoslovak territory liberated by Soviet forces would be handed over to Czech authority. By that, Beneš meant the government-in-exile after its return to Prague. As usual, what Stalin intended was the confusion of all other parties. A year later, as combat officially ended in Eastern Europe one day later than in the West, the Czech and Slovak capitals, Prague and Bratislava, had been liberated by the Red Army with some assistance from indigenous armed resistance factions, although these numbered far less than in Poland. In apparent compliance with the deal made with Beneš, the Soviet troops withdrew before the end of the year, as did the US Third Army, which had liberated western Czechslovakia under General George Patton. He typically had wanted to continue the drive to Prague, a frustrating 45 miles to the east of his front line, but the White House decreed there must be no clash with Stalin’s troops – this in line with President Roosevelt’s expressed belief that Stalin was a gentleman, who would play by the rules of the Western democratic game.
At the 1945 Potsdam Conference Stalin held all the cards, with the two new players in the game of Big Three suffering a considerable disadvantage. President Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, had never been briefed on anything by Roosevelt, and Attlee was only elected halfway through the conference. Their body language in photographs taken at Potsdam says it all: the Soviet dictator sits rock solid and inscrutable while Truman and Attlee lean awkwardly towards, but try not to look at, the man who is getting everything his own way. Among the decisions taken there was the punitive expulsion of nearly 3 million German-speakers – some of whose families had lived in the Sudetenland for six centuries – in one of the massive deportations that changed the ethnic make-up of Central and Eastern Europe during and after the war. This emigration at gunpoint involved old men, women and children walking very long distances into what remained of the Reich, where there was no provision for them and little food even for those already there. It was achieved by a specially formed paramilitary police that was to be the nub of the pro-Communist irregulars who executed the coup of 1948. All these great events hide a multitude of individual tragedies. The parents and sister of successful U-boat commander Fregattenkapitän Reinhard Suhren, who was in an Allied jail, were so terrified after German forces withdrew westwards from the Sudetenland that the father killed his wife and daughter to prevent them falling into the hands of Czech irregulars, and then killed himself. There are no statistics to tell us how many others did the same.3
The first government of the so-called Third Republic, in which both Czechs and Slovaks were reunited, was a coalition consisting of left-wing and ‘democratic’ parties with some religious representation from Catholic Moravia. In hoping that his newborn country would be a bridge between East and West, Beneš the democrat was being optimistic
, but most of his people rightly mistrusted the Western democracies after their betrayal of 1938. Free elections in May 1946 led to another coalition in which the Communist leader Klement Gottwald was named prime minister and Komunistická Strana Ceskoslovenska (KSC) – the Czechoslovakian Communist Party – gained control of the most important posts, including the interior ministry and defence ministry.
As early as 30 June 1945 a nationwide secret police force was set up: Státní Bezpecnost (StB) or, to give it the correct Slovak title, Štátna Bezpecnost. For convenience, both organisations will be referred to as ‘StB’. Under Václav Nosek, Minister of the Interior, its role was to be ‘the sword and the shield of the party’ – not of the country, or even the government. It was modelled closely on, and ‘advised by’, the NKVD, whose title changed to Ministerstvo Vnutrennykh Del (MVD) the following year. The professed brief of StB was to hunt down and punish German stay-behinds, Czechs who had collaborated with the German occupation authorities, as well as all dissidents and people guilty of sabotage and espionage. The StB considered these legitimate targets for the state security organisation of a country that had just emerged from a brutal occupation by German forces, but StB also intimidated or put out of circulation political opponents of KSC, using forged evidence and confessions obtained under torture and by the use of drugs, thus accelerating the Communists’ rise to total power. From its inception, StB used telephone intercepts, interception of much domestic and all international mail, widespread surveillance and a photo archive of several million secretly taken photographs. The StB’s První Sprava, on the model of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, set up in Prague a company manufacturing costume jewellery, which was a traditional Czech export. The company’s offices abroad became a cover for illegals.4