by Douglas Boyd
After getting new orders from Stalin in 1947, Gottwald upped the pressure from the superficially democratic approach, forcing the twelve non-Communist ministers to hand in their resignations in February 1948 – which they did in the hope of provoking a new election, but President Beneš refused to accept them and did not call an election. The KSC then mounted a coup d’état, presenting him with a new cabinet of its choosing. In very suspicious circumstances, the democratic Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk died in a Moscow-style ‘suicide by falling out of a window’ in the Foreign Ministry. A contemporary cartoon shows him by the window, hands tied behind his back, in the grip of two KGB thugs with a third asking him to kindly sign a declaration that he is jumping of his own free will.
His country found itself a ‘people’s democracy’, where all dissidence was to be brutally purged as in the other countries of Eastern Europe. The Catholic religion was ousted by the creed of Marxism–Leninism and Czechoslovakia was forbidden by Moscow to join the European Recovery Programme – the Marshall Plan – and obliged instead to become a founder member of Comecon. On the orders of Molotov, Pavel Sudoplatov gave to a former KGB rezident in Prague a receipt signed by Beneš’ secretary in 1938 for an unrepaid loan of $10,000, to enable the Czech statesman to escape to Britain. He in turn waved it at Beneš as a threat to reveal his former relationship with the Kremlin. Under that pressure, within a month Beneš stepped down and handed power in a bloodless coup to the Kremlin’s man, Klement Gottwald. At the time of the coup, Sudoplatov landed at a Soviet military airfield outside Prague with 400 spetsnaz troops dressed in civilian clothes but equipped for clandestine operations – just in case.
Today the church of St Bartholomew still stands on Bartolomejská Ulice in Prague, but in 1950 the other religious properties on the street included a convent that housed 1,000 nuns working in the capital’s hospitals as nurses and doing charitable work. On one night in 1950, the nuns were forcibly expelled and transported in trucks to a prison camp so that the complex of buildings could become the head offices of StB. Day and night, cars arrived bringing arrested people in for questioning with all the techniques mentioned above. Most of the nuns’ cubicles in the convent were turned into holding cells for prisoners and some were used for ‘intensive’ interrogations. The neighbouring St Bartholomew’s church was converted into a firing range for StB officers.
By 1950, in the climate of growing paranoia, it became important to denounce one’s neighbours before they denounced you. Even some students thought it prudent to join the party. In October 2008 the Czech magazine Respekt published an article based on research by a young worker at the Institute for Study of Totalitarian Regimes, who had unearthed the police report of a denunciation dated 14 March 1950:
Today at around 1600 hours a student, Milan Kundera, born 1.4.1929 in Brno, resident at the student hall of residence on George VI Avenue in Prague VII, presented himself at this department and reported that a student, Iva Militka, resident at that residence, had told a student by the name of Dlask, also of that residence, that she had met a certain acquaintance of hers, Miroslav Dvoracek, at Klarov in Prague the same day. The said Dvoracek apparently left one case in her care, saying he would come to fetch it in the afternoon … Dvoracek had apparently deserted from military service and since the spring of the previous year had possibly been in Germany, where he had gone illegally.
The unfortunate Mr Dvoracek, a conscript in the fledgling Czechoslovakian Air Force, had fled abroad with a comrade during the 1948 coup and returned clandestinely to Czechslovakia, allegedly as an agent of a Western intelligence agency. He was arrested when returning to Militka’s residence to collect his suitcase – and sentenced to hard labour in one of eighteen strict-regime camps around Jáchymov, in the north-west of the country, near the border with the GDR. This was intended as a ‘socially useful’ death sentence. Under the supervision of Red Army personnel who had mining experience in civilian life, the prisoners laboured in inadequate clothing under grotesquely unsafe conditions in uranium mines, digging out the ore needed for the Soviet nuclear programme. Many died from radiation sickness. Dvoracek survived fourteen years’ slavery in the mine.
The preceding paragraph is true, but the name of Kundera, a student representative already known to StB as a dissident, was inserted in the report when the original was rewritten; his signature does not appear anywhere, which would have been the case if he had made the denunciation. Deeper digging by the young researcher would have revealed the falsified report to be no more than a delayed-action smear on the name of the famous author which, for whatever reason, was never used. Fortunately, a Czech friend of the author reacted angrily to the original story, saying, ‘Kundera would never have done that.’ And yet, he recounted how a friend, when a young and healthy student, had been imprisoned for the ‘crime’ of belonging to a group of intellectuals who imported and listened to Western pop music like the Beatles. Emerging from prison after three years, his left leg was severely damaged but he agreed to act as an informer for the StB, presumably to avoid worse treatment. Perhaps the most evil aspect of the Stalinist terror regimes was the fear induced by the fact that one never knew which friend was an informer, commonly referred to as fizl in Czech – a word that seems to be derived from fies, a German word meaning ‘nasty’ and the diminutive –l, so ‘a nasty little man’.
Another young man labouring in the mines at Jáchymov was Ctirad Mašín, sentenced to two years’ slave labour in 1951 for failing to report someone else’s plan to flee the country. A teenage son of General Josef Mašín, a Czech tortured and eventually killed by the Germans in the massive reprisals for the death of Reinhard Heydrich, Ctirad was fortunate to be tried on this minor charge, because he and his brother belonged to an anti-communist armed gang, whose members later escaped to West Berlin, some shooting their way to freedom.
Those are personal dramas, unimportant except to the individuals involved. There were more important things for Czechs to worry about in March 1950. After Beneš’ resignation, with Gottwald replacing him and Antonín Novotný heading the party, StB proceeded to accuse anti-Soviet politicians of treason for blatant show trials during 1952, most of which ended in death sentences. Nor were rank-and-file party members immune. Stalin deeply mistrusted anyone who had travelled in the West and therefore could compare life in a democracy with the repression and perennial shortages in the centrally planned economies of the socialist bloc. The Czechs have their own sense of humour and joked that their socialist society was locked in a heroic struggle with problems that would not exist under any other system. Those targeted included decorated heroes who had fought on the communist side in the Spanish Civil War, men who had fought in Allied uniform during the war, as well as Jews and Slovaks – the last being accused of ‘nationalist deviation’. All these categories were arraigned in show trials and executed or given long prison sentences.
KGB General Alexandr Beshchasnov came to Prague with a support team to ‘explain’ to the StB officers the motivation that had supposedly led these traitors to commit treason. They transmitted regular reports back to Stalin.5 It suited his paranoia to have the various treason trials in the satellite states linked because this looked like proof of a Western conspiracy against the entire socialist ‘sixth of the world’. The vital link turned out to be Noel Field, an American who had been employed by the State Department pre-war before leaving to manage the Swiss activities of the Unitarian Service Committee, assisting refugees from Nazi Germany. Since these included many communists, he assumed after the war that he was welcome in their countries, but not in his own – not least because there is some evidence that he was an undercover NKVD/MVD agent and did not want to become ensnarled in the Alger Hiss investigations back home. Travelling about Central and Eastern Europe, he was in Prague – some say Budapest – in May 1949, when he mysteriously disappeared. His wife went there to look for him, and also disappeared. A brother and a stepdaughter of Field also vanished in other Communist capitals. Field’s
government background and mysterious activities in Switzerland enabled the Soviets to portray him as an American agent and, since the USA was now being talked about as glavny vrag – the main enemy – it was sufficient to manipulate the suspects’ confession obtained in the usual Moscow manner to include admission of contact with him as proof of treason that would be accepted by a rigged court.6
After Tito broke away from Soviet domination in June 1949, Stalin’s paranoia focussed on the satellite rulers who, in his warped opinion, were putting the needs of their own countries before those of the USSR. This was called ‘Trotskyist–Titoist deviation’. For Stalin, Rudolf Slánský, the General Secretary of KSC, was also guilty of the crime of ‘cosmopolitanism’ because he was Jewish and had relatives in other countries. Following the 1948 coup d’état, Slánský was the next most powerful person in the country after President Gottwald. When Gottwald accused two of Slánský’s associates of betraying the party, Slánský joined in the baying for their blood, unaware that he was only buying a little time for himself by organising a purge that saw thousands of KSC members arrested and imprisoned, and hundreds executed.7 Gottwald delayed the arrest of Slánský until he himself was threatened, and then threw Slánský to the wolves, together with thirteen other ‘leading lights’ of the party – of whom ten were also Jewish. They were arrested and put on trial for high treason after a year-long interrogation under torture, which methods Slánský was later accused of having introduced into Czechoslovakia. Films of the long trial in November 1952 showed the defendants – as in the Moscow show trials of the 1930s – admitting everything and asking to be punished appropriately. The verdicts included eleven death sentences. Five days later Slánský was publicly hanged outside Pankrác prison and his ashes scattered with no grave or marker to show where. The message of the trial was clear: it was one thing to murder Jews and priests, but executing the General Secretary of the party meant that no one was safe.8
Another of the accused who had been deported from France to Mauthausen during the German occupation was Artur London, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, who had been appointed Deputy Foreign Minister on his return to Czechoslovakia in 1949. Arrested two years later, he was one of the fourteen accused in the Slánsky trial and convicted on the basis of confessions obtained by torture. Sentenced to imprisonment for life, he was rehabilitated in 1956 and left his homeland in 1963 to settle in France.
The point of the Czech show trials was, as in the USSR, to ‘prove’ that central planning according to Marxist–Leninist doctrine was infallible; therefore, any failures must be due to spies, Western agents, ‘enemies of the people’ and saboteurs, who had to be rooted out and made to pay the supreme penalty. To obtain the confessions, the accused were kept standing at all times while teams of interrogators questioned them for up to eighteen hours a day for months on end. During the theoretically permitted six hours of sleep each night, they were awoken every ten minutes, forced to stand and report their identity in the formula ‘Detention prisoner XXX reports. Number in cell, one. All in order.’
Former first deputy minister of foreign trade Eugen Loebel, who survived to tell the tale, described his interrogation, which:
was conducted by three men, each taking his turn and consisted of a never-ending flood of insult, humiliation and threats … I was not allowed to sit. I even had to eat standing up. You could not even sit on the toilet, because what was provided was a so-called ‘Turkish closet’ [just a hole in the floor]. Walking [and standing] for sixteen hours a day, however slowly, meant covering 15 or 20 miles – on swollen feet. Such a day seemed endless and the prisoner could scarcely wait for night. Yet lying down caused more pain than anything else. The sudden change in pressure brought such violent pain to my feet that sometimes I had to scream out.9
Prolonged sleep deprivation is a torture which destroys the brain’s ability to distinguish between real memory and suggested versions of the same events. In addition, mock executions were used to destabilise the detainees, as were drugs. Loebel described the latter as feeling ‘as though a hand had thrust itself through my forehead into my brain’.10 His trial, which opened on 20 November 1952, was, in the words of historian Patrick Brogan, ‘pure theatre’, in which the accused had learned their parts by rote and knew even at which points the judge or prosecutor would interrupt with specific questions. The verdicts, to which the condemned were instructed to refuse their ‘right’ to appeal, having been announced, eleven of the defendants were executed, cremated and their ashes scattered on a snow-covered road as grit.
Back to Frolik. Before being called up for military service in 1949, he was a trainee accountant and an obedient member of the KSC. Discovering that officers of 2nd Infantry Regiment, in which he was serving, had looted millions of crowns worth of art treasures from a monastery, he reported this to military intelligence and had his honesty rewarded with an invitation to join StB – as an accountant. Promoted to other duties after a few months, he realised that the organisation was not the unswervingly honest ‘organ of the party’ he had assumed it to be, and that false confessions were routinely obtained by torture. Moreover, the Deputy Minister of the Interior, who controlled StB, was Colonel Antonin Prchal, a Czech blackmailed into working for the KGB because of his record of collaboration during the German occupation. It was he who described the honourable president of the People’s Republic as ‘that drunken paralytic’.11
After two years Frolik was moved into counter-espionage and kept his head down. He must have acquired a good service record to be posted to the Czech embassy in London as ‘labour attaché’, a title that explained his contacts with trade union personalities and Labour MPs. After the Soviet invasion of his country in 1968, he decided to defect and was ‘lifted’, with his wife and son, in a James Bond-style operation by MI6. Among the disclosures he made during debriefing was that, during his time in London, První Sprava had thirty full-time spies in Britain and 200 informants. Frolik said another První Sprava officer, named Robert Husak, had run an agent code-named ‘Lee’ who was Labour MP Will Owen, originally recruited by Lieutenant Colonel Jan Paclik, an StB officer accredited as Second Secretary at the embassy. Among themselves, the Czechs codenamed Owen ‘Greedy Bastard’ because he took monthly retainers of £500, expected to be given free holidays in Czechoslovakia and pocketed as many cigars as he could get his hands on when invited to parties at the embassy.12
On 15 January 1970 Owen was arrested by Special Branch officers at his home in Carshalton, and charged with the catch-all offence ‘communicating information that may be useful to an enemy’. He resigned his seat in the Commons a few days before he was found ‘not guilty’ after trial at the Old Bailey on 6 May 1970. Although Owen’s counsel admitted his client had been paid a total of £2,300 in brown envelopes by the Czechs – Owen claimed it was much less than that, such as £5 or £10 each time – he was acquitted because it could not be proven that he had passed across classified material, which seems to make nonsense of the charge in view of the fact that he had sat on the Defence Estimates Committee and a sub-committee dealing with Admiralty matters.13
A very different agent working for the Czechs in Britain at the same time was Nicholas Praeger. Born in Prague, where his father worked as a clerk in the British embassy, but also acted as a spy for První Sprava, Nicholas came to Britain with his parents, wife and child in 1949 and was given British citizenship. Volunteering for service in the RAF without disclosing his foreign birth – why did routine vetting not reveal it? – he trained as a radar technician and passed to Robert Husak photocopies of the complete documentation of the radar-evasion system on RAF bombers at the time. Code-named ‘Marconi’, he left the RAF and worked for the English Electric Company, continuing to pass classified material to Prague until he was caught and tried in 1971. Although sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment, this was reduced to six years when his offences were compared with punishment for similar offences, although his defence that he had been blackmailed by threats agai
nst his wife’s family in Czechoslovakia was pretty thin in view of his father’s espionage experience. Freed in 1977, Praeger was stripped of his British nationality and deported. His wife and child were then living in West Germany, which refused him entry when he tried to go there.
In 1953 a new boss was appointed for StB, who sacked all the KGB-type thugs who used torture. Rudolf Barak was a dark-haired, quick-witted man who introduced more sophisticated methods and made a point of not kow-towing to the KGB ‘advisers’ who had wielded the real power in the past. A popular chief, he himself fell from grace after allegedly stealing some secret funds, and was sent to prison for fifteen years; he later emerged as a filling station employee. By the time Novotný became president in 1957, he was ruler of a completely purged party. In 1960 he proclaimed the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (CSSR).
In Prague, the Jalta hotel on Wenceslaw Square is described with understated Czech humour as ‘more decadent and sexier than ever’ by the hotel’s PR director, and as ‘A nice curiosity, a five-star boutique hotel with a bunker.’ The Jalta was built 1954–58 as a luxury hotel for Western businessmen, politicians and diplomats, who stayed there unaware that the building was constructed over a Second World War bomb crater. Below the hotel cellars was a bomb- and radiation-proof bunker on three levels with its own power generator, water supply and operating theatre, designed to shelter 150 top government officials for up to two months in the event of nuclear war. In the bunker, to which access was forbidden for hotel staff, was an StB listening post: all the hotel’s best rooms and public spaces were bugged by listeners far below their feet, who could also snoop on the staff. When the premises were used as West Germany’s embassy in the 1970s, the StB tapped its telephones and many of the rooms. The bunker is now open as a must-see museum of the Cold War.