Daughters of the KGB: Moscow's Secret Spies, Sleepers and Assassins of the Cold War

by Douglas Boyd

  On 5 January 1968 the Party Central Committee elected Slovak politician Alexander Dubcek to replace Novotný as First Secretary of the KSC. On 22 March 1968 Novotný resigned from the presidency and was succeeded by General Ludvík Svoboda, whose surname ironically means ‘freedom’. During what became known as ‘the Prague Spring’, Dubcek oversaw an end to censorship of the media and permitted anti-Soviet articles in the press. Social democrats formed a new political party. Taking the precaution to reaffirm the loyalty to the Soviet camp of the KSC, Dubcek declared his hope that Czechslovakia could improve relations with all countries. His overall aim, he said, was ‘to give socialism a human face’.

  A short-lived but amazing freedom developed, without equal anywhere in the world. Politicians, students and private individuals dropped in at all hours on the presidential office in the castle overlooking the city of Prague to question Dubcek and express their views on what was to be done next. At the time, the author was a BBC assistant television producer working on an international student debate to be recorded in Holland. Waiting at Schiphol airport to welcome the debating team from Czechoslovakia that was due to take part, he was immensely relieved when they emerged from immigration control. Then came the bad news: they announced that they had come to make an appeal for support from the West, but would be catching the next flight back to Prague because ‘the situation was changing hourly’ and they wanted ‘to be present in Dubcek’s office when certain events happen’. Having been gently persuaded by the programme’s producer that the best exposure they could get was by taking part in the planned debate, the Czechs agreed to do this before flying back to Prague. In return, the motion to be debated was changed, with the consent of the sympathetic Dutch debating team, to make a better platform for them.

  The changes of policy announced under Dubcek rang all the alarm bells in Moscow. The Warsaw Pact called a summit meeting in Dresden, after which Brezhnev, Ulbricht, Kádár and Gomułka brought considerable pressure on Dubcek to backtrack on all the liberalisation. Particularly, they were affronted by the press freedom he had introduced. Massive ‘manoeuvres’ of the Pact armies – excepting Romania, which refused to join in – took place near the Czech borders with the GDR, Poland and Hungary.

  On 27 June a journalist named Ludvik Vákulík published a manifesto entitled Dva tisíce slov – two thousand words of protest – signed by seventy leading intellectuals pledging their support for Dubcek. Ten days later Dubcek was summoned to Warsaw to recant. He refused to go, and rejected also an invitation to Moscow, for obvious reasons, so Brezhnev travelled to Cierna nad Tisou, just inside the Czech border with the USSR. There, he ‘negotiated’ by subjecting the Czech leaders to verbal abuse and threats, but they did not back down.

  When the Warsaw Pact forces invaded on the night of 20 August most members of the KSC Central Committee were surprised that they had not been consulted beforehand. All over the country, in the streets people of all ages – who had studied Russian as a compulsory subject at school – courageously harangued the soldiers pointing loaded guns at them. Radio Prague announced that this invasion was a violation of national sovereignty, but then carried a Soviet announcement that the 400,000 invaders were there to ‘help the workers who had been betrayed by their leaders’.

  Dubcek and his main associates were arrested and forcibly flown to Moscow for more ‘negotiations’. They must have been thinking back to the unhappy fate of other political leaders who had dared to question Soviet hegemony and been taken for a ride. The one-sided ‘negotiations’ strengthened the KSC and gave it control of the media, limited national sovereignty, banned the Czech Social Democratic Party and saw Dubcek and thousands of others stripped of their party membership. He was eventually rusticated to a position in the forestry service of his native Slovakia and would not emerge above the political radar horizon for nineteen years – which was still a lot better than the fate of Slanský and Hungarian Prime Minister Imre Nagy.

  More ominously, the new treaty provided for the ‘temporary’ presence in Czechoslovakia of Soviet troops. Yet Moscow could not crush the Czechs’ yearning for freedom. On 6 January 1977 West German newspapers printed a manifesto initially signed by 243 prominent Czechs which had collected 800 signatures by the end of the year. Referred to as Charter 77, it accused the Czech government of failing to respect the basic human rights of its citizens, even those guaranteed by the state’s constitution. The StB arrested and interrogated playwright Vaclav Havel and many of the other signatories and mounted a new offensive against the Church. Havel went to prison for five years. But they could not prevent a student named Jan Palach symbolising Czech protest by setting fire to himself in Prague’s main square ten days later; he was given a solemn and sad funeral by a huge crowd of mourners.

  It was a gesture of despair. From the promise of the Prague Spring, Czechoslovakia had sunk back into a Soviet-style depression where most people just wanted to ‘keep their noses clean’. On the first anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion, in August 1969, tanks patrolled the streets of Czechoslovakia’s main towns and massive protest demos were broken up by riot police with unnecessary violence. With the StB watching Dubcek and the other dismissed leaders, they lay low.

  Notes

  1. J. Frolik, The Frolik Defection, London, Leo Cooper 1975, pp. vii–viii

  2. See Boyd, The Other First World War

  3. L. Paterson, U-Boat War Patrol, the hidden photographic diary of U564, London, Chatham Publishing 2006, p. 189

  4. Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, p. 233

  5. Applebaum, Iron Curtain, p. 303

  6. Ibid, pp. 307–9

  7. Brogan, Eastern Europe, p. 86

  8. Applebaum, Iron Curtain, p. 304 (author’s italics)

  9. Quoted in Brogan, Eastern Europe, p. 88

  10. Ibid

  11. Frolik, Frolik Defection, p. 11

  12. Ibid, p. 97

  13. R. Deacon, Spyclopeadia, London, Futura 1989, pp. 293–4; Dobson and Payne, Dictionary of Espionage, p. 235

  16

  THE ABC OF ESPIONAGE

  AGENTS, BLACKMAIL, CODES

  Every intelligence organisation dreams of a really top-level walk-in. Early in 1956 Colonel Pribyl, military attaché at the Czech embassy in London received an offer which illustrates how much the technology of spying has changed. It arrived in the form of the fifth carbon copy of a typewritten letter, in which the letters were so indistinct that nobody could identify the machine on which it had been written. With the letter were copies of reports sent to his British case officer by a Dr Potocek, director of the First Czechoslovak Insurance Company, from which it appeared Potocek had a network of at least eight agents working for him, enabling him to pass to London the complete specifications of the new Soviet T-54 main battle tank and actual samples of nerve gases made for use by the Warsaw Pact forces in the event of war. Given the code-name ‘Light’, the author of the near-illegible carbon copy asked that Pribyl pay him £1,000 after verifying this information.

  Pribyl, however, was enjoying his comfortable London posting and was afraid that pursuing this lead might get him declared persona non grata and expelled from the United Kingdom. He sat on the letter, but mentioned it to a colleague, who immediately sent a coded cable to Prague, which resulted in the arrest of Potocek and his agents. Potocek and one other were sentenced to death; the others, to long terms of imprisonment. Meanwhile an experienced agent handler by the name of Jan Mrazek set up a meeting with the mysterious ‘Light’ and paid him, not £1,000 but £1,500. At the time, ‘Light’ refused to reveal his identity, but it later transpired that he was an émigré Czech named Charles Zbytek, who had been in the Free Czech Army during the war and afterwards decided to ‘jump ship’ and stay in the UK while on tour with a Czech choir performing at a Welsh eisteddfod. He took a job with the anti-Communist Czech Intelligence Office (CIO), one of many revanchist organisations in Britain run by refugees from the satellite countries.

  From the sublimely simple – in
espionage terms – to the ridiculous. In October 1960 Josef Frolik was transferred to work on the British desk of První Sprava, thanks to his friendship with a slightly insane colleague who had been trying to poison all the staff at Radio Free Europe (RFE) by placing cyanide crystals in the salt cellars of the canteen, and had to be spirited out of Austria after the plot was betrayed by a double agent! From his new office, Frolik looked across the Danube to the British embassy, a building constantly bugged by StB staff employed as household servants, debugged by British technicians flown out for the purpose and rebugged as soon as they had gone home. ‘Light’ was handed over in 1961 to Frolik, who spoke good English, as his case officer. His colleagues had various theories for why this émigré was betraying CIO agents in-country. It was Frolik’s opinion that ‘the Czech Philby’ did it for the money, but the golden eggs were no longer being laid at the same speed because CIO had lost all credibility with its sources of finance after the betrayals and failures due to the treachery of ‘Light’. Yet, for two further years, he continued to betray his colleagues at, as Frolik later said, ‘a cost in human life and misery that cannot be calculated’.

  By the time that his feed of information dried up completely, he had been paid a total of £40,000 – a comfortable sum at the time, which enabled him to buy a boarding house in Folkestone, send his daughter to a private school and forget about espionage for good.1

  About this time, Britain’s future prime minister Edward Heath2 was targeted by Czech intelligence. Because he was unmarried and showed little interest in women, the Czechs assumed this meant he was homosexual and set a gay honeytrap, to be sprung on a visit to Czechoslovakia. But how to get him there? One of Heath’s passions was playing the organ, so První Sprava arranged for a bisexual Czech organist named Professor Reinburger to give two recitals in London, to which Heath was invited. Naturally, the two organists chatted and the bait was laid. Reinburger offered to arrange a visit to Prague, where Heath could experience the pleasure of playing on the famous organ at St James’ church, one of the finest in Europe. Although arrangements appeared to be fixed when the two men parted, Heath was advised by British security that it was not a good idea for an up-and-coming politician to expose himself to possible blackmail in this way, and the visit was cancelled.3

  In June 2012 BBC reporter Gordon Corera was exploring the declassified archives of StB while investigating the attempted blackmail by Czech agents of former British prime minister Edward Heath. Instead, he uncovered the fact that a junior Conservative minister spied for Prague against payment. During the Cold War the author attended many receptions in Warsaw Pact embassies, but was never approached as was Raymond Mawby in November 1960. Handing over confidential political information including a sketch plan of No. 10 Downing Street to his StB case officer, who gave him the code-name ‘Laval’, he was rewarded with monthly instalments of £100, later increasing to £400 – a decent sum at the time.4

  The undercover war against Britain also used agents of influence. In the early 1960s many British scientists were being enticed to work in the USA for salaries far in excess of what they could earn in their home country. It was called ‘the brain drain’. Learning from a pro-Moscow Labour MP that another MP was acting as a recruiter for one large American company, První Sprava asked its man to raise this in Parliament, with the result that the recruiter’s bona fides were ruined and there was a wave of anti-American outrage in the British media.5

  In April 1956, while going through the personal files of Czech expats in the West who might be coerced into spying, the StB found that Alfred Frenzel, a member of the West German parliament who served on the Bundestag’s Defence Committee, had access to secret material on West German rearmament. Frenzel had fled his homeland after the 1948 takeover and successfully inserted himself into West German society. An officer of the StB, who had known Frenzel before, visited him in West Germany and recruited him by threatening to have his wife arrested during her current visit to Prague. He also threatened to expose Frenzel’s past – which allegedly included some pre-war criminal activities. Since this would have destroyed Frenzel’s career in West Germany, he cracked. Travelling to Austria in July, he met Major Molnar, his První Sprava case officer, and was handed an initial payment of DM 1,500, for which he unwisely signed a receipt with his true signature. Given the code-name ‘Anna’, Frenzel fed highly secret material to Prague for more than four years. The quality of his material, which included many top-secret German documents and details of the latest US aircraft, was evident from the very comfortable house he was given in Czechoslovakia and generous payments into a bank account opened in his name in a Czech bank.

  Frenzel passed his disclosures to Molnar using the gamut of ‘containers’, such as modified toilet articles designed by the StB technical department to auto-destruct if opened without the proper precautions. Molnar, in turn, passed these on to Czech diplomats for forwarding to Prague. However, Molnar’s successor, who took over as case officer in September 1959, lived beyond the style possible for someone declaring a small income to the German tax authority. This relatively banal offence was used to justify his arrest by agents of the BfV shortly before he boarded a flight to Prague. His grossest indiscretion, since he had no diplomatic immunity, was to be carrying a tin of talcum powder in his luggage. Opened in a BfV laboratory, it was found to contain a roll of film, which was developed. Among the images of defence installations and documents, just visible in one exterior shot was the number plate of a car owned by Frenzel and carelessly parked in shot. From this lead, other evidence was gathered, earning him a sentence of fifteen years’ imprisonment. He was, however, exchanged in a spy swap five years later, recognised as the highest-level ‘asset’ První Sprava had in the Cold War, and retired from active espionage, to die of natural causes three years later. Nothing was as simple as the officially publicised story, however. In this instance Gehlen’s BND had also contributed to Frenzel’s arrest by discovering certain secrets he had passed to Prague, and which could only have come from him.6

  In addition to the ‘illegals’ working without diplomatic immunity in a target country, there are, of course, all the diplomats in post there who conduct espionage at the risk of nothing worse than expulsion. One such was Ladislav Bittman, accredited as press secretary at the Czech legation in Vienna, who defected in 1968 in a carefully prepared flight to a hideout in Switzerland. He later published two books on Soviet deception operations.7 One bizarre activity of StB which he reported was the preparation of a vast archive of material for forgery, which involved the sending of numerous Christmas cards to important people in the West, most of whom responded with letters of greeting or cards bearing their signatures and sometimes their official letterheads.8

  When Josef Frolik was posted to the London embassy in April 1964 as industrial attaché, there were eighteen officers of První Sprava and twelve officers of Czech military intelligence there, all accredited as diplomats subordinate to the ambassador – who was, however, not allowed to know what any of them was doing. Frolik’s seventeen colleagues were collecting political information and commercial intelligence, also stealing secrets of industrial processes or smuggling new technology physically back to Prague.9 The man of whom they were all frightened was a Major Koska10 whose job was to spy on them all. Frolik described him as ‘a heavyweight boxing champion during the Nazi occupation, which was evidenced by his pug nose. He had black wavy hair and a pale oval face, which set off his dark, wary eyes that often reminded me of a snake.’11 Koska, it transpired, was a double agent, also reporting back to the KGB what Czech intelligence was up to in London.12 It was, however, he who taught Frolik how to live like a jet-setter while in post, by inventing fictitious ‘contacts’ who had to be expensively entertained. Since this was an important part of the plot of Graham Greene’s novel Our Man in Havana, and since Greene had worked for Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) during the Second World War, perhaps this way of augmenting income is widespread in intelligence circles. />
  One should never place too much credence on spies’ accounts of their work but, according to his own published memoirs, Frolik was not very successful during his London posting. One field he did plough assiduously was the cultivation of active trade unionists, many of whom had been CPGB members before the war, and therefore sympathised with the so-called ‘workers’ states’ behind the Iron Curtain. More than once, Frolik was warned that he was ‘trespassing on KGB territory’ because Moscow regarded trades unions in the West as its preserve and card-carrying members of the CPGB were off-limits to StB. Otherwise, all the techniques of espionage were used by Frolik during his London posting, especially blackmail and the compromising, by making them sign receipts for cash payments, of at least two MPs and others with access to secrets.

  His next assignment was very different. In 1960 the Soviet government founded the ‘people’s friendship university’ for intakes of overseas students, which was subsequently named in honour of the late Patrice Lumumba. Since Western counter-espionage organisations kept a fairly close watch on Warsaw Pact diplomats, the students studying there were all evaluated by the KGB for suitability to act as illegals in later life. Czech intelligence followed suit, founding the University of 17 November to provide degree courses for 4,500 African and Asian students. Frolik was recalled to Prague to recruit selected students at this university for later use as ‘illegals’. To his surprise, he learned – this was, after all, the ‘wilderness of mirrors’ – that some of the students were already working for Western agencies and had been sent to Prague to infiltrate the stream of ‘graduates’ of this spy school.