by Douglas Boyd
After the Soviet invasion to repress the Prague Spring in August 1968, Frolik had more and more problems with the increasing KGB influence on První Sprava and decided to defect to the West. His problem was that his new masters mistrusted him to the point of giving notice to terminate his contract – after which he would not be allowed to cross any frontier for five years. So he built up a secret dossier of real and cover names of some 400 Czech legal and illegal agents working in the West, and contacted a carefully chosen CIA officer, who set up an escape plan, which involved a ‘holiday’ in Bulgaria, from where Frolik was clandestinely transported to a safe haven in Turkey. On arrival in Langley, he paid for his asylum with the list of names.
One name apparently not in Frolik’s dossier was that of Karl Koecher, who arrived in the USA in 1965 at the height of the Cold War, accompanied by his wife. On the surface, the Koechers deserved political asylum because his carefully contrived legend showed that he had several times fallen foul of the StB for writing radio comedy scripts that mocked regime policies. In fact he had been an officer of První Sprava since 1962. Once settled into American life, he studied for and was awarded a doctorate of philosophy from Columbia University. Looking every inch the typical moustached, bespectacled, liberal American academic of the time, Koecher was accorded US citizenship in 1971. Mrs Thatcher’s comment that she would never trust a man who spoke more than two languages had apparently not been heard in Langley because Koecher was employed some years later as a translator for the CIA due to an apparently impeccable record and his competence in several European languages.
Given the necessary security clearance to monitor intercepted phone conversations of Soviet diplomats and other suspects, he passed warnings back to his První Sprava case officer, who in turn warned the KGB when their agents were under surveillance. He also betrayed double agents working for the CIA – among them a Soviet diplomat posted to Colombia. Now, this is where it gets complicated. Aleksandr Ogorodnik – the surname means ‘market gardener’ – was a fairly low-level 34-year-old Soviet diplomat working in the Soviet embassy in Bogotá who imprudently got his local mistress pregnant. Blackmailed by Colombian counter-espionage agents, he handed over to them documents of local importance. After being notified that he was to be promoted and transferred to the Foreign Ministry in Moscow, Ogorodnik was passed over to the CIA, for whom he agreed to continue work, once he got there. Given the code name ‘Trigon’13 – apparently by Aldrich Ames, himself later revealed as a KGB double agent – Ogorodnik was given instruction in the use of codes and dead letter drops.
This is where ‘the widow spy’ comes into the story. Martha Peterson is now a respectable suburban grandmother living ‘somewhere in America’, whose children were amazed to learn that she and their father had both been CIA officers. When younger, she was an attractive, blonde, just-married ‘embassy wife’ in Laos, where her first husband, a former Green Beret, was involved in infiltrating CIA-trained Laotian guerrillas to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail during the US war in Vietnam. After he was killed when his helicopter was shot down, the young widow was repatriated in shock. Coming to terms with her loss, she volunteered for an active role with the CIA and was posted to Moscow, where female embassy staff were not trailed everywhere because at the time the KGB did not take women seriously. From 1975 to 1977 Martha worked in the embassy as a low-grade clerk, popular with her colleagues, who had no idea of her CIA work. In secret, she collected Ogorodnik’s increasingly important material from dead letter drops, leaving in exchange espionage equipment like preset-focus ultra-miniaturised cameras concealed inside harmless-looking lumps of concrete.14
KGB officers arrested Peterson after watching her make one of these dead drops near the Krasnoluzhskii Rail Bridge. Slightly roughed up when she resisted arrest, she was held for three days in the Lubyanka, before being released under her diplomatic immunity. Ogorodnik was already in the prison, but dead. Before being posted back to Moscow, he had insisted on being given a cyanide pill, so that he could end his life on his own terms if caught. This was hidden inside an expensive Montblanc fountain pen. At his first interrogation, he slipped the pen out of his pocket and bit through the specially weakened casing to release the poison. From then on, it became KGB routine not only to handcuff suspects with hands behind their back at the time of arrest, but also to remove any personal possessions immediately.
Koecher was richly rewarded by his KGB masters for uncovering ‘the market gardener’ double agent. As Martha Peterson later said, case officers under diplomatic cover are at little risk, but their agents have no such protection and pay a high price if all goes wrong – in this case because Koecher was given clearance for material he should never have seen. Or was Ogorodnik betrayed by Ames? In the wilderness of mirrors, everything is possible.
Another highly placed Czech defector in 1968 was General Jan Sejna. As a deputy Minister of Defence who had served on Warsaw Pact committees, he brought with him not just Czech secrets but also information about the networks of ‘sleepers’ for sabotage if the Cold War should heat up. One operation was to put out of service large parts of the London Underground railway. This plot seemed to his confessors to be rather far-fetched – until Soviet defector Oleg Lyalin, who had worked in the KGB’s Fifth Directorate, whose business is sabotage, confirmed in 1971 everything Sejna had said.15
No spy can rest on his or her laurels. In 1975 Koecher was called to an interview with KGB boss Oleg Kalugin, who accused him of being a triple agent, ultimately loyal to the CIA. After that, Koecher left the CIA for a safer teaching job, but was recalled after Ronald Reagan was elected to the White House in January 1981. Shortly afterwards, the Koechers were taken in for questioning by the FBI, during which Koecher offered to become a double agent if he was granted immunity from prosecution and allowed to return to Europe.
Somebody rightly had second thoughts about this, so after the couple had sold their apartment and were about to fly to Switzerland, they were arrested – he for espionage and she as a material witness. However, if we are to believe the official story, the whole business was so badly conducted by the FBI that Koecher could not be prosecuted under US law and his wife was able to plead her constitutional right not to testify against her spouse. Although allegedly attacked in federal prison, which Koecher said was an attempt by the FBI to kill him, the couple walked to freedom across the Glienicke Bridge in February 1986.
As a reward for services rendered, Koecher was welcomed home, given a house and a Volvo car – rare in Cold War Czechoslovakia – and a job. He then disappeared into the obscurity proper for a retired spy, except when it was alleged – that word again – he had been involved in procuring for Mohammed Al-Fayed forged documents ‘proving’ a British Secret Service plot to murder Princess Diana and her friend, Al-Fayed’s son, Dodi. The last laugh went to Hana Koecher, who unbelievably was employed as a translator at the British embassy in Prague and only sacked after a Czech journalist informed the embassy staff of her history.
On 5 September 1968 a 23-year-old employee of Radio Brno named Pavel Minarík – code-name ‘Ulyxes’16 – who had just finished a year’s training in espionage techniques, ‘fled’ to the West after being guaranteed that his salary would be paid monthly into a Czech bank account and with 3,000 Czech crowns for expenses in his pocket. He was granted political asylum in Austria, where his broadcasting background saw him given a job in the Vienna office of RFE. He must have been competent, because by the end of the year he was working in the main station at Munich. Each month he delivered, through dead letter drops, a report that was picked up by Czech diplomats, who forwarded it to Prague.
These eventually mounted up to some 21,000 pages of reports covering RFE’s management and financing by American agencies, plus compromising gossip of sexual relations among the staff, especially Czech émigrés, and their alcohol, sex and money problems, in addition to confidential internal documents he had copied. He also managed to search colleagues’ apartments for compromising materi
al and infiltrated a number of émigré Czechoslovak groups. All this was useful to První Sprava, but its main interest was in RFE’s in-country sources who fed up-to-date information designed to show that RFE had a presence inside Czechoslovakia, because these people were vulnerable to instant arrest.
Minarík was young and headstrong. At meetings in Vienna with his case officer, Jaroslav Lis, in April and November 1970, he offered to blow up the RFE station, showing Lis many photographs he had taken inside the building, and he repeated the offer before the 1972 Munich Olympics, but his masters in Prague were not interested. Minarík kept pushing his idea for blowing up RFE but, although RFE’s broadcasts were a source of annoyance for all the satellite governments, the station was a magnet for many émigré dissident groups, making it easier to keep an eye on them. In the event, the big news of those Olympics was the murder and hostage-taking of the Israeli team by Black September terrorists.
In January 1976 Minarík was recalled to Prague, to broadcast his insider knowledge of RFE over Radio Prague. It was no surprise to anyone when he disclosed the US influence in RFE, but he also dished the dirt on the management and individual members of the station staff in an attempt to discredit RFE as a reliable news source. He then disappeared from active espionage, but was to get his comeuppance after the one-party state ended in sametová revoluce – the ‘velvet revolution’ in late 1989. In May 1993 he was charged with being a paid member of První Sprava and having planned a terrorist act against RFE in Munich. Found guilty, he appealed and the ding-dong legal battle between the public prosecutor and his defence team lasted more than four years, ending with a final acquittal.
The Munich-based US-funded radio stations were not in themselves a threat to Czechoslovakia but, on the grounds that some émigrés working there might be dangerous, a second deep-penetration agent code-named ‘Albort’ was given a legend and trained in fieldcraft between 1978 and 1982 while ostensibly working as a musician with Czech groups touring in the West. To establish his standing as a dissident, on one such trip he handed some samizdat publications over to an anti-Communist émigré living in West Germany. In October 1982, 26-year-old ‘Albort’ walked away from his colleagues in the Czech National Symphony Orchestra on tour in Italy, jumped on a train and requested political asylum in the Bundesrepublik, after which he settled in Munich and was taken on as a freelance contributor to RFE’s Czech service. His job was to pass on to diplomats of the Czechoslovak embassy in Bonn background information used in preparation of broadcasts and also about staff employed there and their contacts with other émigré networks.
But ‘Albort’ was no Minarík. By September 1988 he was fed up with the precarious life of a spy and voluntarily confessed his espionage role to BfV investigators. Tried in June 1989, he was sentenced to two years’ probation on the grounds that he had turned himself in and co-operated fully with his interrogators – and also that his activities had not actually caused any harm to people or property in the Bundesrepublik. Perhaps ‘Albort’ was fortunate also that the Soviet bloc was already crumbling, with strikes in Poland and the Hungarian government actually dismantling its barbed-wire fences on the borders. It was time to end the madness of the Cold War.
This was a process undertaken differently in each satellite state. In Prague demonstrations on Czech National Day of 1989 had been so feeble that Václav Havel was seriously depressed in case the wave of liberalisation sweeping through the satellite states was going to bypass Czechoslovakia, leaving it an island of tyranny – in the words of CIA officer Milt Bearden, ‘a European Cuba’.17 Thinking that the peaceful demonstration planned for International Students’ Day on 17 November would be just another timid gesture, Havel did not go to join it in Wenceslaw Square but the news from Berlin brought 15,000 students, schoolchildren and others into the streets. Because so many had seen on television the changes taking place in the other satellite states, they had the confidence to confront the police in the largest demonstration so far, but were met by units in full riot gear with tear-gas grenades and automatic weapons, who laid into them with staves, beating several demonstrators very badly. This completely over-the-top reaction by the authorities proved to be the spark in the powder barrel. Two days later 200,000 demonstrators marched in protest. This grew to an estimated 500,000 on 20 November. On 24 November the party leadership resigned en masse, followed by a two-hour general strike on 27 November.
In an incredible process of political acceleration, three days later the constitution had been amended to permit other political parties. A few days after that, border guards began removing the barbed wire entanglements from the frontiers with West Germany and Austria, and the streets of Prague were filled each evening with people unafraid at last of StB repression as they marched, jingling their key rings in ‘the music of the velvet revolution’. On 10 December President Gustáv Husák endorsed the first multi-party Czechoslovak government since 1948, and tendered his own resignation. But – and it was a big but – the 17,000 officers of StB were still reporting for duty each day. Just before Christmas the six KGB officers ‘advising’ První Sprava flew off to Moscow and did not return.18
Alexander Dubcek was elected speaker of the federal parliament on 28 December and Václav Havel made President of Czechoslovakia on 29 December 1989. It was Havel who commented that one of the worst legacies of his country’s Communist years – and the industrial pollution was the worst in Europe – was universal hypocrisy, with everybody saying one thing while thinking another. It is an observation that applies to all totalitarian states, including the USSR and its Cold War satellites.
In March 1990 Havel appointed Jirí Križan to the post of national security adviser with Oldrich Czerny – a long-time Havel supporter – as his deputy. Czerny was an unlikely-looking intelligence man: a small, slightly built, sandy-haired writer and translator who wore tinted glasses and clothing that looked as though it belonged to a much bigger brother. His previous experience of StB had been loss of his job in a publishing house after he refused to spy on fellow dissidents after Charter 77. Having fluent and idiomatic English, Czerny was then approached by První Sprava. After turning down its offer of employment, the only job he could find was badly paid work unloading cargoes from barges moored on Prague’s quays. His surprise can be imagined when Križan ordered him to work with Jan Ruml, another unlikely figure, sporting a ponytail hairstyle, whom Havel had appointed as a deputy minister of the interior, to ‘get rid of the intelligence service’.19
‘We have all these old Communists [in it],’ Križan said, ‘and we have to get rid of them. Havel wants you to do it.’
‘All right,’ Czerny said. ‘When do you want me to start?’
‘Right now,’ Križan replied. ‘We are five minutes late for a meeting with British Intelligence.’
The StB had already been formally disbanded the previous month and replaced by a totally new agency. This re-employed many officers who had been sacked after 1968 for lack of party loyalty. Unfortunately, they had recommenced the jobs for which they had been trained during the Cold War, and started trailing yesterday’s enemies, the British and American intelligence officers stationed in the Czech Republic. The new administration therefore decided that the way to handle things was to form a much smaller organisation staffed by former dissidents with no intelligence training. This was something that the new Polish government thought madness, and led to a stormy meeting with Andrzej Milczanowski, who did not mince his words.20
The first thing was to decide what to do with the immense archives of StB and První Sprava, which went back forty years. Unlike the situation in Poland, where UB officers had destroyed anything that could be used against them, most of the StB records were still intact, proving that internal intelligence had functioned with 10,000 active informants, like the IMs of the Stasi, infiltrated into every branch of national and local government. To avoid a rash of denunciations and embarrassing trials, Havel’s new administration is said to have decided on the destruction of
all active files, keeping only closed or historical files.
To train the new boys, Czerny turned to the CIA to set up a new secure communications system and ensure the president’s personal safety, as the Secret Service did in the USA. One has to wonder how many Trojan horses came concealed within the American system. The British government supplied SIS officers to train Czech intelligence officers working abroad. Written into the deals was that Prague must deactivate any existing active agents in the West, and recall them and all the sleepers infiltrated in the democracies. The last requirement proved to be a problem: many sleepers refused to ‘come home’, preferring their new lives and having no intention of causing problems in their adopted countries.21
Internal security in the Czech Republic morphed through several titles and forms in the next four years to become BIS, standing for Bezpecnostní Informacní Služba, or Security Information Service. Its website reassures any citizen who cares to consult it that BIS – unlike its predecessors of ill repute – is not interested in anyone’s politics, personal beliefs or activities, so long as they do not impinge on national security, or involve organised crime or terrorism.
Marx had declared that every society contains the seeds of its own destruction, but seemingly none of the thousands of party fat cats realised that the Soviet-imposed Communist societies on which they had battened were no exception to Karl’s creed. As the Western European countries grew more prosperous in the 60s, 70s and 80s, the satellite states, crippled by their planned economies, lagged further and further behind. The Soviet joke They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work was not funny, but tragic. One result of their fatal inability to exploit initiative was the massive borrowing from Western banks required to stave off the evil day, as they saw it. But in the space of a few months towards the end of 1989 the nightmare was over and even the Warsaw Pact a phenomenon of the past.