In the case of one member of the Illegals Directorate there is no doubt about the shattering impact of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. For GROMOV’s brother, Oleg Gordievsky, then serving in Copenhagen, “It was that dreadful event, that awful day, which determined the course of my own life.” The crushing of the Prague Spring convinced him that the Soviet one-party state was, by its very nature, destructive of human liberties. He spent much of the next few years secretly pondering how to work for its overthrow before taking the decision to become a British penetration agent within the KGB.90
SIXTEEN
PROGRESS OPERATIONS
Part 2: Spying on the Soviet Bloc
Dubček later described the eight months after the Soviet invasion as “an organized retreat, in which no inch of territory was given up without calculated resistance.”1 It was a retreat, however, which was doomed to end in defeat. Dubček’s position and that of the other leading reformers was steadily undermined by a combination of Soviet pressure, the old guard within the CPCz and former allies who decided to throw in their lot with the invaders to save their own careers.
The immediate pretext for Dubček’s removal was the World Ice Hockey Championship in Stockholm in March 1969. On March 21, Dubček later recalled, “The whole country watched [on TV] as Czechoslovakia played the Soviets; it was much more than ice hockey, of course. It was a replay of a lost war…” The national rejoicings after the Czechoslovak victory led the KGB to prepare, with assistance from its stooges in the StB, an anti-Soviet riot to follow the next match between Czechoslovakia and the USSR on March 28. Shortly before the match a team of police agents disguised as city workers unloaded a pile of paving stones in front of the offices of the Soviet airline, Aeroflot, in Wenceslas Square. Prague police documents show that the whole operation was directly supervised by a Soviet agent in the Czech ministry of the interior.2 Immediately after the Czechoslovak team had defeated the Soviets for the second time in a week, StB plain clothes personnel mingling with the celebrating crowd began to throw the conveniently placed stones at the Aeroflot office. The office furniture was dragged out on to the pavement and set alight.
Moscow now had the fabricated evidence it required to demand that, “The counter-revolution must be beheaded.” Dubček believed he had no option but to resign. “Otherwise the Soviets would set up another provocation that could lead to further public turmoil and even a bloodbath.”3 On April 17 he was succeeded as First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Party by the Slovak first secretary, Gustáv Husák. As Dubček broadcast the news of his replacement, he broke down and wept.
PROGRESS operations in Czechoslovakia continued. A senior officer from FCD Directorate S, Dmitri Kirillovich Vetrov, arrived in Prague to supervise and coordinate the work of the illegals as they penetrated the ranks of the unrepentant reformists.4 Posing as a Swiss sympathizer with the Prague Spring, Galina Vinogradova (ALLA) was instructed to cultivate Ladislav Lebovič (codenamed KHAN), one of the trainers of the victorious Czechoslovak ice hockey team which was viewed with deep suspicion in the Centre.5 The illegal Yuri Linov (KRAVCHENKO), who pretended to be Austrian, succeeded in gaining the confidence of the international chess grand master and sports columnist Luděk Pachman, one of the organizers of the illegal broadcasts transmitted in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion. As soon as Linov had identified those of Pachman’s friends and associates who were ready to continue “the struggle against the Soviet occupiers,” Pachman himself was arrested and imprisoned.6
Though delighted by Dubček’s departure, the KGB liaison office in Prague remained unenthusiastic about his successor, Gustáv Husák, who had been imprisoned in 1952 on trumped-up charges as an alleged Trotskyist and “bourgeois nationalist.” “Spending nine years in prison,” it reported, “has left its mark on Husák’s psychology, in that he shows unwarranted indulgence towards clear adversaries of the Czechoslovak Communist Party line.” The KGB liaison office complained to the Centre that there was “no genuine internal unity” within the CPCz leadership, which was divided between “internationalists” such as Bil’ak and Indra, who had supported Soviet intervention in August 1968, and “realists” led by Štrougal, who had opposed intervention but now accepted it as a fact of life. The two sides were engaged in a power struggle, seeking to gain key positions and place their supporters within the Party apparatus.7 Over the next year both realists and internationalists had some successes. In January 1970 Štrougal replaced Černík as prime minister. Simultaneously, however, Bil’ak was put in charge of an operation to purge the CPCz of all reformists during the introduction of new Party cards.8 A fellow hardliner, Miloš Jakeš, head of the Central Committee’s Control and Auditing Committee, became his right-hand man and regularly reported on the progress of the purge to the KGB liaison office.9 Seventeen years later Jakeš was to succeed Husák as general secretary of the CPCz.
The Centre’s assessment of the work of the KGB liaison office and residency in Prague during 1970 concluded:
The bloc of revisionist and anti-socialist forces in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic has suffered a political defeat; the legal ideological centers of the right-wing have been eliminated; the main ideologists of Czechoslovak renewal have been removed from the political arena and expelled from the Party; and measures have been taken to purge the state apparatus of the most active carriers of the right-wing danger. However, it would not be right to suppose that with the exchange of Party cards the Czechoslovak Communist Party has totally purged its ranks of hostile and alien elements.10
Indra, whom Moscow had originally intended to take power after the invasion at the head of a “Workers’ and Peasants’ Government,” was reported by the liaison office to be “biding his time,” waiting for an opportunity to press his claims as general secretary.11 His wait was to prove in vain.
KGB agents and Soviet sycophants within the CPCz continued to protest that Štrougal and other former reformists retained far too much influence at the expense of the Soviet Union’s true friends. One informant in the Ministry of the Interior, Jaroslav Zeman, complained that Štrougal was discriminating against the internationalists: “And what sort of person is Štrougal? In 1968 he was preparing to emigrate to the West and had currency and documents ready for his escape.” While turncoats prospered under Štrougal’s patronage, “Officials who cooperate with the USSR are looked down on in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic; they are kept in the dark, and are not promoted or rewarded.”12
By January 1971 310 foreign intelligence officers had been dismissed and 170 expelled from the Party. The whole of the senior staff of the internal StB had been replaced along with many more junior officers.13 The Centre, however, was not satisfied. The KGB liaison office was instructed during 1971 to press the interior ministry and the StB “in a tactful manner” to carry out a thorough reorganization of Czechoslovak intelligence “in view of the fact that the central apparatus was tainted and the possibility that committed agents of the adversary were present in it.” The Centre wished for active assistance from a reformed StB in the collection of scientific and technological intelligence, the deployment of illegals and other FCD operations.14
Despite continuing doubts about the reliability of some StB personnel, the KGB liaison office reported that the minister of the interior, Radko Kaska, displayed a satisfactory level of subservient cooperation:
We have not noticed any unjustified or non-objective information from Kaska. Up to the present he has informed us frankly and in detail about internal political processes in Czechoslovakia and about the situation within the Ministry of Internal Affairs.15
The KGB was provided with copies of StB operational orders and reports, and proposed staff changes were submitted for its approval.16 At Husák’s instructions, Kaska began secretly collecting material on “leading right-wing personalities” in order to determine how many could be held to have broken state laws.17 The KGB was, however, embarrassed to be asked by Kaska in March 1971 whether it had any “adverse inform
ation” on past contacts with the West by the chairman of the National Assembly, Dalibor Hanes. The Centre was concerned that, if it replied to Kaska’s enquiry, it would give the (perfectly accurate) impression that “the KGB is engaged in collecting information on officials of fraternal Parties in friendly countries.” The head of the KGB liaison office in Prague, Ye. G. Sinitsyn, was instructed to reply that it had “no reports of links between Hanes and foreign intelligence,” but that, since it followed the principle of not spying on its allies, it would be unable to respond to such requests in future. Sinitsyn was privately informed by the Centre that Bil’ak had complained to the Soviet ambassador that Hanes had “taken up incorrect positions” during the Prague Spring and that his father had been responsible for “crushing workers’ demonstrations in Slovakia” between the wars.18 Soon afterwards Hanes was replaced as chairman of the National Assembly by the impeccably orthodox Indra.19
On May 4, 1971 Kaska met Semyon Konstantinovich Tsvigun, KGB deputy chairman, to report on the progress of “normalization.”20 Tsvigun owed his job almost solely to the fact that he was one of Brezhnev’s oldest drinking partners. Kalugin found him “downright stupid but relatively harmless.”21 Tsvigun cannot have been wholly reassured by Kaska’s briefing. Over the past two years, Kaska told him, about 450,000 CPCz members had left or been expelled, “making contact between the Party and the population more difficult.”22 With one exception, the heads of all directorates in the interior ministry had been replaced. In all, about 3,000 of its employees in the StB and other agencies had been dismissed. There was, however, still widespread evidence of anti-Soviet feeling. Soviet films and plays were systematically boycotted. At the Czechoslovak premiäre of the film The Kremlin Chimes there were only five people in the audience; at the second showing there were only ten. There were numerous anonymous threats, malicious rumors and acts of sabotage on the railways. But there were also successes to report. The StB had succeeded in setting up a bogus organization dedicated to “socialism with a human face,” in order to smoke out secret supporters of the Prague Spring. Finally, Kaska assured Tsvigun that he and his ministry were in close touch with the KGB liaison office and its head, General Sinitsyn.23
In the spring of 1972 Andropov had a private meeting with Kaska. His manner was more assertive than that of Tsvigun a year earlier. He insisted that opposition forces were still strong, despite the “stabilization” in Czechoslovakia and the strengthening of the Communist Party’s authority, and that they were being infiltrated by Western intelligence services. Agent penetration of the opposition therefore remained essential. 24 The opposition source to which Andropov attached most importance probably remained Leo Lappi (FREDDI). Still posing as a committed West German supporter of the Prague Spring, the illegal FYODOROV had regular meetings with Lappi in Prague and East Berlin. On January 25, 1972 Fyodor Konstantinovich Mortin, who had succeeded Sakharovsky as head of the FCD, sought Andropov’s permission to trick Lappi into becoming a Soviet agent by a “false flag” deception which concealed the role of the KGB. Andropov gave his approval on January 29 and FYODOROV went ahead with the recruitment, claiming to be working for the West German BND. An additional reason for the Centre’s interest in Lappi was that his brother Karl was a West German citizen who, according to KGB files, was “close” to two prominent FRG politicians.25
Despite Kaska’s personal sycophancy towards his KGB advisers and the extensive purge which he had overseen, the Centre remained dissatisfied with the ideological purity of the StB. In August 1972 Andropov reported to the CPSU Central Committee that “internal adversaries” in the StB were striving to prevent the completion of “normalization.”26 A further KGB report to the Central Committee in November cited complaints from its agents and informers within the Czechoslovak Ministry of Internal Affairs that leading posts in the ministry continued to be occupied by “people who do not inspire political confidence.”27 The KGB also received numerous protests from its informants that the disgraced leaders of the Prague Spring and their families were being insufficiently persecuted. Viliam Šalgovič, who had assisted the Soviet invasion in 1968 and had been promoted to the CPCz Central Committee in 1970, complained that the children of “right-wing leaders” were being allowed to enter the universities. Worse still, the children of three disgraced former members of the Presidium—Dubček, Štefan Sádovský and Julius Turček—had been given “excellent marks” in their entrance examinations.28
Šalgovič’s complaint reflected the self-righteous vengefulness of the Soviet sycophants rather than any failure to purge the universities. In 1969-70 900 out of 3,500 university professors were dismissed. All Czech literary and cultural journals were closed down. Unemployed academics and writers were forced to seek new careers as lavatory cleaners, building laborers and boiler-room stokers. Soon after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972, Heinrich Böll described Czechoslovakia as “a veritable cultural cemetery.”29
MANY OF THE reports received by the Centre throughout the period of “normalization” concerned continued covert feuding within the CPCz leadership. In December 1972 Jakeš complained to the KGB liaison office that Husák had ordered the telephones of all Presidium members to be tapped. The working atmosphere within the Central Committee was now, he claimed, so poisonous that the Novotný era appeared, by comparison, a golden age.30 In February 1973 Jakeš and three other leading Soviet loyalists—Presidium members Karel Hoffmann and Antonín Kapek and party secretary Miloslav Hruškovič—again protested to the KGB about what they claimed were “attempts to squeeze out internationalist Communists from important posts.”31 Among other intrigues within the Party leadership reported by the KGB to Moscow during 1973 was the claim that the realist Prime Minister Štrougal was seeking to ingratiate himself with Husák’s internationalist deputy Bil’ak by methods which included giving Bil’ak’s daughter a present costing 10,000 crowns, debited to the budget of the Czechoslovak television service.32
On February 28, 1973 Kaska was killed in an aircrash while visiting his Polish opposite number and was succeeded as Minister of Internal Affairs by Jaromír Obzina, who promptly gave a sycophantic display of his internationalist credentials. “For the CPSU and for Comrade Brezhnev,” he told the KGB liaison, he was “ready to carry out any assignment.”33 Obzina, however, quickly became caught up in Husák’s attempts to increase his personal prestige by combining, like Novotný before the Prague Spring, the post of President of the Republic with that of General Secretary of the CPCz. At the end of 1973, probably at Husák’s request, Obzina began trying to win over internationalists opposed to his ambitions for the presidency. According to KGB reports from Prague, a group of Soviet loyalists headed by Hoffmann, Indra, Jakeš and Kapek (all in close touch with both the KGB and the Soviet embassy) continued to resist any attempt to combine the two posts.34 The growing senility of Ludvík Svoboda, who had succeeded Novotný as president in 1968, however, played into Husák’s hands. In May 1975 he replaced the by now demented Svoboda as head of state. Rudé právo celebrated the occasion by publishing five large photographs of Husák, each showing him in the company of one of the leaders of the five Warsaw Pact countries who had invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968.35
At the time of Husák’s apotheosis, Dubček was working as a mechanic with the Slovak Forestry Commission under constant surveillance and frequent harassment by the StB.36 On October 2, 1975 the Centre reported to Brezhnev that Dubček had sent compromising material on Husák to the Western media. Based on information supplied by Dubček, the West German and Austrian press had reported that during the war Husak had accompanied a group of Nazi journalists to the Katyn Wood near Smolensk, where the Germans had exhumed the bodies of several thousand Polish officers shot by the NKVD (an atrocity blamed by Moscow on the Germans). Dubček was twice summoned for questioning by the StB at the Slovakian interior ministry. The KGB was deeply dissatisfied by the outcome. “At the interrogation,” it informed Brezhnev, “Dubček conducted himself provocatively, c
ategorically refusing to answer questions and declaring that in future he would protest against being subjected to pressure.” Dubček refused to sign either a denial that he had provided the information on Husák or a protest at the use of his name by the Western press, and threatened to react “decisively” if “repressive measures” were taken against him. Husák meanwhile wrote to Obzina to protest his innocence of the charges against him.37
Despite Husák’s success in capturing the presidency, his power was more circumscribed than Novotný’s a decade earlier. His second-in-command, the internationalist Bil’ak, enjoyed greater authority and influence than any other deputy in eastern Europe. Having rejected the idea of a regime wholly dominated by notorious hardliners, the Kremlin, with some misgivings, regarded the Husák-Bil’ak combination as the best available. A KGB report from Prague at the end of the decade reported in thinly disguised language that, despite growing friction between Husák and Bil’ak, neither was attempting to topple the other because they knew that Moscow would not allow it:
Business-like relations between the leaders of Czechoslovakia are being maintained largely because of the fact that Husák Bil’ak and other members of the Presidium of the Czechoslovak Communist Party know that the top leadership of the CPSU gave their full, firm and uncompromising support to Husák and Bil’ak. For both, this is a serious restraining factor for maintaining normal working relations between the two of them, and the situation in the Presidium of the Czechoslovak Communist Party largely depends on their mutual relations.38
Despite its jaundiced view of the political leadership, the KGB liaison office in Prague was fully satisfied with the willingness of Obzina and the StB to do its bidding. Obzina, it reported, kept it “objectively informed” both about what took place in the CPCz Presidium and about the activities of each of its members, Husák included.39 Sinitsyn reported in 1977 that there were “operational contacts” between KGB and StB residencies in twenty-six countries.40 In 1975 the StB had agreed to a Soviet request to open a residency in Albania, a country which the KGB found hard to penetrate.41 In 1976, when the StB discovered that Jozef Grohman, editor-in-chief of the state technical literature publishing house and the Czechoslovak representative at UNESCO, was working for West German intelligence, Obzina invited the Centre to send KGB officers to Prague to help in the investigation of the Grohman case at what he deferentially termed “a higher professional level.”42 Sinitsyn concluded his annual report from Prague in 1977:
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