Daughters of the KGB (31 page)

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.

Yet, every now and again echoes of the suffering emerges to ripple the surface of the present. On 23 March 2014 the death was announced in Prague of Miroslav Štepán, aged 68. The name probably meant nothing to people outside the Czech Republic, but it meant a great deal to Czechs, who remembered him all too well as the KSC party boss responsible for brutally putting down the first demonstrations in 1988 and 1989. After a student demo in Prague on 17 November 1989, he made a famously ill-timed speech:

In no country, not even a developing country or a capitalist or socialist country, should one see kids of fifteen years old deciding when the president should go or who he should be.

He was speaking in a factory of a state company employing 50,000 workers, who were on strike in sympathy with the demonstrators. Few could hear his words clearly due to constant interruptions by whistling, foot-stamping and chanting of, ‘
Nejsme deti!
’
–
We are not children! They also demanded the resignation of this man who commanded the people’s militia known as ‘the fist of the working class’, and sent in riot police to break up the demos – for which he was labelled People’s Enemy No. 1. A few days later, Štepán resigned all his political and public offices.

In 1990 he was the only high party functionary to be put on trial, and was condemned to two and a half years’ imprisonment for abuse of power in using water cannons and tear gas against the peaceful demonstrators in October 1988. After one year’s confinement he was released and created an extreme-Left party under the banner of Czech Communism, which had no success in elections. To his last days, Štepán remained convinced that his downfall was the result of a treacherous deal between the Kremlin and the West, and a great mistake.
²²

So, were the StB files all destroyed? Many Czechs think that they still exist but have been closed to the public and may only be consulted by the president or other high government officials investigating candidates for public office. Certainly Putin’s aphorism that
chekisty
always stick together is borne out in the Czech Republic, where an
émigrée
friend of the author was trying to gain custody of her teenage daughter, but could get no favourable judgement in a Czech court because the father had been a low-grade StB employee. According to her, his former colleagues still have influence in the right places and will use it for him. At the top of Czech society, Minister of Finance Andrej Babiš – the second-richest man in the country – is believed by many of his fellow-citizens to have collaborated with, or been an officer of, StB under the code name ‘Bureš’. In 2013 he sued the Slovakian Memory Institute for publishing this allegation, but neither he nor his witnesses ever came to court. After the elections of 2014, the trial was adjourned
sine die.

Notes

1
.    Frolik,
Frolik Defection
, pp. 48–51

2
.    He was prime minister June 1970–February 1974

3
.    Frolik,
Frolik Defection
, pp. 41–2

4
.    
Intel News
, 29 June 2012

5
.    Frolik,
Frolik Defection
, pp. 58–9

6
.    Ibid, p. 60

7
.    L. Bittman,
The Deception Game
, New York NY, Ballantine Publishing 1981; L. Bittman,
The KGB and Soviet Disinformation
, London, Brassey’s 1985

8
.    Deacon,
Spyclopeadia
, p. 271

9
.    Frolik,
Frolik Defection
, pp. 77–9

10
.  Or possibly Kleska, according to some sources

11
.  Frolik,
Frolik Defection
, p. 80

12
.  Ibid

13
.  Some sources give the code name as ‘Trianon’

14
.  M.D. Peterson,
Widow Spy
, Wilmington, Red Canary Press, 2012

15
.  Dobson and Payne,
Dictionary of Espionage
, p. 285

16
.  Changed to ‘Pley’ in 1972

17
.  Bearden and Risen,
Main Enemy
, p. 403

18
.  Ibid, pp. 408–9

19
.  Ibid, pp. 402–3

20
.  Ibid, p. 423

21
.  Ibid, pp. 424–7

22
.  Ceský Rozhlas 7 – Radio Prague, 24 March 2013

17

AVO
AND
B
LOODSHED IN
B
UDAPEST

Early in November 1944 Soviet forces drove the Germans out of the Hungarian city of Szeged, just twelve miles from the Romanian border. Even at this early stage, Stalin was leaving nothing to chance. Never mind the Red Army’s urgent need for every available aircraft for military purposes, three Hungarian NKVD officers were immediately flown in to prepare the ground for a pro-Moscow provisional government. The first act of Mihály Farkas, Erno Gero
¹
and Imre Nagy, who had been an NKVD agent code-named ‘Volodya’ for two decades,
²
was to celebrate the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

In January 1945, after the liberation of Debrecen, Stalin’s forces occupied two out of the three largest Hungarian cities. Into Debrecen flew another Moscow puppet, to set up the first government. Mátyás Rákosi, however, had been ordered by Stalin not to place himself in the government because he was (a) Jewish
³
and (b) widely hated inside the country as a Communist extremist remembered for his involvement in the Red Terror of the 1919 Hungarian Soviet uprising under Béla Kun. The new party was called Magyar Szocialista Munkáspárt (MSzMP) – the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party – with no mention of the word communism in order to distance it from Béla Kun’s Komunisták Magyarszági Párt, of which many older Hungarians had reason to hate the memory. The first Minister of the Interior in the provisional government was, however, an undercover Communist by the name of Ferenc Erdei, who took his orders from Soviet General Fyodor Kuznetsov. The only worry Erdei apparently had about this relationship was that Kuznetsov concentrated on the minutiae of organising the secret police and completely ignored the skyrocketing crime wave in the liberated areas.
⁴

After the defeat of the Axis forces, Hungary was occupied under an Allied Control Council, headed by Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, who refused to consult his American and British colleagues on the council as he was officially obliged to do.
⁵
Hungary also had to pay huge reparations to the USSR. With the currency changes, it is difficult to estimate exactly the cost to the Hungarian people, but it was about 17 per cent of GDP in 1945–46 and 10 per cent higher in 1946–47, dropping to a still punitive 10 per cent thereafter as it became apparent that the Hungarian economy was otherwise heading for complete meltdown. In addition, it had to bear the costs of the Soviet occupation forces, which came to another crippling 10 per cent of GDP.
⁶