Daughters of the KGB (42 page)

A bridge of spies … a bridge of sighs, of relief. The Glienicke bridge between West Berlin and Potsdam in the GDR was the scene of many high-security spy swaps during the Cold War. Illicitly taken, the picture above is of a swap in the winter of 1986. Today, the bridge is … just a bridge.

Nikita Khrushchev called West Berlin ‘a swamp of espionage’. Among its denizens were the author and fellow RAF linguists in the Signals Section at RAF Gatow (below) logging in real time VHF transmissions from Soviet and GDR pilots flying aircraft like this MIG 15 (above).

When Josef Frolik (left) spied in London for Czech intelligence, among his informers was an MP nicknamed ‘Greedy Bastard’. But Frolik defected to the West and betrayed all his secrets, maybe.

Otto John (above with his wife) defected to the British during the war, and was promoted in 1950 to head the Bundesrepublik’s counter-espionage service. In 1954 he vanished, to re-appear in GDR accusing Chancellor Adenauer of being a militarist. In 1955 he ‘came home’. Sentenced to four years in jail for betraying secrets, he swore he was innocent.

Perhaps the Poles suffered most. The document (left) counter-signed by Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov and Mikoyan ordered the murder of thousands of Polish POWs in 1940.

Catholic priest Jerzy Popiełuszko was tortured to death by the UB in 1984.

These Home Army men (above) fighting the Germans in the winter of 1944 (below) were all murdered by Stalin’s Communist Poles.

This Home Army fighter emerging from a Warsaw sewer in summer 1944 is about to be shot by the Germans dragging him out.

Picasso’s ‘dove of peace’ was the symbol of Soviet-backed unilateral disarmament groups in the West. When the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, this dove (above) was behind bars and the slogan read: ‘Socialism, yes. Occupation, no!!!’

On 27 June 1968 journalist Ludvik Vákulík (left) defied the StB and Moscow’s tanks in the streets, publishing a manifesto entitled
Dva tisíce slov
– two thousand words of protest – signed by seventy leading Czech intellectuals. That took some courage!

A
LSO BY
D
OUGLAS
B
OYD

Non-Fiction

April Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine

Voices from the Dark Years

The French Foreign Legion

The Kremlin Conspiracy

Normandy in the Time of Darkness

Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass

De Gaulle: The Man Who Defied Six US Presidents

Lionheart

The Other First World War

Fiction

The Eagle and the Snake

The Honour and the Glory

The Truth and the Lies

The Virgin and the Fool

The Fiddler and the Ferret

Cover illustrations
: ©
Londonstills.com/Alamy
and iStock © gonullena.

C
OPYRIGHT

First published in 2015

The History Press

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