Daughters of the KGB (28 page)

After Tito broke away from Soviet domination in June 1949, Stalin’s paranoia focussed on the satellite rulers who, in his warped opinion, were putting the needs of their own countries before those of the USSR. This was called ‘Trotskyist–Titoist deviation’. For Stalin, Rudolf Slánský, the General Secretary of KSC, was also guilty of the crime of ‘cosmopolitanism’ because he was Jewish and had relatives in other countries. Following the 1948 coup d’état, Slánský was the next most powerful person in the country after President Gottwald. When Gottwald accused two of Slánský’s associates of betraying the party, Slánský joined in the baying for their blood, unaware that he was only buying a little time for himself by organising a purge that saw thousands of KSC members arrested and imprisoned, and hundreds executed.
⁷
Gottwald delayed the arrest of Slánský until he himself was threatened, and then threw Slánský to the wolves, together with thirteen other ‘leading lights’ of the party – of whom ten were also Jewish. They were arrested and put on trial for high treason after a year-long interrogation under torture, which methods Slánský was later accused of having introduced into Czechoslovakia. Films of the long trial in November 1952 showed the defendants – as in the Moscow show trials of the 1930s – admitting everything and asking to be punished appropriately. The verdicts included eleven death sentences. Five days later Slánský was publicly hanged outside Pankrác prison and his ashes scattered with no grave or marker to show where. The message of the trial was clear: it was one thing to murder Jews and priests, but executing the General Secretary of the party meant that
no one
was safe.
⁸

Another of the accused who had been deported from France to Mauthausen during the German occupation was Artur London, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, who had been appointed Deputy Foreign Minister on his return to Czechoslovakia in 1949. Arrested two years later, he was one of the fourteen accused in the Slánsky trial and convicted on the basis of confessions obtained by torture. Sentenced to imprisonment for life, he was rehabilitated in 1956 and left his homeland in 1963 to settle in France.

The point of the Czech show trials was, as in the USSR, to ‘prove’ that central planning according to Marxist–Leninist doctrine was infallible; therefore, any failures must be due to spies, Western agents, ‘enemies of the people’ and saboteurs, who had to be rooted out and made to pay the supreme penalty. To obtain the confessions, the accused were kept standing at all times while teams of interrogators questioned them for up to eighteen hours a day for months on end. During the theoretically permitted six hours of sleep each night, they were awoken every ten minutes, forced to stand and report their identity in the formula ‘Detention prisoner XXX reports. Number in cell, one. All in order.’

Former first deputy minister of foreign trade Eugen Loebel, who survived to tell the tale, described his interrogation, which:

was conducted by three men, each taking his turn and consisted of a never-ending flood of insult, humiliation and threats … I was not allowed to sit. I even had to eat standing up. You could not even sit on the toilet, because what was provided was a so-called ‘Turkish closet’ [just a hole in the floor]. Walking [and standing] for sixteen hours a day, however slowly, meant covering 15 or 20 miles – on swollen feet. Such a day seemed endless and the prisoner could scarcely wait for night. Yet lying down caused more pain than anything else. The sudden change in pressure brought such violent pain to my feet that sometimes I had to scream out.
⁹

Prolonged sleep deprivation is a torture which destroys the brain’s ability to distinguish between real memory and suggested versions of the same events. In addition, mock executions were used to destabilise the detainees, as were drugs. Loebel described the latter as feeling ‘as though a hand had thrust itself through my forehead into my brain’.
¹⁰
His trial, which opened on 20 November 1952, was, in the words of historian Patrick Brogan, ‘pure theatre’, in which the accused had learned their parts by rote and knew even at which points the judge or prosecutor would interrupt with specific questions. The verdicts, to which the condemned were instructed to refuse their ‘right’ to appeal, having been announced, eleven of the defendants were executed, cremated and their ashes scattered on a snow-covered road as grit.

Back to Frolik. Before being called up for military service in 1949, he was a trainee accountant and an obedient member of the KSC. Discovering that officers of 2nd Infantry Regiment, in which he was serving, had looted millions of crowns worth of art treasures from a monastery, he reported this to military intelligence and had his honesty rewarded with an invitation to join StB – as an accountant. Promoted to other duties after a few months, he realised that the organisation was not the unswervingly honest ‘organ of the party’ he had assumed it to be, and that false confessions were routinely obtained by torture. Moreover, the Deputy Minister of the Interior, who controlled StB, was Colonel Antonin Prchal, a Czech blackmailed into working for the KGB because of his record of collaboration during the German occupation. It was he who described the honourable president of the People’s Republic as ‘that drunken paralytic’.
¹¹

After two years Frolik was moved into counter-espionage and kept his head down. He must have acquired a good service record to be posted to the Czech embassy in London as ‘labour attaché’, a title that explained his contacts with trade union personalities and Labour MPs. After the Soviet invasion of his country in 1968, he decided to defect and was ‘lifted’, with his wife and son, in a James Bond-style operation by MI6. Among the disclosures he made during debriefing was that, during his time in London, První Sprava had thirty full-time spies in Britain and 200 informants. Frolik said another První Sprava officer, named Robert Husak, had run an agent code-named ‘Lee’ who was Labour MP Will Owen, originally recruited by Lieutenant Colonel Jan Paclik, an StB officer accredited as Second Secretary at the embassy. Among themselves, the Czechs codenamed Owen ‘Greedy Bastard’ because he took monthly retainers of £500, expected to be given free holidays in Czechoslovakia and pocketed as many cigars as he could get his hands on when invited to parties at the embassy.
¹²

On 15 January 1970 Owen was arrested by Special Branch officers at his home in Carshalton, and charged with the catch-all offence ‘communicating information that may be useful to an enemy’. He resigned his seat in the Commons a few days before he was found ‘not guilty’ after trial at the Old Bailey on 6 May 1970. Although Owen’s counsel admitted his client had been paid a total of £2,300 in brown envelopes by the Czechs – Owen claimed it was much less than that, such as £5 or £10 each time – he was acquitted because it could not be proven that he had passed across
classified
material, which seems to make nonsense of the charge in view of the fact that he had sat on the Defence Estimates Committee and a sub-committee dealing with Admiralty matters.
¹³

A very different agent working for the Czechs in Britain at the same time was Nicholas Praeger. Born in Prague, where his father worked as a clerk in the British embassy, but also acted as a spy for První Sprava, Nicholas came to Britain with his parents, wife and child in 1949 and was given British citizenship. Volunteering for service in the RAF without disclosing his foreign birth – why did routine vetting not reveal it? – he trained as a radar technician and passed to Robert Husak photocopies of the complete documentation of the radar-evasion system on RAF bombers at the time. Code-named ‘Marconi’, he left the RAF and worked for the English Electric Company, continuing to pass classified material to Prague until he was caught and tried in 1971. Although sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment, this was reduced to six years when his offences were compared with punishment for similar offences, although his defence that he had been blackmailed by threats against his wife’s family in Czechoslovakia was pretty thin in view of his father’s espionage experience. Freed in 1977, Praeger was stripped of his British nationality and deported. His wife and child were then living in West Germany, which refused him entry when he tried to go there.

In 1953 a new boss was appointed for StB, who sacked all the KGB-type thugs who used torture. Rudolf Barak was a dark-haired, quick-witted man who introduced more sophisticated methods and made a point of not kow-towing to the KGB ‘advisers’ who had wielded the real power in the past. A popular chief, he himself fell from grace after allegedly stealing some secret funds, and was sent to prison for fifteen years; he later emerged as a filling station employee. By the time Novotný became president in 1957, he was ruler of a completely purged party. In 1960 he proclaimed the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (CSSR).

In Prague, the Jalta hotel on Wenceslaw Square is described with understated Czech humour as ‘more decadent and sexier than ever’ by the hotel’s PR director, and as ‘A nice curiosity, a five-star boutique hotel with a bunker.’ The Jalta was built 1954–58 as a luxury hotel for Western businessmen, politicians and diplomats, who stayed there unaware that the building was constructed over a Second World War bomb crater. Below the hotel cellars was a bomb- and radiation-proof bunker on three levels with its own power generator, water supply and operating theatre, designed to shelter 150 top government officials for up to two months in the event of nuclear war. In the bunker, to which access was forbidden for hotel staff, was an StB listening post: all the hotel’s best rooms and public spaces were bugged by listeners far below their feet, who could also snoop on the staff. When the premises were used as West Germany’s embassy in the 1970s, the StB tapped its telephones and many of the rooms. The bunker is now open as a must-see museum of the Cold War.

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.