WHAT'S ON BRITSKÉ LISTY

Czech Secret Services' Loud Mouth

3. 8. 2010 / Štěpán Kotrba

The first time something like this what is happening now in Czech Republic occurred was soon after the Velvet Revolution, when the then Minister of Interior of the still Czechoslovak Socialist Republic Richard Sacher (from the Christian Democratic party, KDU-ČSL) disclosed the network of spies living illegally abroad, as part of the purges within the intelligent services who worked for the communist regime. That was a fatal mistake, which cost the lives of dozens of agents living in hiding abroad.

Petr Cibulka also released at that time a more or less harmless (properly cleaned, corrected and forged) list of StB agents and collaborators, which he "accidentally" got through agent David Elleder. In 1992 student Eleder was quietly and inconspicuously drowned in Serbia, so that he couldn't reveal anything else. Since then, our nation has not paid attention to the secret services, at the most flipped through lists of useless or long dead agents sometimes, did a little cursing here and there, but that's all. And to this day the public had been able to flip through and curse only that. Just that, as goes the Czech proverb, "cuckoo eggs have a fetus inside even 20 years later"...

The second time there was a massive outbreak was when it became suitable for some historians with a Jacobin nature and to many politicians, who wanted to cover up their previous failures and for whom, two decades after the "Velvet" coup d'Etat, was no longer actual the agreement made between the then resigning power with the new incumbents, which had been in reality initiated and coordinated by Henry Kissinger, James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, Anatoliy Dobrynin, Anatolij Cherniayev and Georgiy Shaknazarov. Even Stanislav Milota played a role.

As former intelligent services oficer and post-Velvet Revolution security services manager and Britské Listy's collaborator Miroslav Polreich adds to the current situation: "What is still missing is that barbarity perpetrated by those journalists working in the Ministry of Interior (Jan Ruml, Petra Šustrová, Milan Fendrych), when they gave away information about still active agents to whomever showed up and asked." Polreich goes into the details of that time in his book "Utajená zákulisí" (Secret Behind-the-scenes), from page 267.

The Pandora's Box was opened once again a year ago, when other vague accusations came up. With that, the political scene got people's attention away from their deeds into discussing the ageing and senile communist party. Former informers and collaborators turned anti-communist heroes... And no one was there to stain their "merits".

The third wave of denunciations came now. I don't know anyone who would be willing to cooperate with a secret service that hasn't learned how to keep its mouth shut about them for at least 50 years, in some cases even a whole century. Today it is possible to research the history of the background of the period between the world wars, but only partially. Many contacts between Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and some American politicians haven't been revealed until today. The then young Czechoslovak Republic was already an extended arm of the American espionage system in the "Old Continent". That because the U.S. was not always in agreement with Great Britain. And was certainly not always in good terms with Germany. The unveiling of part of our military intelligence services, of former technological or diplomatic spies is, just as was the incapacitation of illegal agents, a fatal mistake for which the "new" Czech secret services will pay for decades.

Put simply and directly: nobody will open their mouths to them. People will not want to cooperate with them, for ideological reasons. And to get information through blackmailing or corruption is not always effective, if nothing else, because if is unstable, unmanageable and risky or also because it is extremely expensive. Those who allowed the publication of living secret services cooperators should be persecuted according to the Penal Code: for treason and subversion. The long term consequences of their acts are fatal.

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