It is easy to see why Djilas’s devastating exposé of the Soviet system as a co-optive oligarchy run by a privileged Party nomenklatura should have been seen as so subversive. In 1963 the twenty-year-old Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky was sent to psychiatric hospital for possessing a copy of it. Even for KGB officers The New Class was seen as a potentially dangerous text. When General Oleg Kalugin finally read the book in the KGB library in 1981, twenty-four years after its publication in the West, he found himself secretly agreeing with it.15 Why Nietzsche should have been mentioned in the same breath as Djilas is more puzzling. His call for a “revaluation of all values” so that the life force of the strongest should not be hampered by the weak, though bearing some relation to the actual practice of Stalinism, was ideological anathema. But the works of Nietzsche, unlike those of Djilas, were scarcely likely to subvert the youth of the Soviet Bloc. The author of the KGB report probably knew no more about the great German philosopher than that he was a well-known enemy of Marxism.
The first stirrings of reform in Czechoslovakia in the mid-1960s, however, caused relatively little concern in the Centre. The chief target of the reformers, the aging and truculent Czechoslovak Communist Party (CPCz) leader, Antonín Novotný, was increasingly regarded in Moscow as a neo-Stalinist nuisance rather than as a bulwark against revisionism. In December 1967 Brezhnev made an unscheduled one-day visit to Prague at the request of Novotný, who was under pressure to relinquish the post of First Secretary, which he had hitherto combined with that of president. Brezhnev refused to intervene, telling Novotný bluntly to deal with the problem himself.16 Deprived of Soviet support, Novotný gave way to the reformers.
The election of the 46-year-old Alexander Dubček as the new First Secretary on January 5, 1968 initially aroused no disquiet in either the Kremlin or the Centre. Dubček had spent most of his childhood in the Soviet Union, graduating with honors from the Moscow Higher Party School in 1958, and was condescendingly known within the KGB as “Our Sasha.” When the Czechoslovak attempt to create “Socialism with a human face” began, the FCD Eleventh (East European) Department at first concluded that “Our Sasha” was being cleverly manipulated by “bourgeois elements” in the CPCz. Once it became clear that Dubček was himself one of the moving forces behind the reforms, the Centre felt a sense of personal betrayal.17
Dubček believed, in retrospect, that Moscow took a secret decision to use the Red Army to crush the Prague Spring little more than two months after he succeeded Novotný:
Under Novotný and his predecessors, the Soviets had been permitted to control the Czechoslovak armed forces and secret police in various ways, which included an implicit “right” to approve key appointments. It was apparently not until mid-March that they realized that their proxies might be fired and replaced without their consent and decided to step in.18
In reality Brezhnev remained unsure about the wisdom of military intervention until almost the eve of the August invasion. The Soviet prime minister, Alexei Kosygin, shared some of Brezhnev’s doubts.19 Both, however, gradually gave way to the hardliners in the Politburo.
The case for military intervention was first put at the Politburo meeting on March 21 by the Ukrainian Party secretary, Petr Yefimovich Shelest, who declared that the fate of the whole “socialist camp” was at stake in the Prague Spring. Though it was “essential to seek out the healthy [pro-Soviet] forces in Czechoslovakia more actively,” he argued that “military measures” would also be necessary. Shelest was vigorously supported by the KGB chairman, Yuri Andropov, who called for “concrete measures” to prepare for armed intervention.20 Though as yet only a candidate (non-voting) member of the Politburo, Andropov became an increasingly influential voice during the Czechoslovak crisis, willing to challenge Kosygin and other more senior figures who appeared reluctant to use force.21
As Soviet ambassador in Budapest in 1956, Andropov had played a key role in suppressing the Hungarian Revolution. His insistence that the threat of counter-revolution had reached a critical stage helped to persuade an initially reluctant Khrushchev to agree to military intervention.22 An admiring junior diplomat in the Soviet embassy later recalled how Andropov had been the first to “see through” the reformist prime minister, Imre Nagy, and had seemed completely in control of events even as Soviet tanks entered Budapest: “He was so calm—even when bullets were flying, when everyone else at the embassy felt like we were in a besieged fortress.”23 As well as being an uncompromising advocate of force, Andropov had demonstrated his mastery of deception, successfully persuading Nagy that the Red Army was being withdrawn while simultaneously plotting his overthrow. When the Hungarian commander-in-chief phoned the Prime Minister’s office early on November 4 to report the Soviet attack, Nagy told him, “Ambassador Andropov is with me and assures me there’s been some mistake and the Soviet government did not order an attack on Hungary. The Ambassador and I are trying to call Moscow.”24
In Czechoslovakia in 1968, as in Hungary in 1956, Andropov’s strategy was based on a mixture of deception and military might. Among the main instruments of deception during the Prague Spring were KGB illegals, all disguised as Westerners. Their deployment in Czechoslovakia in the first of what were henceforth termed PROGRESS operations marked a major innovation in the KGB’s use of illegals. Hitherto illegals had been sent overwhelmingly to the West rather than the East. Most of those deployed within the Soviet Bloc had been sent on missions (codenamed BAYKAL) either to cultivate Western tourists or to monitor contacts between Soviet citizens and Westerners. In 1966 and 1967, for example, a number of illegals were sent to Bulgarian Black Sea resorts to mingle with the growing number of Western holidaymakers and look for possible recruits.25 The illegal Stanislav Federovich Malotenko visited tourist areas of Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania and Czechoslovakia posing as a Western visitor in order to investigate, inter alia, “how willingly women agents agreed to have intimate relations with foreigners without permission” from the KGB.26
During the Prague Spring illegals, posing as Western tourists, journalists, business people and students, were for the first time used in significant numbers in a country of the Soviet Bloc for both intelligence collection and active measures. Czechoslovak counter-revolutionaries, the Centre believed, would be much franker in revealing their subversive designs to those they believed Western sympathizers than to their neighbors in eastern Europe. Even within the FCD the PROGRESS operation in Czechoslovakia was known only to a small circle of senior officers. Initially the PROGRESS file was kept in the office of the head of Directorate S (Illegals), General Anatoli Ivanovich Lazarev, though, as operations in Czechoslovakia expanded, the group within the directorate who were privy to the secret also widened.27
Of the first twenty illegals selected by the Centre for PROGRESS operations in Czechoslovakia during 1968,28 at least five (GROMOV, SADKO, SEVIDOV, VLADIMIR and VLAS)29 and probably another two (GURYEV and YEVDOKIMOV) 30 posed as West Germans. There were also three bogus Austrians (ARTYOMOVA, DIM and VIKTOR)31 and three bogus Britons (BELYAKOV, USKOV and VALYA),32 two fictitious Swiss (ALLA33 and SEP34), one Lebanese (YEFRAT35) and one Mexican (ROY36).37 Probably in March, Andropov ordered that by May 12 at least fifteen of the illegals should be deployed in Czechoslovakia—more than had ever been despatched to any Western country in so short a period of time. Each was given a monthly allowance of 300 dollars as well as travel expenses and enough money to rent an apartment.38
Andropov also expanded the KGB legal representation in Prague. In addition to the KGB liaison office, headed by M. G. Kotov, which had been operating in the headquarters of the StB (its Czechoslovak equivalent) for the past twenty years, Andropov secretly established an undeclared KGB residency, headed by V. V. Surzhaninov, which began work in the Soviet embassy on April 26.39 The deputy head of FCD Directorate S, G. F. Borzov, and another senior Line N officer, V. K. Umnov, were sent to the residency to co-ordinate the work of the illegals.40 The main task both of the residency’s Line PR and of the KGB
liaison with the StB was to identify reliable, pro-Soviet members of the CPCz to form a quisling government after a Soviet invasion. At the top of their list the KGB put four hardline members of the CPCz Presidium—Alois Indra, Jozef Lenárt, Drahomir Kolder and Vasil Bil’ak—and a former minister of the interior, Rudolf Barák, who had been dismissed and imprisoned in 1962, officially for embezzlement of Party funds but in reality for using the StB to collect an incriminating dossier on Novotný.41
KGB officers in Prague had little difficulty in arranging meetings with Indra, Lenárt, Kolder and Bil’ak, who were regular visitors to the Soviet embassy. It was considered too risky, however, to approach Barák directly after his release from prison early in May. Instead, the KGB residency used a female illegal, Galina Leonidovna Linitskaya (codenamed ALLA), operating with a Swiss passport in the name of Maria Werner, to make the first approach to Barák. For some years the vivacious ALLA had specialized in making contact with Western visitors to the Soviet Union who were of interest to the KGB. Her KGB file primly complains that she was “too sexually stimulated” and, despite having a daughter, “not a family person” (not a criticism which appears in the files of male illegals). ALLA had first met Barák in 1961, when he was minister of the interior, and succeeded in renewing contact with him soon after his release from prison. At ALLA’s request, Barák agreed to a meeting with B. S. Ivanov of the KGB residency.42
Indra, Lenárt, Kolder and Bil’ak were all to prove stalwarts of the neo-Stalinist regime which later presided over the destruction of “Socialism with a human face.” Barák, however, proved far less useful than the Prague residency had hoped, partly because of resentment—even by some pro-Soviet members of the CPCz leadership—at his brutality as minister of the interior when he had been in charge of the StB. He was not fully rehabilitated until 1975, seven years after his release from prison.43
THE KGB ILLEGALS deployed in Czechoslovakia had two main tasks: to penetrate the allegedly counter-revolutionary groups springing up during the Prague Spring in order to report on their subversive intentions; and to implement a series of active measures designed to discredit them. The main task of penetration was entrusted to YEFRAT, GURYEV, YEVDOKIMOV, GROMOV and SADKO.44 Their chief targets were what the Centre saw as the main sources of subversive ideas:
• the Union of Writers (in particular its chairman, Eduard Goldst Åcker, and vice-chairman, Jan Procházka, and the celebrated authors Pavel Kohout and Milan Kundera);
• radical journals which had escaped Communist control such as the Union of Writers’ Literární Listy and the Socialist Party’s Svobodne slovo, as well as the increasingly unorthodox Communist Party newspaper, Rudé právo;
• leading reformists in television and radio (in particular Jiří Pelikán, the director-general of Czechoslovak television);
• Charles University, especially its philosophy department, which took the lead in pressing for a new law protecting academic freedom, and leading student activists such as Lubomír Holeček and Jiří Måller;
• K-231, a club of former political prisoners who had been jailed under the notorious Article 231 of the Czechoslovak criminal code;
• KAN, the club of non-Party activists, formed in early April to give those who were not Party members the opportunity to participate in public life and share in the building of “a new political system—hitherto never realized in history—democratic socialism;”
• and the Socialist and People’s Parties, struggling to recover the independent existence they had lost after the Communist coup in 1948.45
One of the defining moments of the Prague Spring, which epitomized the new climate of political freedom and the near-collapse of official censorship, was the May Day procession through the capital, seen on television throughout the country. Instead of the usual tedious display of sycophantic admiration for the Party leadership and platitudinous slogans celebrating friendship with the Soviet Union, there was a spontaneous celebration of popular support for the reform movement combined with irreverent messages for Moscow such as the banners proclaiming “With the Soviet Union for ever—but not a day longer!” and “Long live the USSR—but at its own expense!” Dubček remembered the day “with deep emotion,” “truly touched” by the support for him from the former political prisoners of K-231 and the non-Party activists of KAN. For Moscow, however, the day was an outrageous counter-revolutionary provocation which demonstrated that the Czechoslovak one-party state was in mortal danger.46
The danger was all the greater because, in the Centre’s view, the StB was becoming increasingly unreliable. Probably Moscow’s leading bête noire in Oldřich Černík’s government, which took power in April, was the interior minister, Josef Pavel, who was responsible for the StB. Ironically, the KGB placed much of the blame for Pavel’s appointment on Lubomír Štrougal, who later turned against the reformists and played a prominent part in the return to pro-Soviet orthodoxy. According to a report in the KGB files, Štrougal came into Černík’s office soon after his appointment as prime minister and, fearing that the office was bugged, asked him to come for a stroll by the river Vltava, which runs through the center of Prague. During their walk Štrougal urged Černík to give Pavel the interior ministry. Because Pavel had spent some years in prison during the early 1950s, Štrougal argued that he could be relied upon to ensure that the police and the StB did not abuse their powers. Čerík allegedly agreed with his arguments.47 In late April, soon after becoming Interior Minister, Pavel announced that both the ministry and the StB were henceforth to be under government—not Party—control, and that a series of senior officials were to be sacked. Among them was the pro-Soviet head of the StB, Josef Houska, who was dismissed in June. Some weeks before he left, he handed the KGB photocopies of a series of StB personnel files.48
On May 10 Aleksei Kosygin, the Soviet prime minister, sent Čerík, his Czech counterpart, an outraged letter complaining, among other things, that “agents and saboteurs” disguised as Western tourists had been able to penetrate Czechoslovakia because of poor border security.49 What Kosygin predictably failed to mention, however, was that the most active agents and all the saboteurs with Western passports were KGB illegals. On the very day he sent his letter, GROMOV (Vasili Antonovich Gordievsky) and GURYEV (Valentin Aleksandrovich Gutin), both posing as West Germans, were attempting to kidnap two of the most eloquent tribunes of the Prague Spring.50 GROMOV had recent experience in kidnapping. Only a month earlier he had been decorated for an assignment in Sweden, which involved exfiltrating another illegal, FAUST, who was considered by the Centre to have developed a persecution syndrome. Once back in the Soviet Union, FAUST had been sent to a psychiatric hospital for a year, then released and sacked from the KGB.51
The targets selected for exfiltration by GROMOV and GURYEV in May 1968 were Professor Václav Černý and Jan Prochízka.52 Václav Černý (codenamed TEMNY),53 one of Czechoslovakia’s leading authorities on Romance literature, had been expelled from his chair at Charles University after the Communist coup in 1948 but re-emerged during the Prague Spring as a founder member of KAN and an eloquent advocate of academic freedom. At the June 1967 Congress of the Writers Union, Jan Prochízka had been one of those who took the lead in denouncing official censorship and demanding “freedom of creativity.”54 Claiming to be concerned for his safety, GURYEV tried to persuade Černý that he was in serious personal danger (presumably from the hardline opponents of reform) and offered to find him a temporary hiding place. GROMOV delivered a similar message to Prochízka. Once persuaded of the need to hide, both Černý and Prochízka were to be handed over to thugs from Service V (the FCD “special actions” department), who would drive them in a car with CD plates which could cross unchecked into East Germany.55 If they resisted, Černý and Prochízka were to be subdued with what the operational file euphemistically describes as “special substances.”
The operation, however, was a miserable failure. After the persecution Černý had suffered during the previous twenty
years, GURYEV could not persuade him that he was in any greater danger than usual. GROMOV discovered to his dismay that Prochízka had been supplied with a bodyguard by Pavel. The Centre had also overlooked the language problems involved in the operation. Though Černý was a good linguist, Prochízka spoke only Czech. Posing as a non-Czech-speaking West German, GROMOV found it difficult to communicate with him. Though he could probably have made himself understood in Russian, he would have risked revealing his real identity.56 After a few weeks GURYEV and GROMOV abandoned their kidnap attempts.
In addition to their other missions during the Prague Spring, the illegals were tasked with a series of active measures collectively codenamed KHODOKI (“gobetweens”), which were intended to justify a Soviet invasion by fabricating evidence of a counter-revolutionary conspiracy by Czechoslovak “rightists” and Western intelligence services.57 Posing as sympathetic Westerners, the illegals tried to persuade editors and journalists to publish attacks on the Soviet Union and other provocative articles. They also attempted to interest Černý and K-231 in accepting aid from a fictitious underground organization allegedly supplied with arms by the West. Josef Houska, the StB chief sacked by Pavel in June, was secretly informed of operation KHODOKI and agreed to co-operate with it.58
By mid-July, as part of KHODOKI, the illegals had succeeded in planting fabricated evidence of preparations for an armed coup. On July 19 Pravda reported the discovery of a “secret cache” of American weapons near the West German border, some conveniently contained in packages marked “Made in USA,” which had allegedly been smuggled into Czechoslovakia by “revenge seekers and champions of the old order.” The Soviet authorities, it claimed, had also obtained a copy of an American “secret plan” to overthrow the Prague regime. The press throughout the Soviet Bloc followed up Pravda’s story with reports that hidden Western weapons were being discovered all over Czechoslovakia. Simultaneously bogus intelligence was fed to the StB implicating K-231 and KAN in a counter-revolutionary conspiracy with Western intelligence services.59
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