The Main Enemy Milton Bearden (read full novel .txt) 📖

sense of pride, was all Gorbachev’s doing. He had, indeed, turned out to be a great leader. Gorbachev had sensed the pace of history and had helped it find a natural channel. Gorbachev’s loyal aide would never sway from the conviction that the dramatic historical shifts now under way in Eastern Europe were the result of Gorbachev’s decision not to stand in the way.

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Prague, November 17, 1989

Oldrich Cerny, a slight, sandy-haired writer, film translator, and dissident, had been following Václav Havel’s lead since he was a star-struck teenager in the 1960s. Back then, Cerny had summoned up the courage to march into a Prague theater and had brazenly introduced himself to Czechoslovakia’s brightest young playwright. Havel had agreed to the boy’s simple request that he join him for coffee. Now, more than twenty years later, Oldrich Cerny was about to follow Havel’s lead once more. This time, Cerny would help Havel foment a revolution.

But just now they were waiting, impatiently, for the revolution to begin.

In fact, both men had been waiting for at least twelve years. Havel had solidified his status as Czechoslovakia’s most important anti-Communist dissident in 1977, with the creation of Charter 77, a group of intellectuals who signed a petition seeking freedom of speech and thought and, more broadly, freedom from the repression that had been imposed on the Czech people following the Soviet crackdown on the Prague Spring in 1968. Havel’s reward for Charter 77 had been prison.

Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, meanwhile, Cerny had been ostracized for his refusal to become an informant and agent of the Czech secret services. First he rejected an overture from the internal security police and later a separate pitch from the foreign intelligence service, which was intrigued by his fluency in English and was eager to send him abroad as a spy. His defiance cost him his job at a Czech publishing house, and before long he was barely making ends meet unloading cargo on Prague’s riverfront.

By mid-November 1989, Cerny could see that Havel was worried that the new democratic spirit sweeping across Eastern Europe might pass Czechoslovakia by. Old regimes had tumbled in Poland through elections, and in Hungary through negotiations. The Berlin Wall had just come down, and the government of East Germany seemed to be on its last legs. Yet demonstrations in Prague had so far been modest, hardly enough to shake the Communists out of Prague Castle. Protests in late October on Czech National Day had been so unimpressive that Havel had become depressed. He spent several days in early November recovering from an illness—and frustration. He feared that Czechoslovakia was destined to remain an island of tyranny surrounded by democracy, the Cuba of Eastern Europe.

Havel thought that November 17 would just bring more of the same, so he didn’t join that day’s demonstrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of an infamous Nazi murder of a Czech student. But the students and others who did march peacefully that day through Prague and into Wenceslas Square, the city’s long, narrow, and sloping centerpiece, to commemorate the anniversary were met by riot police eager for a confrontation. The police waded into the crowds, brutally wielding truncheons, beating men, women, and children. The incident outraged the Czech people and electrified the nation overnight. Through its own heavy-handed stupidity, the regime had finally managed to turn the Czechs into revolutionaries.

Suddenly energized, Havel moved to capitalize on the massive protests that were immediately sparked by November 17. He called together key dissidents from all over Prague, including many of the old Charter 77 members, and that weekend they crowded into the Actor’s Studio Theater. In the midst of their heated talks, someone pointed out that they were meeting in a building that was easily accessible to the authorities, so they soon moved to the basement of Laterna Magika, the Magic Lantern Theater, to plot their next move. The Magic Lantern was to become their informal headquarters and the iconic symbol of the sudden and miraculous success of their peaceful “Velvet Revolution.”

No one had elected or appointed Havel and his new dissident group, Civic Forum, to take charge and represent the people, but there had also never been any question among the people crowding into Wenceslas Square that anyone other than Havel would lead them. Within days, Civic Forum opened negotiations with the regime, even as the Communists grumbled that they would never sit down with Havel himself. Meanwhile, the protests grew exponentially, providing fuel to the revolution and sapping the strength of the regime. One local Communist leader in Prague belatedly sought to whip up blue-collar support, but when he went to a working-class district, he was jeered by restive workers who shouted, “We are not little children.” Throughout the revolution, Cerny thought with some amusement, the Communists were always two days late.

Prague, Czechoslovakia, November 1989

Inside the cramped CIA space in the old American embassy, the CIA communicator, a young man with a keen technical mind, patiently worked the video equipment, searching the dial for just the right frequency.

“There!” he called over to David Manners, the CIA’s chief in Prague, and proudly displayed his achievement. It had taken time, but the technician had finally plugged into a very special television show. He had just captured the video feeds from the surveillance cameras that the Czech security service had placed strategically all over Prague to watch their own people, who just now happened to be in the midst of a revolution. The television set in the CIA’s station in the old mansion now filled with images of massive crowds of protesters surging through the streets of Prague. Suddenly, the video feed switched to a different camera and then another; Manners realized his communicator had stumbled across the entire Czech surveillance network, and he was now viewing the same live pictures from all over the city as the “watchers” of the Czech security service. As he watched the video feed cut from one protest to another, and