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

a commission set up by the new government. A counterterrorism unit was virtually the only branch of the foreign intelligence service that was kept intact. But something was needed in place of the old security services, so the Havel government had initially created an organization called the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Democracy. To staff the new office, the government brought back officers who had been purged by the regime after the crackdown in 1968, on the assumption that if the Communists had gotten rid of them, they must not be all bad.

But the new organization quickly proved to be a mess. Given a new lease on life, these old hands started doing what they knew best from the 1960s—targeting the Americans and the British. What was worse, some units, most notably surveillance teams, hadn’t gotten the word yet that they were supposed to be out of business. So StB surveillance teams were still trailing CIA and MI6 officers around Prague in early 1990, as if there hadn’t been a revolution.

Krizan wanted Cerny to come in and start over. He would take the lead in creating a new intelligence service, one suited to a new, pro-Western democracy. Cerny would be joined in this daunting task by Jan Ruml, a ponytailed dissident appointed by Havel to be deputy interior minister in charge of intelligence. They would create a much smaller organization than had existed under the Communists and staff it with fresh blood, young people with no background in intelligence matters. Czechoslovakia was going to start again with a blank slate.

Before they could start fresh, however, the new government had to figure out what to do with the old files of the StB and Sprava One. While some of the files had been destroyed by the Communists on their way out, much of the archives was still intact, including an index card system that provided reference points to registry books identifying agents, their contacts within the intelligence services, and their operational targets dating back as much as forty years. The files showed that StB had had some ten thousand active informants and agents at one time and had thoroughly penetrated every branch of federal and local government. To avoid a witch-hunt within the ranks of the new government, files that were still active at the time of the Velvet Revolution were destroyed. Only old, closed files were retained and scrutinized.

Rumors abounded through Prague in the early days of the Havel government that former StB officers were planning a comeback and that they might plan a coup to topple Havel and reinstate the Communist regime. But closer scrutiny showed that the rumors had been fueled by the simple fact that a few old StB officers were getting together regularly in taverns around Prague to drink, swap stories, and get out of the house. To the relief of Cerny and others around Havel, it quickly became apparent that the StB was dead and that there was no chance that a Czech version of the Odessa network—the near mythical organization of former SS officers that faded into the fabric of postwar Germany—would emerge to threaten the new democracy.

Once they began to dismantle the old apparatus, Cerny and Ruml turned their attention to developing new relations with the British and the Americans. The CIA had not played any role with the dissidents during the Velvet Revolution, but now the Czechs wanted the CIA to help ensure that their communications were secure and that President Havel was adequately protected. So the CIA provided new communications gear and helped train Havel’s bodyguards; Britain’s MI6, meanwhile, agreed to provide field training for the new Czech intelligence officers.

The Czechs also worked with the Americans and British to clear their books of old sleeper agents burrowed deep into Western society. The FBI and CIA asked the new Havel government and its slimmed-down foreign intelligence service to recall longtime “illegal” agents who had been sent to the United States by the Communists years earlier. At the end of the Cold War, the Czechs had about twenty sleeper agents in place around the world, including several in the United States and Britain. They had never been activated; the Communists had planned to turn these illegals loose in case of a major crisis or war with the West.

But these illegals had been in place in their new “cover” lives for so long that some seemed to have forgotten they were spies, not Little League coaches. When the new Czech officials tried to recall them, two or three of the sleeper agents in the United States simply refused, saying that they were Americans now, with families and lives they didn’t want to abandon. In Britain, one or two also refused to come home. The Havel government decided that they should be left alone to live their new lives, especially since none of them had ever really done any damage against the Americans or the British.

CIA Headquarters, Langley, Early 1990

Ever since the earliest days of the Cold War, the CIA had covertly provided funding for magazines, academic journals, and books published in Western Europe by expatriates from the Soviet empire.

Those émigré publications had told the truth to generations of Eastern Europeans and Soviets starved for real information. They had provided glimpses of banned literature and in many cases kept history alive for persecuted minorities. The CIA-backed publications had never had to publish false propaganda; all they had to do was tell the truth to people who lived under regimes built on lies and fabrications. The covert program to smuggle news and literature to people inside the Soviet bloc was one of the CIA’s greatest—and noblest—success stories of the Cold War.

Poland had served as a case study in the power of information. Along with the AFL-CIO and the Catholic Church, the CIA had helped provide the Solidarity movement with the resources it needed to get its message out during the dark days of martial law, when it was forced underground.

For persecuted minority