Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

At about 9 a.m. on the morning of August 21, with Soviet forces already in key positions in Prague, the StB veteran Lieutenant Colonel Bohumil Molnír, who had been given a specially engraved automatic pistol by the former KGB chairman, Ivan Serov, for his assistance in crushing the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, briefed the group of StB officers selected by the KGB to arrest Dubček and the reformist majority on the CPCz Presidium. 67Escorted by KGB officers, the arrest group proceeded to Dubček’s office in the Central Committee building, where one of them announced in what seemed to Dubček the “mechanical voice” of a second-rate amateur actor: “I am placing you in custody in the name of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government led by Comrade Indra.” He added, after a pause in which he seemed to be remembering his lines, that Dubček and his colleagues would shortly be brought before a revolutionary tribunal, also headed by Alois Indra. 68

Indra and the other leading members of the quisling government-in-waiting selected by Moscow were already in the Soviet embassy ready to take power. 69But at this point the invasion plan had to be modified. Indra and his co-conspirators had mistakenly assured Moscow that the invasion would be supported by a majority of the CPCz leadership. 70The fact that Dubček retained a majority on the Presidium as well as overwhelming popular support forced Moscow to abandon its plan for a puppet regime and bring Dubček and his colleagues to the Kremlin, under KGB escort, to be browbeaten into a degree of submission. Brezhnev stuck to the fabricated KGB story that “anti-socialist” forces had been preparing a coup:

Underground command posts and arms caches have now come to light. We don’t want to make charges against you personally, that you’re guilty. You might not even have been aware of it…

As the discussion proceeded over the next few days, however, the Soviet Politburo passed from attempts to justify the invasion and the pretense of comradely solidarity to intimidation and coercion. Dubček felt he had no option but to concede the main Soviet demands: “It could not have been otherwise. We were managing the affairs of an occupied country where the barrel of a Soviet gun was trained on our every move.” On August 26 the Czechoslovak delegation signed a secret protocol accepting a “temporary” occupation by forces of the Warsaw Pact. The decisions of the Extraordinary Fourteenth Congress of the CPCz hurriedly convened on August 22, which had condemned the invasion, were annulled. Some of the leading reformists in the Party, government, radio and television who had most outraged Moscow were dismissed. 71

The Kremlin intended the Moscow protocol only as the beginning of a process of “normalization” which would rapidly turn the Prague Spring into winter. As a later official history of the CPCz complained:

The Right… still held the decisive positions in the Party, the state apparatus and the mass media… The Marxist-Leninist forces in the Party and society led a difficult and complicated struggle from August 1968 to April 1969, characterized by the gradual suppression of the Right. 72

Of particular concern to Andropov was the continued strength of the “Right” in the StB, despite Houska’s arrest of some leading reformists. According to KGB reports from Prague, the situation was most serious in foreign intelligence:

In the [StB] First [foreign intelligence] Directorate nationalist passions were inflamed and there were acts of an anti-Soviet nature: removal of the Soviet flag, [hostile] slogans, attacks on Soviet military units sent to protect the old premises of the First Directorate, intelligence officers going underground, handing in their official passes, and stopping work in protest at the arrival of Soviet troops.

The Centre was outraged by a series of resolutions passed by the plenary committee of the StB First Directorate Communist Party:

1. Communists of the First Directorate Communist Party Organization welcome the return of the Czechoslovak delegation from Moscow and express their joy that comrades Dubček, Smrkovský, Černík, Kriegel, Svoboda and others will have the possibility of resuming their constitutional and Party duties. [In fact, on Soviet insistence, Kriegel was sacked.]

In expressing their confidence in them, the Communists of the First Directorate Party Organization will continue to give these comrades their full support in implementing the [reformist] action program of the Czechoslovak Communist Party.

2. The First Directorate Communist Party Organization expresses concern about the contents of the final communiqué on the talks in Moscow, which reflects the fact that the talks were held in conditions of inequality, under pressure and with occupation forces present in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.

3. The Communists again express their full support for the lawfully elected leadership of the Czechoslovak Intelligence Service and welcome its return to carry out its duties. The Communists demand an urgent investigation into all incidents in which the orders of this leadership, and also the orders of the Minister of Internal Affairs Pavel [sacked at Moscow’s insistence], were contravened. In this connection, it is also essential to determine what role was played by officers of the USSR KGB.

The Party Organization recognizes the decisions of the Fourteenth Congress [annulled by the Moscow protocol] as lawful and places responsibility for the crisis on the Soviet troops. 73

The KGB discovered that the StB resident in New York, codenamed PATERA, was trying vainly to persuade the Czechoslovak foreign minister, Jiří Hájek, to address the United Nations Security Council on the Soviet invasion, in defiance of the Moscow protocol. “If we did not raise the Czechoslovak question in the Security Council,” PATERA insisted, “the nation would declare us to be traitors.” 74The StB resident in Washington, his eyes brimming with tears, told Oleg Kalugin, “My children will hate you for what you’ve done to my country. They will never forgive you for what happened.” 75It took several years for “healthy forces,” as the KGB referred to the Soviet loyalists in the StB, to eradicate all trace of revisionism.

After the Soviet invasion KGB illegals remained central to Andropov’s strategy for penetrating and destabilizing “rightist” forces. 76PROGRESS operations in Czechoslovakia were augmented by other Soviet Bloc intelligence services. On August 25 Mielke, who had deployed East German illegals in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring, informed the Centre that he was sending a further contingent to Prague, together with Stasi officers to direct their operations and liaise with the KGB residency. 77In September Andropov and Sakharovsky, the head of the FCD, traveled to Warsaw and agreed a plan for the SB (the Polish KGB) to use both agents and illegals to penetrate the Czechoslovak “counter-revolutionary underground,” émigré groups and hostile intelligence services. 78

The most valuable unwitting KGB source among the ranks of Czechoslovak “counter-revolutionaries” identified in the files seen by Mitrokhin was Leo Lappi (codenamed FREDDI), a former political prisoner and founder member of K-231. The fact that, though a Czechoslovak citizen, Lappi was an ethnic German made him far easier to cultivate than the majority of Czechoslovak citizens who were not fluent in Western languages. The first contact with Lappi was made by ALLA, posing as a German-speaking Swiss, in October 1968. 79After about two months his cultivation was handed over to another female illegal, ARTYOMOVA, who had assumed the identity of an Austrian businesswoman. 80From February 1969 onwards, Lappi’s case officer was FYODOROV, who, using a West German passport in the name of Walter Brade, for the next decade became the leading illegal specializing in Czechoslovak operations. Since ALLA and ARTYOMOVA had reported that Lappi let rooms to foreigners, FYODOROV made initial contact with him on the pretext that he was a businessman looking for accommodation in Prague. 81