Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Moscow now had the fabricated evidence it required to demand that, “The counter-revolution must be beheaded.” Dubček believed he had no option but to resign. “Otherwise the Soviets would set up another provocation that could lead to further public turmoil and even a bloodbath.” 3On April 17 he was succeeded as First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Party by the Slovak first secretary, Gustáv Husák. As Dubček broadcast the news of his replacement, he broke down and wept.

PROGRESS operations in Czechoslovakia continued. A senior officer from FCD Directorate S, Dmitri Kirillovich Vetrov, arrived in Prague to supervise and coordinate the work of the illegals as they penetrated the ranks of the unrepentant reformists. 4Posing as a Swiss sympathizer with the Prague Spring, Galina Vinogradova (ALLA) was instructed to cultivate Ladislav Lebovič (codenamed KHAN), one of the trainers of the victorious Czechoslovak ice hockey team which was viewed with deep suspicion in the Centre. 5The illegal Yuri Linov (KRAVCHENKO), who pretended to be Austrian, succeeded in gaining the confidence of the international chess grand master and sports columnist Luděk Pachman, one of the organizers of the illegal broadcasts transmitted in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion. As soon as Linov had identified those of Pachman’s friends and associates who were ready to continue “the struggle against the Soviet occupiers,” Pachman himself was arrested and imprisoned. 6

Though delighted by Dubček’s departure, the KGB liaison office in Prague remained unenthusiastic about his successor, Gustáv Husák, who had been imprisoned in 1952 on trumped-up charges as an alleged Trotskyist and “bourgeois nationalist.” “Spending nine years in prison,” it reported, “has left its mark on Husák’s psychology, in that he shows unwarranted indulgence towards clear adversaries of the Czechoslovak Communist Party line.” The KGB liaison office complained to the Centre that there was “no genuine internal unity” within the CPCz leadership, which was divided between “internationalists” such as Bil’ak and Indra, who had supported Soviet intervention in August 1968, and “realists” led by Štrougal, who had opposed intervention but now accepted it as a fact of life. The two sides were engaged in a power struggle, seeking to gain key positions and place their supporters within the Party apparatus. 7Over the next year both realists and internationalists had some successes. In January 1970 Štrougal replaced Černík as prime minister. Simultaneously, however, Bil’ak was put in charge of an operation to purge the CPCz of all reformists during the introduction of new Party cards. 8A fellow hardliner, Miloš Jakeš, head of the Central Committee’s Control and Auditing Committee, became his right-hand man and regularly reported on the progress of the purge to the KGB liaison office. 9Seventeen years later Jakeš was to succeed Husák as general secretary of the CPCz.

The Centre’s assessment of the work of the KGB liaison office and residency in Prague during 1970 concluded:

The bloc of revisionist and anti-socialist forces in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic has suffered a political defeat; the legal ideological centers of the right-wing have been eliminated; the main ideologists of Czechoslovak renewal have been removed from the political arena and expelled from the Party; and measures have been taken to purge the state apparatus of the most active carriers of the right-wing danger. However, it would not be right to suppose that with the exchange of Party cards the Czechoslovak Communist Party has totally purged its ranks of hostile and alien elements. 10

Indra, whom Moscow had originally intended to take power after the invasion at the head of a “Workers’ and Peasants’ Government,” was reported by the liaison office to be “biding his time,” waiting for an opportunity to press his claims as general secretary. 11His wait was to prove in vain.

KGB agents and Soviet sycophants within the CPCz continued to protest that Štrougal and other former reformists retained far too much influence at the expense of the Soviet Union’s true friends. One informant in the Ministry of the Interior, Jaroslav Zeman, complained that Štrougal was discriminating against the internationalists: “And what sort of person is Štrougal? In 1968 he was preparing to emigrate to the West and had currency and documents ready for his escape.” While turncoats prospered under Štrougal’s patronage, “Officials who cooperate with the USSR are looked down on in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic; they are kept in the dark, and are not promoted or rewarded.” 12

By January 1971 310 foreign intelligence officers had been dismissed and 170 expelled from the Party. The whole of the senior staff of the internal StB had been replaced along with many more junior officers. 13The Centre, however, was not satisfied. The KGB liaison office was instructed during 1971 to press the interior ministry and the StB “in a tactful manner” to carry out a thorough reorganization of Czechoslovak intelligence “in view of the fact that the central apparatus was tainted and the possibility that committed agents of the adversary were present in it.” The Centre wished for active assistance from a reformed StB in the collection of scientific and technological intelligence, the deployment of illegals and other FCD operations. 14

Despite continuing doubts about the reliability of some StB personnel, the KGB liaison office reported that the minister of the interior, Radko Kaska, displayed a satisfactory level of subservient cooperation:

We have not noticed any unjustified or non-objective information from Kaska. Up to the present he has informed us frankly and in detail about internal political processes in Czechoslovakia and about the situation within the Ministry of Internal Affairs. 15

The KGB was provided with copies of StB operational orders and reports, and proposed staff changes were submitted for its approval. 16At Husák’s instructions, Kaska began secretly collecting material on “leading right-wing personalities” in order to determine how many could be held to have broken state laws. 17The KGB was, however, embarrassed to be asked by Kaska in March 1971 whether it had any “adverse information” on past contacts with the West by the chairman of the National Assembly, Dalibor Hanes. The Centre was concerned that, if it replied to Kaska’s enquiry, it would give the (perfectly accurate) impression that “the KGB is engaged in collecting information on officials of fraternal Parties in friendly countries.” The head of the KGB liaison office in Prague, Ye. G. Sinitsyn, was instructed to reply that it had “no reports of links between Hanes and foreign intelligence,” but that, since it followed the principle of not spying on its allies, it would be unable to respond to such requests in future. Sinitsyn was privately informed by the Centre that Bil’ak had complained to the Soviet ambassador that Hanes had “taken up incorrect positions” during the Prague Spring and that his father had been responsible for “crushing workers’ demonstrations in Slovakia” between the wars. 18Soon afterwards Hanes was replaced as chairman of the National Assembly by the impeccably orthodox Indra. 19

On May 4, 1971 Kaska met Semyon Konstantinovich Tsvigun, KGB deputy chairman, to report on the progress of “normalization.” 20Tsvigun owed his job almost solely to the fact that he was one of Brezhnev’s oldest drinking partners. Kalugin found him “downright stupid but relatively harmless.” 21Tsvigun cannot have been wholly reassured by Kaska’s briefing. Over the past two years, Kaska told him, about 450,000 CPCz members had left or been expelled, “making contact between the Party and the population more difficult.” 22With one exception, the heads of all directorates in the interior ministry had been replaced. In all, about 3,000 of its employees in the StB and other agencies had been dismissed. There was, however, still widespread evidence of anti-Soviet feeling. Soviet films and plays were systematically boycotted. At the Czechoslovak premiäre of the film The Kremlin Chimes there were only five people in the audience; at the second showing there were only ten. There were numerous anonymous threats, malicious rumors and acts of sabotage on the railways. But there were also successes to report. The StB had succeeded in setting up a bogus organization dedicated to “socialism with a human face,” in order to smoke out secret supporters of the Prague Spring. Finally, Kaska assured Tsvigun that he and his ministry were in close touch with the KGB liaison office and its head, General Sinitsyn. 23