intelligence yet provided by the StB’. When StB officer Josef Frolik defected to the West in 1969 following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia the previous year (leaving from a secret holiday camp for secret agents in Bulgaria!), he gave his interrogators sufficient information to help identify Praeger, who was eventually arrested and convicted in 1971.
The StB were instrumental in turning important people in other professions too: they found that British politicians and trade unionists were more susceptible to a friendly approach from a Czechoslovak than a Russian, usually maintaining that the mistrust between London and Prague was unjustified. Once they received payment for their time writing about promoting new links, they belonged to the StB.
One key agent was Labour politician Will Owen, about whom his fellow MP Leo Abse said later, ‘Owen certainly did his best to rape his motherland.’ Recruited in 1954, he was known as ‘Greedy bastard’ by his StB controllers, interested solely in the fees and free holidays in Czechoslovakia he could get. Owen passed over highly secret material on the British Army of the Rhine and the British portion of NATO until he too was betrayed by Frolik.
John Stonehouse, the Labour MP who infamously faked his own suicide in 1974, worked for the StB for an extended period of time, although he denied that he was an agent when accused by MI5, following Frolik’s defection. Frolik claimed that Stonehouse ‘put [the StB] in a position to know a great deal about certain British military and counter-intelligence operations’, but at the time that was the only real evidence against him. A later defector, code-named Affirm, confirmed in 1980 that Stonehouse had been working for the Czechs, but the StB had been disappointed by the amount of intelligence he was able to provide once he became a minister.
The StB had their hands full with Tom Driberg, who was a double or triple agent, also working for MI5 and the KGB. An MP since 1945, and even chairman of the Labour party for a year, Driberg was able to provide his various masters with information about the habits of MPs, which could be used to blackmail them. Known as ‘Lord of the Spies’ when elevated to the peerage in 1975, he claimed to MI5 that he only ever passed harmless stuff to his Communist contacts.
A fourth MP, code-named Gustav by the StB, has never been properly identified; some claim that Frolik’s description matched Sir Barnett Stross, who died in 1967, but it has been pointed out that any information he was in a position to pass on could as easily have been obtained openly from the Transport & General Workers’ Union headquarters at Transport House in London.
In June 2012, as this book was being written, Conservative minister Raymond Mawby’s career working for the StB through the sixties was uncovered: code name Laval was first contacted in 1960 at a cocktail party at the Czechoslovakian embassy. His weakness was money: ‘His leisure time he spends in bars… and also loves gambling,’ one Czech agent noted. ‘While playing roulette and other games he is willing to accept a monetary ‘‘loan’’ which was exploited twice.’ Mawby was the only Conservative MP known to work for the Eastern bloc, passing over details of key members of the party as well as official and handwritten floor plans of offices at the House of Commons. The relationship only ended in 1971 after a number of Eastern bloc agents were thrown out of the UK: ‘Considering the worsening operational conditions in Great Britain and after evaluating dangerous signals… we are forbidding all contacts with him,’ states a note in his file.
The StB didn’t confine its operations to the United Kingdom. In October 1968, a rash of apparent suicides in West Germany could be linked to the discovery of a spy ring run by the Czech security service. On 8 October, Major-General Horst Wendland, the deputy chief of the BND, shot himself in his office; it was later confirmed that he had been working for the StB. The same day, his friend Rear-Admiral Hermann Ludke, the deputy head of NATO’s logistics division, was found dead on a private hunting estate, shortly after the discovery of photographs of top-secret documents taken by him with a Minox camera of the sort used by the Eastern bloc services. Incredibly, they had been found by a darkroom assistant alongside holiday snaps that Ludke was having developed. Within a few days, Colonel Johannes Grimm, who worked in the German Defence Ministry, was found fatally shot; Gerald Bohm, also in the Defence Ministry, was found drowned in the Rhine river; Edeltraud Grapentin, a liaison with the Information Ministry, died from an overdose of sleeping pills; and Hans-Heinrich Schenk, a researcher at the Economics Ministry, was found hanged in an apartment in Cologne.
Nor were the StB the only agency outside the KGB to run agents in the West. Markus Johannes Wolf, the head of the East German HVA (also known as the Stasi) was an expert at spying on his own people within the German Democratic Republic, but was renowned for the penetration programme that he ran for over a generation within West Germany. According to a defector in 1958, Wolf had two to three thousand penetration agents already in place at that point. One particularly successful tactic was using agents to seduce secretaries in key positions: in the mid-fifties, Irmgard Romer, who worked at the Bonn Foreign Office, was passing copies of telegrams to embassies to her seducer, Carl Helmers. In 1967, Leonore Sutterlein, another secretary at the Foreign Office, was convicted of passing over 3,000 classified documents to her husband, who was in reality a KGB officer; Sutterlein committed suicide when she learned he had married her simply to recruit her. Other secretaries at the Science Ministry and at the embassy in Warsaw were convicted, but many of Wolf’s best agents went undetected.
Wolf’s greatest agent’s most important coup took place following the election of Willy Brandt as chancellor of West Germany in 1969. Some years earlier, Stasi agent Gunter Guillaume had apparently defected from the East, and built up a successful cover, working for the Social Democrat Party. He was elected to the Frankfurt city council in 1968, and when Brandt came to power, Guillaume went to work for his office. Within a few years, he would become Brandt’s most trusted aide — and able to pass back through Wolf to Moscow key details of the Federal Republic’s future plans.
The KGB played its part in dealing with ‘internal’ unrest within the Soviet bloc, notably during the Prague Spring of 1968, when liberalization in Czechoslovakia (so-called ‘socialism with a human face’) was deemed to be a threat to the Soviets. As negotiations and discussions went on between Leonid Brezhnev and Alexander Dubcek, the Czech leader, Andropov’s KGB were paving the way for a Soviet takeover. Although this ended up being military in nature, in June 1968 KGB reserve officer Mikhail Sagatelyan made various recommendations to the Kremlin based on a visit he had made to the country the previous month. In particular, he suggested creating a ‘pro-Soviet faction’ within the Czechoslovak leadership, which would oust Dubcek (‘a lesser evil than a military invasion,’ according to Sagatelyan).
The KGB had already increased their presence within Czechoslovakia, and now carried out two operations: Progress and Khodoki. Progress saw KGB agents, including future CIA spy Oleg Gordievsky’s brother, pose as Westerners making contact with opposition groups in Czechoslovakia; Khodoki involved agents fabricating proof that the opposition was planning an armed coup — thereby giving the USSR a pretext to come to the government’s aid.
Andropov genuinely believed that Western agencies were trying to promote the political changes that Dubcek was proposing. He even discarded a report from his trusted resident in Washington, Oleg Kalugin, which stated clearly that the CIA were not involved based on documents which he had seen. Where hard evidence didn’t exist, the KGB invented it, using their agents to ‘discover’ arms caches and promote unrest.
The Red Army, supported by units from other Warsaw Pact countries, invaded Czechoslovakia on the night of 20 August 1968, removing Dubcek from power. Unfortunately, the opposition to Dubcek’s policies was nowhere near as strong as the Kremlin had believed, and in the end he was returned to power, albeit on a very tight leash from Moscow, with a heavy KGB presence in the country monitoring for signs of disquiet.
The Prague Spring’s conclusion had two major repercussions within the spy world: the Brezhnev Doctrine, formally stated in September 1968, noted that while each country had a right to take ‘its own separate road to socialism’, their policies mustn’t damage either socialism in their own country, or anywhere else. If such damage did occur, the Soviet Union had ‘an internationalist duty’ to ‘act in resolute opposition to the anti-socialist forces’. This would keep the KGB busy for the next twenty years. The other result was its personal effect on Oleg Gordievsky; the way in which the Prague Spring was dealt with by Moscow would be a motivating factor in his decision to work with the CIA.
Although the CIA’s primary activities during the second half of the sixties were involved with the conflict in south-east Asia, they also continued with their intelligence-gathering missions against the Communist countries. The decade saw a number of technological advances, with improvements in the quality of listening devices and the other paraphernalia of espionage — some of these prompted by the wilder ideas seen on TV shows like
