Staff Writer

From 1969 to 1976, Pavel Minarík worked as a journalist at Radio Free Europe's headquarters in Munich, broadcasting across the Iron Curtain into communist Czechoslovakia during the height of the Cold War. What Minarík's RFE colleagues didn't realize at the time was that he also worked as a collaborator for the communist secret police, the StB, under the code name Ulyxes, allegedly plotting to blow the station to kingdom come.

In one of the most notorious Soviet bloc infiltrations of the era, Minarík transmitted at least three separate attack proposals to his StB superiors in Prague as part of Operation PANEL, a clandestine effort to stop the station from broadcasting into the East. Saboteurs eventually bombed the station in 1981.

Now, as RFE prepares to abandon its headquarters just off Wenceslas Square for a more remote Prague location to reduce its profile as a terrorist target, Czech officials have reopened the prosecution against Minarík. It's the latest chapter in a 12-year legal cat-and-mouse game that has involved the efforts of at least three countries.

A court convicted Minarík in 1993 and sentenced him to four years in jail for plotting the attacks, but an appeals court later returned the case to the trial level for further investigation by the Office for the Documentation and Investigation of the Crimes of Communism (ÚDV).

State attorney Milena Hojovcová has now re-charged Minarík with plotting a crime and endangering the safety of the public. If convicted, he faces between eight and 13 years in prison.

"I have no illusions that Minarík will be quickly sentenced," said Jan Srb of the ÚDV. "However, I do not want to predict what the outcome will be. After all, this is a case of terrorism, and that is very serious. Even preparation of such an act, [even when] not committed, is very serious."

Anna Rausová, spokeswoman for the station — now called Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — declined to comment on the proceedings.

Twists and turns

Minařík effectively won a reprieve when a Brno city court halted prosecution in 2003, ruling that it remained uncertain if the Munich bombing stemmed from one of Minařík's plans; he had been studying at university in Kiev at the time. A regional appellate court affirmed that decision, finding that Minařík's plots included alerting the RFE staff to give them time to evacuate; the 1981 attack meanwhile, had been carried out under the supervision of the terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, according to East German Stasi secret police files unsealed after 1989.

While 1970s Czech law prohibited Minařík from plotting an explosion that could have caused more than 200,000 Kč (now more than $8,500) in damage, prosecutors found it difficult, decades later, to fix the potential damage that could have been caused by one of Minařík's proposed attacks.

"There were hardly any archives or documents from that time saved at all," Srb said in a Radio Prague interview, noting that Radio Free Europe relocated to Prague in 1990, after the Velvet Revolution.

The Czech Supreme Court in 2004 reinstated the charges, however, leading prosecutors to seek international assistance in pressing their case. In August last year, the ÚDV revealed it had been helping the U.S. government investigate allegations that Czech doctors conducted medical experiments on American prisoners during the Korean War.

Meanwhile, the ÚDV asked for support in determining the damage that one of Minařík's attacks would have caused. Prosecutors did not discuss what role the cooperation played in the new charges against him, though they downplayed talks of a quid pro quo.

ÚDV investigators also said they found no evidence of the Korean War allegations, which had surfaced in the early 1990s during testimony given by Major General Jan Šejna, a defector from Czechoslovakia in 1968, before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on POW/MIAs.

Minařík, a former Interior Ministry agent under communism, now works as an entrepreneur in Brno, active in commercial consulting and trading companies.

Radio Free Europe, founded in 1949 as an auxiliary of the CIA, transmitted messages of freedom and democracy to Czechoslovakia and other nations in the communist bloc during the Cold War. It merged in 1975 with Radio Liberty, a station that aired similar broadcasts to states inside the Soviet Union.

The CIA's involvement with RFE ended in 1971, though the station is funded in large part by the U.S. Congress, and since 1994 has been under the authority of the U.S. agency that oversees nonmilitary government broadcasts, such as Voice of America. Since the end of the Cold War, the station's mission has shifted to promoting democratic values and free-market economies in other regions of the world where the media is controlled. It continues to remain a potential target for attacks; its Prague headquarters, now surrounded by concrete barricades, has been under constant military guard since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C.

Struggling prosecutions

In the early 1990s, only one former party official was convicted despite a long series of high-profile anti-communist trials: former Prague political boss Miroslav Štěpán, who was sentenced to two and a half years for attempting to crush the reformist demonstrations that led to the 1989 revolution.

The age and declining health of victims and suspects have also sidetracked cases dating from the early years of communism in the 1940s and 1950s, with prosecutions often abandoned because of claims of poor health by defendants — a not uncommon escape hatch from the Czech legal system in all types of criminal cases.

But as the pre-1989 regime grows distant, prosecutors also struggle with increasing apathy in Czech society, both for pursuing collaborators like Minařík and for reforming a legal system seen as lumbering and sometimes corrupt. Only those directly affected by such crimes seem to sustain their passion for the effort, Srb said.

"A fairly large part of society today isn't interested in the problems of the past years," Srb told the media after the Brno court halted Minařík's prosecution for the second time in 2003. "On the other hand, there are enough people who are very interested in this sort of thing — people who were persecuted in the past or whose relatives were persecuted. Their reactions are very negative. They are sad and angry that nowadays ... years after the fall of communism, we are still not able to straighten these things out."