The Prague Post
December 2nd, 2008
Endowment Fund     Business Listings ONLINE      Reservations      Classifieds    Subscriptions
Prague Property

Home » Archives » News

Former red spies were in key posts

Counter-intelligence agency riddled with ex-StB until 2003

By Kimberly Ashton
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
February 28th, 2007 issue

Some 14 years after the Velvet Revolution — and four years after the Czech Republic joined NATO — the country’s military intelligence service (VZ) was still stacked with former members of the communist-era secret police, or StB, a senior military official said.

Gen. Miroslav Krejčík, the head of military intelligence, said that, as late as 2003, the government still had not managed to purge the VZ, especially its counter-intelligence arm — as many as 76 percent of military counter-intelligence officers had been secret police agents, including the former deputy head of security.
Krejčík arrived at the Security Information Service in 2004 and immediately started removing past communist collaborators. The last former StB agent was removed in December 2005, said Ladislav Šticha, Krejčík’s spokesman, Feb. 27.
He said that because of the the organization’s clandestine nature he was not able to say how many counter-intelligence workers had been removed.
“It was a hard fight to make them leave. They abused all possible contacts, including the government office and some deputies,” Krejčík told Mladá fronta Dnes (MfD) Feb. 26.
After the 1989 revolution, those in the intelligence service said StB agents would be around for a few more years to train the new officers, Šticha said.
“But in fact they stayed there 15 years — they sort of hid there — and many of them even reached higher positions, like the colonel rank.”
Now, he said, “there is not even one” former StB officer in counter-intelligence. But there are some former agents in other state government positions that don’t require negative lustration certificates, which state that a public employee did not collaborate with the secret police.
Mostly, they relied on other former StB agents to make their way through the ranks of counter-intelligence.
Šticha said the damages these officers inflicted on the service are hard to quantify. “They sabotaged the activities, and they were also in a way discouraging young and promising officers; many of [these young officers] left,” he said.
One of the damages Krejčík alluded to in the MfD article was his sense that NATO members didn’t trust Czechs a few years ago.
“Now we are considered to be a trustworthy and fair partner,” Šticha said.
Naďa Černá contributed to this report.

Kimberly Ashton can be reached at kashton@praguepost.com


Other articles in News (28/02/2007):

Browse the Current Issue

If you enjoyed this article, why don't you subscribe to the print version!
We accept secure online transactions provided by PayPal and Moneybookers

Be the first to add a comment!


Full Name: *
City: *
E-mail: **
This comment can be published in the print version of The Prague Post
Enter the text on the right:
 visual captcha
Comment: *
* Required field. In order to be approved for display, comments must have a first and last name and a city.
** E-mails are required and will only be used for internal purposes.

Most visited in Business Listings

Hotel booking
The Prague Post Online contains a selection of articles that have been printed in
The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic.
To subscribe to the print paper, click here.
Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.