Havel and a spy who came in from the cold

If I’d read the character in some spy novel, I would have thought him a figment of the writer’s imagination-so unlike he was from anything I had  encountered thus far.

It was in the early 1990’s and I was in Oxford attending a weekend conference on the changing post-Cold war intelligence  landscape when a friend suggested there was someone among the foreign delegates I might be interested in meeting in a more relaxed atmosphere.

I arrived one saturday evening at one of the town’s quieter pubs to find my friend having a pint with a casually dressed middle-aged man. His foreign ‘guest’ had a thick moustache and longish hair, and was smoking a pipe. He greeted me with a warm handshake and a mischivous glint in his eye. Had he been alone or with some students, I  could have easily   mistaken him for a somewhat eccentric Oxford don. But the presence of my friend at his side suggested a more intriguing possibility, and I was not disappointed.

It turned out that my friend’s  foreign ‘guest’ was the newly appointed head of Czech intelligence, that was at the time being trained and advised by MI6. (The British had won a contract against strong competition from the CIA, the Germans, and the French.).

 The Czech told me that during the 1980’s he had worked for the anti-communist dissident Charter 77 movement while employed as a lowly technician in a film studio dubbing foreign films. The work proved perfect cover for exchanging information with fellow dissidents, and maintaining contact with helpful foreign contacts.

As far as I recall it was not long after Vaclav Havel, the leader of the ‘velvet revolution’, became the founding president of what is now the Czech republic in 1993, that our ‘guest’ found himself  offered an  appointment as his country’s head spook.  “I told Vaclav that  I had no experience of working in an intelligence agency- to which he replied, ‘That is why I want you to be the head : you have to clean  out the organisation from top to bottom as I can’t trust anyone else to do the job’.”

I never saw or heard of our ‘guest’ again though I suspect that, like Havel, he would have struggled to remain a practicing politician and an independent intellectual.  I would later come to wonder how this spy who came in from the cold got on as the end of the Cold War gave way to an international  environment motivated more by self-interest and opportunism than ideology, and where the intelligence services of democratic states became increasingly drawn into the questionable practices of the US-led ‘war on terror.’

I remembered that  Oxford night  this morning as I read about the death of Havel. Among the tributes from old Eastern European hands , I quote from one written by Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian: “Havel was the epitome of a dissident because he persisted in the struggle, patiently, non-violently, with dignity and wit, not knowing when or even if the outward victory would come.”

In today’s world the memory of the Czech ‘velvet revolution’ remains a beacon to the possibility of change through passive resistance: a thought worth hanging onto as  Christmas approaches.