I am glad I caught the BBC’s John Simpson’s fascinating recollection this morning of his avoidance of an attempted honey pot trap by the communist Czech intelligence service during the Cold War. It brought back memories of a somewhat more mundane encounter I had many years later , thankfully devoid of any attempted sexual subversion, and involving a very different, and genuinely friendly kind of spy of the same nationality.
It took place during a weekend conference at Oxford’s St Antony’s College, attended by an assortment of academics, think-tanks, and a number of intelligence ‘professionals’ mostly retired on the subject ‘Intelligence Services in a Changing World.’
Early on in the conference I was approached and invited for a drink by one of the British delegates , a Cold War civil service veteran who had followed my career as a journalist covering a number of interesting scenarios including the Falklands War and the troubles in Northern Ireland.
He told me there was an unidentified foreign ‘friend’ attending the conference I would be interested to meet and who he planned to introduce me to. It was a Saturday.
Early that evening, as arranged, I turned up, at one of Oxford’s more discreet and less popular pubs, and there found my contact with someone I took on first sight, mistakenly as it turned out, for an archetypal middle-aged Oxford don.
The third man was short and rotund, dressed in a crumpled tweed suit, and bow tie, and was smoking a pipe. Beneath a mop of overgrown hair, his eyes followed me with an initially quizzical look that soon dissipated with a welcoming smile as we shook hands.
As the three of us shared a pint in an isolated snug of the pub, I listened with growing amazement to his story. It turned out that he had served as President Václav Havel’s first spy chief during the Czech Republic’s emergence as a democratic state after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Before that, during the later years of the Cold War, he had volunteered as a member of Charter 77 , the group of intellectual dissidents in communist-run Czechoslovakia formed in 1977 to help fuel and inspire the reform movement that 12 years later would usher in the democratic era, through what became known as the Velvet Revolution.
His job during those years had been working in a small film studio dubbing foreign films into Czech, and he was happy to have projector room used as a drop-off and distribution point for dissident propaganda.
It was not, he told me, a spy’s job he was doing but the work of one dissident among many so he was surprised the day Havel called him to the presidential office and told him about his new appointment as the nascent democratic state’s head of intelligence.
So he related: ‘But why me? I have never worked for any intelligence organization.” I asked Havel. ‘ That’s exactly why, ‘ Havel replied. ‘ I don’t trust anyone in the organization I have inherited from the old regime. I need someone from the outside I can trust to help me carry out a root and branch reform.”
The third man went on to tell me that had he taken the job and with Havel’s blessing went about reorganizing Czech intelligence with the help, as he told me, from the British after MI6 bid successfully for a training contract (The Germans, French and Americans lost out.)
Our meeting took place in September 1999, a year when you could still smoke in pubs, and when the subjects at the conference I attended ranged from the US’s trusted role as a superpower holding world peace together, and intelligence cooperation with the ‘new’ diminished Russian secret services, to the ethical conduct of western human and signals intelligence gathering, and the containment of nuclear proliferation, and where the threat of international terrorism was submerged and relegated amidst a general sense of collective post-Cold-War complacency.
Two years later the Twin Towers in New York were attacked, and the world, not just the spooks, entered a different more unsettling stage than that I inhabited that genial Autumn evening when I shared a pint with two ‘friends’ in Oxford. I never saw my Czech third man again.
