24 • AUGUST, FRANTISEK
gated Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration
camp, and gave evidence against him at his trial for war crimes. At-
kins was demobilized in 1947, and until she died in June 2000, she
devoted herself to the Special Forces Club in London and the F Sec-
tion memorial in Valenc ̧ay, France.AUGUST, FRANTISEK.Born near Prague in 1928, Frantisek August
was the son of an anti-Nazi who survived imprisonment in a German
concentration camp after his arrest for helping a resistance group en-
gaged in sabotage. After the war, both father and son joined the Com-
munist party, and after the coup of February 1948 the younger
August joined the National Security Corps. Five years of training fol-
lowed, after which he was posted with a commission as an intelli-
gence officer to a battalion of the Czech Border Guards.
In 1953 August took a course at the Counterintelligence School in
Prague and the following year was sent to Moscow for training by
the Soviet Ministry of the Interior. Upon his return to Prague in early
1955, he was appointed head of the intelligence department at the
Border Guards Brigade headquarters. In January 1958 he was pro-
moted to the British desk of theCzech Intelligence Service(StB)
and in December 1961 arrived in London under consular cover for a
tour of duty that lasted two years, until October 1963. Later, in July
1966, he served as the StB’s deputyrezidentin Beirut, under third
secretary cover.
Appalled by what he discovered in the StB’s files concerning the
Soviet-inspired coup of 1948, August became a supporter of the re-
form movement that gained the ascendancy when Alexander Dubcek
deposed Antonin Novotny in January 1968. He survived the purge of
the StB conducted by Dubcek, which cost the StB’s hard-line chief,
Colonel Josef Houska, his job in July 1968, and then from Beirut
watched the invasion of Czechoslovakia by 5,000 Warsaw Pact tanks
a month later and the reinstatement of Houska. When the news of the
invasion first reached his embassy, August unwisely had sent a cable
in support of the reformers. In April 1969, while on extended sick
leave, he received a tip that he had been judged unreliable and, to
force him to return home, his wife and children were to be abducted.
Instead, at the end of July, he sought political asylum.
August’s autobiography,Red Star over Prague, was published in