Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Intelligence

his open window. Between 1948 and 1952, the Czech secret police,

under the direction of the MGB, destroyed political diversity. Men

and women, democrats and socialists, went to the gallows after gar-

ish public show trials. The MGB apparently used the most famous of

these, the Slansky Trialin 1952, as a dress rehearsal for a mass trial

of Soviet Jews. Public show trials continued for more than a year af-

ter Joseph Stalin’s death, as the Czech party ensured its complete

control of the society. The MGB, and later the KGB, used the newly

sovietized Czech foreign intelligence service. Czech officers played

an important role in Soviet active measuresin the 1950s and 1960s.

PRAGUE CRISIS, 1968. The KGB was instrumental in persuading

Leonid Brezhnev to intervene in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, where a re-

formist party leadership had reduced press censorship and was pub-

lishing details of the political repression of the 1940s and 1950s. KGB

Chair Yuri Andropovwas quick to see the danger of the “Prague

Spring,” and in Politburo meetings in 1968 he called for direct Soviet

action. The KGB presented very slanted reporting to the leadership,

exaggerating the anti-Soviet tendencies of Czech leader Alexander

Dubcek, and pointing out that liberalism in Prague was infecting the

Ukraine, Moldavia, and the Baltic republics with similar viruses. To

ensure a bloodless putsch, Andropov dispatched teams of illegalsto

Prague in what were known as Progress Operations, to develop

dossiers on Czech dissidentsand allow the targeting of enemies.

The KGB played a key role in the coup de main that seized Prague

in August as well. KGB teams took control of radio stations, police

offices, and the headquarters of the Czech Communist Party. Dubcek

and his colleagues were detained by KGB teams and shipped off to a

secret location inside the Soviet Union, where they could first recon-

sider and then publicly confess their sins in documents published

around the world. The Czech security and intelligence services were

purged of those suspected of liberalism, which caused a number of

good intelligence officers to defect to the West.

The Prague Spring was no threat to either Moscow or the Warsaw

Pact. Andropov and party reactionaries apparently feared that

Dubcek’s gospel of communism with a human face could spread to

Moscow and lead to demands for greater intellectual freedom. One of

the Czech communists who later defected to the West said that he had

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