Tracking the Informer Network of the Czechoslovak Security Police (StB)

• In Event: Days of Our Lives in Secret Police Files

Abstract

While Czech historians have set out the basic organization of the Czechoslovak StB, far less understood is how its network of informers operated – those citizens who were recruited with different levels of importance in order to watch, entrap, and feed information into the StB machinery. This paper seeks to explore the recruitment and work of various types of informer, focusing especially on those who inveigled and surveyed western foreigners in the 1980s. A starting point is the evidence from my own surveillance file (Prague in 1989) in order to understand the StB resources devoted to one insignificant individual. That personal ‘Venn-diagram’ then expands to incorporate informers of lesser and greater importance, for example those attached to western embassies in Prague or those dispatched abroad on special missions against ‘ideologically subversive centres’. The paper seeks to uncover how and why certain Czechoslovak citizens might agree of refuse to be recruited; how integrated they became in a StB network across the country; and how effective they were at their job in the eyes of their StB handlers. A preliminary assessment will also be made of the efficiency of the informer network in the last days of communism. The paper is based on ongoing research in the Czech security service archives (surprisingly open to public scrutiny). Despite the wholesale destruction of so many StB files in December 1989, through deciphering informer codenames and matching them to targeted ‘hostile’ individuals it is possible to illuminate where and how deeply the informer network was embedded in Czechoslovak society.

Author

• Mark Cornwall, U of Southampton (UK)