In June 1986, a pair of operatives from communist Czechoslovakia’s STB intelligence service approached a mysterious couple in a Prague hotel. The man’s passport identified him as a Syrian diplomat named Waleed Watar. His pregnant wife also had a Syrian diplomatic passport.
In fact, the man was born in Venezuela. He was with his wife, Magdalena Cope, recently released from a French prison.
RamÃrez Sanchez spent a lot of time behind the Iron Curtain and was known to have the support of the KGB and the Stasi of East Gemini. But a new book based on the archives of the Czechoslovak secret police suggests that the picture of communist bloc support for him and other violent radical actors at the end of the Cold War is not so simple.
“It was the dramatic Reagan idea that the Soviets and all the other services were training them, giving them whatever they needed and then directing them to attack in the West,” said Daniela Raktorova, an intelligence studies expert at King’s College London. has been done.” And the author of the book, Seeing the Jackal. “Actually, the reality was more complicated.”
In this instance, Czechoslovak agents told RamÃrez Sanchez and his wife that they knew who they really were, and that they had information that French intelligence operatives were in Prague and on a mission to “wipe out” them. are Officers advised them to leave the country immediately. Within hours, Ramirez Sanchez was on a flight.
But the French plot is believed to have been fictitious. The STB only wanted Ramirez Sanchez, who, along with his colleagues for the past decade, was out of the country, afraid of his reputation and his methods.
Between the 1960s and 1980s, communist Prague often served as a haven for activists from revolutionary and terrorist movements from around the world, who traveled to Czechoslovakia for meetings, planning, and sometimes contact with local authorities. used as a safe place for
Richterova worked in the archives of the former Czechoslovak Security Service in Prague, which has made a handful of its communist-era documents open for viewing, revealing links between Czechoslovakia and various violent non-state actors during the Cold War. I have received an unprecedented insight. war
The archives show that Yasser Arafat had close ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the book details extensive ties between the PLO’s security service, headed by Arafat’s No. 2, Abu Id, and Czechoslovak authorities have
A visit to Prague in 1981 led to an agreement on a package that included intelligence exchange, joint operations, arms supplies and security training. The files show that city officials even discussed an operation in which Palestinians would target and either kill or kidnap Czech dissidents living abroad, although nothing came of those discussions.
There were times, however, when the Czechoslovaks turned to Middle Eastern groups, and there were many occasions when it was clear that Prague was confused and alarmed by the presence of Arab activists on its territory and to keep tabs on them. There was a struggle. Although there were close ties to the PLO, the STB was wary of more radical Palestinian groups as well as rogue actors such as Ramirez Sanchez.
The full story about Moscow and the KGB’s relationship with these groups is locked away in Russian archives. But the Czechoslovak documents made it clear that “there was no coherent policy and no direction from the Soviet Union”.
The book also shows that the Communist-era intelligence service, when it came to domestic intruders, was as concerned as it was when it came to tracking down foreign gangs, whose members often had access to middlemen. There used to be a whole stash of diplomatic passports under different identities issued by the source. Eastern countries.
“The STB workers didn’t speak Arabic, they didn’t have much of an understanding of which group a member was, and when they didn’t put them in that persona, it didn’t work on the non-Greta lists,” Rectorova said.
The political and ethical dilemmas of how to track radical groups, and when to cooperate with them when some goals may be compatible, have lasting relevance today. With the KGB archive firmly locked away in Moscow, the Czechoslovakian documents are a rare insight into how these dilemmas were handled and discussed in the Soviet bloc. They are more educated than anything available in the West where, for example, in Britain, the MI6 archives are closed.
“It’s about how states use their spies to communicate with dangerous individuals, some of whom they want to align and some of whom they don’t. It’s always a complicated business. And the hard dance happens,” Richtroff said.
