New details emerge about StB bugging of Havel apartment
New details have come to light on how Czechoslovakia’s communist era secret police, the StB, spied on the regime’s opponents, including the future president Václav Havel. The details were published on Thursday in the daily Mladá Fronta Dnes, and come from StB records currently being digitalised by the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes.
Everyone knows that Václav Havel was a leading target for the StB’s covert spying operations, but only now have new details emerged on how they carried out their work. The newly published files show how StB agents led by a Captain Nedbal crept into the attic of a house on what was then Bedřich Engels Embankment, now Rašín Embankment, just before dawn on February 10th, 1966.
Once inside they drilled a tiny hole in the ceiling above a flat belonging to one Václav Havel – an “extraordinarily talented” playwright according to the StB, "known for his opposition to socialism". In the hole they inserted a small microphone, to record conversations between Havel and the many “people of anti-Marxist attitudes” who came to visit. Jiří Rejchl, spokesman of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, told Radio Prague how they’d discovered the information:
“We’ve started digitalising material from the StB’s 6th unit, which was the unit that specialised in following targets. The 6th unit has 180 films, and on those 16mm films are 252,000 pages of information. So we’ve started digitalising the 6th unit, and the first film has information about Václav Havel.”
The placing of the microphone in Havel’s apartment was carried out in absolute secrecy. Indeed, the StB were so worried about being caught in the act, they mounted a large-scale surveillance operation to monitor Havel’s movements to make sure no-one was at home at the time. The microphone was connected to a telephone exchange in a neighbouring house ostensibly installed as part of the city’s Civil Defence system.
After a week’s monitoring it became evident that one microphone was not enough. So the same three-man team was sent back to the attic of the house in Bedřich Engels Embankment to install another one. The bugs were removed by the StB in March 1968. Mladá Fronta Dnes claims this was because several StB officers, influenced by the cultural and intellectual thaw of the Prague Spring, had tipped off Havel’s friends that he was being bugged.
But they didn’t need telling, says the paper. Actor Pavel Landovský told Mladá Fronta Dnes that everyone knew Havel’s flat and phone were bugged, and they acted and spoke accordingly.
The bugging of Havel’s apartment is just the tip of the iceberg. Jiří Rejchl says the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes has 20 km of files belonging to the StB and other communist-era bodies, plus another 5km on microfilm. That information is being gradually digitalised and put online, and almost all of it will be made available to the public.
