Czech Military Intelligence employee names revealed in serious blunder

The Czech Military Intelligence service is having to answer for one of the worst blunders in its history – unintentionally revealing the names of some of its employees, including undercover agents active on foreign missions. The story, broken on Monday by the daily Mladá fronta Dnes, has exploded like a bombshell on the Czech political scene with the institution coming under fire from every conceivable side.

Some time ago, the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes asked the Czech Military Intelligence Service for a complete list of its communist era agents and employees. The request was promptly granted, and in April of this year, a list of 380 people was made public online. Inconceivably, among the names reported were people who stayed with the service after the fall of communism and are active agents today. The list remained on the web for several weeks before someone noticed the blunder and had it was quickly removed.

Both institutions have been left with egg on their face and are arguing over who is to blame. The Czech military intelligence, which provided the list, blames the institute for ignoring a written warning not to publish any entries from after 1990. The former director of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, Pavel Žáček, who was in office at the time, argues that the military intelligence had enough time to remove any sensitive information from the materials prior to handing them over.

Either way, the military intelligence service has now become a laughing stock, having rendered its own agents useless and moreover put their lives at serious risk.

So who is to blame for a blunder that seems too bad to be real? Did the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes break the law in putting these people’s names on the web? That’s a question I put to Andor Šándor, a former chief of defense intelligence who now works as an independent security consultant.

“It is true that there is one law, I cannot say exactly the paragraph, which requires them to stick to some specific security rules, which means they are not supposed to publish everything they get. On the other hand, I would say that the military intelligence should have been more careful when judging what names should have been sent to that institution. If I were the boss, I would probably be more careful about that, and what I would not have sent at any cost would be the names of those working abroad under civilian cover.”

Those who were under civilian cover abroad in the past and are still working for the intelligence service might face repercussions for the damage their past work did to the countries they were sent to. While it is not clear how many currently active agents were included in the list of names, two of them appear in the Mladá fronta Dnes report published on Monday. One is the former charge d’affaires at the Czech embassy in Moscow, František Masopust, who says something like that should never happen in any civilized country. Andor Šándor again.

“There may be a threat to particular persons, who are still working for the intelligence service, or the ones who used to work for it, in particular under civilian cover. I wouldn’t say it’s a large number of people who are at threat, but some of them may be. It is extremely stupid to publish the names of people who work for you, either in Prague or abroad.”

While the Czech military service has conceded that the publication was certainly problematic, it denies that the publication of the names of some of its employees could present a risk to the service as a whole.