PRAGUE (dpa) – “I’m looking forward to your answer,” wrote a Slovak named Karol to his Czech friend Josef on May 21, 1951. But only now, a half a century later, can Josef get a chance to respond.
The letter, posted from the town of Banska Bystrica, was one of those which once were confiscated completely at random and kept under lock and key by the erstwhile Czechoslovak secret service during the communist regime.
Now the letter is part of the exhibition in Prague called “Not Only Did The Walls Have Ears”. For the first time since the 1989 “Velvet Revolution”, the confiscated materials and methods of the communist secret service StB are on display.
Foreigners who up till 1990 had stayed in the famous art deco hotel “Europa” on St. Wenzeslaus Square can now probably read transcripts of the conversations in the StB documents.
Almost every room where “persons from the capitalist west” were staying was bugged – regardless of whether the “target” person was a tourist or a business traveller.
The exhibition in the Prague police museum shows the electrical circuitry plans of the Europe Hotel, as well as a copy of the orders for the electronic surveillance of then-dissident Vaclav Havel, today the country’s president. In 1968, a hidden microphone in the roof was used to listen in on him.
The exhibition provides a first glimpse behind the scenes of the StB, says Daniel Povolny of the Office for Clarifying Communist Crimes (UDV). “It is dedicated to all the victims of the earlier regime,” he says.
The show, for which his office spent years studying StB documents, has met with great interest by Czechs, with many visitors coming away shocked at the methods used by the communist state.
“These times are now over, thank God, and hopefully will never return,” wrote one woman, Olga Kralova, in the visitors’ book.
It was shortly after the communists seized power in 1948 that they systematically built up the StB. Until the overthrow of communism, it was under the roof of the Interior Ministry and on paper at least was governed by strict laws.
“But there was a lot of room in the vague wording,” Povolny said. In 1953, a workers’ revolt in then communist East Germany, which was put down by Soviet tanks, was an occasion in which the StB used to demand more powers.
“The class enemy is profiting from the inadequacies,” the StB argued at the Interior Ministry in seeking greater authority. In the step-by-step buildup which followed, the regime lowered the restrictions on the StB so much that by 1982, Czechoslovakia had a nearly perfect system of surveillance over its people.
The secret service even taught their agents how to hang wallpaper so that the listening devices could be professionally disguised. At times, the StB had more than 50 translators for the 800 telephone calls which were daily listened in on and for 170,000 confiscated letters.
The “evidence” gained from these materials was, contrary to the laws on the books, used in trials.
Povolny said that between 1954 and 1963 alone, 123 “bugs” were found in the embassies of western countries and in the living quarters of their staff members. And as early as 1950, the StB already had 23,277 duplicate keys.
The Prague exhibition has about 55 items on display, including a Soviet training film, an ashtray containing a microphone and an infrared scanner to help read letters in sealed envelopes.
Also featured prominently are the keys which an agent in 1973 embarrassingly left behind during an illegal search of the apartment of Zdenek Mlynar.
A prominent politician of the “Prague Spring” reform movement, Mlynar when he found the keys, also looked around and discovered the electronic eavesdropping equipment in his home. He complained – without success – to the Interior Ministry. In 1977 he emigrated to Vienna.
“The exhibition shows how much energy the totalitarian regime spent working against humanity,” one visitor wrote in the guest book.
Another visitor, 17-year-old Lukas Revenda, said the show was “a chance for the younger generation to stop and think”. Yet another visitor asked the ominous question: “What methods does today’s Czech secret service use?”
