Karel Köcher

"We renounced our American citizenship, Hanička too, the consul came to us. We flew out on an American passport. The next morning they put us on a Hercules, those huge military transport planes where there are no seats, just benches on the side. Surrounded by agents, handcuffed so brutally that I couldn't feel my hands. Only one of the seven agents was ashamed of how they were treating me, and he gave me gum. He tried to calm me down. We arrived at Tempelhof, the airport in West Berlin. Right off the plane, they put me in a van. They took me with Hanička to that famous bridge in the van. Handcuffed. Everyone had this strange terror that nothing would happen. The traffic was stopped, we went through all the intersections, policemen on motorbikes everywhere, an incredible passage through West Berlin to the bridge. The bridge was over the Havel River, that's the road from Berlin to Potsdam. The end of Berlin, a very nice area, classic Art Nouveau bridge. I was sitting in that van with my wife, waiting for the car with Shcharansky to come from the other side. There were some other people there, thrown in with us, exchanged a couple of such quite insignificant people. The son of the tennis player Javorský who was taking a woman across the border from Bulgaria to Turkey and got arrested. Javorský had a tennis school and taught tennis to the Chancellor, so the Chancellor negotiated for his son to be released. They were insignificant, just thrown in; it was all about Shcharansky and me. A car came from Potsdam with Sharansky on board. They stopped on the East German side. He got out of the car first and crossed the bridge. It snowed a lot that day and they had to stop and sweep the bridge so that the line between East and West, the border of the Iron Curtain, could be seen. Coaches with tourists stop there now. The Soviets gave Shcharansky a new suit, but he's tiny, he had to roll his pants up. Shcharansky came, walked towards the van and took a big step over the line, lifted his leg to the other side. He walked past me and at that moment they took off the handcuffs and opened the door. In the meantime, Wolfgang Vogel had already arrived in a gold Mercedes Benz, and he pulled up to the van. I crossed the line, Vogel was waiting behind it and we crossed into East Germany. There was a bus waiting with champagne and a waiter and we went to the Stasi villa and the hotel. The next day I flew to Prague on the plane of the Minister of the Interior. That was the first time the Czechs made their presence felt."

"It was recommended who to recruit or not to recruit, that was one of the main objectives: to discover those softer types who could be pushed or bribed. There was also an opportunity to mess with those recruiters. That was fine with me because I think the Americans are very nasty to their agents. If somebody signs on and works for them, they put themselves at tremendous risk, not just of arrest, but of ruining everything, the family in general, and they don't take care of them afterwards. It was a real pleasure to torpedo those recruiters. Or when they were going to Africa, to Uganda or wherever, to recruit somebody who was going there as an interpreter, I could warn who they were going to recruit. I shouldn't have known in theory, but everybody was talkative and everybody was telling me, so it wasn't a problem to find out."

"Lie Detector. I guess it's different nowadays, I don't think I could fool them anymore. I'm sure they'll be much more sophisticated. That was done in one afternoon. There was a Major Dufek, a psychiatrist; he worked in Krakovská Street, the Interior Ministry had a medical facility there. He had a laboratory where he built a lie detector with his own hands. He was assisted by an American corporal who had defected, who had previously worked as an assistant in polygraph interrogations, and then applied for asylum in Czechoslovakia. So he built this lie detector, a monstrous device, it didn't have semiconductors or chips, but tubes, though everything else was there. He put these bracelets on my fingers, a belt around my chest to sense my breath and sweat. He just taught me the technique and explained how to get around it. You have to be strong-willed and you have to have the aptitude, but it's possible." - "And what's the technique?" - "The technique is multiple. To determine a baseline level from which to calculate the thrill of lying, that level has to be high enough so that actual lying doesn't make it much higher. So when I was asked some basic things like where I was born, where I went to elementary school, I was already imagining that I was lying and trying to be as nervous as possible. So that's the first stage. The next stage is when he asks you questions, if you're a member of foreign intelligence, you imagine something, a beautiful alpine meadow or that you're eating something good, something that doesn't excite you but calms you down. That's the power of concentration."

"They came to my house, Gvozdek reported, he was in charge of the counter-espionage department against the Germans, but he was in charge of my training in the spy craft. He said, 'Karel, I'll come to you with one more person.' He came with an intelligence officer, they sat down with me, I made them coffee and he said they had a proposal for me. This was 1964. 'We want to send you to the United States.' I'm quoting verbatim. And I said, 'What am I going to do there?' 'You're going to infiltrate the CIA.' So I suppressed a smile, he didn't speak English, he had no idea about America, but he was a good, honest man. So I asked how I was going to do it. He said, "That'll be your business, Karel." And that was the end of it. Ševela added: "You'll graduate from college and that will open the doors for you." You see, Ševela's rudeness... It wasn't that, it was an absurd proposal, but the absurdity... It's like someone suggesting you jump from a great height into the water. Will you do it? Or lift a heavy barbell. I was a weightlifter. That's just a dare... Do I do it? I don't believe it. Of course, that's how I threw out all serious careers and became an adventurer." - "Adventurer?" - "Adventurer. First of all, when you have that identity - my real identity was intelligence officer - even if you teach philosophy at an American college, you're an intelligence officer in the first place, because you can be picked up at any time and you have to organize your life and look over your shoulder all the time. Your identity is this. You're a secret agent, not a professor. You're a professor after that."

"Vladivoj Tomek was... I don't like to talk about it because I can't say anything good about Vladivoj. He ended up terribly. He was one of the nine who were sent to the French Grammar School; before that he went to La Guardia Gymnasium in Holešovice, but Vladivoj was the least able of all the nine to adapt. All Ds, no French at all, Ds in math. He was a bit overweight, probably had diabetes, his family was broken, he lived with his mother, who... I was there once, she was drunk. Pretty bad. Most of the kids in that school were girls, just a few boys, all girls, and all beautiful, from rich families of first republican socialites. He didn't stand a chance; I had a chance, my first girl was one of my classmates, but Tomek was getting the shaft. Also, he stank, he was probably sick, no one was willing to sit next to him. That was the stumbling block. Zdeňka Macková, a pretty girl, she sang somewhere, she wanted to be an opera singer, I used to go home with her, we were friends. And they put her next to Tomek on the bench. And she had a fit, she cried so much that she couldn't sit with him. She was crying her heart out. I switched seats with her, sat next to Tomek. Tommy clung to me a little bit after that. He was really an underachiever; he was absent very often, he was sick. He was bad at math, I excelled, he borrowed my notebooks and I tried to explain to him what happened in classes. Once he went to borrow a notebook from me in Vinohrady and there he got the idea because he saw a military patrol coming from the Olšany Cemetery. They had submachine guns, so he got the idea to ambush them and seize the weapon. And when they caught him, that's exactly how he told the investigators that he had the idea when he went to borrow a notebook from me. That's how I got into a terrible mess." - "What time was that?" - "He killed him in 1952, his name was Šmatlava. The whole thing is insane because fighting the regime by shooting a soldier in national service is nonsense. He was pissed off because he was ostracized in the community of his classmates, the girls didn't want to talk to him. He was failing in school. He had an urge to break big, to be a hero. But being a hero in this way... Nowadays he'd probably rob a bank or sell drugs - he wanted to do something daring. That was it."

“They find out about me and think what they ought to do with me. They were not into killing me. That would have been possible with Kalugin in the KGB, but it would hardly be possible in Czechoslovakia. The guy who was in charge of me in the American department, in the first administration, comes to me and says: ´Karel, we have wonderful news for you. You will not return to America, you will stay here. In two days you will appear in a press conference.´ – it was after the Minařík case – ´and you will testify about Havel and Tigrid and the people around them.´ That was couple of months before, the Charter was already being prepared, and in the first administration they must have known about it, because the community of people around the Charter was swarming with agents; in my opinion, at least half of the founders of the Charter were agents. ´You will simply accuse them.´ They were probably preparing some trial where they intended to charge Havel with high treason. It was even more complicated, because Tigrid was a CIA officer. I knew his boss. Obviously, I didn’t want to accuse Tigrid and Havel, especially Havel. And so I said to them: ´Well, arrest me then´ That was the final proof for them that I was an enemy for them. ´Come on, you got your parents here, your mom is here, you will get a car, a villa, you will become a hero, you are American, you are a traitor…´ This pressure lasted for some three days. Eventually – and it was quite a desperate situation because they didn’t know what to do with me, and I didn’t know how to get out of it, either – I began plying their game and I said: ´All right, so I'm this American agent, and obviously I had told these Americans where exactly I was going and where I would be, right? And if one of their CIA officers gets lost, that will be pretty bad. You will then get a war just like in the 1950s.´ And so they solved it this way: ´Pack your luggage!´ I packed my things and they drove me to the Ruzyně prison and told me to look at it. From there they took me to the Ruzyně airport and said: ´Fly there, and if you don’t break all your cooperation with the CIA immediately and start working against us, we will exterminate you in America. We can get hold of you there.´ They bypassed the passport control and led me to the airplane, returned my American passport to me and I flew off. And I resigned from the CIA immediately.”

"I missed Prague, and thus I asked them (my superiors in Prague) to do this as a favor for me. I wanted them to let me go to some organization or institution where I would be working under some special arrangement. After all those years I was able to arrive as a tourist, using my American passport. They didn’t approve it, but they had me come here and gave me a diplomatic passport and they didn’t restrict my movement in Prague, and thus I could pose as a tourist. It was good will on their part that they allowed me to come and go. They were generous in it, because at that time they didn’t yet have a clue what would be passing through Prague to Moscow. I tried to explain to Moscow that handling it this way was unsustainable, that they needed to find some modus vivendi, and reduce their nuclear armament and seek reciprocal measures from them. I was giving them guarantees that it was possible to negotiate with the Americans in good faith, that the enemies, the people around Reagan, were gone, and that those who were in power now would keep their word. And I was absolutely right in that. There was James Baker. They were sort of American conservative patriots, but they were very pragmatic. This Baker later befriended Shevardnadze, they were personal friends, and Reagan and Gorbatschow also became good friends. To explain that these two superpowers cannot go into conflict, but that they should rather divide the spheres of their interests, and if possible, leave out Eastern Europe and us from their plans, because this kind of empire was no longer possible in modern world. Because you can prove them that if the worst comes to the worst, the Americans would run them over. Economically and in terms of arms, because - it cannot be helped - the USA is indeed a more advanced society compared to the Soviet Union." Interviewer: "About the reports you were sending to Prague - these were mostly some analyses?" K. K.: "Yes, they were analyses based on very confidential information." Interviewer: "And you were getting the information from the people you knew?" K. K: "Certainly. They are very happy to talk to you about it, if you understand, of course they are. This way I learnt, for instance, that a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union was really being prepared. The deputy of one minister has really admitted it." Interviewer: "And when did this happen?" K. K.: "I think it was in 1983."

“I was still trying to get to a position where I would not only have an opportunity to get some information, but where I would have the chance to actively learn something valuable and have an influence on the development of activities and strategies. I was working in the CIA quite successfully, and I eventually managed to attain this. In 1976 I was offered work in the office... It was basically a think tank, a small analytical research institute within the CIA structure, which served as the brain for their analysis. It was the most secret office, which had access to absolutely all CIA materials, and which was producing documents of even greater importance. I wrote a report of over hundred pages - I think I still have it somewhere – which discussed the assignment to get into the thinking of Soviet leaders and to find out the motives for their decisions, use examples from their personal histories to analyze them, and to determine whether they are pragmatical or ideological in their decision-making, what inclinations they have... similar investigations were carried out on Hitler during WWII. This was the top secret department, which meant the following: in order to get inside the CIA, you need to pass through many checkpoints. Then you take the elevator to their floor, pass through doors with coded access locks - every room had a coded access door in the CIA. I managed to get inside of all this, and get to the very top – and I reported it to Prague. That was when Kalugin intervened. What he achieved was that I was summoned to a meeting in Prague. He got scared. Kalugin, an American agent, got scared, because at that level, it was quite possible that I would find out about it. Or that I would be able to deduce who was sending the information to them. And I think he didn't dare to tell this to the Americans, because otherwise I would have been arrested immediately. If somebody had identified me, I would have been arrested and it would be then up to him. Because nobody else knew about me. Because Kalugin was the only Russian who had my materials. He solved it the same way he had done it with Schtschadrin, whom he had kidnapped and killed, whom he had probably killed by himself. Schtschadrin had also posed a personal threat to him, and he had been in a similar situation like me, working at the top level. And so I was called off to Prague, and everything was wonderful and everybody admired me, and then Kalugin appeared there and began to question me about some facts which I was not able to remember. His reaction was: ´You see?! He is not answering!´ He called me an enemy, who was working for the Americans and asked the intelligence service to get rid of me. He writes about it in his memoirs, where he exposed himself, and thus there is no doubt that it really was so. By the way, there is one more memoir, because Kalugin didn’t arrive alone to Prague; he allegedly came for a business trip with another person from the intelligence service. He was now after me. He wanted to meet me, he was asking about me, but he had been directly ordered by Andropov not to do it. This other guy writes that as soon as he heard it, he informed Andropov, that he phoned to Andropov from the Soviet embassy, and Andropov again forbade Kalugin to have any further contacts with me. Nevertheless, he still contacted me, and it is evident that he went against Andropov's order. Shortly after, Kalugin was kicked out from his position. I suspect that it might have been because of me, because he had disobeyed the order, because Andropov liked me quite well. But then he probably didn’t want to be involved in this, because the Czechs and Slovaks were autonomous to a certain extent, and he didn't really want to give orders to them. He didn’t want to turn them into enemies, and thus he left Köcher alone. So there I was in the villa near Benešov near Prague, and Kalugin told them that I was the enemy...”

“I was already about to leave (the USA), the apartment and everything was already sold and my stuff packed, and I was... well, not arrested, but asked to meet them. It was a joint meeting where the FBI and the CIA were present, there was certain Brown, the head of the intelligence in the CIA, and then the head of counterintelligence from the FBI from New York, a young guy. The made me a good offer. They said: ´We know that you work for the other side, but we will give you immunity if you start working for us, how about that?´ What was interesting was that they were asking me only about the period when I had been in the CIA, that is until 1976. They asked no questions about what was after that. They didn’t know about it, you understand? Thus it was probably Kalugin who had turned me in, because if Fiala had turned me in, they would have known everything. Or it was more complicated with Fiala, but that doesn’t matter. So we discussed it for about a week and they let me go home, so if I were smart enough, I would even be able to escape them. If I had had some forged passports somewhere in my safe. Since I'm a professional, I would have escaped them even if I had been under surveillance.”

“The situation there was interesting, because it was a maximum security prison located directly in New York, where people were awaiting trial. That was because Giuliani arrested whomever he could. They were the top heads of the mafia; really there were all the godfathers of the New York mafia there. Behind the bars there was Persico, the leader of the Colombo family, there was old Gambino and young Gambino, the topmost bosses, and they were immensely interesting people. Then there was some prominent Irish terrorist, so you were in an excellent company. Then there was Don Gaetano Badalamente, the boss of Italian mafia, whom the FBI lured from Palermo somewhere to Barcelona where they kidnapped him, a very interesting man. Those were the times when the mafia was not yet involved in drug trafficking, but they were exercising this medieval-like justice. It was actually a government. But I am very grateful to him and I will not say a word against him, because he really helped me. They treated me with great respect. Then there were other remarkable people... There were several extraordinary people, and it was an immensely great learning experience to meet them. Then there was the current boss of the Italian freemasons’ lodge P2, of the ultra neofascist rightwing, who is its leader up to now, and at that time he was nr. 2. It’s a long story, but this Franceso Pazienza was an immensely interesting man.”