Jaroslav Lamr

"It was hard to bear the fact that also the youth was followed by the secret police, including the Scouts. In the Brdy area where I used to live, there were large settlements of the tramp movement. At that time – late 1970s and early 80s – there were efforts to break the movement apart or infiltrate it with our people. I found it hard to bear that missions were organized with the sole goal of destroying Scout settlements where there were totems and places ready for an assembly. The order would arrive: liquidate it. I was personally strongly against it. We argued with the guy who was supposed to carry it out. I was against it, argued with him, but this was an order and he couldn’t have changed it. It was wrong for the secret agents, policemen and militia men to participate in the destruction of the Scout and tramp settlements."

"The job of an operative consisted of targeting the environment of foreign residents who were arriving in the given district. When it was the whole family they attempted to gather as much information as possible about the family, its members, relatives, acquaintances, out of whom they would single out people who could be recruited and give out information about the family. Foreigners would commonly visit the factories in the Příbram area, uranium mines, ore fields, the world-wide known enterprise Hamiro for business purposes. We would seek the people who were in official contact with those foreigners, trying to recruit them. Interestingly enough, after 1989 we found out that there were traitors among ourselves. Not that we wouldn’t have known back then. But only after 1989 did I find out the details. As I reflect upon my work, we could have done our best but still achieve nothing because among our ranks there was a guy recruited by the British intelligence. He was able to disperse any interest that we in the Central Bohemian region had in England. He was our operating officer in the secret service and furthermore had the competence of unlimited lustration. So any efforts were futile. His name was Jiří Kroča and nobody would have ever found out had he not died of heart attack. His wife, a Soviet citizen, brought the equipment to the secret police HQ in Prague where they in horror discovered that he was an agent for the British."