Stanislav Pohořal

"Every state institution, today, past, has its secret services. These secret services have their roles. And, of course, I had, and I say absolutely responsibly, a duty, and it was also for the benefit of my duties that I performed, to work with the military counterintelligence staff. Which was part of the army, but it was also a state security body. And, of course, with the intelligence administration, because I was a reporter myself for some time and I was the deputy commander of the intelligence regiment in Zbiroh, here not far from Prague, where we conducted radio intelligence. We can talk about it today; we were strictly secretive and it was a normal service that every army has. Even today's army is conducting this intelligence. Why? Because our task was to do technical, radio intelligence in Europe in order to protect the territory or airspace of the Czechoslovak Republic. So, I myself was part of the intelligence service of the Czechoslovak army. As for military counterintelligence, I must say that we had a very good military counterintelligence, and thanks God we had it, because when I served in Zbiroh, our troops were spread across the state border. If you can imagine, when there was still the wire stretched, the wire fence along the border. So, there it was guarded by members of the Border Guard and only behind that fence, in the direction of Germany, we had our units, because we had our technical equipment there, so that we could, with the help of radiolocation and others, carry out specialized reconnaissance activities on the territory of a potential enemy."

"So, he tells me, well, that we should be grateful to America for ridding us of the occupiers, and the other great slogans that were used back then, and I warned him that we are grateful, but that he must realize that what happened here in the sixties was not the work of the army at all, it was simply the work of politicians, just like in America, because the army was ordered, so it went to fulfill the task. We had to explain it, because they had such an opinion that the army was also responsible for everything, even in the 1968. So, I had to explain to him, I asked the congressman how he assessed the US military's entry into Panama in the 1980s, in November and December. I don't know if you remember, but the Americans entered Panama with violent aggression. During that aggression… So, the congressman answered me like he would be just after some political training. 'Colonel, the American soldier brought freedom to the Panamanian people for the first time,' and he kept going, how the Americans were doing freedom there in Panama. And so, I answered, 'Mr. Congressman, that's exactly what they told us in the sixty-eighth and sixty-ninth, you know? That we will have freedom now and that everything will be all right.'… And as you can see, here during all the stay that the Soviet army was here in our territory, including the all the measures around August 21, 1968, it was… Well, it actually is bad… There were about 417 to 420 dead people. But it wasn't just in shooting, it wasn't just in shooting at all, it was in traffic accidents, it was in various accidents and things like that. While the Americans shot more than four thousand people in Panama in a month. They shot them; I emphasize. So, take that comparison, I know it's hard for someone to listen to it, but that's the way it is. So, I always wonder when it comes to Americans, how they go to make a democracy somewhere, where it is going to be again and what goal they pursue."

"The military Obroda, like a dissident club, did not convince me in a way that… I was fascinated by their intention, which they officially proclaimed, and also by what they actually did after. Some of those military Obroda people became new Jesuits who were simply firing people. The only goal they had was to fire people, to fire officers, to fire generals, and they just went that way, so the result is what you see today. When Vacek, the Minister of Defense, and I left the army in 1991, we were leaving the army, which had two hundred thousand soldiers, members of the army. It was fully armed, it was secure, the troops were trained, we had secured reserves, we had a secure training, and we left with the proviso that we handed over the army, as they say, zu grunt, in order. Unfortunately, today, if you look, the army has twenty thousand soldiers, they use a lot of weapons and technology that they had in that year 1991, that is, thirty years ago, and if you see what they actually do, then mainly they go on missions to get killed. Fourteen people dead in Afghanistan without any meaning or effect."

When I came to Prague and saw the troops coming here, I was also looking at Wenceslas Square and I must say that I still had a sad feeling from two points of view. First of all, because I saw some of the guys who were there on Wenceslas Square, just maybe under the influence of emotions doing terribly bad things. Not in the sense that they would protest badly against entering, but at a time when, for example (and I considered it as a soldier), I saw tanks standing by the Radio headquarters, one tank began to burn. And the tank guyes had such a quick witted that immediately the one tank full of ammunition; if it started to explode, there would have been a lot of dead; so they took it away from the other tanks so that it wouldn't catch on fire. Our guys, or the young boys, instead of running away from the tank, they were jumping in front of the tank. Unfortunately, it also happened that they took someone under the tank there.

"And it happened to us a year later. Because I, as the youngest lieutenant, was ordered to go to Prague with the platoon in 1969, on August 21. And that we would help to liquidate some of the actions that were taking place there. We did not know what was going on there. We came to Prague by Prague V3S, as if for a walk - we didn't have weapons or gas masks with us, nothing, just helmets, and then we were coming to Národní třída and there was the tear gas everywhere, they were fighting there, the police (respectively Public Security) with the others, it wasn't nice. So, they hurried back to Stará Boleslav to pack gas masks and helmets for us and they brought us submachine guns, so we were ready, because our task was to guard important objects which were likely to be attacked. We were guarding the Polish embassy, the building of the Central Committee of the Communist Party - at that time it was the building where the Ministry of Transport is today - and we spent about ten to fourteen days there. We were sorry that people there waved their fists at us because it was not our fault, we just had to watch over it. But I want to say quite openly here: we never shot at anyone; we haven't even had sharp ammunition. That is why I am deeply offended by some of the opinions of the current senators, I will not name them, who simply come there with statements that the 1969 was bad, meaning that the army shot against its own people. The army never shot against its own."

"At that time we were already preparing for the possibility of meeting with Mr. Havel, at that time still the chairman of the Civic Forum. Because it was necessary to solve a fundamental thing: who will lead the army, who will be the minister and what the army will do next, because it is not fun. Imagine that at that time you have, as I said, 220 thousand soldiers, several full divisions of motorized, tank artillery, tanks, planes, and now someone is controlling it all, and now someone is attacking it from somewhere. It happened that the Civic Forum posted leaflets and insults against the army in the barracks, for example, and that there was a danger that some regimental commanders, who were 30-35 years old at the time - they were young boys - would, as they say, go crazy, come out with tanks and there's a civil war here, which no one wanted. So, we were arguing with Mr. Havel, you can see that Mr. Křižan is there with him, that's this gentleman, he was a script editor who also came there for the Civic Forum. There was also a spokeman of the Civic forum and from our side we were there: here I am, here it is the Minister Vacek and next to him sits Mr. Ducháček, who was the first deputy chief of staff. There were a number of questions, one of those questions, which was funny to me, was when Mr. Havel came up with the idea that it could be ensured in the military that not only party organizations, then the Communist Party, but also clubs, civic associations, a club of young social democrats. Of course, I again took the experience of the Czechoslovak army from the time of the First Republic and from the time when the army was built by President Masaryk. And we had to explain to Mr. Havel that it was not possible; that all politics had to leave the barracks. That it must be behind the barracks gate and that the army must be apolitical."