Prague, Dec 29 (CTK) – The new book about Karel Koecher, the best known spy of the Czechoslovak communist secret service who managed to infiltrate the CIA in the 1970s, written by Vladimir Sevela is the most thoroughly documented story of a Czech intelligence agent, daily Hospodarske noviny (HN) wrote on Tuesday.
This is true even though Sevela admits that he was unable to clarify all aspects concerning the Koecher spy story.
Some explanations may still be provided by Moscow archives that have been unavailable so far, except for the so called Mitrokhin Archive that the British intelligence gained after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the paper writes.
Sevela seemed to talk to all available persons who had repeated contacts with Koecher and his wife Hana before the married couple moved from Czechoslovakia to the United States in 1965, during their U.S. stay and after their return.
In November 1984, the Koechers were arrested by the FBI. In 1986, the Czech couple was swapped for Soviet dissident Anatoly Scharansky.
The Czechoslovak communist regime did not use Koecher in its propaganda, unlike the story of Pavel Minarik who worked for the Czechoslovak secret service in the Munich seat of Radio Free Europe. The reason may be that even those who controlled the Koechers had repeated doubts about their loyalty, HN writes.
The Koechers used their real identity in the USA and their secret mission was to gain information useful for the Eastern Bloc.
Karel Koecher was willing to meet Sevela several times and talk about the past, while his wife Hana stayed in the shadow of her often excentric husband, like she had done before. However, it was Hana who managed to keep calm even in the most dramatic situations, such as when FBI agents arrested them. She refused to talk to the FBI then.
The paper writes that Hana seems the stronger of the two. The married life was a working relation of two spies and its bizarre part was a regular participation in swingers parties and planned swapping of wives and husbands, the paper writes.
Koecher did not want to talk about these private affairs, same as he refused to admit that the information he sent to Prague and Moscow led to the arrests and deaths of those whom he had turned in, HN writes.
Apart from its careful presentation of facts, the book describes trivial ridiculous moments in the work of the Czechoslovak communist intelligence officers. For example, one of the officers failed to verify the Koechers´ place of residence only because he did not realise that their name was pronounced in American English in a different way than in the Czech Republic where the original German pronunciation was used, the paper writes.
