Operation ‘Professor’

H. Gordon Skilling under Secret Police Surveillance in Czechoslovakia

Petr Blažek

Gordon Skilling visited Communist Czechoslovakia a total of seventeen times. The first time was in the summer of 1948 (just months after the takeover). The last time was in April 1987. In between he visited in 1950, 1958 (twice), 1961, 1962, 1967, 1968 (twice), 1969 (twice), 1975, 1977, 1978 (twice), 1984, and 1987.

Two interesting sets of documents concerning these visits are preserved in the Security Services Archive, Prague. They were made in consequence of Skilling’s being tailed by agents of the State Security Forces (Státní bezpečnosti – StB). The first file is from 1962–77, and has the cover name ‘Professor’. The official reason for starting up this surveillance file in December 1962 was that Skilling ‘often comes to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and establishes suspect contacts’. The other documents in the file demonstrate that the secret police had been truly interested in this Canadian scholar even earlier, but it had probably been a matter of merely a routine check of a Western foreigner’s sojourns as a tourist, not providing, as it says in one of the documents, any ‘agency information’.

The turning point was came in September 1961, when the StB intercepted a letter from Skilling to the Canadian consul in Prague, in which he mentions his talks with officials of the Canadian Department of External Affairs in connection with his planned sojourn in Vienna for a year and possible journeys to the Soviet bloc. The result was an StB operation code-named ‘Professor’, in which Skilling was kept under surveillance during a trip to Czechoslovakia in April 1962. According to the extant plan, the secret police agents had taken an interest in Skilling’s friends even before the visit. (The file mentions Zdeněk Rudinger, Alena Maxová, and Fedor Ballo). The agents prepared the installation of bugging devices in the hotels and tried to find a suitable person who would provide the StB with information about Skilling’s intentions. It is not clear from the file whether they were successful. All that we have is reports from an StB collaborator, who at the time was working as a receptionist in the Hotel Morava, where Skilling was staying in Prague. From these reports it can be deduced that StB agents were busy at work in the rooms next door to Skilling’s. From the assessment of Operation ‘Professor’ it is clear that Skilling and his family were under close surveillance probably the whole time they were in Czechoslovakia. (The report mentions meetings with their old friends the Rudingers, the Polišenskýs, the Haningers, the Milners, and Alfons Bednár).

From the documents it is clear that Skilling was suspected of being involved in espionage while visiting Czechoslovakia in April 1962. Though close surveillance did not provide information confirming this suspicion, secret police interest in him continued in the subsequent months. From another intercepted letter from Skilling, StB agents learnt in autumn 1962 that he was considering another trip to Czechoslovakia. Surprisingly, however, the file was shelved as early as February 1963 with the justification that none of the individuals could be considered useful in getting the operation started and, moreover, they write that Skilling did not at present intend to come to the ČSSR.

Operation ‘Professor’ was, according to the preserved documents, reactivated only twelve years later, when, unfortunately, the StB managed to find a willing collaborator amongst Skilling’s friends. In the summer of 1975 the earlier operational file was newly registered in the category for people suspected of having committed crimes. The primary reason for this step was the ‘agent information’ obtained from an undercover StB agent with the cover name ‘Václav’, whom Skilling had met with several times on his visit to Prague in July of that year.

The file still contains a total of three similar records from meetings with an StB officer, Major Novotný, and an agent called ‘Václav’. The secret police collaborator was the historian Václav Kotyk (b. 1927), whom Skilling had met in the 1960s and trusted greatly. In the early years of the reestablishment of hard-line Communism after the crushing of the Prague Spring reform movement, Kotyk had was thrown out of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and had to make a living by working in a factory warehouse; he began to collaborate with the secret police in the autumn of 1973. His information about Skilling’s contacts, plans, and opinions document the extent of Kotyk’s collaboration. The records mention a number of people whom Skilling used to meet with during his visits to Czechoslovakia, including Jiřina Šiklová. At this time she was devoting herself fully to clandestine contact with exiles. The reports repeatedly also mention Vilém Prečan, who was doing organizational work in support of persecuted historians. In Kotyk’s assessment Skilling had come to the country with ‘certain tasks’ and ‘probably in the interests of some intelligence service’. Skilling asked Kotyk to help him to stay in touch with people in Slovakia in the future, and told him that a member of the Canadian Embassy staff was to work as a middleman in this communication.

Although the StB agents subsequently worked out a detailed plan for the renewed Operation ‘Professor’, the results were ultimately the same as in the early 1960s. Since Skilling did not come back to Czechoslovak till February 1977, the file was shelved. But several months later the situation changed once again, because Skilling visited Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1977 and then twice in 1978. Unfortunately, StB documents about these visits have yet to be found in the archive (probably because they were shredded in late 1989). Concerning the open StB action against Skilling on 18 October 1978, we thus have a description of these events only in Skilling’s memoirs. When travelling by bus from Bratislava to Vienna, he was searched at the frontier and after samizdat and notes were discovered he was taken back to Bratislava, where he was subjected to an all-day interrogation: ‘During the whole morning they questioned me closely about my meetings in Prague and Bratislava, asking me where I stayed, whom I met, what I had talked about, and whether I had given or received any written materials. I managed to evade answering most of their questions and invented stories about where I had stayed. I refused to say anything about my conversations [...] After lunch they told me that they knew I had been lying all along and that they were aware of everything I done after my visit to Kusý’s. They had translated my notes into Slovak and questioned me about them. Unfortunately these included notes on my conversations in Prague and some coded messages from Jiřina Šiklová for Prečan. [...] At about seven o’clock I was requested to sign the final written protocol.’ Only later was Skilling taken back to the frontier and allowed to leave Czechoslovakia.

Skilling’s last two visits to Czechoslovakia before the collapse of the Communist regime were in 1984 and 1987. Information about them is in an operational file of the StB with the cover name ‘Laco’. It includes written documents and photographs from surveillance by StB agents. Of particular interest are the photographs made during the Skillings’ golden wedding celebrations at their banquet in the Municipal House, Prague, on 21 April 1987, and also on the following day at the Old Town Town Hall. In the photograph are a number of well-known Charter 77 signatories (including Rudolf Battěk, Jiří Dientsbier, Jiří Gruntorád, Jiří Hájek, Ivan Havel, Václav Havel, Václav Malý, Dana Němcová, Milan Otáhal, Petr Pithart, Jiřína Šiklová, and Zdeněk Urbánek) and their friends. These photographs say more about Professor Skilling’s Czechoslovak contacts at the time than all the other documents of the secret police.