Sending Couriers to Czechoslovakia as Part of Anticommunist Resistance in the First Half of the 1950s

Abstract

The anticommunist resistance in Czechoslovakia, organized from abroad, was led primarily by groups of experienced Czechoslovak intelligence officers who fled to the West after the coup d'état in February 1948. Financed and organized by the intelligence services of France, Great Britain, and the United States, and in isolated cases by the Czechoslovak exile organizations, these groups sent hundreds of couriers to Czechoslovakia to carry out various intelligence tasks. Recruited mainly from young individuals placed in refugee camps, these people faced a perilous mission. The State Security Service apprehended many of them. Those deemed unsuitable for intelligence use by the communist security apparatus faced years of imprisonment or even execution. A few years after the communist coup d'etat in Czechoslovakia, when it became clear that World War III would not break out, activities of the Western intelligence services that previously sent couriers dramatically changed. Risks when crossing the national border and working in Czechoslovakia became enormous. The state borders with Western countries were heavily guarded. Czechoslovak society was overcome by fear, and it was difficult to find people willing to cooperate with patriots in exile. In the middle of the 1950s, Western intelligence services stopped sending couriers to Czechoslovakia. They began to focus more on the use of legal channels and tried to recruit collaborators from among Czechoslovak citizens who regularly visited Western countries for business or cultural purposes.