Terrorists and Revolutionaries: The Achilles Heel of Communist Surveillance

Abstract

The scholarly understanding of communist state surveillance practices remains limited. Utilising thousands of recently declassified archival materials from communist Czechoslovakia, this article aims to revise our understanding of everyday security practices and surveillance under communist regimes, which have thus far been overwhelmingly understood in relation to the domestic population and social control. In the 1970s and 1980s, Czechoslovakia attracted the Cold War terrorist and revolutionary elite. Visits by the likes of Carlos the Jackal, Munich Olympic massacre mastermind Abu Daoud, and key PLO figures in Prague were closely surveilled by the Czechoslovak State Security (StB). This article investigates the motifs and performance of a wide range of mechanisms that the StB utilised to surveil violent non-state actors, including informer networks and SIGINT. It argues that in the last decade of the Cold War, Prague adopted a “surveillance-centred” approach to international terrorists on its territory—arguably enabled by informal “non-aggression pacts.” Furthermore, it challenges the notion that the communist state security structures were omnipotent surveillance mechanisms. Despite having spent decades perfecting their grip on domestic dissent, when confronted with foreign, unfamiliar, and uncontrollable non-state actors engaged in terrorism or political violence, these ominous institutions were often shown to be anxious, inept, and at times impotent. Finally, it explores the parallel state approaches to international terrorists and revolutionaries, and their shortcomings, across the Iron Curtain jurisdictions. Overall, this article seeks to expand our understanding of the broad and varied complexities of intelligence and surveillance in communist regimes.