Life Grim for Man Who Arrested Havel

Times have changed for Petr Zak, a former secret police major.

Just 13 months ago Zak arrested dissident Vaclav Havel. Now, Havel is president and Zak sits disconsolately at home under what he calls virtual house arrest.

Like the thousands of others who toiled for the dreaded STB, the Czech acronym for the now disbanded secret police, Zak is under orders to stay home while an Interior Ministry commission mulls his fate.

In keeping with the philosophy of love and dignity preached by President Havel, it is a mild punishment for years of repression that Zak helped carry out under the Communist government.

The routine leaves Zak and countless other former functionaries across Eastern Europe hours to ponder the fate that has wrenched power from their hands.

A year ago the burly, balding Zak confidently rasped out testimony that sent Havel to jail for four months on charges of obstructing a police official. In an interview with the Associated Press, Zak seemed deflated.

Seated in his neat apartment in a shabby block on the outskirts of Prague, he groped to describe the change that has torn him from the 20 years of intelligence work he clearly relished.

“It was a bit of a shock,” he finally conceded during an hourlong interview.

When unrest broke out after the Nov. 17 police attack on peaceful students, “some official structures did not act at all, some went beyond their authority--and the result was what happened,” he said.

As head of a 30-member department dealing with what he calls “extremism in independent initiatives,” Zak was among those who best knew Havel, Foreign Minister Jiri Dienstbier and an array of other dissidents catapulted by revolution into positions of power.

In his classic Bolshevik “we lost-they won” view, this transformation was less surprising for Zak than for a startled world watching Czechoslovakia’s rapid makeover.

Zak claimed that the dissidents long ago drew up a “schedule” of events for 1989 that foresaw the eventual assumption of power. And he is sure things would not have happened so fast without “certain international support” for his opponents.

There were a few mistakes on the Communists’ side, too, he admitted. One was a failure publicly to acknowledge, or perhaps even play upon, differences between the various dissident groups; another was that “we were forced more and more to carry out preventive measures and not our own intelligence work.”

It was during these “preventive measures”--the only term Zak used to describe detention or interrogation--that he spent hours in discussion with Havel, Dienstbier and others, puffing on Petra cigarettes, the cheap brand smoked by all three men.

Zak believes the Communists should and will play a significant role in Czechoslovakia. He refused to talk about differences among the former leaders over what to do about the dissidents, saying only that four groups fought for control.

Equally loyally, he refused to criticize the decision on Jan. 16, 1989, to arrest Havel. Zak was one of those who detained the playwright after a small demonstration on Wenceslas Square, which Havel observed without taking part.

The arrest finally drove thousands of intellectuals who had refused to side openly with the dissidents into signing petitions for Havel’s release.

It was the start of a revolt that moved with furious pace after Nov. 17.

Many former Communist functionaries have found the changes unbearable.

At least six people closely associated with the old rulers, including two policemen and former Slovak Communist leader Viliam Salgovic, long reputed to be a KGB agent, have committed suicide since the revolution.

Scattered reports in state media indicate that many Communists are being fired and are finding it hard to get work at even the most menial tasks.

Zak said his children met some resentment at school “when they refused to join in certain actions” of protest of the authorities.

“And I suppose,” he said, “I was also punished by what is happening to me.”