Amateur Cold War Spies Get Respect

The street-side entrance to Jaroslava Martinkova’s apartment building is difficult to miss. The foggy glass doors keep passersby from gazing inside, but her name appears plainly on the doorbell panel, second from the bottom in a column of 10.

Yet when New York attorney Lawrence Molnar came searching for Martinkova shortly after the fall of communism, he walked by the six-story building--blackened by years of chimneys spewing soot into the wintry Prague sky--three times before ringing the bell.

“It was really a matter of getting up enough courage to stop,” Molnar said. “I was expecting the worst possible reaction: My best friend’s widow crying, ‘You ruined my husband!’ ”

Molnar and Martinkova are to meet again this morning at the U.S. Embassy, just across the river from the site of their anxious encounter seven years ago. This time, though, Molnar can expect only tears of appreciation from Martinkova--and for his part, the easing from his conscience of the torment of nearly half a century of guilt.

In an unusual gathering behind closed doors in the embassy’s Peach Room, a CIA official is scheduled to present Martinkova and three other Czechs with medals and $10,000 each for espionage work they, or their loved ones, carried out behind the Iron Curtain during the coldest years of the Cold War.

Molnar, a Czech emigre-turned-CIA agent, recruited untold numbers of collaborators in the early 1950s, many from among friends and classmates in an anti-Communist underground organization at the Charles University law school in Prague, the capital. All of them paid dearly for their activities, agreed to only with a handshake; until now, none got as much as a thank you.

“I would be insincere if I didn’t say the money will be helpful,” said Milan Voldrich, 72, who spent nearly nine years in prison and now lives with his wife on $350 a month in a one-room Prague apartment. “But the medal is the real reward. I can hand it down to my son, so he will know his father took part in something important.”

To most of them, their chief was known as “Holub,” or pigeon, Molnar’s undercover moniker. In the name of Czechoslovak patriotism and Western-style freedom, they set out to defeat communism.

The young spies attempted to steal a top-of-the-line Soviet MIG-15 fighter plane, glean classified data on Eastern Bloc nuclear installations and smuggle to the West industrial and military secrets by means of a clandestine radio network. Many were hastily trained in the cloak-and-dagger techniques of the day, using dead-letter boxes, writing with invisible ink, assuming false identities, deciphering secret codes and finding shelter in safe houses.

“As university students, they wanted to change the world,” said Blanka Libosvar, 57, whose late husband, Cestmir, spent six years in prison for arranging hide-outs for Molnar and others. “He was fundamentally convinced that he was doing something for the good of things.”

Short-Lived Missions

But unlike the popular novels and films that glamorized the surreptitious world of Cold War intelligence, these short-lived missions were mostly as amateurish as they were daring.

Clint Eastwood escaped across the North Pole with a supersonic Soviet fighter in the 1982 movie “Firefox.” But a real-life version in 1952 landed Martinkova’s husband, Zdenek Martinek, and others behind bars before they even made contact with the MIG-15 pilot they were to win over with offers of fame and fortune.

“Not even they and their collaborators succeeded,” the Czechoslovak news agency boasted in a 1956 dispatch exposing the operation.

Indeed, by most measures, Holub’s flock failed miserably, and while Molnar managed to escape to the United States, the others were rounded up, convicted of treason and condemned to lives of misery by the authorities they had so willfully betrayed.

Molnar says he was sentenced to death in absentia, but unlike his forsaken friends, it was a fate he never had to contemplate.

“It was a very difficult life--his nerves and general health were very much undermined,” Martinkova, 64, said of her husband, a would-be lawyer who died in 1984 after years of working in heavy construction and perilous uranium mines, where he fell sick with leukemia. He spent more than nine years in prison before receiving amnesty in the early 1960s.

“He would wake up with horrible nightmares,” she said. “He was afraid he was being watched or followed. He had his ideals and didn’t give them up, but he was terribly bitter that nothing came of it all.”

‘Not Secret but Private’

The CIA is saying nothing publicly about today’s ceremony; an official at the U.S. Embassy in Prague, explaining it is “not secret but private,” also declined to comment. But John C. Mattes, a Miami lawyer who represents the erstwhile spies and their families, characterized the event as the most far-reaching acknowledgment by the agency of botched operations in the Eastern Bloc since the 1960 downing of U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers.

With the Cold War over, and the Czech Republic last week invited to join the Atlantic alliance, Mattes said the CIA has unprecedented latitude to confront the issue of Communist-era collaborators, most of whom were never paid for their services let alone given any special recognition.

“For them to face these individuals personally is an extraordinary step because it is something they have been unwilling and unable to do,” said Mattes, who has handled a number of highly publicized cases involving the CIA, including litigation on behalf of Vietnamese commandos seeking compensation after their capture in Vietnam and Laos. “It is really an historic moral accountability, a first-time acknowledgment that clandestine operations were mounted and people did sacrifice, suffer and pay a very great price in the service of the United States.”

A former U.S. intelligence official with knowledge of Eastern Europe said the CIA has from time to time addressed individual cases from the Cold War, but agreed it is unusual for the agency to arrange--and host--a special ceremony overseas. Cases are typically handled more discreetly, the former official said, to avoid publicity and a flood of unwarranted claims.

“When a claim is legitimate, you can be assured it will be addressed,” the former official said. “These may be pretty low-level guys, but there was pretty high-level suffering.”

That only four people will be honored today is more happenstance than design. Molnar, 70, says there are probably thousands more who deserve recognition across the former Eastern Bloc, but he tracked down only the few he remembered well or could confirm were still living in his native Czech Republic, which split from Slovakia in 1993. Molnar did not even know Voldrich but included him based on his friends’ accounts.

The CIA made no effort to expand his list, Molnar said.

“I don’t have any comment,” said Tom Crispell, a spokesman for the CIA at its Virginia headquarters.

Molnar, a slight, snowy-haired estate lawyer, long ago parted ways with the agency--his first job upon emigrating to the United States in the 1950s was loading delivery trucks in New York City--but he took up the search for his lost recruits almost as soon as the Communists were chased from power in Czechoslovakia in 1989.

“I am writing you this letter to ask whether the services they had given and the suffering they were subjected to, should not be given consideration by the agency,” Molnar wrote to then-CIA Director William H. Webster in 1991. “Your thoughts about a moral obligation of the agency to these persons would be greatly appreciated.”

Last year, frustrated by his inability to get the CIA to treat his inquiry seriously, Molnar hired Mattes, who immediately threatened to take the agency to court if it did not “do the right thing.”

A settlement, setting out today’s ceremony in Prague and absolving the agency of any future liability, followed.

“They wouldn’t return my calls and kept giving me the runaround,” Molnar said in his Manhattan office, a photograph from the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia mounted behind his desk. “I didn’t know what to do. I was depressed--six years of depression. I couldn’t go back to Prague because I couldn’t bear to face Mrs. Martinkova and the others without something to report.”

For all his anguish, Molnar’s friends and colleagues in the Czech Republic say they never harbored ill will toward the man they so desperately wanted to assist; even his dreaded first meeting in 1990 with Martinkova was heart-wrenching but astonishingly cordial, they both recounted. Molnar’s campaign to square things with the CIA, moreover, has come as a great surprise here and, for some, a tremendous embarrassment.

Bohuslav Perutka, who in 1948 invited Molnar, then a first-year law student, to join the underground club at Charles University, insists that the CIA owes nothing to its Czech collaborators. He will attend today’s ceremony with deep misgivings, he said.

“There was a great deal of amateurism, and the agency bears some responsibility for how things turned out, but in the root of the cases, it was our own doing,” Perutka said. “Everyone is the master of his own destiny. We needn’t have met with Molnar. . . . We didn’t do it for the CIA; we did it through the CIA. We didn’t do it for a medal or financial reward; we did it for our country.”

A small, contemplative man with black plastic glasses, Perutka, 68, was recruited by Molnar in 1952 to set up a clandestine communication network across Czechoslovakia. He operated a radio transmitter, learned Morse code and eventually applied for membership in the Communist Party--on Molnar’s order--as cover for his espionage.

“It was really very difficult for me,” said Perutka, who has run into problems since 1989 because of his brief party association. “I don’t pretend to be a great moralist, but I am not comfortable being two-faced.”

Use of Dead-Letter Box

But Perutka was never called upon to do much beyond listen for coded orders from West Germany, which seldom came and never offered much direction. It was his one and only use of a dead-letter box more than a year earlier that sealed his fate in 1956, when two plainclothes Czechoslovak security officers nabbed him at the train station in Ostrava, close to the Polish border, and seized a radio transmitter from his apartment.

Thinking his message had long before been picked up, Perutka confessed to his interrogators that a secret communique had been buried in a glass jar near a roadside marker north of Prague. Following his directions, Perutka’s captors immediately intercepted the message.

“Received your reports,” Perutka had written. “Am awaiting your instructions. I am now a candidate of the Communist Party, as you wished. Have hope for an apartment in Ostrava. Naturally, I will be at your disposal. From June 19 to July 4, I am away from home, therefore do not transmit or repeat your report. Greetings to friends.”

Perutka says it stings that the message never made it to its intended audience, particularly since it was his only attempt to reach his superiors during four years working for the CIA.

But disappointment was a way of life. Voldrich, whom Perutka befriended in prison, was supposed to send a coded postcard to West Germany confirming his mission to steal atomic secrets was on track. After crossing the border into Germany for his orders, Voldrich was dispatched back into Czechoslovakia from Munich with a small sum of money and no new identity papers. He was arrested before he even bought the postcard.

Be it failure, pride, humiliation or worry for loved ones, Molnar’s loyalists have remained tight-lipped in both good and bad times.

Martinek would meet now and then over dinner with fellow political prisoners but otherwise rarely talked about the darkest years of his life. Libosvar was the same. Voldrich’s son, 50, knows only scant details of his father’s ordeal, and Perutka says he can only guess when asked if his daughter and four grandchildren are proud of today’s honor.

“I would say to my husband sometimes, ‘What good was any of this to you?’ And he would get angry,” Martinkova said, stroking an empty gold locket dangling from her neck. “I know why Mr. Molnar has done all of this, but then I view it as a practical matter. My husband wouldn’t allow it. What he had done was something beyond criticism. He lived only for that.”