Miroslav Janda

“Superintendent Blažek looked like one of famous Czech actors – sleek, a tie, a ring, shortly nobby. You could recognize at first glimpse he had never worked manually. He opened a file: ‘So Mr. Janda, do you know this man?’, he showed me a photo of Fanki. I answered: ‘yes’. He lost countenance a little because he had thought I would deny. But my brother had known Fanki for eight years and I had visited Prague with Fanki to buy stuff for hunters. Why should I deny? ‘I know him very well.’ – ‘When did you see him last time?’ I said around 1971, which was the year of my visit in Zagreb. I explained Fanki had arrived for hunting at my brother’s hunting ground. My brother had died in 1973. Blažek pulled out another papers: ‘Did you write this?’ I was inspecting the letter: ‘It looks like my handwriting.’ He again awaited I would deny. I write in block letters usually: ‘But someone could fake it.’ – ‘No, no... This is exactly your handwriting. Mr. Janda, not this letter, but only one sentence in it implies ten years in prison.’”

“I arrived to Zagreb. I hadn’t been allowed to pass trough Austria, so I had chosen an express via Hungary. I accommodated in the hotel Central near the railway station. I asked in hotel reception where I could find a post office in order to make a call: ‘The phone is right here in the hotel.’ – ‘How can I make a call to Germany?’ I called Fanki and he promised he would come within two days, if I would stay. My travel permission was valid for 14 days so I answered I would wait for him in the hotel. He arrived by plane from Munich and took a taxi right to the Central. I got a call from reception that a visitor was waiting for me. I went downstairs and that was it. We had spent together two days in two hotels all night long. Fanki said he knew from my brother that I had been making water measurements of rivers in areas where Russian military bases were situated – Fanki knew everything about me. He was interested especially in the military area Mimon: ‘We would be pleased if you would write some reports on it. It is not very dangerous. You would just observe surroundings and write.’ Next day he brought a bonboniere: ‘Don’t unwrap it now, only when you arrive home to Prague. At the bottom are packed cipher tables.’ – ‘What should I do if a frontier guard would uncover it?’, I asked. – ‘Neither Yugoslavian nor Hungarian frontier guards are making any searches. The only danger presents Slovakian guard.’ – ‘In case of emergency I would pretend I know nothing about it, that I have just bought a bonboniere in a shop.’ – ‘That’s right. Just pretend you know nothing at all.’ I brought the bonboniere all the way to Prague.”

“The first issue of our meetings was the letters: ‘Mr. Janda, you have sent five letters.’ They had classified letters on a 3 digit scale: 1, 2, and 3. The most important reports got number 1. I received 1000 German marks for such letter, 500 German marks for the second rank and 200 for the third. ‘You have sent five letters during the last year. That means 5000 German marks.’ They suggested I should take it home. I have always refused and disappointed them at least in the first years of our communication. I could take maybe 50 German marks to buy a T-shirt for my daughter, but it would be absolutely crazy to take with me 3000 German marks when everybody else in the bus had only 10 or 20 Marks. I would be immediately arrested if I would follow such suggestion.”

“I unwrapped the bonboniere in the evening at home. Each sentence and each order of a letter meant a specific kind of weapons. For example airforce: in this case the sentence had to start with “B”. Artillery or infantry had other letters. I had to write sentences according these rules in German. I spent four hours to write one letter. It was arduous stuff. The text needed to have some logic: ‘I’m in Prague. I’m greeting you, the food and beer is good.’ As if some real German tourist was writing a letter. It was enough to drive me crazy, family around you... Finally I had been writing the letters in my office. The only person who knew that I was writing some letters was our charwoman: ‘Mr Janda, you are the only one in this company who is really working hard.’ I had been writing the messages in this way. It was really dangerous. I had to find an address of some innocent civilian in a phone book, but none educated. It was impossible to use a worker who would ‘speak’ German. Therefore I was looking for people with a degree. I had to follow an instruction to put each letter in some mailbox in the district where the chosen person had lived, for example in district Žižkov. I was walking through Žižkov in the night looking for mailboxes! There was another instruction to wait about 15 minutes near the chosen mailbox if someone was patrolling around or was shadowing me. I rather went there in the night. It was forbidden to handle the letters without gloves. I had objected that in winter this is ok but how it would look like if I would sit in a tram with gloves in the summer: ‘Use an adhesive plaster, cover your thumb and forefinger with which you will touch the letter, detached the plaster after the action and throw it away.’”

“I had returned from a business trip from north Bohemia on 17th of February in 1978. It was Friday 14:30 p.m. when I came to my office. Only Mr. Kulhánek was there: ‘Where have you been all the time? The State Security is looking for you from the very morning. They have visited our chief deputy as well. I don’t like these guys.’ The invisible lead I had been hiding in a normal pencil at its very end. So I have squeezed it out, opened the window and threw it into the river Vltava beneath. On this Friday our sport team had a training so I left for a tram in Lidická Street. I had been walking along the river towards a bridge of Palacký. Before I had reached the tram stop two men got off a car suddenly. It was lieutenant colonel Horák and major Hudec. Another two men were standing nearby by a car Volha. Horák approached me: ‘Are you Mr. Janda? You are going with us.’ – ‘Why should I go? – ‘We will talk about it later at a different place.‘ We headed for the Volha. No one spoke a world. We drove few miles. Suddenly I realized we were approaching Ruzyň. An iron gate opened. Horak announced: ‘we are three plus one’. We drove in. I remained sitting in the car. They got out. Horak went to the building. On the doorsteps a warden stood – the first warden in my life. Horak turned to him: ‘Put him alone into a custody cell.’”

“In the first two years I had been sending only ciphered letters. Than I have asked for some more effective way of writing. That was a mistake: ‘Yes, we have prepared a secret writing method for you. Your messages will be invisible. I will give you a special pencil. You will write your reports on the second side of each letter.’ During the first two years after Zagreb The State Security agents had written in their reports that the cipher was unknown neither the content of the letters. However The State Security had successfully registered all my letters. It was a standard method of the regime to control all suspicious letters sent abroad. My ciphered letters were written by a normal pen in German language. The State Security had the letters but without knowledge of their real content. This had changed with the secret pencil. Our people knew the chemical process. They were able to make the invisible writing visible. All was lost. The special pencil looked like an ordinary one: Hardmuth České Budějovice. Only its lead was different. I had been writing and saw nothing. However The State Security knew only the content: that I had written about military area Mimoň, barrack in Mladá Boleslav, military base on the border near Česká Kamenice, a fuel storage near Hřensko (there we had measured river Labe), but they still hadn’t disclosed my identity. It took seven years until The State Security finally identified me on 24th September in 1977. They had controlled 11 450 letters altogether to uncover one secret agent and to identify my handwriting.”

“He hold out his hand to me: ‘My name is Prokop. I am a prosecutor. Have you already talked to Mr. Janda’, he turned to my interrogators from The State Security. ‘We are waiting for you’, they answered. Prokop pulled out the penal code: ‘So Mr. Janda, on the basis of investigation of The State Security I take you into custody according to the article 67. The reason is section 105 – espionage on behalf of a foreign security service. I can tell you’, he leafed through the penal code, ‘penalties are between 10 and 15 years. In case of organized group it could be even higher.’ – ‘Slow down’, I answered, ‘this is only my second day here and you are already telling me I will be sentenced to 10 years!’ – ‘The facts we know are clear enough to propose such a punishment. Within article 105 you can never get lower sentence.’ So I had 10 years already.”