"In addition, I asked for an interview with a high-ranking party official and got Vasil Mohorita. He was simply young at the time, the youngest member of the Communist leadership and head of the Socialist Youth Union. The interview was not in private, he still had a much older advisor there. I asked various questions, I asked how come Czechoslovakia was apparently the only country that had its leading writer behind bars. This was not the situation in 1989, perhaps not even in Albania. The answer, of course, was that he was definitely not there for his plays. And that it all just had to be done through the courts and so on. We talked about the freedom of travelling and how come the young people in Brno, Budějovice or Bratislava can't go to Vienna for a day, that they have to ask for foreign exchange and permission to go to a capitalist state. This is just an obstacle... If they can watch Austrian television, why can't they go to Vienna for a day? How much could it cost fro the state? It doesn't have to cost anything. He explained that there must be order, they can't go there with empty pockets, and so on. Finally, one last question. Now can´t remember what the last question was. Maybe about Havel. And why that attitude? But anyway, Mohorita ended up not having the answer. He was sitting there, he wanted to say something, and he couldn't. You can hear it on the tape. And his senior advisor was indicating that I should press Stop, stop recording, but I let it go and I held the microphone. And finally, after ten seconds, Vasil Mohorita said, 'We aim to strengthen socialism, not to destroy it.'"
"Probably the main signal for me was during the Palachiada [in January 1989]. After they sprayed my car [with white paint] and blew the air out of all four tyres of my car, the following day I was invited to the police, at the Public Security station in Školská Street, to make a report and an assessment of the damage. It then turned out to be far less than my original estimation. So I was invited, and I was to meet some superintendent there. I told him that I didn't understand why I was getting a new accreditation card every year, a renewed accreditation, and then such nonsense was going on. It's only the second or third week of the new year and it's already starting all over again. What's the point? And the superintendent replied, "Don't you understand? Those at the top are in danger. They know the end of their power is coming.' That's what a uniformed policeman in a police station in downtown Prague said to my face, to me, a Voice of America correspondent. I told this to Ivan Medek in Vienna the next day. And he said, 'When a Public Security officer says that to you, it's on its way to a big change.'"
" There was a ban on recording. I didn't want to leave my expensive tape recorders in the car. So I had them in my bag, in a suitcase that I took with me to the cemetery. I put it on the ground and I was standing on something higher so that I could see what was going on. It took me a while to find the cemetery, I came a little late. All of a sudden, a man in plain clothes came and carried my bag away. I shouted at him, but I couldn't shout too loud, someone was just talking at Seifert's grave. And he was going out. To another man. I said, 'What's going on here?' And they said, 'Get in the car.' They pushed me in the car. My bag was on the lap of one of the State Security officers in the front. So we set off across the countryside. And I was like, 'What right do you have to arrest me?' They were like, 'You're not under arrest, you're under pre-trial detention.' - 'You don't have any right...' - 'We do, according to the blah blah blah paragraph.' They were driving up and down for about ten minutes, it felt like an eternity. Suddenly they turned into a field and there was another car waiting in the middle of the field. So I got into the next car and I was like, 'Shit, I don't like this at all. That means nobody knows what car took me and so on. They drove for another ten or fifteen minutes and then I got out at Kralupy by the Public Security station. There I had to wait in a waiting room where there was a train timetable and a portrait of Comrade President. The door was slightly ajar so I could see the 'mourning' State Security members dressed in black. Members, but also agents. Faces I recognized from somewhere. At that moment, I didn't know from where. I understood that something was going on here. After thirty minutes an elderly man came out, gave me back my papers and said, 'Yes, you are Naegele, you are properly accredited, you can leave.' I said, 'But how, after thirty minutes in the car? How am I supposed to find my way?' - 'Yeah, you want an escort?' So he walked me to the exit of the building and said that now I could take as many pictures as I wanted. I didn't even have my camera with me as far as I knew. Then somehow I found the cemetery, where there were still a few buses parked and the State Security men were getting on. There was a whole crowd of State Security officers, a hundred and fifty or a hundred. So during that drive I was afraid."
"It was International Human Rights Day again, on 10 December 1988. The City National Committee gave permission to hold the demonstration on Škroupovo Square, not on Wenceslas Square, where the organizers originally had intended to have it. I was on a short visit to the office of the Italian Press Agency in Krakovská Street, and then I decided to go to the metro, down Krakovská Street, to see if by any chance there were people around the horse [the statue of St. Wenceslas on Wenceslas Square]. There were some young people there, but not at the demonstration. As I was going down the stairs to the vestibule, I was stopped by a State Security man who threw me against the wall. He started shouting at me what I was doing upstairs. I replied that I was went past. Then he shouted at me that I had butter on my head [have an egg on one´s face, trans.]. I didn't even understand the expression in that context, so I said, no, maybe rainwater or raindrops at most. And then he threatened me, what would I say if he told me that my accreditation in Czechoslovakia would expire at midnight that day because I would have to leave Czechoslovakia forever. I said to him, 'Excuse me, I'd take that as an anonymous statement. You didn't introduce yourself.' I asked him to introduce himself. He quickly showed me some number. That wasn't enough for me as he didn't give me time to read it. So who's afraid?! So he told a National Security Corps man to write me down, just verify my ID. And then he let me go. Meanwhile, Jirka Dienstbier Sr. was walking by. He wasn't surprised, he used to experience much worse things. So I came to the demonstration when it was already in full swing, fifteen minutes later. I didn't get very close to the podium, but I was watching and recording."
"I would repeat what I had said on CNN: that until that fear disappears, until the ordinary citizen is afraid to go out on the streets because he might lose his job at university, for themselves or for their children, or lose the opportunity to travel abroad, or lose his job, or get into a difficult situation with State Security, those people prefer to stay at home. And who actually went to the streets in October 1989? It was young people. Often people who didn't have that much to lose. They were also retired people. But not so much the parents of children. And the fear was just overwhelming. They had experienced twenty years of normalisation and knew that they could expect the consequences of anti-socialist public engagement. That only disappeared after the opening of the Berlin Wall, when the Soviet Union did not react with violence. And after November twenty-second in Prague, when there were rumours that the Czechoslovak People's Army might intervene. That they would repeat what happened in 1969. And then the soldiers didn't come. So that fear disappeared. As soon as there was a live broadcast on Czechoslovak television on the same day, that fear disappeared, and then the demonstrations were in the hundreds of thousands."
"[The interest of the secret police in his person had been strong even before he joined the Voice of America.] This, of course, continued. At least they already knew who they were dealing with. Before, it wasn't clear to them. Is this Yankee a CIA agent, or what is he? Then they understood that I was accredited from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that I was a correspondent for the Voice of America. Then State Security, or at least some of its members, tried to remove me by convincing - fortunately unsuccessfully - the Ministry of Foreign Affairs not to renew my accreditation. That was one case, and it happened repeatedly. First I was followed, and then they got a complaint, one from me and one from the head of the press centre for foreign journalists in Prague, that I realised I was being followed and it was counterproductive, because of course I then wrote about it. And what do they benefit from that? Nothing. So they had a meeting and decided that they needed to build an agency network."
Interview with Václav Havel in 1986
"Through Ivan Havel, I interviewed Václav Havel in the spring of 1986 in Zdeněk Urbánek's flat on Letná. It was a conspiratorial meeting, even Havel didn't know who he was going to meet. He simply came to say hello to Zdeněk, that he had something for him, and I was there. So he had to think quickly what was important to say. He was going to get the Erasmus of Rotterdam Award, but he wasn't going to go to Holland because it would be too risky, he might not be able to come back. And so he was thinking on the spot what he could say without risking ending up in prison again. He literally said, 'A new era is beginning, the Voice of America is here, we have to take advantage of it without losing that opportunity in the future'. But then I did a lot of interviews with him. Almost always after he moved to the waterfront to a large flat which he shared with Ivan Havel and his wife Dagmar. And there were obstacles, both the National Security Corps man downstairs in uniform, or State Security men in the neighbourhood, but they never stopped me. At most, they just asked for my ID on the staircase. Then the second biggest obstacle was Mrs. Olga, who tried to protect her husband from journalists so that he would have time to write. But as soon as I said I was from the Voice of America, of course, 'Come in...'. We were never on first name terms. He was on first name terms with other Western journalists, but he had a problem with my name. He couldn't pronounce it. He always had a problem with my first and surname."
Journalist Jolyon Arthur Naegele was born on 19 April 1955 in New York City, as the son of artists Thomas Ferdinand Naegele and Rosemary Naegele, née Hurst. Both of his parents arrived in the USA from Europe during World War II. His mother was of English origin, his father German with Jewish roots. Even as a young boy, he became interested in Czechoslovakia, and when he made his first independent trip to Europe at the age of 18, he spent several days there as well. The country, untouched by americanisation, made a great impression on him and he decided to study Czech at the City College of New York. He further continued his studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University of London. He completed his postgraduate studies in international relations and political science in Bologna and Washington. From 1980 he worked as an economic journalist for Business International magazine in Vienna and regularly visited Czechoslovakia. As a Czech-speaking American, he was closely watched by State Security, which suspected him of espionage. In 1984, he started working for the Voice of America radio station as one of the few Western journalists accredited in communist Czechoslovakia. Although he still lived in Vienna, he spent several days each month in Czechoslovakia. He also travelled to other communist bloc countries. He made reports and interviews in Czechoslovak enterprises, agricultural cooperative farms, talked to official politicians as well as to representatives of the opposition. At the end of the 1980s, he reported on anti-regime demonstrations. He was still being watched by State Security, he was detained several times, and faced threats and attempts to discredit him. In the middle of 1989 he moved to Bonn, but from the beginning of the 1990s he began to live in Prague. In the 1990s he wrote reports on the war in Yugoslavia and monitored the situation of refugees. In 1994, he left Voice of America and after a year and a half of freelancing, he joined the Free Europe station, where he continued reporting from the former Yugoslavia and the Caucasus countries. From 2004, he was a political analyst with the peacekeeping mission in Kosovo. He is married for the second time in the Czech Republic and has an adult daughter, Eliška, from his first marriage.
