“No sooner had I received it, three girls came up who were in charge of Operation Manuel. That was an operation organised by Castro. The Cubans, and revolutionary fighters from Latin America in general, would undergo weapons and technology training somewhere and would then go through Czechoslovakia to Belgium, where they got new passports, then from Belgium to Madrid, where they switched identities again, and then they flew off to Latin America to fight the imperialists. I didn’t know it back then (and it’s still a rather unknown fact), until those three ladies came to me, one was crying, so I asked what the matter was. She said: ‘Look, we’re in a bit of a fix, we sent off a group of about fifteen from Prague, and they caught them and shot them all.’ Well, they were pretty young boys, but mostly illiterate, those weren’t any fighters, they were resolved to kill imperialists, but that was about the only thing going for them, nothing else. So when I saw that, I let them tell me what that Manuel was actually about, because back then the way intelligence services worked - nowadays you can read everything in the newspapers, if there’d be a third person with us, everyone would be talking about it next day and you wouldn’t know who snitched, whether you, him, or I. Back then, even though we were friends, we had studied together, it never occurred to us to discuss someone else’s work. You just don’t do that. No boasting, no advice. That wasn’t the done thing. So I didn’t know much about it. And I reckoned, this isn’t good. Not like this. Firstly, I didn’t see the sense in some ten, five, fifteen, however many fighters staging a coup in Latin America, that didn’t sound realistic. And secondly, those were people whom we weren’t able to protect, and so most of them got caught.”
“In the meantime the chief of the American section in the intelligence corps was one Míla Čech. Míla Čech - before that he’d been employed by the International Student Union, a big friend of Pelikán, the editor of Listy [The Pages/Herald, an exile dissident socialist periodical - trans.], who was later a parliamentary deputy for the Socialists in the Italian parliament (I met him as well, but that was later). So this person said to me: ‘Look, I’ve been following your analyses, your reports; you’ll be my deputy here.’ I didn’t really know what that meant, and he said: ‘Look, our main task is, first, to get rid of all the stetsecs [State Security members - trans.] who are still here - for various merits and so on... That’s the first mission.’ That was in 1961. ‘Second, we have to split off from the interior. We have nothing to do with those guys, they just abuse us and demand various information from us.’ So I come back from cold America, where I was under surveillance, and now someone confides in me that everything here is rubbish and has to be changes. In other words, the intelligence service was one of the first institutes to evoke the changes. I’m not talking about the writers, journalists, historians, philosophers, you know how that went, the film makers, the wave surged up everywhere in the early sixties, and we were no different. So I took charge of my little North America department, he was a level higher, he had South America as well, and we managed things this way. First, we got rid of the people quite cleanly by setting requirements - only people with university degrees can work here. That knocked out most of them, actually, because they didn’t have a degree. They had mostly been employed there because they were the friend of someone, or because they’d been a diligent employee at some district security department, so they got a warm spot in return...”
Miroslav Polreich was born on 17 June 1931 in what was then Německý Brod (renamed to Havlíčkův Brod in 1945). His father was an active Communist. On his recommendation, Miroslav first learnt a craft and only after completing his training and passing an ADK course (Workers‘ Course Graduate, a six-month substitute to four years of grammar school - trans.), he began studies at the University of Political Sciences. He later switched to the Faculty of International Relations. After completing his studies in 1954 he was offered a job in the intelligence services. He underwent a year of intelligence training and was then assigned Canada, later the USA. After domestic unrest he was sent to Washington for four years in 1957. He returned home in 1961. His superior tasked him with purging the intelligence corps of State Security members. Polreich, enthused by this new direction, accepted the job willingly. At the time he was already clearly oriented towards the reformist movement inside the Communist Party. In 1964 he was designated as intelligence resident at the Czechoslovak mission to the UN (his cover was the post of first secretary). Before beginning the mission, he demanded and obtained a business trip to Vietnam. This gave him an extra say in backstage negotiations, and he could thus bring a positive contribution to the development of USA-USSR relations in the critical period of the Israeli Six Day War and the Vietnam War. In 1969 he resigned out of principle (due to the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia) and was long barred from doing any work at all, even manual labour. Finally, after two years, he found employment at Řempo. At the time he was active in the dissent with Jiří Hájek. In March 1989 he came in touch with reform Communists from the Obroda (Renewal) group. November 1989 brought him rehabilitation and the post of director of the Security Department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1991-1992 he led the Czechoslovak delegation as ambassador for disarmament supervision at the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Vienna. When Jiří Dienstbier left the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Polreich also resigned and took up lecturing (mostly in the USA), among other places, at the National Defence University in Washington, DC. He worked as an freelance analyst for foreign policy, he taught at a university. He was active until 2019, he regularly gave interviews on security issues. He died in a car accident on the 15th of March in 2019.
