Discovering your Cold War Czechoslovak Secret Police file (280)

Mark Baker was featured in episode 9 where he told us about working in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s as a journalist for a small publishing company called Business International (BI). He was the company’s Czechoslovakia expert and with his Czech minder Arnold he travelled to Prague and other cities to report on significant economic and political developments.

In 2021, he published “Čas Proměn” (“Time of Changes”), written in Czech, it is a collection of stories about Central and Eastern Europe in the 1980s and early ‘90s.

Over the Christmas 2021 holidays, as he was visiting family in Ohio, he received a surprise email from a Czech academic. He was writing to Mark that he had finished reading the book and that he liked it. But then he added, cryptically, that Mark might want to revise part of it for future editions as he had found Mark’s Czechoslovak secret police surveillance file… 

We hear about the plans the Czechoslovak secret police had for Mark and the secret of Operation Oheň, aka Operation Fire.

0:00 Introduction to Mark Baker's story

2:40 Mark's journey as a journalist in Czechoslovakia

5:59 Discovering Arnold's collaboration with the secret police and Mark's own surveillance file

14:14 Reflection on the photographs from Mark's surveillance file

19:45 Decoding the secret language and understanding the code names in the file

24:01 Unveiling Mark's first appearance on the secret police radar

44:15 Mark Baker: Operation Ohen and the infiltration of US Embassies

45:00 Changes after the fall of the Berlin Wall and end of STB operations

48:59 Ian Sanders: Closing remarks, reminders and invitation to join the discussion group

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Listen to mark's previous episode here https://pod.fo/e/f83f

Mark's blog is available here. https://markbakerprague.com/part-1-introducing-our-man-inter

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