The Pigeon Tunnel by Carré John le

Author:Carré, John le [Carré, John le]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, History
ISBN: 9780241257555
Amazon: 0241257557
Goodreads: 28457084
Publisher: Viking
Published: 2016-09-08T07:00:00+00:00

Oldrich Cerný should in no way be compared with either Bakatin or Primakov, both professed communists of their day. In 1993, four years after the Berlin Wall came down, Oldrich Cerný – Olda to his friends – took over the Czech foreign intelligence service and, at the behest of his old friend and fellow dissident, Václav Havel, set about turning it into a place fit for habitation by the Western spy community. Over the five years in which he ran it, he struck up a close relationship with Britain’s MI6, notably with Richard Dearlove, who later became its Chief under Tony Blair. Quite soon after Cerný’s retirement from the post, I visited him in Prague and we spent a couple of days together, now in his tiny apartment with Helena, his companion of many years, and now out and about in one of the city’s many cellar bars, drinking Scotch at scrubbed pine tables.

Before getting the job, Cerný, like Vadim Bakatin, knew nothing whatever of intelligence work which, as Havel explained, was why he had chosen him. Once he took it over, he couldn’t believe what he had walked into:

‘The bastards didn’t know the fucking Cold War was over,’ he exclaimed between gusts of laughter.

Few foreigners can swear convincingly in English, but Cerný was the exception. He had studied at Newcastle on a grant awarded him during the Prague Spring, so perhaps that’s where he learned the art. On his return to a country once again under Russia’s heel, he translated children’s books by day and wrote anonymous dissident tracts by night.

‘We had guys spying on Germany!’ he went on incredulously. ‘In nineteen-fucking-ninety-three! We had guys out in the street with truncheons looking for priests and anti-Party elements they could beat the shit out of! “Listen,” I told them. “We don’t do that stuff any more. We’re a fucking democracy!”’

If Cerný talked with the exuberance of a man released, he had every right to. He was an anti-communist by nature and by birth. His father, a wartime Czech resistance fighter, had been imprisoned in Buchenwald by the Nazis, then given twenty years for treason by the communists. One of his earliest memories was seeing his father’s coffin being dumped on the family doorstep by the prison goons.

Little wonder then that Cerný the writer, dramatist, translator and graduate in English Literature should have waged a lifelong battle against political tyranny; or that he was repeatedly hauled in for interrogation by the KGB and Czech intelligence who, having failed to recruit him, persecuted him instead.

And it is interesting that, for all his protestations of being hopelessly ill-equipped to take over his country’s spies after its split with Slovakia, he held the job down for five years, retired with distinction, went on to direct a human rights foundation established by his friend Havel, and set up his own Security Studies think-tank that, fifteen years later and three years after his death, flourishes undiminished.

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