Munich’s Wilderness of Mirrors: 1959 Poison Plot, or Not

On November 18, 1975, Josef Frolik, a seventeen-year veteran of the Czechoslovak Intelligence Service (StB) who had defected to the West, testified before a U.S. Senate Subcommittee. In page after page of remarkable testimony, Frolik presented detailed information about the inner most workings of intelligence services, not only that of Czecho-slovakia but also of the KGB and other Warsaw Pact services. He gave true names and code names of agents and StB officers. 

For example, Frolik said that Major Jaroslav Nemec, a Czechoslovak intelligence officer, code name "Nekola," listed officially as the Czechoslovak Vice-consul in Salzburg, had planned a mass poisoning of RFE employees by substituting atropine in the canteen's saltshakers in November 1959. The operation was given the code name "Puppet" of "Doll" (PANENKA).

Chairman Senator Thurmond asked Frolik, "What is the significance of the atropine?" Frolik answered, "It can create hallucinations and in large quantities death of people." He added that “Nemec had an agent in Radio Free Europe, who, as it turned out, also was an agent of the CIA...the double agent gave the plan to the CIA, and therefore it did not happen.” 

Actually there were three double agents of the CIA involved in the plot. One of them was code-name "Jachym,” who started working for the Czechoslovak Intelligence Service in 1953. He was sent to West Germany through a "faked escape" across the border the next year. The faked escape was meant to establish his bona fides within the Czech émigré community and then lead to a permanent job with RFE. He had been trained in radio codes, secret writing and other tradecraft. He had at least 59 meetings with the StB in Austria, Holland, Switzerland, and Germany. "Jachym's" intelligence tasks in Germany were: the Czech emigration. American Military Intelligence, and Radio Free Europe.

             

In the early 1990s, when he was confronted with the spying allegations, "Jachym" for the first time admitted he had lied to RFE on his employment application: he did not escape to the Germany but was sent on an espionage assignment. He acknowledged being part of the 1959 StB plot to put atropine in the RFE saltshakers, but he said he was under control of the CIA from the beginning. Unbeknownst to “Jachym” the StB also had involved two other agents code named “Alex” and “Kytka”, both of whom were actually double agents of the CIA.

Under CIA control, “Jachym” gave StB officer Nemec one saltshaker that he had purchased at a local department store. It had to be a little different from one normally found in the canteen, i.e., for easier identification, if atropine were in it. "Jachym" did not actually place a saltshaker in the canteen, but one or two other RFE employees ("Alex" or "Kytka") possibly did so--he saw one of them pocket two saltshakers and reported it to the CIA.

Taking no chances, Radio Free Europe closed the canteen without explanation to the staff and to the Works Council (Labor), which had co-determination rights regarding the opening and closing of the canteen. The Works Council sued in Munich’ Labor Court to reopen the canteen. RFE’s Director Erik Hazelhoff had to appear in court but could not give the reasons for the canteen’s closure on “security grounds.” 

Radio Free Europe was now in a serious quandary as the covert RFE-CIA connection could not be admitted publicly. A total of five Bavarian government agencies and the U.S. Army Southern Command told the press that they had not heard of the matter, before the court hearing.

Archibald S. Alexander, president of RFE's parent organization the Free Europe Committee, submitted a long report to the Board of Directors in December 1959, in which he wrote,

It was agreed between the Executive Committee and me that the matter should be handled in Munich by having Erik Hazelhoff, the European Director, go to the German authorities. It was understood at the time and still appears to be the case that the plot had been discovered when Jaroslav Nemec. had sought to induce at least one employee to insert the substance, which he provided, into the saltshakers It turned out that the employee was and had for some time been working for the U.S. Army intelligence.

It is unfortunate that some of the news versions of this event may have cast doubt in the minds of readers or listeners as to whether there really had been this serious attempt upon the lives or health of RFE employees by Communist agents. There could have been some doubt as to whether the whole thing was not an attempted propaganda stunt by RFE.

Although the Army Southern Command had publicly denied knowledge of the plot, on December 18, 1959, Headquarters U.S. Army Europe, in Heidelberg, Germany, issued a press statement that continued to distort the truth:

During its normal security operations in Germany, Army counter-intelligence agents discovered a plot to poison workers at RFE in Munich and passed this information immediately to RFE as a matter of urgent concern. The German Ministry of Justice was also informed by the U.S. Army.

The Army counter-intelligence investigation shows that Jaroslav Nemec. a vice consul at the Czech Consulate in Salzburg. Austria on November 16 gave a communist agent saltshakers containing atropine for placement in the RFE cafeteria in Munich.

The agent was told that the shakers contained a 'mild laxative.’ Clinical analysis, however, proved that they contained atropine in sufficient quantities to cause serious illness the degree of which would depend upon the age and physical condition of the individual and the amount of 'salt' consumed.

The United States government directly, or indirectly, contacted the Austrian government, and Major Nemec was declared persona non grata. The Austrian government issued an arrest warrant for Major Jaroslav Nemec. The Chief of the Czech intelligence station in Vienna, General Bohumile Molnar drove to Salzburg to warn Nemec of the arrest warrant. When Molnar finally found Nemec drunk in a ski resort town in the Austrian Alps, he put him into the trunk of a car and secretly drove him across the Austrian border to Czechoslovakia.

Time magazine ran a story in its December 28^, 1959 issued entitled “In the Salt”, which in part read

To counter skepticism, the U.S. State Department stepped in to confirm "a nefarious plot," and U.S. Army Headquarters in Heidelberg reported that its counter-intelligence agents had discovered the guilty Communist, one Jaroslav Nemec, who works in the Czechoslovak consulate at Salzburg, Austria.

The story was covered in newspapers in the United States.  For example, the press agency UPI distributed an article entitled "Red Diplomat Named As Radio Poison Plotter" and quoted from the U.S. Army reports.

Former CIA officer Ted Shackley has written in his book Spymaster: My Life in the CIA:

It was May 1959, and the Czech intelligence service, popularly referred to in the media as the StB, was doing its best to penetrate and neutralize Radio Free Europe (RFE). Having just become head of the Czech unit, I therefore encouraged the officers working on Czech operations in Munich to dangle one or more RFE employees in areas where StB agents were known to be lurking in the hope that they would take the bait and recruit one of our offerings. 

One of RFE's Czech staffers was selected as the dangle. We briefed him to be outspoken in his dissatisfaction with his working conditions and in his desire to return home at some point in the future. Then, we sent him on holiday to Salzburg, Austria, a city within easy range of RFE's Munich headquarters and one of the StB's happy hunting grounds. He had not been there long when, in one of the Weinschenken, he met a congenial soul who in time introduced him to a new circle of drinking buddies, one of whom turned out to be Jaroslav Nemec, an StB officer stationed in Salzburg under diplomatic cover. Nemec offered our man a chance to earn his passage home. Our man agreed with a show of reluctance, and we had our double agent. 

At one of his Salzburg meetings with our double agent, Nemec gave him a saltshaker that the agent had previously taken from the RFE cafeteria at Nemec's request. Nemec told the agent to take the saltshaker back into the RFE cafeteria. When the agent showed his CIA case officer the shaker, it had a white substance in it that looked like salt. We had the substance analyzed and were told it was atropine. A derivative of belladonna, atropine has legitimate medical uses. Ophthalmologists use it to dilate the pupil of the eye, but when taken internally in a large dose, it is a poison. In the concentration in which the Czechs had prepared it, it was not a deadly poison, only a strong laxative, but it was certainly enough to make people sick.

Jaroslov Bittman, another Czechoslovak intelligence officer who defected and wrote many books and articles afterwards, claims in his book The Deception Game: Czechoslovak Intelligence in Soviet Political Warfare that the saltshaker affair was, "More or less a practical joke" of the StB.  

Was there was a real attempt to poison RFE's staff, or a provocation (practical joke?) on part of the StB to intimidate them? Was this a successful CIA double-agent operation against the StB, or a successful CIA campaign against the StB involving Josef Frolik, the U.S. Senate, CIA, RFE, and U.S. Army? The record is not clear to this day, and probably the truth is a combination of all the possibilities one can imagine in Munich’s Wilderness of Mirrors.

Suggested Reading

Bittman, Ladislav, The Deception Game: Czechoslovak Intelligence in Soviet Political Warfare.

Shackley, Ted, Spymaster: My Life in the CIA.

Radio Free Europe Begins Broadcasting

On July 4, 1950, Radio Free Europe transmitted its first program, as the “Voice of Free Czechoslovakia,” only 30 minutes in length, as an “audience building broadcast.”

In this article, we will briefly look back at the major personalities and circumstances that led to this significant development in the American state-private network for the struggle for men’s minds in the early years of the Cold War.

Frank Wisner, World War II Office of Strategic Services (OSS) veteran, was a main actor responsible for the development of the American radio stations Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty in Munich in the Cold War. In September 1944, he had been sent to Bucharest. Romania, where he controlled an OSS operation that evacuated allied airmen downed behind enemy lines. Wisner remained in Bucharest until March 1945, when he witnessed the arrival of Soviet troops and the tragic aftermath of the occupation. After WWII, Frank Wisner returned to private practice in the US and joined the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1947 Wisner left private practice and joined the State Department as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Occupied Countries. He became involved with the refugees from the USSR and Soviet-dominated countries in Eastern Europe and traveled to Germany to visit the Displace Persons camps, overflowing with over 700,00 refugees.  He initiated a study on the “Utilization of Refugees from the U.S.S.R. in U.S. National Interests”, which to led to the idea of a secret destabilizing émigré force under Operation Bloodstone.

In June 1948, famed career diplomat George Kennan, now with the Department of State Policy Planning Staff, placed Wisner at the head of the list for a new CIA position of Director of the Office of Special Projects, based on the "recommendations of people who know him. I personally have no knowledge of his ability, but his qualifications seem reasonably good.”

By August 1948 in Europe, the CIA had acquired a radio transmitter, a printing plant, and began assembling a fleet of weather balloons intended to carry and drop off propaganda leaflets, and other materials, over the Iron Curtain. Frank Wisner, still with the Department of State, called Director of Central Intelligence Hillenkoetter on 4 August 1948, and told him that “project for the clandestine radio transmitter “ had been approved in principle. A definite approval would only follow after the details of who was to operate the transmitter and “to whom the transmissions would be directed and who would set up the raw material to be transmitted.”

On September 1,1948, Wisner became Assistant Director for Policy Coordination, in charge of CIA covert operations, or which Radio Free Europe would became a major component.

Allen Dulles

The Certificate of Incorporation of a nonprofit company called Committee for Free Europe, Inc. was submitted to the State of New York for approval on April 29, 1949. The New York City law firm for which Allen Dulles worked, Sullivan and Cromwell, filed the papers required for incorporation. The Committee for Free Europe was founded, in part, to

Help the non-Fascist and non-Communist leaders who have fled to the United States from the countries of Eastern Europe to maintain themselves in useful occupations during their enforced stay in the United States.

Assist these leaders in maintaining contact with their fellow citizens in other lands and in keeping alive among them the ideals of individual and national freedom.

One of the most critical incorporation document articles was: “No part of the activities of the corporation shall be the carrying on of propaganda or otherwise attempting to influence legislation.”

Joseph Grew

Directors and officers included future Central Intelligence Director Allen Dulles and future US President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Chairman Joseph C. Grew, former US Ambassador to Japan, announced at a press conference on June 1, 1949, that one purpose of the corporation was "to put the voices of these exiled leaders on the air, addressed to their own peoples back in Europe, in their own languags, in the familiar tones.”

On June 2, 1949, the corporate name was changed to the National Committee for Free Europe (NCFE)--it would change again in April 1950 to National Committee for a Free Europe.

The financial books of the NCFE were set up for five Operating Committees:

• General Administrative
• Committee on Intellectual Activities
• Committee on Radio and Press
• Committee on American Contacts
• National Committee (Bulgarian, Czechoslovak, Hungarian, Romanian).

The term "Radio Free Europe evolved" from the Operating Committee Radio and Press. 

From a 1969 U.S. government Secret Eyes Only report we read:

Originally intended as political action instruments to mobilize the

post-war emigration from Eastern Europe and the USSR into an effective

opposition, the parent organizations of the two Radios have long

since turned virtually their entire efforts to broadcasting. In doing so,

their broadcasts have evolved in step with the development of official

U.S. policies toward these countries. For nearly 20 years, the two Radios

have used the cover of privately financed, non-profit American

corporations. But during that time funds have come largely from CIA.

During a press conference on June 23 1949, Secretary of State Acheson said that the State Department “was very happy to see the formation of the distinguished group” and “the Department felt the purpose of the organization was excellent and was glad to welcome its entrance in the field and give it hearty endorsement.”

            

In 1949, General Lucius D. Clay was the Military Governor for the US Zone in Germany.  On June 1, 1949, Frank Wisner met John McCloy, then State Department High Commissioner for Germany and then wrote a memorandum to his staff concerning that meeting:

Last night I talked for about forty-five minutes with Mr. McCloy... I mentioned in particular the conversations and exchange of communications, which I had with General Clay in regard to the radio broadcasting activity from Germany. In this connection I filled him in on the background and significance of the developments regarding the formation of the various refugee national committees and the New York Committee, pointing out that General Clay had said that he saw no problem in allowing duly authorized representatives of really responsible and broadly representative national committees of refugees to enter Germany and there to arrange for broadcasts.

In June 1949, the FEC established a Committee on Press and Broadcasting, chaired by FEC director Fred Altschul and including veteran radio journalist Edward R. Murrow. Robert Lang, another former OSS officer, was appointed the first Director of Radio Free Europe (RFE). Broadcast division of NCFE begins recruiting personnel both in Munich and New York. Experienced American broadcast personnel were employed to train exiles in American techniques and to begin production of programs. 

Cord Meyer, the CIA official directly responsible for Radio Free Europe policy and programming for most of his intelligence career in the Internationals Organizations Division of the CIA, wrote in his autobiography Facing Reality:

At the start, the somewhat naïve notion existed that all that was necessary was to build some radio transmitters and to hand the microphones to exiles to say what they wished…. It quickly became evident that the exile leaders were so divided among themselves on ideological lines and the different political groups were so prone to infighting, that a tower of Babel would be erected if they were left to their own devices.

Paul B. Henze was one of the early American managers of Radio Free Europe in Munich.  He would later join the US State Department and National Security Council.  At a conference at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California in 2004 examining the role of international broadcasting, Henze succinctly summed up the radio station’s genesis:

Radio Free Europe was an experiment. It was jerrybuilt. Its success was far from foreordained. The early years of its operation were never trouble-free. It faced many difficulties, some inherent in the operation itself, some the result of bureaucratic factors, many caused by doubts about--even strong opposition to--the notion of radio broadcasts as a means of communicating with peoples who had been forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Empire and isolated from the outer world with no immediate prospect of improvement of their situation.

Almost all the planning that went into the creation of Radio Free Europe was an improvised response to the sense of urgency that prevailed in the early 1950s about the threat, which Stalinist aggressive expansionism represented for the United States and the Free World. The notion that Radio Free Europe resulted from a coherent concept of what needed to be done has become widespread in recent years, but it remains an illusion.

Frank Altschul

Frank Altschul wrote a long status report to Allen Dulles in August 1950, part of which included:

If Radio Free Europe is to be effective, it’s sincerity must be above suspicion. It would be self-defeating to attempt to expound the gospel of twentieth century liberalism through the recognized voice of nineteenth century reaction. This raises a question that goes directly to the very heart of our activity in the field of propaganda. The way in which it is answered may have an important bearing upon the success or failure of our effort.

Whether ...  the experiment will seem to continue to justify the very considerable capital and current expenditure involved is primarily a question for those to decide who have assumed the responsibility of defraying up to now our budgetary requirements.

According to an August 1954 State Department Top Secret report,

The Free Europe Committee (FEC) and Radio Free Europe (RFE) are powerful propaganda and psychological political instruments which are controlled by the Agency and are supposed to operate under policy guidance from the Department. The FEC was created in 1949 as a private organization, financed partly by private donations and partly by funds from the Agency, the latter accounting for about two thirds to three fourths of the money.

The real target audience of the first broadcast was perhaps not behind the Iron Curtain but the nascent anti-Communist domestic activities in the United States conducted by the Crusade for Freedom: Radio Free Europe became the focal point of the fund raising campaigns throughout the 1950s.