Operation Border Stone: the fake escape route that ended in ugly reality

​Imagine you’re a Czech dissident or anti-communist – or just a believer in democracy, or even just an intellectual. Maybe you fought on the “wrong” side during the war (still against the Nazis, but with the Czech army-in-exile in the west instead of the communist-sponsored partisans in the east). Or maybe you just have a big house with some nice things in it. The problem for you is that it’s February 1948 and the communists have seized control of Czechoslovakia in a coup d’état. You’re going to be on their list. You don’t know what to do.
 
Then you’re introduced by a friend of a friend to a young woman who says she can help. Her name is Milena Markova, but maybe she calls herself Vanda Roubalova, or even (with encouraging resonances of old wartime resistance code-names) “Kolda”. She tells you she has contacts in the west, with the American intelligence services, and if you’re important enough, she might even confirm that yes, the dreaded Statni Bezpecnost or StB has its eye on you.

So you liquidate your assets, gather together your loved ones, and arrange to meet her in the woods one night, near the German border. There you are passed to people smugglers or corrupt border guards who sneak you over a very convincing border to a US Army post, where you are welcomed by a member of the US Counter Intelligence Corps. And of course, during this interview, you are asked who told you about Milena Markova, and what other networks of dissatisfied Czechs you have heard about – after all, maybe you can help them escape too... You’re offered Lucky Strikes to smoke and American whisky to drink. Maybe you toast the portrait of President Truman that hangs on the wall.
 
Then, having signed your statement, one of two things happens. Either you are sent on your own, carrying your signed confession, to another US Army post a little further through the darkened woods – and in this case, perhaps because you misunderstood the instructions and inadvertently wandered back across the border, you are caught red-handed by Czechoslovak border guards. Or, in the alternative scenario, the American officer’s welcoming manner hardens suddenly; he tells you that your application for asylum has been rejected and you are abruptly handed over to the Czech authorities (news of which perfidious western betrayal will filter back to the dissident underground on prison grapevines). Either way, you are arrested, stripped of your cash and valuables, put on trial and sentenced to hard labour or death, with your friends, family and helpers soon to follow.
 
You’ve been caught by an entrapment “combination” run by the Czechoslovak StB (State Security) named Operation KAMEN or “Border Stone”. As Igor Lukes puts it in the CIA’s Studies in Intelligence (Volume 55, No.1), this was “a fiendishly clever scheme” involving false borders and border posts positioned well inside the actual border, fake German and American officers, and of course a network of agents provocateurs like Milena Markova. It was set in place as soon as the communists took power and continued running until the Americans, having learned the truth and issued formal protests that were mockingly dismissed, broadcast a public warning about the scheme on Radio Free Europe in 1951.
 
As with many spy stories, it’s easy to sympathise with the poor victims, yet still tempting to romanticise other aspects of the operation, and none more so than the role of the glamorous femme fatale. But let’s look at her. According to one of the officers involved in Operation Border Stone, Milena Markova was no willing participant. She had been blackmailed into working for the StB because of her dishonourable behaviour during the war, presumably dating Nazi occupiers; and eventually, having been used too many times to continue as an effective decoy duck, she was herself arrested and held in solitary confinement, where she committed suicide.
 
And that’s the point. At its heart, or in place of its heart, this “fiendish scheme” is another brutish tale. The StB were operating far beyond the law, sometimes gunning down escapers to satisfy personal grievances, always robbing them of their valuables along the way – and even targeting people not for ideological reasons but purely for the likely profit to be made.
 
Which, I think, is why we want spy fiction, in place of spy fact. Because even when we congratulate ourselves on preferring the supposedly de-romanticised stories, deep down we know we still like them fictionalised and dramatized. The alternative is too damn ugly.
 
Nor does it take much to imagine how versions of this scheme are being played out today.

 
I am indebted to the aforementioned piece “Ensnaring the Unwitting in Czechoslovakia – KAMEN: A Cold War Dangle Operation with an American Dimension, 1948–52” in Studies in Intelligence Vol. 55, No. 1 (Extracts, March 2011), as well as to the article “Refugee trap at the wrong border” by Tabea Rossol in Der Spiegel (November 1, 2013). The image depicts an actual StB agent, disguised as an American, interviewing the Czechoslovakian Jaroslav Hakr. (Photo: abscr.cz Archiv bezpecnostnich sluzeb, ABS H-253.)
 
My (very fictionalised) spy story The Borodino Sacrifice is available now on Amazon: mybook.to/Borodino