František Moravec

František Moravec (1952)

František Moravec (born July 23, 1895 in Čáslav ( Bohemia ), † July 26, 1966 in Washington, DC ), former legionnaire , was a highly decorated high officer in the Czechoslovak Army in pre-war Czechoslovakia , from 1937 head of the military intelligence service in Czechoslovakia and from Then in 1940 under the government in exile in London, most recently with the rank of brigadier general, and was one of the most important figures in the Czechoslovak resistance against the German occupation from 1939 to 1945. After 1945 he returned to Czechoslovakia and remained in the army until he fled first to Germany and then to the USA in 1948 .

Life

Moravec, who graduated from high school in 1913, studied philology (Latin and French) at Charles University in Prague , but had to end his studies early because he was drafted into the army. He attended an officers' school and was posted to Hungary and later to Galicia as a lieutenant. Moravec was taken prisoner by Russia, switched sides and volunteered for the Serbian Legion in 1916. He took part in fighting on the Romanian front and fought against the Central Powers near Thessaloniki. In March 1918, Moravec was transferred to the Czechoslovak legions in France at the front in Alsace. At the end of the year he returned to Czechoslovakia and continued his service in Pilsen, where he got married. Moravec decided to stay in the army and studied from 1925 to 1928 at the Military College in Prague.

Activity in the intelligence service

Moravec worked from the end of 1929 in a leading position in the intelligence department of the military command in Pilsen, on September 30, 1934 he was assigned to the General Staff in Prague, where he also worked in a leading position for the military intelligence service (the "2nd department") was - as head of a sub-department and from 1937 in the rank of colonel as deputy head, from January 1939 then as provisional head of the intelligence service.

His great success during this period included the recruitment of one of the most important agents of the time, the German Abwehr officer Paul Thümmel , known as Agent A-54, who provided a lot of important, if not always accurate, information.

Due to a warning from A-54 about the imminent so-called breaking up of the rest of the Czech Republic on March 15, 1939, Moravec left Czechoslovakia the day before with ten other employees and a lot of material with British help and flew to London. In the government-in-exile of President Edvard Beneš , he continued his previous activity: on August 1, 1940, he became head of the intelligence service center of the Ministry of Defense, and from June 1941 he was renamed “2. Department". He kept in touch with agent A-54 and above all with the resistance organizations in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia ; the information he passed on to the allies was highly valued. Moravec was also responsible for the preparation and implementation of Operation Anthropoid , the assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich . After 1944 he was also deputy chief of staff for the formation of the Czechoslovak army in exile and deputy chief of staff at the main command in London; on October 28, 1944 he was promoted to brigadier general. Moravec was one of the most important figures in the Czechoslovak resistance at the time.

On June 5, 1945 Moravec returned to Czechoslovakia, but could not prevail. At the instigation of some ministries dominated by the Communist Party , several investigations were initiated against him, which were only withdrawn after the intervention of President Beneš. Moravec decided to go into exile again, which he succeeded on March 29, 1948. For some time he worked for the US Colonel Charles Katek, an employee of the OSS and CIC , who trained couriers for trips to Czechoslovakia. In late 1954, Moravec reached the United States, where he worked as a consultant and analyst for the Department of Defense until his death.

In 1991 he was posthumously promoted to Army General. In 1999 a special unit of the Czech armed forces was named after him, the 601st skupina speciálních sil .

Awards

Moravec has received numerous high military awards including:

Fonts

František Moravec: Master of Spies. The Memoirs of General Frantisek Moravec. The Bodley Head Ltd 1975, ISBN 0-370-10353-X (autobiography), with reprints
František Moravec: Špion, jemuž neveřili (translation from English), Sixty-Eight Publishers, Toronto 1977, ISBN 0-88781-032-2 , with reprints

Individual evidence

↑ On the cold war front - Czechoslovakia 1948-1956, online at: www.ustrcr.cz / ... , accessed on July 30, 2012

swell

František Moravec, Špion, jemuž neveřili (autobiography, translation from English), Sixty-Eight Publishers, Toronto 1977, ISBN 0-88781-032-2
Vedoucí funkcionáři / František Moravec on the server of the military. News Service of the Czech Republic, online at: www.vzcr.cz / ... , accessed on July 25, 2012
MORAVEC, František ..., short biography of the ÚSTR Institute , online at: www.ustrcr.cz / ... , accessed on July 25, 2012
Czechoslovak parachutists, Part 2: Cooperation between SOE and Czechoslovak Military Intelligence Officers, online at: www.indiannet.eu/home_resistance / ... , accessed July 25, 2012
Czechs in Exile, eneral Frantisek Moravec, online at: www.czechsinexile.org / ... , accessed on July 25, 2012

Web links

Literature and other media by and about František Moravec in the catalog of the National Library of the Czech Republic

personal data
SURNAME	Moravec, František
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Czechoslovak intelligence officer
DATE OF BIRTH	July 23, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH	Čáslav
DATE OF DEATH	July 26, 1966
Place of death	Washington, DC

[1] On the cold war front - Czechoslovakia 1948-1956, online at: www.ustrcr.cz / ... , accessed on July 30, 2012