Josef Frolík

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Josef Frolík (born September 22, 1928 in Libušín , Czechoslovakia as Josef Lukeš; died May 11, 1989 in Florida ) was a Czechoslovak secret service agent who defected to the USA in 1969 .

Life

Frolík attended the business school in Slaný and then worked as an accountant for the newspaper Rudé právo . During his military service in the Czechoslovak People's Army in 1952 , he was recruited for the Czechoslovak State Security Service , and in 1955 he became an officer with the task of monitoring people in Czechoslovak foreign trade and counter-espionage. From 1964 to 1966 he was deployed to Great Britain with a diplomatic passport ; his local command officer was a diplomat from the Czechoslovak embassy in London. When he returned to Prague, he found that he himself was being monitored. After the crackdown on the Prague Spring in 1968, at the latest, he made contact with the American secret service CIA .

In 1969 he defected to the CIA and revealed the structures of the secret service and the names of 400 of the 2,000 secret service employees. As a result, numerous agents in Great Britain and Asia were uncovered and arrested. He testified before a subcommittee of the United States Senate . In 1975 he wrote a book about various secret service activities of the Warsaw Pact states, which was published in the USA. From then on, Frolik was employed as an advisor to the CIA. In 1976 he was sentenced to death in absentia in Czechoslovakia. In 1976 he gave an interview to ZDF in which he confirmed the claims from his book that Eastern secret services had influenced the bomb attacks carried out by the South Tyrol Liberation Committee between 1956 and 1969.

In connection with the fake news affair about the alleged behavior of Bundeswehr soldiers in the country of NATO partner Lithuania in 2017, the security policy editor of the FAZ Lorenz Hemicker recalled the affair, according to Frolík, staged by eastern intelligence officers about the behavior of Bundeswehr soldiers at the Castlemartin military training area in Pembrokeshire in Wales in 1962.

Fonts

  • The Frolik defection: the memoirs of an intelligence agent , Cooper, London 1975
  • Špión vypovídá . Index, Cologne 1979

literature

  • Prokop Tomek: Josef Frolík - muž na nepravém místě . In: Securitas imperii , Prague: Themis, 2008, pp. 183–202. ISSN 1804-1612 [ Josef Frolík - a man in the wrong place ]
  • Stanislav Dragúň: Defektori - špióni alebo zradcovia ČSSR? In: Historická revue: vedecko-populárny časopis o dejinách , 2011, pp. 37–41

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The information here is based mainly on the article by Pavel Žáček in the magazine Reflex of August 24, 2006, online at: reflex.cz / ...
  2. ↑ Thomas Riegler: Secret Services and South Tyrol , in: Salto.bz , December 26, 2015
  3. ↑ Lorenz Hemicker: Fake news attack in 1962 , FAZ , March 4, 2017, p. 16
personal data
SURNAME Frolík, Josef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czechoslovak secret service agent
DATE OF BIRTH September 22, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Libušín
DATE OF DEATH May 11, 1989
Place of death Florida