Top Secret Operation “Kámen”

ABOUT THE EVENT

A multimedia lecture by researcher and writer Václava Jandečková will reveal the almost unknown illegal activities of the State Security service at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s. Through many distinctive examples, she will present the stories of those involved and the background to insidious crimes based on setting traps for preselected victims who were provoked into fleeing Czechoslovakia. The secret police devised Operation “Kámen” so they could interrogate selected individuals at fake German customs posts in supposed offices of US military counterintelligence. Armed with incriminating material, they then arrested and convicted people who believed they had genuinely crossed the state border for an illegal “crossing”. These were not isolated incidents, but widely applied measures by a security apparatus that covertly violated its own laws.

Speaker / guest: Václava Jandečková