PRISONER IN PRAGUE

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27147, 17 September 1953, Page 5

PRISONER IN PRAGUE

[These are . the second and third in a series of four articles by William N. Oatis, an ' Associated Press correspondent who is telling what happened to him in Czechoslovakia. He returned to the United States last May after two years’ imprisonment by the Communists]

[By

WILLIAM N. OATIS]

(Copyright 1953 by the Associated Press)

II I walked the floor furiously and called myself a fool. It was Tuesday, April 24, 1951, and I was in a Prague office of the Czechoslovak Communist secret police, who had arrested me the day before. -: On a desk lay several little black books they had found. These were books I had kept in line with my work as an Associated Press correspondent. One had the names and telephone numbers of friends in Prague—foreign diplomats and Czechoslovak citizens. The others contained notes of information' I had obtained from some of these people —news and background. The police called me a spy. I regarded myself rather as a legitimate journalist, but I knew they objected to my gathering news from other than official sources. If I was on the spot for doing that, the people who gave me such news were on the spot, too. I owed it to my news sources to protect them. That was ‘a principle of journalism. Reporters in America had gone tp gaol rather than testify against their informants.

But as I compared my lot with theirs I was dismayed. They had the means to defend themselves, legal advice, public opinion and civil-rights guarantees. I had none of those. I was one man alone against a powerful and ruthless force. “We want to know the names of the Czechoslovak citizens who gave you the unofficial news,” said one policeman. But I felt utterly helpless that Tuesday. I was questioned till long after midnight. Names in Address Book The interrogation went on all day on Wednesday, too. That night the man picked up my address book and said: “Which of these people gave you unofficial news ” “I cannot tell you.” “Why not?” “Journalistic ethics.” “If you do not tell us which ones,” the man threatened, “we will arrest them all.” On the face of it, it looked this way. If I gave in there was a chance that some people would get hurt. If I did not, there was the certainty that more people would be. I gave the interpreter a list of names, and with each name the class of data I had got from that person—such things as “Prague rumours” and “Brno rumours.’ ” “Will this get them into trouble?” I asked. “Why should it?” he said. “Why, it’s nothing—‘Prague rumours,’ ‘Brno rumours.”

Another interpreter also sought to soothe my anxiety. “Do you think we are stupid? Do you think we would arrest all those people? Do you think we want to make enemies? There are many people we do not arrest. We just call them in and say: ‘Look, do not be stupid’.”

I let myself be lulled by these words—as I also let myself be lulled by that same man’s sly suggestion that once x L had given the police what they wanted they would expel me from the country. That night I signed my first confession.

. In my notes was a list of places m and near Prague reported to be the actual or projected sites of military installations.

I had got this list from LieutenantColonel George L. Atwood, the United States Military. Attache, when I had gone to him to check a report from another diplomat along the same line. Confession to Sign When the police learned all this they laid a typewritten sheet before me to sign. It read:

“(1) I gathered military information on the territory of the Czechoslovak republic.

“(2) I committed espionage on the teritory of the Czechoslovak republic.” I refused to sign the paper till I had been made familiar with the law on espionage. I wanted to\ be sure that gathering information in itself, constituted espionage, and I wantedto know what penalty my signature would lay me open to. The bald-headed interpreter pulled a Czech legal pamphlet from a file and read me a few paragraphs in English. Whether he garbled the citations, or whether I misunderstood him, I got the idea that the collection of any military information in Czechoslovakia is a type of espionage punishable by three months to three years in prison (actually the law deals with secret military information). “Would Make it Worse”

I had been made to feel that to deny the facts, however damaging, would only make my situation worse, so I signed the paper. On Thursday I helped the police read my notes, and was allowed to take a bath on Friday. I must have turned stubborn again that night. A policeman brought me stinking old house slippers and shapless blue burlap pyjamas. When I had put on this prison uniform I was led around the

corner to a cell. About 4 a.m. on Saturday, a uniformed guard banged on my cell door. He blihdfolded me with black cloth-covered goggles and led me into an immense blackness. Suddenly, out of that blackness, from what seemed an enormous distance, I heard a loud and menacing shout.

It was none the less sinister for being in the Czech language, of which I understood hardly a word. At once, just as loud and menacing, came the interpretation. ‘‘You are now facing the State power of the Czechoslovak Republic.” Now, boasting of their authority, they started in again, three or four of them, talking by turns. The chief interrogator shouted questions about the list of military sites. “Where did you get that?” he demanded. “From Colonel Atwood.”

“What did you want it for?” “Just for my own information. I did not intend to qse it in a story.” There were, perhaps, two hours like that. Then I was allowed to take off my blindfold. The room was full of chairs, and was not nearly so large as I had imagined. The morning light came through the second-floor windows. Two plain-clothes detectives got me some breakfast.

I was asked about a man named Vladimir Komarek, alias Josef Kulhanek. I had seen the name Komarek for the first time on a police document a few days before. I had heard about the man from my Czech employees, but I had never met him. All I knew was that he was a Czech refugee from Paris, who was in and out of his homeland from time to time on mysterious missions. But three of my employees were acquainted with him, and they were under arrest, and the police said that Komarek was a foreign agent and that another acquaintance of his had shot and killed one of their men some two months before.

I insisted I had never even seen Komarek, so they asked me about another man—Jan Stransky, a former employee of the United Press in Prague. Stransky, on a Sunday pass from a labour camp, where he was serving time for plotting to flee the country, had visited my office, saying he was hunting for Russell Jones, the United Press chief in Prague. He said he was going to get out of camp in a few months and hoped he could get his job back. I agreed to take a note from him and give it to Jones when I saw Jones the next day. I saw Jones at a “world student congress,” and gave it to him. He read it and tore it up, throwing away the pieces. Now the police asked: “Do you know what was in that letter?’** “No,” I said. “I didn’t read it.” There followed question after question, hour after hour. I had been under interrogation for 24 hours. I was dead tired, fighting sleep, swaying on my feet, and they would not let me sit down. I said: “I’m not going to answer any more questions.” “Why not?”

“I’m sleepy. I’m not going to answer any more questions tonight. I want to go to bed.” ‘You’ll be sorry you said that.” They whisked me downstairs, handcuffed my wrists together in front of me, and led me out to a small sedan. I thought: “Here I go to Pankrac Prison.” ni A slim man with pouched eyes, a man who always reminded me of a lizard, leaned across a desk and said: “This is the best prison in Europe.” He belonged to the Communist Secret Police of Czechoslovakia. They had arrested me six days before on suspicion that I, the Associated Press correspondent in Prague, was also a spy. They had questioned me at the police station day after day until finally, weary from 24 hours of steady grilling, I had balked. Then they had brought me here handcuffed and blindfolded in the back of a car. Now with the blindfold off I found myself in a sparely furnished office in the dim light of dawn, the dawn of Sunday, April 29, 1951. Through the window I saw a courtyard and beyond, a new building going up. “How many steps are there on the way up here?” the man asked. “Ninety,” I said. “You’re still a spy,” he said, smiling. I smiled back. It was supposed to be a joke. The men from the police station went on interrogating me all that day. We staved off hunger with fat slabs of bacon sent from downstairs. Many questions concerned an incident of a few weeks earlier. An Indian diplomat had heard that apartments in his neighbourhood of Prague were being taken over for Army officers. I asked Lieutenant-Colonel George L. Atwood, the American military attache, if he had heard this, too. He said he had, and more, and he gave me a list of supposed military sites in and around the city. The police already had my signature on a statement to the effect that in thus picking up military information I had committed espionage. Now they wrote another statement. For me to sign this would have had me admit that I gave military information to Colonel Atwood and in doing so committed espionage.

I refused to sign it. “I want to go to bed,” I said. “Just rewrite this for us the way you want it, and then you can go to bed,” said the lizard-faced man. “Desperate I rewrote it. They brought it back to me rewritten again and asked me to sign it. I had been up 42 hours, and I was desperate for sleep, so I signed. Then I was blindfolded and taken downstairs and when I took the blindfold off I was in a cell.’ I had some smelly blankets, and a straw milt. I made a bed on the floor, tied my handkerchief across my eyes to keep ont the electric light, and went to sleep. I was awakened only once to get a number—2o9l. The next day the men from headquarters questioned me, morning and afternoon, m the upstairs office, and I had vegetarian noon and evening meals in my cell. After supper I was taken back upstairs. This time all my old acquaintances were gone, except a pudgy little curly-haired interpreter. Seated at a desk was a new man. He was a rangy, brown-haired young man with a sardonic look, squinty yellow eyes, high cheekbones, hollow cheeks, and a narrow mouth with the corners turned down.

He might have passed for a smalltown roughneck but he was in the red-trimmed olive drab uniform of a police lieutenant. He was taking over my interrogation in that prison; Every inmate has a “referent” who questions him and prepares him fdr trial.. This one sat bolt upright, looking serious. The interpreter translated: ‘ r Make no mistake, your American citizenship will not help you here.”. ’ “Testimony in Writing” That was how I met .Lieutenant Josef Ledl (I learned his name later - from his signature on a paper). Early next morning he called me from my cell and began putting, my testimony in writing. The document was called a protocol. From time to time I was presented with finished pages and asked to write on each: “I have read this, I approve it. I have signed it. Wiliam Nathan Oatis.” I did so readily, as long as the protocol kept near the facts and then the “referent” and the interpreter began to rewrite my account. “This is not right,” I said one day, pointing to an inaccuracy. “What differences does it make?” He showed exasperation. Such arguments became more and more frequent. Gradually it became apparent he wanted not the facts as I knew them, but as he would have liked them to be. Meanwhile 1 was trying to find out what was likely to happen to me. Four people now were at work on my interrogation, the “referent” and three interpreters in turns. One interpreter, a young woman, asked me: “How would you like to go home, on the Fourth of July?” Another, a dapper little man named Vilda, said: “You won’t be here in 10 weeks.” “I don’t believe you,” I told him. He insisted he knew what he was talking -about.

The “referent? said a foreigner coujd be punished with a sentence of expulsion. I knew that my wife in Si. Paul, Minnesota, must be worried about me. I asked the lieutenant to -let me write to her. He put me off. One night Vilda suggested I try again. The “referent” asked me what I wanted to say in the letter. I told him and he left the room. Letter to Wife Pretty soon he came back with something written in Czech. The interpreter put it in English and handed it to me. The “referent”, had written my letter for me. It was fantastic. It made me say that I had been caught in espionage, that I had told all, and that I wanted to live a clean new life. “Keep your hopes high,” it wound up, “and trust in the justice of the Czechoslovak people, who are working for peace.” “When me wife reads this she’ll think J’ve gone crazy,” I said, but Vilda reminded me: “Your wife is clever. She’ll understand.” The “referent” insisted the letter would go out that way or not at all, so I copied it in my own handwriting and he sent it. That was the first statement I signed that was quite out of character and patently phony. Once they had got me to sign that one it was easier for them. That talk about high hopes and a clean new life was encouraging. So was Vilda. He said: “Don’t worry about a trial.” A few nights later, about a month after my arrest, a police staff captain sat down at the desk and I sat down in my’chair facing him. He smiled and began to talk, smoothly and courteously. He asked me what connexion the Associated Press had with the United States Government. I said it had none.

“Oh. Oatis,” he said dubiously. My "referent” standing by must had felt he had muffed the case since his commander, the captain, had had to intervene. He now exploded, he twitched, frowned anti screeched at me something interpreted as “you dirty He accused me of backtracking on the testimony. Intelligence School In due course the captain asked me about a caad found in my effects. It was an off-duty pass from the Military Intelligence Service Japanese language school at Fort Snelling, Minnesota. I had been there briefly in 1944 on my way to a year’s study at a similar school at the University of Michigan. At Michigan I continued the training in Japanese that I had begun in the Army specialised training programme at the University of Minnesota. Although Military Intelligence ran the Michigan school I was never in that branch at the school. I was a corporal on the detached enlisted men’s list and I never got Into it, for after I

finished the course I was discharged from the Army. But the commander told me to write about the school and the men I had known there and put me back in my cell with a typewriter and cigarettes. I wrote several pages, sent them to him, and went to bed. The next night’s questioning brought out that Colonel''Atwood had been in the language school, while I was there, but that we had not met there. Some 24 hours later the commander laid a long document before me and said: “Sign this and you don’t need to worry.” The first part was a garbled version of my account about the language school. The second part was something new. It introduced Atwood as an old fellow student. It had me saying that he was a spy and that I gave him information because I knew he was interested in espionage reports of all kinds. It was so weird I smiled. I thought: “This looks as if it were all aimed at Atwood. If I sign it they’ll expel him, but maybe they’ll expel me too without a trial.” I signed that -statement and hooked myself properly because, as I saw with chagrin later, they were not trying to get Atwood out of the country. They were trying to keep me in prison. By now I had signed so many papers that it had become a habit. I went on signing them almost automatically, seldom questioning even the wildest departures from fact.

I had come to the conclusion that many prisoners—l daresay most prisoners—come to in that place. You are in the hands of the secret police, and you will never get away from them until you give them what they want. Once my will had faded away in that fashion the “referent” had plain sailing. He rewrote all my protocols from the beginning, introducing changes. Finally I was ushered into an office of the prison where a fidgety woman interpreter sat with a baldheaded, cross-eyed man in shirt sleeves and bow tie. “I am Judge Novak, the chairman of the Senate of the State Court in Prague,” he said. “You have behaved well here. If you behave well before the Court also, you won’t need to worry.” How often had I heard that line. The Judge read what he said was the indictment. Nowhere was there any mention of the paragraphs of the law under which I was indicted; I stood accused formally of espionage for the United States Government. Words that the “referent” had put into my mouth by putting them into my protocol were used to show that I had sent news stories on the arrests of former Foreign Minister Clementis, and Otto Sling, the deposed Brno Communist leader, with intent to advise the American espionage net which of its Strongpoints in Czechoslovakia had fallen so that it could regroup. Judge Novak said a lawyer had been assigned me. “The function of a lawyer,” he said, “is not to help the defendant to escape sentence. It is to help him get a lighter sentence.” [This seemed to mean that I stood convicted even before I went to trial and it was the presiding Judge that was giving me the newsj Four days later I met a rabbity, poker-faced man whom the interpre-

ter introduced as ‘‘your lawyer, Dr. Bartos.” Dr. Bartos told me: “I think you have a good chance to go home this year.” He advised me to testify according to the protocol and said his defence would be that I did not go into espionage deliberately but just fell into it. That week. the “referent” had me in hig office almost dailv and we rehearsed the protocol. He asked the questions and I gave the answers more or less as written. At length I got it down pat and on Monday, July 2, three Of my employees and I went on trial before Judge. Novak’s Court at Pankrac Prison.