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Spy/journalist contacts common By Richard Allen Greene President Vaclav Havel may have been caught flat-footed by the news that Helmut Zilk had a secret-police (StB) file, but Zilk himself was not surprised. "Anyone who had contacts with the people from your [communist] countries knew that everyone he was speaking to definitely had something to do with the secret services," Zilk told the news agency CTK. The former mayor of Vienna, whom Havel publicly denied state honors at the end of October, worked as a journalist in Prague during the communist era. After the scandal broke, Zilk was among the first to point out that all foreign journalists were the subject of police scrutiny, and hence had files. Other foreign correspondents who covered the region at the time agreed. "I wouldn't know, but I assume I had contacts with the secret police," said Dessa Trevisan, who reported on the region for The Times of London in 1968-69. "Of course there was a file on everyone." "I knew I was being watched all the time, though I was not always aware of it," said Mark Brayne, a BBC World Service reporter who covered Czechoslovakia from 1981 to 1984. "I'm sure there was a file on [Zilk,]" concurred Iva Drapalova, who was the head of the Associated Press (AP) office in Prague from 1972 to 1988. She said all journalists were watched constantly. "You assumed it was happening," Drapalova said. "If you wanted to do the job, you had to live with it." Drapalova, who is Czech, chose to review her file after it became possible in summer 1997. (By law, only Czech citizens can see their secret-police files, and then only by appointment.) She spent three days in Pardubice reading the 1,160-page collection of documents and more than $700 (20,000 Kc) photocopying pages from it. The experience convinced her that little credence should be given to the information gathered by the secret police. "Factually, [my file] is very inaccurate," she said. "For years, they said I was from a Jewish background, and I wasn't. They said I was from Olomouc, and I wasn't. "They got wrong which mountains my summer cottage was in, and then when they found which mountains they were, they got the house wrong," Drapalova said. Drapalova said she had always doubted the competence of those charged with watching her, but even so, she was surprised by some of what she learned from reading her file. "The Interior Ministry [which directed internal security] requested copies of my articles from the Foreign Ministry, along with translations because they [the Interior Ministry] didn't have enough translators," Drapalova marveled. The BBC's Brayne said that, though he was sometimes conscious of being watched, the secret police never approached him openly. "They left you alone," he said. "There was never any kind of approach from anyone identifying themselves as being with the Interior Ministry or anything like that." Trevisan of The Times said that, although she was friendly with playwright Havel due to her interest in theater, she, too, was left alone by the security services. "I was never approached overtly there [in Czechoslovakia], though I was [approached] in Poland," she remembered. Drapalova said that a certain give-and-take with people she assumed were reporting on her activities was a routine part of a foreign correspondent's job here. "In this business, when you wanted to get information, you dropped information -- with diplomats, with Czech politicians," she explained. Zilk, she said "was sure to have exchanged information. It was absolutely normal with journalists. When you are trying to get into contact with someone, you exchange views." She said that she found it hard to believe some of the allegations against Zilk, including the report that he accepted 66,000 Austrian schillings (then $2,500) between 1953 and 1969 for collaborating with the secret police. "Sixty-six thousand schillings sounds ridiculous to me," she said. "Not that they would pay it, but that he would be so cheap." And even if Zilk was a conscious collaborator, Drapalova said, it would be hard to condemn him unconditionally. "People who were collaborating intelligently probably did less harm than a stupid concierge who just reported everything," she said.
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