He tried to play the role of a double agent
Stáhnout obrázek
Josef Ondra was born on 11 June 1958 in Nový Jičín and grew up in Veselí nad Moravou. His father was a veterinarian and in 1968, under the influence of the revival process, he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, his mother was a housewife. His mother‘s parents were arrested by the Gestapo during the war for helping the Jewish population in Ostrava. His grandfather survived the war, but his grandmother of Jewish origin was murdered in Auschwitz. Their two daughters hid from the Gestapo in southern Moravia throughout the war. In 1973 Josef Ondra was accepted to the grammar school in Strážnice. Just before the school year began, however, he received a notice from the headmaster that his admission was cancelled. As he found out later, the reason was his father‘s expulsion from the Communist Party and the demand that the school management find a vacancy for the son of a Communist functionary. Ondra could at least enter Lipník nad Bečvou TV repairer apprenticeship with a secondary school graduation exam. At school and at boarding school he experienced ideological bullying and threats of expulsion from his field because of his cadre assessment and his pro-Western attitudes. He was expelled from the Socialist Youth Union after a fortnight. After his apprenticeship, he was not allowed to continue to his fourth year of graduation. Since he could not find work in his field and was to start two years of military service, he decided to emigrate in 1976. He purchased a trip to Yugoslavia, from where he contacted a distant relative in Germany who helped him cross the Italian border. His parents were unaware of the emigration and for several weeks were convinced, based on a report from the travel agency, that their son had drowned at sea. As soon as it became known that he had emigrated, the District Court in Hodonín sentenced Josef Ondra to two years in prison on 16 March 1977 for illegally leaving the republic. The parents were interrogated by State Security; his mother was allowed to visit her son until after five years, the father a year later. His father was dismissed from his post as district veterinarian and transferred to menial work in a meat processing plant. After a short stay in Austria, Ondra made his way to Germany, where he applied for asylum. Thanks to a scholarship he received, he was able to study German at the Goethe Institute in Frankfurt, where he made contact with the Czech Catholic Mission there. Later he became involved in the activities of Opus Bonum and the Czech spiritual centre Velehrad. Apart from meeting Father Anastáz Opasek, he also met Karel Kryl, Jiří Gruša, Ivan Medek and other well-known exiles. At that time he worked in an advertising agency, then became an employee of an electrical goods store in Offenbach. During his work, he also supplied goods to the American army and had access to American bases. In the second half of the 1980s, he was contacted by Czechoslovak intelligence and offered cooperation. However, Ondra immediately reported the offer to American intelligence and then to German intelligence. After an agreement, he began working for the CIA under the code name „Novo“ and accepted the offer of Czechoslovak intelligence. The American-controlled cooperation with Communist intelligence lasted less than two years. During that time, he made one trip to Prague, where he signed his cooperation with Czechoslovak intelligence. His intelligence activities ended after a fake intervention by the German intelligence authorities against Ondra. After November 1989, Josef Ondra regularly visited the Czech Republic, where he returned permanently in 2010.
