Radek Schovánek

“Sometimes we couldn’t even sleep. At four in the morning, we had to go peel potatoes, and at ten we were supposed to go to bed. So that’s about six hours of sleep, and even at two a.m. we’d be scrubbing the floor or standing in formation. One time Ladislav Sornas came—he’s among the legionnaires today because he served in the Gulf War in 1990. So at two in the morning, he ordered the entire company to line up. We crawled out in our filthy, stinking pajamas—mine hadn’t been changed for three months. Our drawstrings were torn off our fly flaps, and there we were, a hundred people in yellowish, dirty pajamas, sleep-deprived, worn out. Just desperate-looking figures. He stood in front of us, tilted his cap back, and said, ‘We’d kick the asses of those Americans from the Fifth Armored Brigade in Bavaria!’ And I looked around at these poor souls, just glad to be standing, and imagined us charging the American army. Things like that happened sometimes.”

"State Security had a huge advantage of anonymity. They could afford anything, because they had a badge and a gun on their ass and anonymity protected them. They took great pride in the fact that nobody knew them. And I always went to the interrogation maybe ten minutes or a quarter of an hour earlier than it was stated on the summons, because I thought that maybe I would see someone, hear something. So the second time I went a quarter of an hour early, and my friend Láďa Mindl, a classmate of mine, was working at the Jičín telephone exchange. And when I worked at the switchboard, we had to cooperate - if someone threatened the SS anonymously, for example from a phone booth, they blocked it and we had to trace it, the number. Which we usually didn't do, they disconnected it and dropped it. Well, sometimes somebody found it for them. But we knew each other, we were classmates. I got the summons a quarter of an hour early and I see Láďa walking down the hall. So I said to him, "Hey, Láďa, look, I got this paper and I don't know why or to whom. And he says, 'What did he look like?' 'Taller, wavy hair, blue eyes.' And he says, 'Yeah! That's Miloš Zeman! That's Miloš here from the State. So he [the doorman] dialed him and said, 'Lieutenant, you have Mr. Schovánek here.' And he came out all red with rage, because I already knew his name. Then it was only a short walk to find out that he lived in Lužany and my dad drove him to and from work as a line driver."

"The state security noticed me on October 22, 1987. And now I'm going to talk about what an incredible idiot I am. At eight o'clock in the morning, I came to see Čuňas, who was managing the heating in the boiler room of the U Tomáše pub. He gave me a new Vokno, gave me the first Voknoviny that had just come out - he was very happy about it. It was a cyclostyle folder of about five pages. He gave me three copies at once. And I had a videotape of the meeting at Charlie's that I took to somebody in Prague. I had some letters from Jarda Hutka that were of interest to Jiří Gruntorád. I had some tapes that Hutka had sent me from Holland. I had a videotape of the film The Incinerator of the Dead. It was a stupid combination of exile and samizdat stuff. I walk into Jiří Gruntorád's place at 23 Oldřichova Street in Nusle and I walk into the passage and suddenly three guys in suits behind me. So I thought, 'Wow, they must be State Security officers!' I was shaking terribly, but I walked in front of them. I walked up the stairs, they walked a little bit behind me, and I passed the door of the Gruntorád, and I went up two more floors, and I waited there. They rang the bell at the Gruntorád and went in. So I waited a little while until it was quiet. I ran out of the building with the suitcase of stuff and there's a little park about a hundred yards away. So I was sitting there and this was at about nine o'clock or nine-thirty, because I must have been at the Čuňas's place first thing in the morning. So I sat there until about one o'clock, and if I, a fool, had at least gone to the main station or Masaryk station - then Prague center - and put the suitcase in the storage room or something... But I rang the bell with the suitcase full of stuff, thinking that the State Security officers would be out of the apartment by now. Well, Jirka's house was being searched, so Jirka opened the door, barred it and gestured for me to get out. So I started to run, jumping as fast as I could, and I managed to run to the front of the house, and then Lieutenant Hřebík, who was not a State Security officer, but a criminal officer, came running after me and yelled at me to stop or he would shoot. That must have been about 12:30, because at 1:00 the interrogation had already started. So I stopped, he searched me, and in my pocket I had a book about Charter 77 that Ivana Šustrová had put together, so he picked me up, took me to, I don't know where, I think to Školská Street, and there two State Security officers from the youth department picked me up, one was called Polák, he played the good guy, and the other was called Volek, he played the bad guy, and they took me to Bartolomějská, and there followed the most difficult interrogation I've ever experienced in my life. According to the document that survived, it started at one o'clock and ended at 1:30 at night. Without going to the toilet, without there being any break."

“There were dozens of jammers—near Hradec Králové, near Poděbrady... around every major city. Just Prague alone, being a large city, was surrounded by a ring of jammers, which made listening to Radio Free Europe here very difficult. But the CIA developed two very simple instructions for how to eliminate even this ground-based jamming. And indeed—with a cardboard box wrapped in a special way with aluminum foil, it was possible to eliminate the interference. I remember that in the mid-1980s, I was able to listen to Radio Free Europe in Prague with perfectly clear reception and no interference at all. They also developed a special antenna. I think it was called model 86, or maybe 84. It was a guide broadcast by Radio Free Europe—how to build an antenna that cancels ground interference. That guide is on the online magazine Minulost.cz, including a recording of the broadcast about how to build the antenna. I built one myself, and it worked excellently.”