Date: 2/23/2021
Author: Kent Moors, Ph.D.
Sometimes your background does not simply make you a good choice for an undertaking. It can make you the only choice. Such was my situation in this week’s Classified Intelligence Brief Spy Tales entry.
Two months ago, a Spy Tale discussed how I had a rather peripheral role during the decline of communism and the rise of a twentieth century popular leader in Poland (“Witnessing History in Gdansk,” December 9, 2020.)
That narrative mentioned my scholarly reputation had resulted in election as a foreign corresponding member of both the Polish and Czech Academies of Science. I had indicated that “[t]he Czech events are a story for another time.”
Well, that time is this week. What I will talk about in this offering is not the only “Czech episode” from my career, but it is the most unusual. Anyway, it is at the moment the only one I am yet allowed to discuss.
Today you are going to be introduced to one of the most persistent, irritating, infuriating, fascinating people I have ever met. It goes to show that even exoteric academics can sometimes have an impact on history.
His name is Julius Tomin and at 82 he is still the quintessential gadfly, nipping at the higher ups and fighting for a cause. Some just regard him as a pain in the ass. His base for years has been Oxford, where he has been taking on the academic hierarchy in the way he is most comfortable … storming the battlements as an antagonist and dissident from the outside looking in.
He could have simply kept to himself in the various academic posts his supporters moved him into and out of. But Julius is nothing if not a nonconformist.
When last we talked (almost five years ago), he was still rattling the gilded cages of the dons at Oxford, as always from the other side of the ivy, while at the same time lecturing about Plato to whomever would listen in a Swindon pub.
However, when we first ran into each other over forty years ago, he was running an underground seminar in classical Greek political philosophy, meeting in a network of Prague apartments, and dodging the dreaded StB (Státní bezpečnost, Czech State Security).
It was my academic credentials that got me into this adventure. As I explained in the last Spy Tale (“A Giving of Accounts…From Massachusetts to Vietnam, February 17, 2021), I moved into an academic specialization in Plato and classical political philosophy upon my return from Vietnam.
That meant I was my “other employer’s” logical choice for this assignment. Actually, I was their only one. For some strange reason, there simply were not any other counterintelligence officers who had a name in the field, wrote books on Plato, and read classical Greek (who would have thought that?) Years later, the same reasoning would move me into global energy and risk assessment-related operations after my international academic/scholarly reputation had shifted.
For decades, my academic day job came in handy when I needed a valid cover for an op. The sortie in Prague was tailormade.
It was also a testimony to a differing intelligence agency culture. The Brits had two guys at MI6 with similar qualifications.
In one of those strange twists, an opportunity to exploit the soft underbelly of the Soviet controlled Warsaw Pact would center on an almost 2,500-year-old dead Greek. But we needed somebody to enter the belly of the beast to do it.
That turned out to be me.
At this point, as usual, I need to provide some background. The late 1960s had witnessed opposition to communist rule in what was then called Czechoslovakia. A movement that became known as “socialism with a human face” had erupted on the streets of Prague. That “Prague Spring” was subsequently put down by Soviet forces in the first application of what became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine (named for Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev).
The official version of that doctrine finally decided upon by the Kremlin put it this way: any threat to socialist rule in any state of the Soviet bloc was a threat to them all, and therefore justified the intervention of fellow socialist states.
In other words, a sterling example of Moscow’s “socialistic brotherly love.”
In 1955, Brezhnev’s predecessor Nikita Khrushchev had signed the Belgrade Declaration, which stated that different views of how socialism could be obtained were possible in Eastern and Central Europe. Such a view had led to the socialism with a human face approach of the Prague Spring. It was crushed by Red Army tanks.
As expected, ongoing opposition went underground. In several Eastern European cities, it would center about universities. But nowhere as pronounced as in Prague.
This was the groundbreaking Charter 77, a watershed moment for dissent and human rights in the Soviet world. The strange thing was that the initial signatories thought they would fail. “It was not going to change anything,” one told me years later. “The government was not going to listen.”
I asked him then why bother? He simply answered, “Because it was the right thing to do.” Even the spark that resulted in Charter 77 was unusual. It started with the December 1976 arrest of a psychedelic rock bank called The Plastic People of the Universe.
In response, 241 academics, artists, writers, and intellectuals signed the charter issued in January of 1977. It held the Czech government accountable not only to its own laws, but as well under international agreements to which it was a party. This included the Helsinki Accords guaranteeing human rights and freedoms. The government had signed the accords in 1975.
Those who put their names on the Charter did so at their own personal peril. Professors were fired from tenured posts, playwrights and artists had their works removed from public view, all family members were either expelled from universities or prevented from ever applying as students. Some rather well-known scholars among the signatories ended up being forced into the most degrading jobs available, including one famous philosopher who ended up cleaning out toilets in a Prague train station.
The Chartists were better known abroad than at home. The state-controlled press and media made no mention of them. After all, the powers that be were hardly going to give airtime or newspaper space to a movement opposing their rule. Fellow citizens also looked upon such protest as likely to make things more difficult for everybody else. As a result, the wider population had mixed views on the intellectual dissidents.
Julius at the time was on the philosophy faculty at Charles University in Prague.
He already had a reputation for being irascible. For example, attendance in his advanced seminars on Plato or Aristotle required that one could read classical Greek. After signing the Charter, he was removed from the faculty and at one point worked as a nightwatchman at the Prague Zoo. Earlier, he had operated a turbine but was dismissed by management when he was found trying to teach philosophy to coworkers.
For Julius, however, the situation would get very unsettling. Because he did not stop. Instead, he insisted on running an underground seminar in classical philosophy meeting in various apartments surrounding the university against the specific instructions of the StB.
Twice he was taken through this side of a building no Czech wanted to see.
Both times he was sent to prison. Upon each release, he went back to his surreptitious teaching and a dangerous cat and mouse game with a state security operation that had no sense of humor. Once he unsuccessfully tried to escape.
The StB was a nasty piece of work, even by Eastern Bloc Cold War standards. And in one of the most bizarre decisions ever, it became the only intelligence agency in history to declare Plato and Aristotle “enemies of the state.” All teaching on either were stripped from university curricula, nothing could be published about them in the country, all books on them were banned, and extensive files were compiled on these “subversives.”
Which made what Julius was doing even riskier.
Once the StB cascaded down its vengeance on local philosophy (and philosophers), an unusual outside support network developed. It was centered about the Oxford-based Jan Hus Educational Foundation, named after the famous Czech theologian and dissenter who had served as master, dean, and rector of Charles University in the early fifteenth century. The foundation emerged after Julius in 1978 requested support from the international academic community.
There was even talk at the time of establishing Jan Hus College, which would have become Oxford’s first multi-institutional “college without walls.” That turned out to be a reach too far for the Oxford Council.
The foundation attempted to bring Chartist-affiliated students who were no longer eligible for matriculation at Czech universities outside for study and sent in books. It would also dispatch delegations of outside academics and scholars to the “apartment seminars” in Prague.
That’s where I came in, along with a colleague from British MI6 and others who were “only” profs. At the time, I was jockeying between academic appointments in the US and at LSE in London. I knew Kathy Wilkes, the philosopher at Oxford who was the guiding force behind the foundation.
More importantly, however, I was also a candidate for a foreign corresponding position with the Czech Academy of Sciences, a development that had been unfolding quite apart from what was surrounding the Charter. This consideration would oblige the Czech authorities to allow me access to universities in Prague and elsewhere in the country. A similar appointment as a foreign member of the Polish Academy had allowed me into that country for a lecture tour at the height of the Solidarity movement (as I described in the December Spy Tale entry).
My assignment was to support where possible the continuing academic opposition to the Czech regime, set up ongoing contacts that could be used once I left, identify potential asset recruits, and assess the situation.
I attended several of the “apartment” seminars Julius conducted to overflow crowds. It was surreal to say the least. Not the least because StB officers were outside watching the affairs and taking photographs of everybody coming in and out.
In the first of my visits, Julius and I had a public difference of opinion on how to interpret a significant theme from the Republic, significant in no small part because of the carefully thought-out way Plato had selected the Greek used in laying out the argument. This disagreement had been brewing for a bit. My view was in one of my books which Julius had reviewed for a local scholarly journal. He had not been too critical of the work but considered my translations “another example of a Western intellectual reading Greek but not thinking in it.” Fine way for a Czech to talk!
Nonetheless, this little tiff provided additional excellent cover for the StB watchers, further authenticating my scholarly bona fides. In addition, the Czech Academy connection effectively prevented them from detaining me as they had with some of the other participants from the multinational group growing around the Oxford foundation. In earlier trips, those arrested and encouraged to leave Czechoslovakia included the world-famous French “deconstructionist” philosopher and literary critic Jacques Derrida.
In 1979, Julius and his first wife Zdena (they divorced in 1995) received permission to leave for academic study. He later held a brief visiting position at the University of Hawaii but the bulk of his time has been spent in the UK in general and in the Oxford area in particular.
Zdena Tominová was a dissident in her own right and a brilliant, biting writer. Author of the well-received novel Stalin’s Shoe released in the 1980s and the main writer for the influential samizdat (i.e., underground, clandestine publication) Padlock in the 1970s, Zdena was better known in the West for her autobiographical screenplay Enemies of the State, telecast in the UK (1981) and the US (1988). The actress Zoë Wanamaker played here in the drama.
She was also one of original signers and a principal spokesperson for the Chartists, rumored to have co-authored the Memorandum justifying the Charter. Her works were banned for life by the communist regime, a move later rescinded by Czech President Václav Havel (who clearly had written at least some of the Memorandum). Zdena eventually returned to live in Prague and died there on May 24, 2020.
In May 1981, Julius and Zdena were informed by the Czech Embassy in London that their passports had been revoked along with their Czech citizenship. Julius has been a British resident ever since although he has never applied for UK citizenship. He traveled back to Prague after the fall of communism but retains an icy relationship with his former faculty at Charles University. Some consider his departure from the country to have been a relinquishing of the fight for academic freedom they had to conduct from the inside.
One other recent note of interest. Julius and Zdena’s niece Michaela Marksová-Tominová graduated from Charles University and has been a Czech politician since 1997. From 2014 until 2017, she was the Czech Minister of Labor and Social Affairs as well as the government’s go-to person on human rights.
It seems the defense of human freedom continues into a new generation in this family.
Dr. Kent Moors
This is an installment of Classified Intelligence Brief, your guide to what’s really happening behind the headlines… and how to profit from it. Dr. Kent Moors served the United States for 30 years as one of the most highly decorated intelligence operatives alive today (including THREE Presidential commendations).
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