Prague Washington Prague

PRAGUE _WASHINGTON_ PRAGUE Reports frorn the United States Ernbassy in Czechoslovakia, Novernber-Decernber 1989 Depese US.indd 1 28.10.2004 20:35:10 Depese US.indd 2 28.10.2004 20:35:10 prague–washington–prague Depese US.indd 3 28.10.2004 20:35:11 Depese US.indd 4 28.10.2004 20:35:13 PRAGUE WASHINGTON PRAGUE Reports from the United States Embassy in Czechoslovakia, November–December 1989 Edited by Vilém Prečan Václav Havel Library Prague 2004 Depese US.indd 5 28.10.2004 20:35:13 The Vaclav Havel Library is a non-governmental institution located in Prague, the Czech Republic. Its basic goal is to serve as an archive of documents chroni- cling the complex battle for democracy and freedom in the second half of the twentieth century through the works of Vaclav Havel. At the same time, the Vaclav Havel Library strives to initiate and stimulate research, discussion, and meetings devoted to the study of contemporary problems encountered during the transformation of a post-Communist state into a socially, economically, and culturally developed civil society. Published by Václav Havel Library, Prague 2004 (www.vaclavhavel-library.org) Edited, with an introduction and commentary, by Vilém Prečan, 2004 Designed by Jiří Karásek, Studio Marvil Typeset by Studio Marvil Printed in the Czech Republic All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Photos © 1989, 1990 by Pavel Štecha Design © 2004 by Jiří Karásek ISBN 80-903518-0-8 Depese US.indd 6 28.10.2004 20:35:13 Preface Since the 1960s, I remember American ambassadors in Prague having a keen interest in the Czechoslovak opposition movement, free-thinkers, and independent intellectuals. American diplomats were interested in the work of such people and endeavored to help them, for example, by arranging for scholar- ships to American universities. This interest should in no way be described as patronizing or as having the arrogant character of a superpower overseeing its satellite or protectorate or even as a mere business transaction, whereby the United States sought to buy off the Czechoslovak opposition movement to make it pro-American. It’s understandable that U. S. diplomats were writing about their contacts with us, and indeed we always knew they were; to do so is the duty of all diplomats the world over. I am delighted that the library that bears my name has as its first publication a collection of dispatches sent from Prague to the State Department in 1989, at a time when Shirley Temple Black was the American Ambassador in Prague. I very much look forward to reading these dispatches and am certain that in doing so the actual course of events will come to mind and I’ll be able to compare my own memories of the events with how they are described in these reports. Václav Havel VII Depese US.indd 7 28.10.2004 20:35:13 Depese US.indd 8 28.10.2004 20:35:13 Introduction It is unusual for documents related to diplomacy to be published so soon after their having been written. It usually happens only when governments them- selves have an interest in publishing such sources, and then they usually publish them either in the form of White Books or Green Books or books of some other color or as ad hoc volumes that have a current political aim. That the set of documents published in this volume got into the hands of independent his- torians so soon after their having originated is thanks to an American nongov- ernmental institution with a name that will probably mean little to the layman and might even be confusing. That institution is the National Security Archive (NSA). It was established to gather and publish documents that have been declassified on the basis of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The NSA has been more than successful in achieving this aim. Among its many projects, of which I should name at least the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) and the “Irangate” affair (1987), the National Security Archive initiated two related, large international research projects in the 1990s: one encompassed the four major crises in the Soviet bloc (East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Poland in 1980–81); the other was concerned with the democratic revolutions in eastern Europe in the late 1980s. The aim of the projects was to assemble an extensive source base, including testimony from actors in the events, and to present the results of this research to scholars and the general public in a series of international conferences held in 1995–99 and, subsequently, in large volumes of documents, which are gradually being published. Three of the conferences were held in Czechoslovakia (two of which I had the honor of helping to organize). The topic of the one of these was the international consequences of the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia in February 1948. Another, held in October 1999, was concerned with the run-up to, and course of, the democratic revolution in Czechoslovakia, 1987–89. For the 1989 conference the NSA managed, on the basis of the FOIA, to put together a select set of telegrams that had been sent and received by the U.S. Embassy in Prague in November and December 1989. In 1997 the NSA asked the U.S. Department of State for the Prague telegrams bearing the acro- nyms PGOV (political and governmental), PREL (political relations) and PHUM IX Depese US.indd 9 28.10.2004 20:35:14 (political and human rights). From the great number of telegrams that were sent from Prague in the course of those two months (a total of about 2,500), there emerged, on the basis of the NSA request, a set of 150 telegrams, 132 of which, almost 700 pages in length, were presented to the NSA in September 1998. From the series marked E1–E150 during declassification, eighteen items are missing, that is to say, they were not declassified. The NSA then gave copies of these 132 telegrams to the Czechoslovak Documentation Center in Prague, which in 1998–99 had been its partner in the international project “Openness in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union.” Twenty-eight of these telegrams were included in the volume of documents, which was compiled for participants in the conference called “The Democratic Revolution in Czechoslovakia: Its Preconditions, Course, and Immediate Repercussions, 1987–89.” That volume, printed in 200 copies, is the Briefing Book for an International Conference: Prague, 14–16 October 1999. A Chronology of Events and a Compendium of Declassified Documents, edited by Derek Paton and Vilém Prečan (Prague, 1999). In the present volume it is re- ferred to simply as the Briefing Book 1999. The copies of the original telegrams were deposited in the archives of the Czechoslovak Documentation Center. The whole set was later translated into Czech as source material, but until a short while ago nothing else was done with it. In addition to this “Czechoslovak Cable” record group (in the End of the Cold War Collection, Box 3) the NSA managed to get 12 more telegrams from other countries declassified. Dating from September and October 1989, most of them are concerned with the East Germans who were flooding into Prague in autumn 1989 and rushing to the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany to seek asylum. Two of these telegrams concerned with East Germans were sent from Prague; a third Prague telegram in this group, however, is a report from Ambassador Shirley Temple Black about her conversation with the Leading Secretary of the Prague City Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Miroslav Štěpán, in October 1989. The NSA has also made copies of these telegrams available to the Czechoslovak Documentation Center. In late July 2004 the Board of the recently founded Václav Havel Library decided that its first publication should be a volume of these telegrams from late 1989 and that this volume, entitled Prague–Washington–Prague, should be presented when the Library introduced itself to the public on the eve of the 15th anniversary of the democratic revolution of 1989. It asked me to prepare the volume for publication. This was a superb, unexpected opportunity for a historian to publish a valuable set of sources, which had hitherto remained largely unknown to researchers and had little likelihood of being published in its entirety. Moreover, it was an opportunity to publish it in a bilingual edition of the Czech translations together with the English originals. It was a challenge and an incredibly difficult task to get the volume ready for publication in less X Depese US.indd 10 28.10.2004 20:35:14 than three months while ensuring it met the demanding criteria of a profes- sionally published volume of documents. Talks with the General Editor of the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series, in the Bureau of Public Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, Washington, in September 2004, confirmed for the Editor of the current volume that no other documents relating to Czechoslovakia in 1989 had yet been declassified apart from those that the NSA had managed to obtain. That information was, on the one hand, disappointing because the Editor hoped that in addition to other telegrams he might at least get records from the Czechoslovak Desk and the pertinent office or bureau of the State Department from that pe- riod.

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