CZECH REPUBLIC - CZECHOSLOVAKIA COUNTRY READER TABLE OF CONTENTS Carl F. Norden 1940 Consular Officer, Prague George F. Bogardus 1945-1948 Vice Consul, Prague Claiborne Pell 1945-1948 Consular Officer, Prague and Bratislava Harold C. Vedeler 1945-1948 Central Europe Division, Washington, DC 1955-1957 Deputy Chief of Mission, Prague Louise Armstrong 1948-1949 Rotation Officer, Prague Mary Chiavarini 1948-1949 Secretary to Ambassador Jacobs, Prague Sidney Sober 1949-1950 Consular Officer, Prague William J. Cunningham 1950 Clerk, Prague Harry G. Barnes, Jr. 1953-1956 Consular Officer, Prague William A. Crawford 1957-1959 Deputy Chief of Mission, Prague Jonathan Dean 1961-1962 Political/Economic Officer, Prague Martin Wenick 1965-1967 Consular Officer, Prague Kenneth N. Skoug 1967-1969 Commercial/Economic Officer, Prague Julian M. Niemczyk 1967-1969 Air Attaché, Prague John A. Baker, Jr. 1968-1970 Deputy Chief of Mission, Prague Theodore E. Russell 1968-1971 Rotation Officer, Prague Ellen Johnson 1969-1973 Secretary, Prague Samuel G. Wise, Jr. 1970-1971 Chief Political/Economic Officer, Prague Robert B. Morley 1971-1973 Economic/Commercial Officer, Office of Czech Hungarian and Polish Affairs, Washington, DC 1 Peter S. Bridges 1971-1974 Chief Political/Economic Officer, Prague Edward Hurwitz 1972-1974 Czech-Bulgaria Desk Officer, Washington, DC Robert William Farrand 1972-1975 Economic Officer, Prague Jack R. Perry 1974-1976 Deputy Chief of Mission, Prague Timothy E. Deal 1975-1976 Czechoslovakia Desk Officer, Washington, DC John M. Evans 1975-1978 Consular Officer, Prague Leonardo M. Williams 1976-1979 Assistant Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Prague Joseph R. McGhee 1979-1981 Consular Officer, Prague Patricia D. Hughes 1980-1982 Rotation Officer, Prague Martin Wenick 1981-1983 Deputy Chief of Mission, Prague Helen Weinland 1982-1984 Political Officer, Prague William P. Kiehl 1982-1986 Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Prague Robert William Farrand 1983-1985 Deputy Chief of Mission, Prague Julian M. Niemczyk 1986-1989 Ambassador, Czechoslovakia Theodore E. Russell 1988-1991 Deputy Chief of Mission, Prague 1993-1996 Ambassador, Slovakia Thomas N. Hull III 1989-1993 Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Prague John M. Evans 1991-1994 Deputy Chief of Mission, Prague Jenonne Walker 1995-1998 Ambassador, Czech Republic Leonardo M. Williams 1995-1998 Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Prague CARL F. NORDEN 2 Consular Officer Prague (1940) Carl Norden attended boarding school in Switzerland where he became bilingual in English and German. He served in Yugoslavia during World War II. He then received a Master's in political science from Harvard and worked for City Bank for six years before he entered the Service. He has served in Prague; Paramaribo, Suriname; Havana, Cuba and with ARA. This interview was conducted in 1991 by Ambassador Horace G. Torbert. Q: You went to Prague by way of the Foreign Service school, did you get some training? Were you doing the same thing in Prague as in Berlin? NORDEN: No. I went to Prague because there was a scandal, a visa scandal. Our local staff had been selling visas, I was sent to put a stop to it which I did. Q: I had one of those in Salzburg after the war. Did you leave Prague because Prague was invaded? NORDEN: It already had been invaded when I went there. The Germans treated the natives quite well, their motto was give the Czechs plenty of beer and feed them well and they will make no trouble for us. Which it turned out to be so, the Czechs were not about to make any trouble of any kind. GEORGE F. BOGARDUS Vice Consul Prague (1945-1948) George F. Bogardus was born in Iowa in 1917 and graduated from Harvard University in 1939. He served in the U.S. Army in 1941 and joined the Foreign Service in 1941. His overseas posts included Canada, Kenya, Czechoslovakia, Algeria, Germany, and Vietnam. He was interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy on April 10th 1996. Q: You were in Prague from when to when? BOGARDUS: December 5 of '45 until Easter of '48. That was a most fantastic period. Q: We want to talk about this, but first, how did you get there? I mean, this was right after the war. Things must have been in pretty bad shape. BOGARDUS: That was an odyssey, it certainly was. Q: Your wife came with you? 3 BOGARDUS: Yes. We took the Queen Elizabeth from Halifax. It was still a troop ship, basically, but they allowed some civilians on board. That took us to Southampton. Our objective was Prague and I had written ahead to the ambassador (you had to do this sort of thing). On the way, I said, "How are we going to communicate with these people? They all know German as a second language, but we know that's very unpopular." It just happened that Czech colleagues who had been in their consular service in Montreal, who had met me earlier, were going back, too. So, I wandered around to them and said, "How do you say, 'I'm an American and I don't know how to speak Czech. Do you speak English perhaps?'" "No, no, of course not." And then, "French maybe?" "No, no." "Well, what about German?" "Oh, yes." So, they did, they told us. That was very, very useful at that time because in Prague they were grabbing people who looked Germanic and putting them into a little concentration camp until they found out whether they were Germans. It worked like a charm, especially for my wife, who has some German ancestry, partly, and looks pale and blue-eyed and so forth. It worked. When we got there we went through the routine, and invariably the Czech answer was "Natuerlich, Was wollen Sie?". Q: Did you take a train? BOGARDUS: Oh, that's right. The train took us from Southampton to London. We stayed around several days there in London. The embassy was trying to figure out, "How are we going to get these people off on their way?" Eventually, they got us on a Channel boat to France and Paris, a train, the boat train. We arrived in Paris and nobody knew we were coming. It was not terribly easy, but as soon as they did find out we were there, then the Embassy was very helpful. It was late in November. When we got word that we were going to fly to Prague, I sent a telegram to the American embassy, the ambassador, saying, "Here we are. We're going to be there." Well, the airline said the airplane was not going to fly after all. Two days later, we finally did take off. It was to go to Prague. We put down near Frankfurt and they said, "No, we've been diverted. This plane goes to Berlin." Eventually, they flew us to Prague. So, it was a three, four, or five day delay in all this. When we arrived in Prague airport, the only American around was a man to meet the courier... Well, he was designated to meet the courier and trade pouches. He wasn't going to pay a bit of attention to us. And we didn't know, for example, the word for "men" and "women" at the airport. And my wife took our little daughter, who was two years old that day into the men's room. Anyway, that's the sort of thing. Eventually, we got a colleague -- we called downtown. We got through to the embassy to the duty officer, Walter Birge. He was a third secretary like me. Then our odyssey was over, except not entirely because we stayed in the Alcron Hotel for several days, which is one of the two finest hotels, or had been pre-war. But it had just been vacated by the Russian officers who left their lice behind in the beds (bedbugs). The milk was not in bottles at all, all food was severely rationed. We had a hard time, especially with this little two-year-old daughter. You'd go across the street to the milk store and take your own pail. There was no real cereal even, no real bread even. The coffee was ersatz. Well, the embassy helped us out a bit more, but even they couldn't do so much, except the ambassador got us a supply of canned milk a few days later. His name was Laurence Steinhardt from New York. He was a non-career ambassador but he was the first ambassadorial or chief of mission appointment by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, who sent him as minister to Stockholm. Then he went to Peru after that, and then to Moscow during the 4 early part of the war, and then they had gone to Ankara and finally to Prague. The Steinhardts had arrived in early June of '45, six months earlier. The chancery is a big, old building, the Schönbrunn Palace that the U.S. government bought in 1921. It's baroque, one of the finest places. It's very old and extremely interesting. We didn't get settled into our house really until early January of '46. The embassy gave us the German equivalent of a jeep, called a "Hanomag," which apparently had been to Stalingrad and back. The motor jumped from extra low to high gear. It was entirely open in the winter, and the winter can be quite cold there. But the Czechs were so eager to see foreigners that they immediately said, "Oh, we're a western people. Remember, we're a western people." That's true. I'm going on and on and on here. Also in January my father in Des Moines very naively forwarded through to me in the open mail in an official brown envelope with official letterhead a routine appreciation of my loyal services to the OSS! This arrived by mailman after having undoubtedly been opened and scrutinized by the Czech intelligence, including the Communist Party.