Cold War

Jan Koura - Mehdi Ben Barka and the interpretation of his cooperation with Czechoslovak intelligence
Abstract

Mehdi Ben Barka (1920–1965), a prominent representative of the Moroccan opposition and anti‑colonial movement, who was kidnapped in Paris in October 1965 under unknown circumstances and whose body has not been found to this day, was a frequent visitor to socialist Czechoslovakia in the first half of the 1960s. He was repeatedly travelling to the other side of the Iron Curtain to maintain his collaboration with Czechoslovak intelligence (State Security, StB), with whose he made first contact through the Residentura in Paris in 1960. Although the details and development of this cooperation are now known thanks to the declassification of the relevant documents, it is still inadequately answered what circumstances and motives led the Moroccan politician to maintain his connection with the StB. The article, based on a study of the extensive files that the First Directorate (Intelligence) of StB kept on Mehdi Ben Barka and other relevant sources, attempts to seek an answer to this question, which will be pursued along three different interpretive levels. The emphasis will be placed not only on the changing political situation in Morocco and the Maghreb, but also on the overall context of the Cold War and developments within the anti‑colonial movement in the 1960s.

Jan Vajskebr, Jan Zumr, Petr Kaňák - Heinrich Reiser – War Criminal in the Whirl of the Cold War
Abstract

After the Nazis seized power in Germany, Heinrich Reiser (1899–1978) became an official of the secret police (Gestapo), and participated in the occupation of the Czech hinterland in March 1939. In the summer of 1940 he was ordered to France, where he specialised in the suppression of the left-wing resistance and the Soviet espionage network that came to be known as the Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle). At the end of the war, he took part in the repressions against the foreign workers under forced labour in Germany. When the war ended, he spent some time in hiding and was briefly imprisoned by the French army. After the war alliance between the victorious powers broke up, Reiser’s knowledge and abilities were used by the Gehlen Organisation, on the foundations of which the West German security service (BND) was later established. As part of the denazification process in the security services in the late 1950s, agents with a Nazi past were fired, or sent into retirement, which was also the case with Reiser. The justice of the Federal Republic of Germany was only ever interested in him as a witness in investigating other members of the Nazi repressive apparatus, and he was never punished for his crimes.