New Light on Old Spies #2: The Saga of the Swinging Spies
How a Czech 'super-spy' infiltrated the CIA!
Photo: Ex-KGB sleeper agent Karel Koecher worked for the CIA during the cold war. After spending years feeding information to the Russians, he was caught in 1986, jailed and then exchanged in a prisoner swap.
On a cold February night in 1986, Berlin’s Glienicke Bridge became the scene of the cold war’s last ever prisoner exchange – a dramatic hand-over involving a Soviet dissident and Karel Koecher, the only foreign agent ever known to have infiltrated the CIA.
Koecher was a Czech citizen who had been living undercover in the US for 21 years. Alternately codenamed Rino, Turian or Pedro, he had moved to America in 1965 to establish himself as a mole within the CIA. Koecher’s KGB case officer, Colonel Alexander Sokolov, would later call him a super-spy.
According to files held by Czech secret police, his wife, Hana Koecherova, codenamed Adrid, had distributed secret messages on Koecher’s behalf during their decades abroad but was never charged with espionage.
For years she had been a New York City diamond dealer. Everyone in the business loved her. Living in the couple’s flat at 50 East 89th Street in Manhattan, a block from the Guggenheim, Hana’s neighbours were Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, and tennis star Ivan Lendl.
But in 1986 Hana was on her way back to a very different world – Czechoslovakia was a stifling place in the mid-80s.
Koecher was eager to cross the bridge. After spending years as a sleeper agent he had eventually obtained a job and top secret security clearance with the CIA. When he fell out of favour with his Soviet handlers in Prague, he bypassed the Czechoslovak state security, the StB, and reported directly to the KGB in Moscow.
After two decades in the US he was finally arrested by the FBI, and by February 1986 he had been held for 14 months awaiting trial in New York City’s Metropolitan Correctional Centre, where a fellow prisoner had tried to stab him to death.
Speaking of the prisoner exchange, Kocher remembers: “There [was] a car” – a gold Mercedes – “and this German lawyer [Wolfgang] Vogel who arranged all the swaps, beginning with Gary Powers [the US pilot featured in Steven Spielberg’s recent film, Bridge of Spies],” Koecher said. “So, I crossed the line, and got in with my wife. The feeling was, I am superman.”
On the Potsdam side of the bridge, Koecher had a glass of champagne and went to a party at “some Stasi villa”, he said. He flew back to Prague the next day and was interrogated in the Czech spa town of Karlovy Vary for two months. When the questioning ended, he and Hana moved into an apartment with Koecher’s mother.
In penetrating the CIA Koecher had done something no communist spy had done before but he was still not a welcome repatriate – decades abroad made him suspect. Following the wholesale purge of Czechoslovak leaders in 1968, Koecher had drifted towards relative autonomy and was forced to survive in the margins of obvolute cold war interests. His volatility made him enemies but his intellect and placement meant that top officials returned to him for information repeatedly. Years later the KGB chief, Vladimir Kryuchkov, would equate Koecher’s experience as a spy to falling “into a meat grinder”.
In the end, despite years of intrigue and enormous cost, neither Koecher nor his contemporaries would anticipate the imminent collapse of the Eastern Bloc.
In the early 1980s, Karl F. Koecher and his wife Hanna lived a gold-plated life in New York City’s swish Upper East Side. They drove a new, blue BMW and lived in a luxury co-op alongside the tennis star Ivan Lendl and the comedian Mel Brooks. Hanna was a diamond dealer, blue-eyed and beautiful with a penchant for mink fur coats. Karl told neighbors that he was a security consultant who moonlighted in Columbia University’s Philosophy department. They were popular at work, in their building—and at swinging sex parties, according to accounts.
But in November 1984, the glamorous couple were unmasked for what they really were—Soviet moles infiltrating American security agencies. Koecher admitted to doing incalculable damage to the CIA and its assets; his wife was found to be an accomplice. He was sentenced to life in jail but served just two years. When he returned to Czechoslovakia in 1986 in a foreign prisoner exchange, he received a hero’s welcome.
The CIA has never revealed who alerted them to Koecher’s treachery, though he left a trail of destruction in his wake that included the suicide of Aleksandr Dmitrievich Ogorodnik, a Soviet diplomat working undercover for the CIA. Once incarcerated, Koecher faced a miserable future in jail. After a stabbing attempt by a new inmate, who Koecher now believes to have been a CIA mole, he appealed to the KGB in a letter, saying he feared for his life.
And so, in February 1986, Koecher and his wife became part of the final prisoner exchange, held on the frigid Glienicke Bridge, in Berlin. A gold Mercedes was waiting for them, driving them back into their old world and freedom, of sorts. Two months of interrogation followed before they were able to move back in with his mother, who had believed her son had been a dissenter.
Today, the couple live in a quiet village outside Prague: Hana organizes seminars between construction professionals and professors from technical schools, while her husband is retired, and spends his days reading or exercising in a nearby forest. It’s a far cry from their former glitzy existences as double agents in New York City—or the seemingly inevitable life behind bars that they managed to escape.
Behind the paywall:
Pavel Zacek, Director of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, will discuss the recent release of the Czechoslovak intelligence services' archives. Benjamin Fischer former chief historian for the CIA, will provide commentary.
Pavel Zacek earned his Ph.D. from Charles University in Prague. Prior to being named director of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, Zacek worked as acting director of the Czech Security Service Archives. He is the author of nearly a dozen books on the Czechoslovak security services, including most recently At the Head of the State Security Service. The Fall of the Regime in the Records of a Secret Police Officer (2006).
Benjamin B. Fischer is a former chief historian for the CIA. A career CIA officer, Fischer worked for 8 years in analysis, and 15 years in operations. Beginning in 1995, Fischer worked at the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence, where he published several monographs, including A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare, Okhrana: The Paris Operations of the Russian Imperial Police, and At Cold War's End: U.S. Intelligence on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1989-1991, which was selected for inclusion in a timecapsule to be held at the National Archives until it is unsealed in 2100. In 2002, Fischer was awarded a visiting research fellowship at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo, Norway.
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