For example, he said that Major Jaroslav Nemec, a Czechoslovak intelligence officer, code name NEKOLA, listed officially as the Czechoslovak Vice-consul in Salzburg, had planned a mass poisoning of RFE employees by substituting atropine in the cafeteria's saltshakers in November 1959. The operation was given the code name PANENKA (puppet).
Chairman Senator Thurmond asked Frolik, "What is the significance of the atropine?
Frolik answered, "It can create hallucinations and in large quantities death of people." He added that “Nemec had an agent in Radio Free Europe, who, as it turned out, also was an agent of the CIA ... the double agent gave the plan to the CIA, and therefore it did not happen.”
One of the so-called double agents of the CIA at RFE was code-name "Jachym,” who started working for the Czechoslovak Intelligence Service in 1953. He was sent to West Germany through a "faked escape" across the border the next year. The faked escape was meant to establish his bona fides within the Czech émigré community and then lead to a permanent job with RFE. He had been trained in radio codes, secret writing and other tradecraft. He had at least 59 meetings with the StB in Austria, Holland, Switzerland, and Germany. "Jachym's" intelligence tasks in Germany were: the Czech emigration. American Military Intelligence, and Radio Free Europe.
In the early 1990s, when he was confronted by RFE with spying allegations, "Jachym" for the first time admitted he had lied to RFE on his employment application: he did not escape to the Germany but StB sent him on an espionage assignment at RFE. He acknowledged being part of the 1959 StB plot to put atropine in the RFE cafeteria saltshakers, but he said he was under control of the CIA in Munich from the beginning.
Unbeknownst to “Jachym” the StB also had involved two other agents code named “Alex” and “Kytka”, both of whom were actually double agents of the CIA. Under CIA control, “Jachym” gave StB officer Nemec one saltshaker that he had purchased at a local department store. It had to be a little different from one normally found in the cafeteria, i.e., for easier identification, if atropine were in it. "Jachym" did not actually place a saltshaker in the cafeteria, but one or two other RFE employees ("Alex" or "Kytka") possibly did so--"Jachym" saw "Alex" of them pocket two saltshakers and reported it to the CIA in Munich. One version of the story is that Nemec had given "Alex" the two saltshakers containing atropine at the Kuftstein train station in Salzburg, Austria on or about November 16, 1959.
RFE management learned of the atropine story on November 21, 1959. Taking no chances, on November 23, 1959, Radio Free Europe management closed the cafeteria without an explanation to the staff and to the Works Council (Labor), which had co-determination rights regarding the opening and closing of the cafeteria. The Works Council sued in Munich’ Labor Court to reopen the canteen. RFE’s European Director Erik Hazelhoff had to appear in court but could not give the reasons for the cafeteria’s closure on “security grounds.” RFE's cafeteria was reopened on December 17, 1959.
Radio Free Europe was now in a serious quandary as the covert RFE-CIA connection could not be admitted publicly. Also, a total of five Bavarian government agencies and the U.S. Army Southern Command told the press that they had not heard of the matter, before the court hearing.
Radio Free Europe was now in a serious quandary as the covert RFE-CIA connection could not be admitted publicly. Also, a total of five Bavarian government agencies and the U.S. Army Southern Command told the press that they had not heard of the matter, before the court hearing.
Archibald S. Alexander, president of RFE's parent organization the Free Europe Committee, submitted a long report to the Board of Directors in December 1959, in which he wrote,
It was agreed between the Executive Committee and me that the matter should be handled in Munich by having Erik Hazelhoff, the European Director, go to the German authorities. It was understood at the time and still appears to be the case that the plot had been discovered when Jaroslav Nemec had sought to induce at least one employee to insert the substance, which he provided, into the salt shakers It turned out that the employee was and had for some time been working for the U.S. Army intelligence.
It is unfortunate that some of the news versions of this event may have cast doubt in the minds of readers or listeners as to whether there really had been this serious attempt upon the lives or health of RFE employees by Communist agents. There could have been some doubt as to whether the whole thing was not an attempted propaganda stunt by RFE.
An abridged copy of the report was sent to Free Europe Committee members, with information copies to Regional Directors of the Crusade for Freedom.
Although the Army Southern Command had at first publicly denied knowledge of the plot, on December 18, 1959, Headquarters U.S. Army Europe, in Heidelberg, Germany, issued a press statement that continued to distort the truth:
During its normal security operations in Germany, Army counter-intelligence agents discovered a plot to poison workers at RFE in Munich and passed this information immediately to RFE as a matter of urgent concern. The German Ministry of Justice was also informed by the U.S. Army.
The Army counter-intelligence investigation shows that Jaroslav Nemec. a vice consul at the Czech Consulate in Salzburg. Austria on November 16 gave a communist agent salt shakers containing atropine for placement in the RFE cafeteria in Munich.
The agent was told that the shakers contained a 'mild laxative.’ Clinical analysis, however, proved that they contained atropine in sufficient quantities to cause serious illness the degree of which would depend upon the age and physical condition of the individual and the amount of 'salt' consumed.
The New York Times published a special report on December 17, 1969, in which the journalist wrote, “The amount of poison in each salt shaker was said to be 2.36 per cent by weight of the contents. Atropine is a white crystalline alkaloid indistinguishable from salt. (Medical sources in New York doubted the amount cited was enough to kill, but said it probably could cause serious illness.)"
The United States government directly, or indirectly, contacted the Austrian government, and Major Nemec was declared persona non grata. The Austrian government issued an arrest warrant for Major Jaroslav Nemec. The Chief of the Czech intelligence station in Vienna, General Bohumil Molnar drove to Salzburg to warn Nemec of the arrest warrant. When Molnar finally found Nemec drunk in a ski resort town in the Austrian Alps, he put him into the trunk of his car and secretly drove him across the Austrian border to Czechoslovakia.
Time magazine ran a story in its December 28, 1959 issued entitled “In the Salt”, which, in part, read: “To counter skepticism, the U.S. State Department stepped in to confirm "a nefarious plot," and U.S. Army Headquarters in Heidelberg reported that its counter-intelligence agents had discovered the guilty Communist, one Jaroslav Nemec, who works in the Czechoslovak consulate at Salzburg, Austria”.
The story also was covered in newspapers in the United States. For example, the press agency UPI distributed an article entitled "Red Diplomat Named As Radio Poison Plotter" and quoted from the U.S. Army reports.
Former CIA officer Ted Shackley has written in his book Spymaster: My Life in the CIA:
It was May 1959, and the Czech intelligence service, popularly referred to in the media as the StB, was doing its best to penetrate and neutralize Radio Free Europe (RFE). Having just become head of the Czech unit, I therefore encouraged the officers working on Czech operations in Munich to dangle one or more RFE employees in areas where StB agents were known to be lurking in the hope that they would take the bait and recruit one of our offerings.
One of RFE's Czech staffers was selected as the dangle. We briefed him to be outspoken in his dissatisfaction with his working conditions and in his desire to return home at some point in the future. Then, we sent him on holiday to Salzburg, Austria, a city within easy range of RFE's Munich headquarters and one of the StB's happy hunting grounds. He had not been there long when, in one of the Weinschenken, he met a congenial soul who in time introduced him to a new circle of drinking buddies, one of whom turned out to be Jaroslav Nemec, an StB officer stationed in Salzburg under diplomatic cover. Nemec offered our man a chance to earn his passage home. Our man agreed with a show of reluctance, and we had our double agent.
At one of his Salzburg meetings with our double agent, Nemec gave him a saltshaker that the agent had previously taken from the RFE cafeteria at Nemec's request. Nemec told the agent to take the saltshaker back into the RFE cafeteria. When the agent showed his CIA case officer the shaker, it had a white substance in it that looked like salt. We had the substance analyzed and were told it was atropine. A derivative of belladonna, atropine has legitimate medical uses. Ophthalmologists use it to dilate the pupil of the eye, but when taken internally in a large dose, it is a poison. In the concentration in which the Czechs had prepared it, it was not a deadly poison, only a strong laxative, but it was certainly enough to make people sick.
Ladislav Bittman, another Czechoslovak intelligence officer, who defected and wrote many books and articles afterwards, claims in his book The Deception Game: Czechoslovak Intelligence in Soviet Political Warfare that the salt-shaker affair was:
- A kind of scatological “practical joke” designed “mainly to amuse themselves,”
- Create an atmosphere of fear among RFE employees. (pp. 11-12)
Case Closed
On January 15, 1960, the Public Prosecutor's office in Munich announced that the investigation was discontinued because there was no evidence of a crime: "The atropine found in two saltshakers ... was not enough to cause serious harm to anyone." And, "The salt contained 1.31 percent atropine which meant that a man using it, for instance, to salt his soup would not consume enough atropine to kill him or even seriously hinder his bodily functions. Legally, therefore, the case was only one of investigation to cause high bodily harm, and this offence was not punishable."
On January 15, 1960, the Public Prosecutor's office in Munich announced that the investigation was discontinued because there was no evidence of a crime: "The atropine found in two saltshakers ... was not enough to cause serious harm to anyone." And, "The salt contained 1.31 percent atropine which meant that a man using it, for instance, to salt his soup would not consume enough atropine to kill him or even seriously hinder his bodily functions. Legally, therefore, the case was only one of investigation to cause high bodily harm, and this offence was not punishable."
Was there was a real attempt to poison RFE's staff, or a provocation on part of the StB to terrorise and intimidate them? Was this a successful CIA double-agent operation against the StB, or a successful CIA campaign against the StB involving Josef Frolik, the U.S. Senate, CIA, RFE, and U.S. Army? The record is not clear to this day; probably the truth is a combination of all the possibilities one can imagine in Munich’s Wilderness of Mirrors.
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