Pepa left Czechoslovakia before I did.
His father had gone to the United States before the war, originally expecting the stay to be temporary. The war prevented him from returning. He eventually remarried there and had another family. Pepa grew up in Prague with his mother.
His mother was strong-willed and bitter that the West had taken her husband. For a long time I assumed she was a committed Communist, partly because of a man I believed at the time was a secret policeman, and partly because of that bitterness about the West. When she visited the United States in 1968, she was surprised by how nice it was here and by the abundance of goods in the stores. I do not remember her ever defending Communist government repression. More recently, after reading her file and seeing that the authorities themselves had characterized her as materialistic, or capitalist, I mentioned to Pepa that I had always thought she was a Communist. He corrected me. She was not.
Pepa’s father eventually helped make it possible for Pepa to leave. Pepa went to the United States in July 1965, first to Lehigh and later to MIT.
I did not tell Pepa that I was planning to escape from Czechoslovakia myself.
It was not until about 1975 or 1976 that he told me what had happened before he left.
According to Pepa, he had been recruited in Prague by a military intelligence organization. I remember him describing it as “GRU or something,” but I do not know the exact organization and I will not give it a name now as though I had established it.
The officer he dealt with was called Juran. Pepa remembered him as having a Russian accent.
Pepa told me that the training went on for about six months and included weekends outside Prague. He was shown a briefcase with a false bottom. He was offered a Shell-type road map, five hundred dollars, and instructions connected with photographing missile sites in the United States, but he either refused them or never actually took them. They also wanted him to learn how to make microdots. He asked whether he would actually have to use the technique. They told him yes, so he said no.
His intention, he told me, was never to do it. He planned to cooperate enough to get out of Czechoslovakia and then refuse.
The Communist Czechoslovak government had given Pepa permission to remain outside the country for one year, one school year. When he decided to stay on at MIT after Lehigh, he needed that permission extended, which meant dealing with the Czechoslovak embassy or consulate. I no longer remember whether this was Washington or New York. An attaché there asked him for a report for Juran.
Pepa wrote a message, sealed it, and said in it that he had never intended to spy and wanted to be released from the arrangement.
That did not end it immediately.
Later Juran came to Pepa’s apartment on Beacon Hill with a younger man. By then Roberta was Pepa’s girlfriend. Pepa took the two men to a restaurant, since he did not want to discuss the matter in front of Roberta, even though the three of them would have been speaking Czech.
He told them that he would not work for them, but that he would not work against them either. He could have called the FBI, he said, but he preferred to keep the relationship friendly and simply be left alone.
According to Pepa, that ended the contact for the time being.
Years later, when Pepa made his first return to Czechoslovakia, around 1975 or 1976, Juran met him again and tested whether he could still be recruited. Pepa treated it lightly. He always described himself as apolitical and said he was not going to be pulled into either side.
A month or two after Pepa returned to the United States from that trip, I happened to stop at my gas station with my girlfriend. I was not working at the time because my leg was in a cast from a tennis injury to my ankle.
An FBI agent was there waiting.
At first the agent said Pepa was applying for some kind of sensitive government job and that he was doing a security check. I laughed. I knew Pepa well enough to know that story made no sense.
The questions shifted to Pepa’s trip to Czechoslovakia, and I understood right away that they already knew about him being recruited as a spy. I told the agent what Pepa had told me about Juran and the intelligence recruitment.
The agent asked why I had never reported it.
I told him that I did not believe Pepa had actually spied for anybody. Given my own family history, if I had believed for a moment that Pepa was doing that kind of work, I would have reported it. But that was not the Pepa I knew. He was interested in architecture and women, not politics.
The agent told me that he had originally come from Poland and spoke Polish. Later Milan and I joked that the FBI had been clever enough to send somebody who might understand us if we started saying something bad about him in Czech.
Pepa later told me that about a week after that, the FBI told him to come to their headquarters. He went and told them everything. They asked him why he had not come to the FBI as soon as he had arrived in the United States. His explanation was pure Pepa. If he had gone to the FBI immediately, he said, they would have tried to turn him into a double agent. He did not want to work for the Czechoslovaks and he did not want to work for the Americans either.
Pepa also told me that the FBI said he was lucky Juran had been older and senior. The way Pepa told it, the FBI said that with a younger or less experienced operative, he could have been killed — meaning during that encounter at Beacon Hill, after he had already sent his refusal letter and still would not change his mind when Juran and the younger man came to see him. I did not hear the FBI say that myself. Pepa told me that the FBI had told him this.
On a later trip to Prague, Pepa said Juran met him again and Pepa joked that there was no point trying to recruit him now because he was an exposed spy.
Many years later I found something in an StB file concerning Pepa’s mother that made the old story more interesting. The material connected Juran with the General Staff and described an operational interest involving Pepa’s father and possible future recruitment.
My interpretation was that if Pepa had actually delivered photographs of missile sites, the intelligence service might then have had something that could be used to compromise or pressure his father. That is my interpretation of the material. I have not found a document that states that mechanism in those words.
I gave the file to Pepa.
What pleased him most was that the file gave him evidence that although he had agreed to spy for them to get himself out of Czechoslovakia, he had actually never spied for them. I did not press him on my interpretation about his father.
I had known Pepa since I was fourteen. I knew the tutor who saved my ninth-grade year, the architect, the man who abandoned me for a girlfriend in Litomyšl, the man who could talk his way out of a room with two tattooed boyfriends, and the friend who had taught me more than almost anyone else.
The intelligence story was another Pepa story I learned long after the fact.
And it was still Pepa: he had found a way to say yes while planning to do no such thing.