The Foreign Service Journal, January 2006

88 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 6 R EFLECTIONS The Mystery of the Hidden Files B Y K IMBERLY K RHOUNEK Rarely does a Foreign Service offi- cer come across a genuine Cold War mystery. But one damp, cold day in December 2004, my colleagues and I stumbled across a decades-old secret, hidden within the embassy itself. It all began when the political-eco- nomic section of Embassy Prague took on the task of cleaning out and reorganizing our five bulging office safes. Shortly after Christmas, while all was quiet on the Washington front, several of us dressed in our oldest jeans and took on the herculean task. Once we got into the swing of things, the fun of discovery began. My personal favorites were the bio- graphic files, with pages of newspaper clippings and memos of secret meet- ings with dissidents. These were a treasure trove of memorabilia for the hard-core Cold Warrior, with dozens of files on long-dead Communist leaders, each of which seemed to come with an obligatory 5”x7” black- and-white photo of a jowly, serious, middle-aged functionary with thick, dark eyeglasses. We salvaged the photos and later had an excellent game of “To Tell the Truth” with our FSN employees, who took great relish in identifying the photos of our com- munist-era gallery, pointing out those who ended as crooks, died in prison or were airbrushed out of history. Our files provided a fascinating worm’s-eye view of the amazing trans- formation of the former Warsaw Pact countries. Imagine, if you will, a file on one of the Czech Republic’s citi- zens, Vaclav Havel, that began, “Vaclav Havel, an unemployed play- wright…” and ended with “President of the Czech Republic” (a country that did not exist prior to 1993). We finally came to the bottom drawer of our last safe, and to our sur- prise, it revealed a stack of decades- old legal documents written in Czech. There was no letter or memo in the files explaining what they were, or how they ended up in our safe. Puzzled, we launched our own inves- tigation. A historian at the Czech National Archives later confirmed that we were in possession of some 283 original court case files from the 1940s and 1950s from the Olomouc region in the eastern part of the Czech Republic. The files were marked with a red “P” for “political” and dealt with cases of political persecution relating to illegal border crossings, opposition to collec- tivization of land, and punishments for those who made derogatory state- ments against the communist regime or listened to “Voice of America.” The Czech archivists were stunned and thrilled by the discovery of our documents. In 1971 the Justice Ministry had ordered the destruction of all political case files from the 1940s and 1950s, so it appears that our small cache is one of the few to have escaped the purge. We can only assume that some brave Czech took the considerable risk of bringing the files to the embassy for safekeeping. We are proud to say that we fulfilled our task, although we kept them so safely that their very existence had passed out of our collective memory. In June 2005, following approval by the department and amid much press fanfare, Ambassador William Cabaniss hand-delivered our formerly hidden treasures to the eager staff at the Czech National Archives. Not only do they provide a fascinating insight into a period of lost history, but some have relevance even today for families seeking restitution for com- munist-era abuses. Still, how these documents got to the embassy remains a mystery. No Czechs have come forward since the press announcement to claim the credit for saving the files from destruction; perhaps they are long since dead or emigrated. Our hope is that one of our embassy predecessors will remember this incident and can describe the day a mysterious donor arrived on our doorstep. Only then can we close the book on the “Mys- tery of the Hidden Files.” n Kimberly Krhounek is a political offi- cer who joined the Foreign Service in 1994. She has served in Haiti, Prague (where she is currently on her second tour), the Sinai Desert, the U.S. mission to the United Nations and Washington. The stamp is courtesy of the AAFSW Bookfair “Stamp Corner.”