Jindřich Suchý

* 1945

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From 1978 he worked for the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), but State Security was watching him all the time. He was sentenced twice to a total of 19 years

Jindřich Suchý, photo of the file, 1983, KR 17207 VKR
Jindřich Suchý, photo of the file, 1983, KR 17207 VKR
photo: Security Services Archive

Jindřich Suchý was born on 27 April 1945 in Mělník. He trained as a waiter. From 1964 to 1966 he was in the army in the anti-aircraft missile brigade in Prague. In 1967 he emigrated to Germany, where he disclosed everything he knew about the air defence of Prague to the Western intelligence services at the base in Oberursel. For the next three years he remained in the West as an asylum seeker. In 1970 he was arrested at the Yugoslav border and returned to the Czechoslovakia. Here he again made a living as a waiter. In 1975 he was sentenced to three years for so-called distorting the currency economy, and was released on parole in 1977. From April 1978 he worked at the Merkur Hotel in Česká Lípa, where many members of the Soviet army used to go. On 11 July 1978, Jindřich Suchý visited the West German embassy in East Berlin. He contacted the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) and worked intensively with them for the next year. All the time, however, he was being followed by Czechoslovak State Security and in 1979 he was arrested and sentenced to ten years imprisonment for espionage. He served his sentence in Valdice. In 1982, he wrote a letter from prison to the President of the Republic in which he revealed that he had disclosed secret information from his military service in 1967. However, he did not receive another sentence. In February 1984, Suchý attempted to inform the BND of his situation in a several-page letter through a released fellow prisoner, but the letter was intercepted by State Security. In October 1984, Jindřich Suchý was sentenced to a further nine years in prison. He was released in January 1990. After about a week at liberty, he was visited by a group of secret police officers, so he decided to go to the Federal Republic of Germany as a precaution, where he remained until 1993. Only then did he return to the Czech Republic.