Secrets from the 'Prague Spring'

Among the thousands of Czechoslovak intellectuals, politicians and statesmen who fled their native land in the wake of the 1968 Soviet invasion, few managed to get out with much more than a few personal papers in their pitifully skimpy baggage. Like most refugees from Communist dictatorships, the information they carried with them was confined to what could be conveniently stored in the human memory.

Not so Karel Kaplan. A former Communist ideologue in Czechoslovakia who blossomed as a party liberal during the short-lived "Prague spring" of 1968, Kaplan has assembled in West Germany what he says is a vast compendium of documents relating to the turbulent history of Czechoslovakia in the past three decades.

Squirreled away in a two-room Munich apartment, Kaplan's cache has piqued the curiosity of Western intelligence officers and historians. Kaplan claims to have retrieved from Czechoslovakia 14,000 pages of personal notes, photocopies and microfilms of documents, many of them sensitive and some, he says, highly explosive.

Kaplan has shown outsiders only tantalizing bits of his collection, and his claims about its contents are so far unconfirmed by independent experts. But Western intelligence officers who have interviewed him confirm that he once had access to the sort of sensitive Communist Party and secret-police archives he says are now in his possession.

Articles based on some of Kaplan's documents are scheduled to appear in forthcoming issues of the Italian magazine Panorama. The Hoover Institution in Stanford, Calif., is trying to bring Kaplan and his cache to the U.S.

Kaplan, 50, a square-built, methodical man with a crew cut, left Czechoslovakia last September after a checkered career in his country's politics. A lifelong Communist, he was appointed to head the party's Culture and Propaganda Committee in Bohemia only a year after the 1948 Communist coup d'etat toppled Prague's last democratic government. Although he served as an agitprop official throughout the Stalinist terror, he later became an active supporter within the party of its leading liberal, Alexander Dubcek. It was during Dubcek's brief tenure as party chief that Kaplan began his career as sort of closet archivist of the previous regimes.

In 1968 Kaplan received an appointment as research director of the Committee for the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Trials, which had been established by Dubcek to investigate the repressive practices of the Stalinist period. In this job, Kaplan had the opportunity to examine and, presumably, to copy documents on a wide range of subjects.

Kaplan says his trove includes evidence of pre-1948 Communist conspiracies, plus 30 years of secret documentation from the archives of the Czechoslovak Politburo, the party central committee, the state planning commission, the trade unions and the secret police. Kaplan also had access to memorandums detailing Prague party leaders' discussions with Joseph Stalin and the Czechoslovak party's instructions from Moscow, notably in connection with the celebrated 1952 show trial of Party Chief Rudolf Slansky and other high-level officials. Among the items in Kaplan's cache, according to Kaplan:

> Documentation of a plan conceived in 1952 by Stalin for a possible future invasion of Western Europe. KapIan asserts that Stalin ordered a shift from defensive to offensive military strategy, thus preparing the Soviet armed forces for a European invasion.

> Notes Kaplan took from the interrogation records of the late U.S. diplomat Noel Field by the Czechoslovak secret police. Widely suspected of having been a Soviet secret agent, Field apparently ran afoul of his Communist employers. He was arrested in Prague in 1949 and disappeared for eight years behind the bars of various East European prisons. His wife, brother and foster daughter were also arrested while trying to penetrate the celebrated mystery of his disappearance. During his interrogation he was closely questioned about his relations with a State Department colleague, Alger Hiss. Kaplan has also claimed that Czech intelligence documents described Julius Rosenberg, who was executed (along with his wife Ethel) for spying in 1953, as "our agent."

> Details relating to the 1948 death of democratic Czechoslovakia's last Foreign Minister, Jan Masaryk. Back then, the Communists insisted that Masaryk had committed suicide. Presumably, Kaplan's documents would further substantiate the evidence released under Dubcek that Masaryk did not jump but was pushed out the bathroom window of his third-floor ministerial apartment in Prague's Czernin Palace. Masaryk's murder, according to former Foreign Ministry employees, was planned by both Czechoslovak and Soviet security agencies.

> Dramatic documents describing threats and other pressure leveled against Dubcek by Soviet leaders at meetings in Cierna and Kiev before and after the Soviet invasion in 1968. These are followed by notes concerning Dubcek's brief stay in prison and his enforced trip to Moscow after his downfall, when he was drugged and tortured.

Kaplan himself was arrested and was held for three months in Prague's Ruzyn prison for "antistate activities." He was then released without trial. "They thought they had got everything out of me," he told TIME'S Bonn bureau chief William Mader last week. Expelled from the Communist Party, Kaplan had been able to find work only as a laborer in a tire factory. Last year, Kaplan says, he wrote to an old friend, the Czechoslovak Minister of the Interior, Jaromir Obzina, asking for permission to go abroad. Permission was granted, and Kaplan soon left the country --empty-handed, he insists.

How Kaplan got his vast collection of documents to the West is a matter of conjecture, as well as a cause for skepticism. Kaplan will say only that "I got it all out to Munich after I had left. I thought they might become useful." Smiling mysteriously, he adds: "And there is more coming; the channel still operates."

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