Photo: Ian Willoughby, Radio Prague International
US journalist Mark Baker spent time in Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s and was long curious whether the Communist state’s secret police kept a file on him. Eventually he did discover that not only was he being monitored in the dying days of the Cold War – the StB also wanted to recruit him as a spy. Baker, who in 2021 published the memoir Čas proměn (Times of Change), has just begun sharing this story – filled with eye-popping details – in a series of blog posts.
In the late 1980s you lived in Vienna but you also covered Czechoslovakia for a magazine called Business International and visited the country many times. Later, after 1989, it seemed from your enquiries that the StB didn’t keep a file on you. More recently it turned out that they did. How did you finally discover that?
“As you said, in the 1980s I was working as a journalist and travelling relatively frequently to Czechoslovakia.
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Author: Ian Willoughby