The following is a contribution from Novak Vučo and Vladimir Petrović to JiC’s ongoing symposium on Mark Drumbl and Barbora Holá’s new book, Informers up Close. Vladimir is a Research Professor at Institute for Contemporary History Belgrade and a researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Amsterdam. Novak is a prosecuting attorney from Belgrade, Serbia, specializing in war crimes. To see all of the other submissions to the symposium, click here.

Writing about secret service surveillance operations has always been popular. However, writing sensibly on this topic is incredibly difficult. Accordingly, books from which we can actually learn something about it are rather rare. There are many reasons for that. The modus operandi of these organizations is soaked in secrecy, mystery, obfuscation, and disinformation. Hence, it is no wonder that established academics rarely venture into such a sticky domain. The result is that this field is sadly almost entirely abandoned to popular accounts of questionable accuracy, as well as populated by authorized and semi-authorized publications by those same services or their proxies and admirers. If only for this reason, Mark Drumbl and Barbora Holá’s book should be highly praised, as it rests on solid academic ground and aims at shedding light into this dark corner of our reality.  

In our view, the authors succeeded in their effort for several reasons. Firstly, they are both experienced in the realm of international criminal law in general, and criminology in particular, but they are also well-versed in the promises and pitfalls of transitional justice mechanisms in various contexts around the world. Secondly, they decided to zoom into only one such organization, namely, the political police of Communist Czechoslovakia. Thirdly, they delved into only one crucial aspect of its activity: the interaction with the citizenry in order to obtain information. Spying on elements of society deemed unreliable was pervasive all over the Eastern Bloc and created an entire, massive subgroup in society – the informers. Drumbl and Holá unwind how this dynamic played out in postwar Czechoslovakia. What was the scope of the surveillance and its societal impact?

The authors provide a valuable overview of organization of repression in socialist Czechoslovakia, beginning with a special focus on 1948-1956. This ’Period of Stalinization’ was formative for the institutional culture of its robust security apparatus. Evolving under the watchful Soviet gaze, this system was generally set to provide total control over the population by extracting information considered to be valuable for the regime protection. At its center was the secret police, State Security (Státní bezpečnost – StB). Modeled according to its Cheka/NKVD precursor, the StB was also supposed to act as the Communist party’s “sword and shield”. In 1955, 38% of the informers were Communist party members, and although in the mid-1960s that number dropped below 10%, there is no doubt that they provided valuable service to the all-powerful party. 

This is not an unusual development – it happened in every country which fell under Stalin’s influence after the Second World War. However, even though they came from the same mold, and were also closely intertwined, Eastern European security regimes showed some slight, albeit telling, variations. For instance, they all relied on informers, but to a different degree. 

The book reveals that Czechoslovak society had a less dense informer-handler network than most of the Warsaw Pact countries. During the 40 years of its existence, the StB recruited around 150,000 informers, and had around 18,000 full-time employees inside its ranks. The number of informers peaked in 1959 with 41,859 individuals officially registered as informers and dropped to 5,693 in 1969. During the ’70s and ’80s, the StB typically employed around 9,000 people as full-time personnel and its informer network fluctuated in size. This might sound like a lot, but it also indicates a 1:100 ratio between the security and non-security persons. Compared to 1:30 ratio of Bulgaria’s DB and especially to an unmatchable 1:8 ratio achieved by German Democratic Republic’s Stasi, it begs the question – was StB less interested in what citizens think, or was it simply more cost-effective? 

Besides meticulous statistics, the book excavates many important questions. For instance, how does one become an informer? Drumbl and Holá shatter the myth about coercion, as they remind us that perhaps only a third of informers were forced into collaboration. Although blackmailing or bullying was not an uncommon practice, the authors paint a much more nuanced picture. They aim to explore how this system affected the daily lives of ordinary citizens in socialist Czechoslovakia, including personal relationships 

The authors examine in detail individual cases of informers coming from various social backgrounds. They trace informer recruitment, motivations, and the role they played in the security apparatus. Informer life stories are indicative not only of the StB’s work, but also of the dynamics of Czechoslovak society too. What emerges is a complex web of relations between handlers and informers, informers and their objects of scrutiny, entanglement with family members and friends.  These connections, complex enough during the reign of the Communist party, acquired a completely different tone after the Velvet Revolution and the concomitant delegitimization of the Communist experiment and discontinuation of StB, whose officers and informers became subjects of lustration. More importantly, they became a readily condemned and even despised, yet poorly understood, object of hatred. 

Drumbl and Holá aim to alter that situation, and rightly so. Long time ago, Lon Fuller singled out a problem of a Nazi-era “grudge informer” as one of the theoretically and practically trickiest problems for a legal system and society alike. Drumbl and Holá are asking whether we are any smarter or wiser today? In the aftermath of the collapse of the Communist regimes, after decades of experimenting with different modalities of transitional justice, the problem is hardly solved. In their view, “crude measures such as the ones adopted in the Czech Republic lost nuance, complexity, and context; they simultaneously underperformed and overperformed; they painted too thinly and in other ways lacquered too thickly”. They remind us that some, like Martha Minow, cautiously advocate the power of forgiveness: “In other words, perhaps informers should assumptively hover beyond the reach of transitional justice. That said, a society that does nothing about informers — a transition that completely unplugs — might trigger sentiments of injustice, emptiness, and anger.” 

Coming from exactly such a society, from the ruins of Yugoslavia, and sharing an interest in war crimes committed during its demise, we can attest to the corrosive effect of impunity. In its extreme, one criminal with a strong secret service background like Željko Ražnatović Arkan rose to become a paramilitary leader, warlord, Serbia’s MP and an undisputed boss of its underworld, all at the same time. Was he an informant, handler or an officer of powerful Yugoslav UDB? We simply do not know, as archives remain closed, and people remain silent. Deadly in war, agents and their informers might not be less dangerous in peacetime. Left unchecked, they might continue accumulating and exercising enormous para-institutional power, dictating and curbing the pace of transition, acquiring significant economic and political power. They could even ascend to the highest office, subverting democratic processes and threatening world peace, as has happened in Putin’s Russia. Whoever thinks this is an exaggeration should read Sergey Vasiliev’s contribution to this volume.

In the face of this tension. what Drumbl and Holá are proposing is a dialogue. Their “goal is to initiate a conversation oriented toward the development of mechanisms that can speak in a forthright sense about the nuance of the informer, respect the dignity of all involved, and dissipate the coercive power of those who run the newly emergent state so as to ensure inclusivity and fairness while also promoting redress for persons aggrieved by the acts of informers.” They propose to look into informers on a case-by-case basis, yet also from a normative standpoint. For example, they explore six facets of informing that could affect conversations about reconciliation and rehabilitation: harm, constraint, time, motivation, content and awareness. That would certainly take time but could also move us past the stage of blanket condemnation toward an actual exchange about the modalities of policing society through obtaining information, which is not at all just a Cold War saga; it speaks to our present concerns too. In that respect, the crucial precondition is discontinuation of political police and a transparent approach to the scope of its abuse of power. After all, informants might have contributed to those transgressions, but they were performed by handlers and their political masters. Millennia ago, Roman poet Juvenal ridiculed Plato’s ideal state guarded by the bravest, asking – yes, but who guards the guardians? How to handle the handlers, he might ask if he was among us?

Eastern Europe is an excellent laboratory in this respect. It is indeed tempting to look into the different pace of economic transition and markers of democratic backsliding to see if they correlate in any way with the intensity and thoroughness of suppression of Communist political police apparatus. The work of Lavinia Stan delivers such comparative insights, despite numerous obstacles, both linguistic, political and heuristic, which stand in the way. These heuristic challenges are one more reason which should put Drumbl and Holá’s Informers Up Close on the shelves of anybody interested in how oppressive governments function(ed). Apart from Eastern Germany, the StB was among the most thoroughly dismantled Communist political security organizations. Their rank-and-file was lustrated (or was at least slated to be); their documents seized and opened for research. Therefore, it is possible to draw scholarly conclusions which are far-reaching. 

Drumbl and Holá perform this task with commendable, even surgical, precision. This autopsy was made possible because the StB is defunct. We can see how it operated, we can marvel at its blunders, and we can reel from its cruelty. We can easily question its very raison d’être, given that it failed to do even its basic task of keeping the masters informed. What did they know about the Prague Spring or Velvet Revolution ahead of time, if anything? Such incompetence is not specific to the StB. Indeed, it seems to come with the job. The futility of intelligence labor was recently also persuasively unmasked in a book The State Enemies. Harmful Role of Secret Service by Predrag Marković. Futility does not extend solely to the KGB and its satellite services, but also arises from epic intelligence failures in the West, such as a complete misreading of the Hungarian 1956 uprising or inability to understand the meaning of 1989 until it was clear to anybody with a TV. No matter how ineffective in their core occupation, spies and secret service operatives proved very able in handling, brokering and obtaining power, influence and assets. Countries like Russia and Serbia and other places which made a point of not reforming their security apparatus demonstrate how quickly economic and political transition can be derailed toward state capture. 

Therefore, Eastern Europe is also a cautionary tale for Western societies that pride themselves in greater transparency and higher human rights standards, but they often do not live up to those expectations. The glimpses which we occasionally see, typically when something goes wrong (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo detentions, clandestine CIA prisons in Eastern Europe and so on…) look ugly. We know even less about the extent of electronic surveillance, which might have completely put traditional informers out of business. Be that as it is, operating from the shadows is hardly compatible with social contract of a democratic society which safeguards the rights of an individual. We are therefore marveling at this and looking forward to every other opportunity to investigate this phenomenon and to bring it under thorough public scrutiny.