Book Review: The Prague Spring
By Bill Rapp/Coffeetown Press
Reviewed by Kenneth Dekleva
The Reviewer — Dr. Kenneth Dekleva served as a Regional Medical Officer/Psychiatrist with the U.S. Dept. of State from 2002-2016 and is currently the CEO of Blackwood Advisory Solutions LLC and Professor of Psychiatry, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX. He is also the author of The Negotiator’s Cross, The Last Violinist, and The Russian Diplomat’s Wife, and a new upcoming novel, The Expediter. The views expressed are entirely his own and do not represent the views of the U.S. Government, the U.S. Dept. of State, or UT Southwestern Medical Center.
REVIEW: Bill Rapp is a highly regarded former senior CIA official, diplomat, academic historian, and author. His most recent spy novel, The Prague Spring, is the latest in his thrilling ‘Cold War’ series, with Karl Baier, a CIA station chief, as the main protagonist. But like some of his earlier novels, set in Europe, this latest one takes place in Prague during 1968, when the Czechoslovak government, under its leader Alexander Dubček, had begun to relax social, cultural, and economic controls during the ‘Prague Spring,’ highlighting its ‘socialism with a human face.’ But as always, the Soviet Union, and its leadership, military, and intelligence services (as well as those of its fraternal Warsaw Pact countries) are never far away, and always eerily present.
Walking in Prague today (I have been there many times for diplomatic work and other trips), it’s all too easy for Rapp’s readers to forget the Cold War and its cruelty. Bill Rapp knows of such things. He knows what happened in Prague in August 1968, when the Soviet tanks rolled in, crushing the short-lived Prague Spring. Walking today, one can see the Hradčany castle, in which the feared Czechoslovak secret police – the STB – did its dirty work. From there one can see Wenceslas Square, where in 1969 a young Czech martyr doused himself with gasoline and immolated himself to protest the occupation. Prague’s softness, colors and scents of spring, and forlorn quality of democratic stirrings had lasted but a few weeks. The border had closed like a vise-grip, and – in Churchill’s words - an iron curtain once again descended upon the land. The border was not to be trifled with. It had walls, guards with shoot-to-kill orders, mines, dogs, searchlights, and barbed-wire. Later, it evolved into a world of espionage and counterespionage, of double agents (such as Karl Koecher) and defectors (Ladislav Bittman) --- all forgotten now and relegated to dusty historical archives.
Rapp’s novel begins with Karl Baier, now serving as station chief in Prague, where he and his officers must recruit local agents, in an espionage cat and mouse game, as they attempt to obtain intelligence regarding the Czechoslovak government’s intentions with respect to the Prague Spring, and those of its ‘big brother,’ the Soviet Union. These events happen under the nose of the Czechoslovak secret service, the notorious STB, and its partner ‘fraternal’ services, such as the KGB, GRU, and East Germany’s HVA and Stasi.
The first part of the novel begins in 1948, during Karl Baier’s first assignment in Prague, during the time of the Communist post-war takeover (aided by the USSR), and his recruitment and exfiltration of a young Czech diplomat, and another agent, who are not all they appear to be. Rapp captures the tradecraft, psychological tension, and fear of betrayal in these chapters very well.
Baier returns to Prague in 1968, where he reunites with the same diplomat (now in a new role) whom he had helped to exfiltrate in 1948. This part of the story introduces another character, an East German Stasi officer, who is one of the book’s most intriguing persons, a former aristocrat turned Communist spy, whom Baier knows from earlier times in Berlin, Budapest, and Vienna. There is more intrigue, the murder of a recruited Czech agent, the harassment and beating of two CIA officers, and a missing letter.
The plot continues with further diplomatic intrigue, as Baier attempts to ascertain exactly what the Soviet response to Prague Spring might be, and how to recruit agents with access to such information. And his Stasi counterpart remains a formidable adversary, meeting with liaison partners in Prague and with a recruited agent in Vienna, the latter event taking place in the lovely Franziskaner Kirche. Adding the setting of Vienna – the city of spies during the Cold War and even today! – lends a nice touch to Rapp’s novel.
The plot gets more propulsive, as Baier’s officers attempt to gather intelligence regarding diplomatic meetings between the Czechoslovak government and the Kremlin, after which a CIA officer, and then Baier, are kidnapped by the GRU. It all ends with the Soviet denouement, and later in the novel, with more defections, betrayals, deaths, and ambiguity. Baier no longer knows whom he can trust. Rapp wonderfully captures the uncertainty and ambiguity of intelligence work in such Cold War settings, and its odd, cruel, psychology, where trust, success, ‘winning,’ and ‘losing’ are all rather challenging concepts to define.
Overall, Bill Rapp’s novel about Prague, and its short-lived experiment with socialist democratic principles, is a most worthy read. Of course, the reader, unlike Karl Baier, knows the outcome. The Cold War was cruel and moral; we had to win, but victory was pyrrhic. It brought other, newer challenges – the ‘global war against terror’ – and other moral dilemmas, of eavesdropping, torture, harsh interrogation, assassination, and pre-emptive war. And today, a resumption of ‘great power’ conflict, with different adversaries, alliances, and liaison partners. Karl Baier would understand this world too, as he did during the Cold War. The same is true for Bill Rapp, whose enjoyable thriller ends fittingly with a meeting in Vienna, in a small church pew. Vienna is a good starting point for a sequel, that’s what Karl Baier would say.
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