Spolková zpravodajská služba a pražské jaro 1968

338
Dokumente des Bundesnachrichtendienstes zum Prager Frühling 1968
V. Summary
Following the documentations issued by
the “BND History“ research and task group
about the uprising in East Germany in 1953
(Volume No. 6), the closure of sectors in
Berlin in 1961 (No. 1) and the Cuba crisis in
1962 (No. 3), this writing also deals with a
Cold War conflict of outstanding geopolitical
importance.
This documentation’s focus is on the
“Prague Spring“ and the role of the
Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND): the developments
in Czechoslovakia in 1968,
the attempt made by the party leadership
under Alexander Dubček (1921 – 1992) to
introduce “socialism with a human face“,
and the violent defeat of this attempt at
reform by the Soviet Union and other Warsaw
Pact states.
This documentation follows the pattern of
previous publications: the focus is on providing
relevant contemporary documents
from the BND archive. The source materials
are published in the form of colored
facsimiles. The selection and compilation
was done by way of example in order to
provide an outline of the in-house discourse
on the topic.
In recognition of the special cooperation
between BND and ÚZSI historians, the text
versions of this edition are in both English
and Czech.
This ninth edition is a novelty insofar as it
was not planned and authored by the BND
historians alone: historians of the Czech
Republic’s civilian foreign secret service,
Úřad pro zahraniční styky a in-formace
(ÚZSI), were also involved in preparing this
documentation on the role of West Germany’s
foreign intelligence service in the
”Prague Spring“. The ÚZSI historians contributed
a piece on the BND’s role in the
“Prague Spring“, from the perspective of
the Czechoslovakian secret service of the
1960s/1970s, which is based on relevant
files in the service’s possession. It was the
first time that historians and archivists of
two intelligence agencies cooperated on
one project, giving their respective views
of the subject on the basis of the original
documents - a new approach to cooperation
between two European intelligence
services on a partnership basis.
MFGBND 9/2016