The Czechs

Soon after the coup d’état in February 1948 that brought the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC) into power, the government granted the security services—civilian and military—unlimited freedom of action against any target, with no regard for the rule of law. The StB (Statni bezpecnost, the civilian state security apparatus) was especially cunning in adapting and combining the techniques of Nazi Germany’s Gestapo and the Soviet Union's special services in the struggle against the StB’s primary targets: Americans and their Czech associates. 

The StB embraced the view of its Soviet teachers that its mission was not merely to identify and neutralize existing opponents to the new order through routine investigative methods. Instead, the StB adopted a more proactive method: It created fictitious resistance organizations, dangled them as bait, and waited for potential new resisters—in addition to those already active—to be drawn to them.

Soviet special services introduced this approach to counterintelligence in postwar Eastern Europe with frightening success. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Wolnosc i Niezawislosc (WiN)—a Soviet and Polish Communist security (Urzad bezpieczenstwa [UB]) joint operation—identified an underground organization, took it over, built it up, and used it to gain significant US, British, and Polish émigré support. They ran this fictitious scheme to discourage domestic resistance and to gain Western cash and intelligence technology. The ruse ended in December 1952, when the communists publicly declared themselves to be the creators and managers of WiN. 1