By Greg Rushford

I visited Prague last month, looking for insights into Russian and Chinese intelligence strategies in this important capital city in central Europe. As it turned out, the Czech Republic’s principal counterintelligence agency — the Security Information Service, better known by its acronym BIS — made it easy. On December 3, 2018, the BIS released its latest annual public report on secret foreign influence operations that had targeted the Czech Republic. 

Unsurprisingly, the BIS spooks pointed their fingers in a familiar direction: various Russian “active measures” aimed at advancing Vladimir Putin’s foreign agenda of disruption; and espionage operations emanating from Xi Jinping’s Beijing. Well-informed observers were quick to commend the BIS for its professionalism in releasing such an apolitical, fact-based report. “Compared to most of the security institutions in Central Europe,” noted the respected Prague-based European Values Think Tank, the BIS “managed to describe Russian and Chinese intelligence activities in the Czech Republic in a remarkable detail.” 

But that certainly would be news to the overwhelming majority of Americans. As usual, the major cable television channels where a majority of Americans get their news, very little of which is foreign — Fox, MSNBC, CNN — had nothing. Even the New York Times, which prides itself as the gold standard for foreign news reporting, ran only a skimpy Associated Press filler that consisted of just seven sparse sentences. That wire service said that the BIS had uncovered a Russian cyber-espionage operation that had targeted the Czech foreign ministry. There was no mention that BIS had also identified Chinese important espionage operations in the Czech Republic. There was scant mention of why the story was an important one — a core journalistic principle that is taught at the high-school level. 

This is not surprising. Even the best American editors are prone to downplay any story that wouldn’t immediately be perceived by readers in the heartland as relevant to their daily lives.  Why should people in Peoria care about what happens in Prague? 

As it happens, there are ample reasons. Those reasons begin with an appreciation of history — and the consequences of being ill-informed about disturbing trends in global politics. Furthermore, reading current political news from Prague helps provide valuable context that offers opportunities for further reflection on the chaotic current political environment in the United States. 

But that’s getting ahead of the story, which begins with a brief overview of ongoing security threats at the behest of the Russians and Chinese that the Czech intelligence service has exposed.

Familiar Russian and Chinese Mischief

Moscow-directed influence and disinformation operations against the Czech Republic, the BIS reported, “were a part of the general Russian” strategy of weakening the vital NATO alliance and the European Union internally. Perhaps the most disturbing detail in the report: The Czech ministry of foreign affairs was targeted by a brazen Russian cyber-espionage campaign that began in 2016 and was detected the next year. By then, the Russian intelligence operatives had hacked into more than 150 diplomatic electronic mailboxes, including those of the Czech foreign minister. To experienced observers, such operations have a familiar, if brazen, ring. Moscow’s traditional subversive “active measures” of covert dirty tricks have long been aimed at weakening the institutions that sustain and protect liberal democracies. 

By contrast, the BIS reported that the Chinese have been focusing on the classic espionage business of stealing secrets. The Czech counterintelligence officials said they had “identified a worrying development in the area of Chinese activities…that as a whole pose a threat to the Czech Republic in the field of economic, scientific and technical espionage.” Toward that end, the BIS noted that China “has almost unlimited funds at its disposal and is able to offer these funds to foreign companies in exchange for access to intellectual property or entry to foreign markets.” 

It doesn’t take much reflection to see why American readers should find the BIS findings relevant. As the Czech Republic is an important member of the NATO alliance, any attempts to weaken that country are also of national security concern to the United States. More specifically, even the most casual consumers of news would recognize that the Russians have also been running similar cyber-espionage operations in the United States. And the reports of the Chinese spying aimed at stealing valuable intellectual property mirror news of Beijing’s economic espionage activities that also target the United States. 

Two Presidents: One Mentality

But while the BIS report was important for its insights into foreign intelligence operations, reading it offers a stark reminder of the (disturbing) similarities between current political trends in both the Czech Republic and the United States.  Specifically, Americans who read about Czech President Milos Zeman cannot help but reflect upon U.S. President Donald Trump and his America First agenda.

Zeman is called the European Trump, and for good reason. And his reaction to the BIS disclosures about his friends in Moscow and Beijing was, well, Trumplike, which I’ll explain shortly. But for context, consider how much alike the two presidents are.

For context, consider this recent report about Zeman in Politico: “He’s a septuagenarian who dislikes Muslims, the media and migrants and loves Vladimir Putin,” reporter Siegfried Mortkowitz noted. “He’s detested by urban dwellers and liberal elites who see him as a national embarrassment and a menace to values they hold dear.” 

Other European analysts have noted how Zeman’s supporters outside the major cities are hardly bothered by his tendency to speak crudely, as they also tend to speak the same language of resentment. Zeman, who was elected to a second term in January 2018, is also loathe to apologize for anything, preferring instead to double down in the face of protests from the detested elites. 

Surely, every American — no matter his or her political persuasion — who has read this far would have already been reminded of Donald Trump. 

The parallels between the two presidents are simply impossible to ignore, beginning with their attitude toward a free press.

Chafing at a free press

Trump has invested considerable political energy in trying to discredit the so-called purveyors of “fake news.” He has famously branding the media as the “enemy of the people” — with no apologies for the fact that using such language puts him in some very distasteful historical company indeed.

Zeman also chafes at his country’s free press, once joking about “liquidating” journalists with Vladimir Putin, a man with expertise on that subject. And in October last year, Zeman reacted to the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul this way: “I love journalists, that’s why I may organize a special banquet for them this evening at the Saudi embassy.” 

[Anyone who doubts that the Czech Republic has a free press would profit from visiting Czech Press Photo 2018, which is now on display in Prague’s Old Town Hall. Sponsored by the minister of culture and the mayor of Prague, the exhibition treats visitors to an impressive display of the best news photographs and documentaries produced by the country’s journalists in the past year. One of the most compelling: a spot news photo of a bare-breasted Ukrainian activist who shamed Zeman during his January 2018 presidential campaign. She was shouting: “Zeman is Putin’s slut.”]

Shared covert political support from Moscow

Zeman, who was the only European head of state who openly supported Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy, has never hid his pro-Moscow sentiments. And like Trump, Zeman has been dogged by convincing evidence that the Russians covertly supported his political campaigns.   

Zeman has close associates who are suspected of dubious dealings with Russians who have connections in the Kremlin. So does Trump, although his personal involvement remains a matter of ongoing investigations. 

When Trump was reminded by Fox News host Bill O’Reilly in February 2017 that “Putin’s a killer,” he shot back: “There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of killers. Well, you think our country’s so innocent?”

Zeman has accepted Russia’s 2015 seizing of Crimea. Donald Trump has just said — incredibly — that the Soviet Union did the right thing when it invaded Afghanistan in 1979. And just the other day, Trump even said that he trusted the leaders of communist China more than he did his Democratic opponents in the U.S. Congress. 

And while each president is loathe to utter any words that might cause offense to Putin, they certainly are not shy when it comes to scorn directed toward the European Union and NATO. It is difficult to give either president the benefit of the doubt for having good intentions, when their statements dovetail with Moscow’s propaganda machine. 

A mutual distrust of their country’s professional intelligence services

Perhaps nowhere are the parallels more striking than when it comes to the attitude displayed by the two presidents toward their country’s professional intelligence services. The cadre of intelligence officers at the BIS, as do their non-partisan counterparts in America’s CIA, are steeped in the importance of speaking truth to power. But of course, this is not always appreciated in the highest corridors of political power. 

It is a matter of record that when U.S. intelligence agencies reported they had found disturbing evidence of Russian interference in 2016 aimed at promoting his presidential candidacy, Trump repeatedly denigrated the findings. Trump at one point even called the heads of the CIA and FBI “political hacks.”

Zeman reacted in similar fashion to last month’s BIS report that detailed Russian- and Chinese covert strategies aimed at undermining Czech national security. The BIS had given him “wrong” data, he said. The Czech president also insisted that the quality of BIS’s intelligence analyses had been “deteriorating,” reported RadioFreeEurope/Radio Liberty. Czech intelligence officers were “bozos,” Zeman ranted.

Last May, Zeman even blocked the promotion of BIS chief Michal Koudelka to the rank of general. Koudelka is a professional intelligence officer who has developed an expertise on Russian influence operations. 

The importance of understanding history

Beyond the current political similarities, Americans have important historical reasons to be more interested in what goes on in Prague. In the late 1930s the America Firsters of that era were infamously slow to recognize the growing threat posed to the western democracies by fascism. In 1938, historians recall that perhaps only three percent of an ill-informed American public believed that America should fight to defend our democratic allies, France and the United Kingdom, from Adolf Hitler’s conquest. That changed suddenly, of course, when America was later drawn into World War II after the December 7, 1941, Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.

But the global conflict had become inevitable in February 1939 when Hitler seized the German-speaking Sudetenland, in the western part of was then called Czechoslovakia. The Nazis took Prague the following month — but people in America’s heartland mostly slept. They still didn’t understand why what had happened in Prague, mattered to them.

This isn’t just ancient history from the Czech point of view, either. Last month in Prague, I was reminded of how people in Prague still cringe at the memory of Neville Chamberlain’s September 1938 appeasement in Munich. The Czechs were shocked when the British leader agreed to let Hitler take the Sudetenland. 

Chamberlain had hoped that Hitler’s thirst for conquest would be satisfied by feeding it. As the renowned intelligence scholar Christopher Andrew relates in his newest book, The Secret World, Chamberlain had been warned by his own counterintelligence service, MI5, that the appeasement would produce the opposite effect. The British prime minister disregarded the secret intelligence — more politely than Milos Zeman’s current intemperate rejection of the BIS reports, but just as unwise. 

Today, the Czechs still remember what they call the Munich Betrayal. And every time that Donald Trump speaks respectfully of Putin — and disrespectfully of the NATO alliance — the Czechs have a familiar feeling. They have good reason to worry whether, if push comes to shove with the Russian Bear, America will still have their backs. 

Message to American news editors: Step up your game.