It was Dr Tomek who had first succeeded in locating my StB surveillance file and sent me that surprising email over the Christmas holidays I wrote about last week. The archive occupies a nondescript building see map plot, below , a few meters from the tram stop.
The archive opens on schedule at 9am, and Dr Tomek ushers me inside. In hushed tones, Dr Tomek gives me a short lesson in archive etiquette. Thankfully, though, I can bring in my phone β and its built-in camera. The reading room resembles a small library.
Here and there, a few scattered individuals hunch over their desks and read through pages of yellowing paper. They study the materials carefully and then, occasionally, rise from their chairs to train their cameras on them and snap a photo. I wonder to myself if anyone here now, like me, is reading their file for the first time. Dr Tomek and I find a table toward the back of the room. I sit down and try to make myself comfortable, while he goes over to a counter to fetch my file from an archive researcher.
My mind drifts and then I hear Dr Tomek walk up behind me. He plops down a stack of dusty, blue booklets that, at first glance, looks exactly like the books we used in college for taking exams. It could also have referred to the hotel the authorities often wanted me to use whenever I came to Prague and which turns up frequently in the files as well : the Hotel Intercontinental. As it turns out, the blue booklets constitute only a small part of my file. The booklets mostly pertain to a single StB operation: a day-long effort to surveil my movements on the date of June 29, , while I was in Czechoslovakia on a reporting trip.
After paging through the blue booklets for an hour or so, Dr Tomek motions me over to the counter, where an archive researcher hands me a USB flash-drive with hundreds of additional pages. These included American embassies and consulates as well as companies, banks and media groups. The Czech language is unusually dense. While clicking through my file, I occasionally come across index pages affiliated with "INTER" with lists of items that are crossed out.
