Daniela Richterova is senior lecturer in intelligence studies at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. Her research and teaching focus on Cold War intelligence as well as contemporary issues related to state-based threats and counterterrorism. She recently published Watching the Jackals: Prague’s Covert Liaisons with Cold War Terrorists and Revolutionaries (Georgetown University Press, 2025), describing the ties between the Czechoslovakian State Security Service, or StB, and mainly Palestinian groups, based on archival material from the StB as well as other sources. Diwan interviewed Richterova in late September to discuss her book and the lessons her account imparts.
Michael Young: You recently published a book titled Watching the Jackals: Prague’s Covert Liaisons with Cold War Terrorists and Revolutionaries. What motivated you to write the book and what do you feel is new in it?
DR: I came at this from two directions. As a graduate student I was studying the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and kept bumping into the shadow of Moscow and its allies in the background. Then, as someone born in Czechoslovakia at the tail end of the Cold War, I realized that Prague itself kept appearing in this story—hosting visitors from Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli, and, of course, Palestinian factions. When I looked closer, I found a tranche of declassified diplomatic and intelligence records that revealed, in unprecedented detail, how these relationships unfolded—from cultural and diplomatic courtesies, through commercial and security ties, all the way to intelligence matters. That kind of source base is rare. Most states do not open up the intimate mechanics of their dealings with controversial nonstate actors. So, the project became the subject of my doctorate, followed by another half-decade of archival digging and interviews, and finally this book.
What is new, I think, is the granularity and the nuance. The popular picture is of a monolithic “Soviets trained the terrorists” storyline. The documents show something messier: Prague could be a hospitable node—allowing meetings, safe houses, and logistics—but the Czechoslovak secret services also fretted about reputational blowback and sometimes pushed people out, as happened with Abou Daoud, Wadi Haddad’s disciples, or Carlos the Jackal. You can watch officials argue over costs and benefits, track how they handled different Palestinian groups, and see when ideology yielded to risk management. It is a view of Cold War liaisons as a spectrum rather than a blank cheque, rebuilt from files that only recently became accessible and from voices who were there.
Overall, the book shows how complicated and constantly recalibrated state policies toward these actors were. It also opens up the inner life of the factions—their security and intelligence needs and capabilities—and underlines that Cold War alliances rested not only on ideology but on managing risks, business interests, and personal connections.
MY: One of your main points, as you just implied, is that the ties between the Czechoslovakian State Security Service, or StB, and Palestinian groups (as your focus is mainly on Prague’s ties with the Palestinians), involved much more caution on the Czechoslovakian side than is commonly assumed, even if this varied with the nature of the group on the other side. Can you break this down for us? With what types of Palestinian or other groups did Prague deal, and how did it differentiate among these groups?
DR: What the files show is that Prague did not deal with a single Palestinian actor, but with several very different ones, and it behaved differently with each. With the mainstream Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)—above all Fatah and the PLO security service around Abou Iyad—ties became relatively formal after the mid-1970s. There was a Fatah-dominated official PLO office in Prague and high-level visits, and liaison could include security training and information exchange. Even there, the StB paired cooperation with control—surveillance, infiltration, and clear red lines about not staging operations from Czechoslovak soil, because officials worried about reputation and trade.
A second cluster were the harder-edged factions in the PLO orbit, especially the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) led by George Habash. Prague was consistently uneasy about the direct involvement in, as well as the legacy of, the PFLP’s international terrorist operations. Officials appreciated the movement’s Marxist self-presentation at a rhetorical level, but there was a basic lack of trust and the relationship never became anything as official or institutionalized as it was with Fatah. In practice, that meant keeping contacts at arm’s length, watching closely, and limiting exposure when the risk of damaging fallout rose.
Then there were the independents and rogues who intersected with Palestinian networks—most famously Carlos the Jackal. Here, Prague acted like an anxious host: tolerating brief transits under heavy watch, and when notoriety began to endanger Czechoslovak diplomacy, moving to end his visits to the communist state.
Finally, on Abou Nidal’s organization, Prague’s posture was also firm because the Czechoslovaks feared spillover of the vicious Arafat-Abou Nidal vendetta onto its territory. Late in the Cold War, when Abou Nidal’s right-hand man came on a clandestine mission to Czechoslovakia, reached out to the StB, and floated the idea of security liaison, Prague turned him down. That decision captures the broader pattern: status, utility, and reputational risk drove differentiation.
MY: What were the often-contradictory motives involved in the StB’s approach to these militant groups? Can you lay this out for us?
DR: What the archives (and the interviews) show is a tug-of-war of motives. On one side, there was ideological and diplomatic solidarity: after 1967 and especially Arafat’s speech to the United Nations in 1974, the PLO looked like the effective standard-bearer of the anti-Israel struggle, and Czechoslovakia, very much within a wider Soviet-bloc push, opened channels, hosted an office, and offered tightly framed cooperation. On the other side sat reputational and commercial caution. Officials were acutely aware that being painted as Moscow’s “puppet” by arming terrorists would hurt trade, diplomacy, and their ability to call out others at the UN. So, cooperation came with hard red lines: no operations from Prague, watch the optics, and keep a margin of maneuver with regard to actors whose violence could have detrimental consequences.
A second, equally strong tension was between intelligence value and internal security risk. The StB wanted access—debriefing diplomats, visitors, or trainees—because these contacts yielded information on the factions themselves and on regional states. But the service also saw high-profile militants as a liability—they attracted the interest of hostile services, were a risk to foreign delegations, and represented a standing reputational hazard. That is why, in the case of several of the more hardline Palestinian groups, Prague evolved from close surveillance to active measures—visa pressure, controlled “hospitality,” and ousting problematic figures typically under a false pretext.
Put simply, StB practice sat at the intersection of ideology, intelligence appetite, and risk management. The contradictions are not a bug in the story, they are the story—how a cautious, commercially minded, security-conscious state tried to harvest information and influence from a violent ecosystem without letting it explode in its own living room.
MY: Do you feel that your decision not to address inter-Palestinian dynamics in the book lost you something essential in your narrative? I ask this, because StB officers in the Middle East must have been well aware of how inter-Palestinian dynamics were affecting the behavior of the Palestinian groups vis-à-vis Czechoslovakia, and must have reported on this to their hierarchy at home, yet this dimension is not one you really cover at any length in your account.
DR: With every book you have to choose a focus, otherwise you lose the reader very quickly. I wrote this from the vantage point of Czechoslovakia—how Prague opened, managed, and sometimes closed channels to militant actors—so inter-Palestinian dynamics appear where they illuminate that story rather than as a thread of their own.
That said, the internal politics mattered, and were reported to top diplomats and spies in Prague by those on the ground in Beirut, Damascus, or elsewhere in the Middle East. I address them when they intersect with the Prague file: meetings with Arafat’s representatives, conversations Czechoslovak diplomats had with George Habash, and several discreditation campaigns that factions mounted against one another. One revealing episode comes late in the Cold War, when Abou Nidal’s envoy, Abou Bakr, arrives in Prague and delivers a withering brief on his rivals, which is essentially an attempt to cast them as unreliable and self-serving. He even quips that Arafat “wears an ushanka [or Russian fur hat], but one of American make,” shorthand for telling a Soviet-bloc audience that Arafat looked ideologically aligned while edging toward Washington.
For a full inside-the-movements analysis, there are already excellent accounts—above all Yezid Sayigh’s Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993. Such analysis requires a different source base than the one I drew on—Palestinian records, Arabic-language press, memoirs, and oral histories. While my book does use some of these sources, it largely rests on Czechoslovak diplomatic, Communist Party, and StB files and interviews with Prague’s envoys and spies, which were key to reconstructing how a small, cautious state navigated a very noisy ecosystem.
MY: Can you tell us a bit how the StB, and the Czechoslovakian authorities in general, dealt with Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan now serving a life sentence in France, who was involved in many violent operations during the 1970s and 1980s?
DR: Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, known as “Carlos the Jackal,” became notorious for headline-grabbing violence in the years you mentioned. He led the December 1975 attack against the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries headquarters in Vienna, in which he took oil ministers hostage, killed three people, and then flew to Algiers. He was also convicted for the September 1974 grenade attack at Paris’s Drugstore Publicis, which killed two people and injured dozens. Later, he was held responsible for a string of bombings in France in the early 1980s that left multiple people dead and scores wounded. He was captured in Sudan in 1994 and is serving life sentences in France.
The record shows that the StB adopted a three-step approach toward Carlos: first watch. When Carlos surfaced in Czechoslovakia in late 1978, the StB treated him as a risk to be mapped and monitored. Officers put him under close surveillance, used hotel reporting, and quietly checked his contacts through liaison to understand with whom he was meeting and why. The view that emerges in the files is of an anxious host: the Czechoslovak authorities tolerated brief stays under heavy control while worrying about reputational blowback if a celebrity terrorist drew attention to Prague.
Second, prevent. By 1979 the authorities tried to keep Carlos out. They flagged him and associates on internal watch and visa-control lists, circulated his identities, and sought to stop entries at the consular gate. They were eager to shorten his and his associates’ stay, because hosting him threatened both Czechoslovak prestige and commercial interests. However, this approach was not very successful as every time Carlos—a master of disguise—arrived in Prague, he sported a new identity, nationality, and passport. Hence, in the 1980s Prague was forced to graduate to a much more forceful strategy.
The third approach they adopted was ousting. When prevention did not resolve the problem, Czechoslovakia escalated to managed removal. The StB expelled members of Carlos’ entourage and, in June 1986, executed a deception: officers warned Carlos that a French hit team was in Prague and that the state could not guarantee his safety. While initially skeptical of this thinly veiled lie, he left within hours. As the operation to eject him from Czechoslovak territory was under way, Prague was so concerned about Carlos’s volatile temperament and proclivity to violence, that the Ministry of Interior deployed the country’s newly established anti-terrorist unit to protect the U.S. Embassy. That sequence—watch, prevent, oust—captures Czechoslovakia’s risk-management approach to Cold War terrorists and revolutionaries.
MY: What lessons does your book hold for countries today wanting to develop an effective counterterrorist strategy? You conclude that the Czechoslovak method for dealing with terrorists on its territory “generated long-term problems,” and that the StB failed to control its nonstate partners, therefore was unable to project power. Can you try to answer in light of these two conclusions?
DR: Two conclusions from the book carry over directly. First, trading “presence” for access generates long-term problems. Hosting violent nonstate actors in order to watch or influence them buys only short-term situational awareness while importing reputational, legal, and diplomatic costs, and it invites counter-operations by others on your soil.
Second, access is not the same as control. The StB could meet, monitor, even occasionally steer, but it did not command these partners and, therefore, could not project power through them. The result was an anxious kind of proximity that satisfied immediate intelligence appetites while eroding the state’s ability to set and enforce rules.
To the first part of your question: an effective counterterrorism strategy must be tailored to the nature of the threat, to the state’s objectives, and to its real capabilities. What is clear from Czechoslovakia’s experience with terrorists and revolutionaries—whom I collectively call “jackals”—as well as from the comparative models I discuss from France, the United Kingdom, and other states in the final chapter, is that specialist expertise is decisive. Without language skills, cultural literacy, and political insight, every form of interaction, whether liaison, infiltration and manipulation, or active disruption, is complicated, often ineffective, and sometimes counterproductive.
