I did not see myself as an informer

In the 1970s and 80s, State Security (StB) often sought out young students from special-interest groups (tramps, Catholics etc.) to obtain as collaborators. They chose especially those who showed mental weakness and malleability when being interrogated for banal misdemeanours. This is hardly surprising considering the myths and stories of prisoners of the 1950s about State Security and their dread Bartolomějská Street central. In 1970 Petr Rádl, a student of the University of Economics, was detained and interrogated in connection with a scuffle in the train station pub: “I was awfully afraid. I knew things, say from Mucha's book Cold Sun, and I imagined the light shining in my face, the shouts and blows,” Rádl describes. Several months later he was contacted by State Security again and was invited to Bartolomějská Street. “When somebody said Bartolomějská, it was like a shot of ice down the back. I am a very nervous man, I was twenty at the time and I was completely devastated. The StB agent pulled out the thickest file possible and told me: ‛This is your case.’ It was clear to me that I was going to be expelled from school and that the only question was how much time in prison. I think they were trained to know how to impress. A lot of people were brave; I was completely goggle-eyed.” Petr Rádl did not go to prison; he successfully finished his studies and, under the code name Kolínský, regularly informed State Security mostly about his co-workers at Czechoslovak Railways. He ended his cooperation in a letter to his supervising officer in 1985. He is not aware of having hurt anyone directly, he says that he informed mostly on his communist superiors and reported various illegal dumps. He is ashamed of having cooperated and he is sorry that he failed to resist. His case file is preserved only in a torso.