Lieutenant Colonel Miroslav Horák

"The main part of this facility [the Czech presence] took place, it was called Pul-e-Charkhi, there was Pul-e-Charkhi and Puli Khumri. I'm sure that tells you something. I think that was about fourteen kilometres from Kabul, from the capital, where we used to go shopping. It was awesome there in the sense that every family, and mostly there were married couples and their children with a few exceptions, had a house. This house in the Pul-e-Charkhi estate was surrounded by a wall because there were stray dogs and so on. Inside there was a swimming pool, the accommodation was sensational, a living room of about sixty square meters, hot and cold water. There was one problem, the water was salty. So, the drinking water was imported. All the mountains around Pul-e-Charkhi were salty. - "Did the electricity work then?" - "Electricity worked." - "Did you get that from the local power station?" - "Yes. And moreover there were diesel generators, so that when the power went out, the generator automatically kicked in to get the electricity going. - "In that place where the houses were for the individual foreigners, was it only a Czech town?" - "That was the Czechoslovak town of Pul-e-Charkhi." - "Was it connected with the construction of the cement factory in Puli Khumri?" - "No, it was completely somewhere else. There was, of course, a communal canteen in the housing estate, in those barracks. There were about forty or fifty of those barracks, it is hard to tell. It was a Czechoslovak town." -"Czechoslovakia built that itself?" - "The Czechoslovaks themselves built it as part of the project." - "So, there were, let's say, forty families there?" - "Well, forty for sure, but the main part were university students. The part that was related to repairing military equipment, so those were the minimum. There was an estimate of up to ten specialists from the Czech [Czechoslovak] Republic, whether they were welders, patternmaker, because part of it was a foundry. Of course, there were two of us there as radio operators, technicians for signal equipment."

"When a member of any delegation [Czechoslovakia, Poland, Switzerland and Sweden] arrived or left, there was a huge reception at the place to which he belonged. I don't want to say vulgarly that it was a gluttonous affair. But it was a meeting, a get-together, a chat. So, it brought us extremely close together. But there were other problems. One of the warnings I got was: 'When you talk to the Swedes, watch out, some Lieutenant Boogle works for the CIA!' So it was also a world where information was being gathered even at that time. They didn't look at us as oddballs, we were their partners. But still, when you slip something out, unknowingly, sometimes it's very valuable information. A lot of people think that espionage or agency is a special kind of work. That's not true. Part of this work is mainly monitoring arrivals, who has left the country, who has arrived, who has met with whom, monitoring the daily press. From all this, information is drawn." - "You also knew who in your group was working for the intelligence services? Or did they all work?" - "Of course. We had very close contact with the military attaché and his deputies in Fenjan [Pyongyang], and there they were giving the information through a different route." - "You suddenly had to work with Swiss and Swedish soldiers, while at home you were quite closed. Did your view of these foreign soldiers change in any way?" - "To use the term quarantine, I don't know if it's the most appropriate, but for the first three months I wasn't allowed outside the delegation building. That is to say, the old officers kept an eye on me until they found that I was able to make some kind of arrangement, that there were certain principles, because it was on a diplomatic level. You don't learn that in a day or two either. So, then I was allowed into the meeting with an escort. And it was only after six months that I was allowed, when there was a meeting, to visit delegations on my own."