Printer Friendly

Email to A Friend

Monday September 10, 2007

Speculation lingers over Cold War-era death

by dinah spritzer
jta

prague | Forty years ago, on Aug. 20, 1967, the head of the world’s largest Jewish humanitarian organization was found drowned in Prague’s Vltava River, producing one of the Cold War’s major murder mysteries.

Was Charles Jordan, executive vice-chairman of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a victim of the StB, the Czechoslovak communist secret police?

Could he have been murdered by the Egyptian intelligence service as he sought to integrate millions of Palestinian refugees into the Arab states immediately following the Six-Day War in 1967?

Or perhaps, as some have claimed, he was done in by Arab students. There is even a much derided theory that Jordan was targeted by Jews angered by his sympathy for the Palestinians.

The Jordan case remains unresolved despite three investigations by the Czech state following the collapse of communism. But has everything possible been done to uncover his fate?

In July, the JDC had become so dissatisfied with the quality of the most recent Czech investigation — concluded in 2004 — that the organization asked U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to pressure the Czech government into reopening the case. The State Department has yet to reply.

Adding to the murkiness of the case, in recent years the FBI has advanced the widely rejected view that Jordan’s death was merely an accident and, some Czech investigators say, Israeli officials have not cooperated with the probe.

A faulty investigation of Jordan’s death would suggest that other secrets from the Cold War-era concerning dealings among the Middle East, the United States and the Soviet bloc are, even if unintentionally, being kept from public view.

“If we could find out more about Jordan, imagine what we might learn about how the intelligence services were operating during that time,” said Martin Smok, co-author of a 2004 Czech documentary film on Jordan’s death, “Between a Star and a Crescent — Father of the Refugees.”

While making his film, he clashed with the Office for the Documentation and Investigation of Communist Crimes, or UDV, the department responsible for examining the Jordan case.

UDV spokesman Jan Srb countered that “it did investigate all of Smok’s leads and found them to go nowhere. We can only deal with facts, and that is what we have done.”

Observers say that aspects of the UDV investigation are perplexing.

Jordan, 59, told friends in the summer of 1967 that he was going on vacation in Prague with his wife. He was busy at the time helping Romanian Jews escape to Israel and had been in Bucharest prior to arriving in Prague. Jordan was due in September to submit his plan for the rehabilitation of Palestinian refugees to the United Nations Refugee Agency in New York.

Jordan, born in Philadelphia but raised in Germany until Hitler came to power, made his life’s work the support of refugees.

JDC, meanwhile, was banned from operating in the communist bloc and Jews were being openly persecuted there following the Six-Day War, in which the Soviets had supported the losing side.

Arab and Soviet states were operating intelligence rings together, and sometimes against each other. But they were united in hostility against Israel, to which JDC was providing sustenance.

Jordan’s wife told the Czechoslovak police he left the Hotel Esplanade the evening of Aug. 16, 1967 to get a newspaper and never returned.

No one saw Jordan leave his room that evening, inviting one theory that Jordan was in fact murdered within the airline office or an apartment linked to the hotel.

At least one person alive today knew about the comings and goings of the Egyptians in Prague in 1967, and for the first time she spoke to a journalist during an extensive interview with JTA.

She was an StB informant who worked for Talaat, the Egyptian Embassy official and United Arab Airlines chief. According to her StB file, she was ordered by the Czech spy agency to seduce him and gather information on his activities.

The JDC leader had visited the U.S. Embassy and the Prague Jewish Community during his stay, something that should not have gone unnoticed by the secret police.

Arguing against StB involvement in Jordan’s death, the UDV says the spy agency would not have carried out such a significant act without the direction of the Soviet Union, which the UDV believes had no reason to eliminate Jordan and thus create further tension with the West.

Within this web of sex and spy agencies, is there more to be investigated?

Smok asserts that the United States and Israeli intelligence agencies knew much more about Jordan than they were sharing with their Czech counterparts, a conjecture that’s hard to prove.

Officials of the UDV said the U.S. agencies had been cooperative, although oddly the FBI sent a note saying it had concluded Jordan had died as the result of an accident, a theory neither the UDV nor anyone even vaguely familiar with the case accepts.

But officials said Israel had not responded to repeated requests for information, saying that as late as 2005 the Czech interior minister was asking for assistance from his Israeli counterpart, to no avail. The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office told JTA it was looking into the matter.

Czech and Israeli intelligence sources told JTA they found the UDV claim bizarre, since the Mossad has an intensive and excellent relationship with its Czech counterpart.

The sources noted that although the Mossad may not have wanted to work directly with the UDV, it does not mean it didn’t share what it knew about Jordan or Arab activity in Prague in 1967 with Czech authorities interested in the case.

On the Czech side, Tomas Kraus, chairman of the Czech Federation of Jewish Communities, echoed the sentiment of many Czech, Israeli and American sources. “There are a million theories, but I don’t think we can ever get to the bottom of it.”

Did you find this article interesting? Subscribe to our FREE newsletter and you'll be notified each week when "J." goes online. We'll tell you about the most important stories of the week and give you a link to each one.

This page contains a BETA version of Amazon contextual links. They are marked by the dashed underline.  Your purchases support our site. At times they point to items which are not related to the actual link. Please alert us by email if you discover objectionable links.