Internationalising the intelligence history of the Prague Spring

Abstract

This article examines how changing collaborations between the Czechoslovakian, Soviet, and East German intelligence services during the 1960s formed the intelligence context of responses to the Prague Spring of 1968. The author uses international history to locate the debates over the uprising among the so-called Warsaw Five throughout 1968 in much longer interplay between local and regional drives for securitisation, centred on intelligence collaborations. This leads us to a reconsideration of the centrality of intelligence collaboration in responses to the crisis and the extent to which actors beyond the borders of Czechoslovakia conditioned these responses.