Karl Koecher

Karel František Köcher, usually referred simply as Karel Köcher, sometimes written as Karl Koecher (born 21 September 1934) is a Czechoslovak mole known to have penetrated the CIA during the Cold War.

Early life Born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, his father was a Viennese-born Czech and his mother Irena, a Slovak Jew. and the Czechoslovak intelligence service in 1962 using the codename Pedro.

Czechoslovakia State Security (StB) career Koecher claimed that constant harassment from the Czechoslovakia State Security (StB) due to his history of anti-state and anti-social behavior, ruined his different careers and in order to end the harassment, he decided to join the StB. With the help of a friend within the StB and his language skills, he was recruited into the intelligence service.

Immigration to the United States In 1965 he and his wife, Hana Koecher (the daughter of a Communist Party official),

CIA work With the purge of his superiors at the StB during the aftermath of the 1968 Soviet Union led invasion of Czechoslovakia, he found himself out of touch with the service and approached the FBI instead in an attempt to defect and use his knowledge against the Soviets but they were not interested.

He quickly became one of the USSR's best sources of information, allowing them to mount an effective defense against CIA covert actions. He translated documents from a key CIA asset in Moscow, Ogorodnik. (Ogorodnik's CIA case officer, Aldrich Ames, had given Ogorodnik the codename Trigon.) Another suggestion, by a CIA historian, is that it was the StB intelligence officer, Jan Fila, who betrayed him with the latter disappearing in December 1989, a month after the Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution. and hours before they were scheduled to fly to Switzerland, Koecher and his wife were arrested in New York City. Koecher was held on espionage charges and Hana Koecher as a material witness. His wife had been denied access to a lawyer despite frequent requests for one, She refused to testify against Karl, asserting spousal privilege, though prosecutors argued this did not apply given the two had been partners in crime. According to Koecher, Rudy Giuliani, as a prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, had bungled the case and was unable to gain enough evidence to convict Koecher after Koecher's arrest and instead offered immunity to Koecher in exchange for more information.

Koecher was the victim of an attempted stabbing by an unnamed inmate while in prison. and was sentenced to life in prison, On 11 February 1986, Koecher and his wife were part of a nine-person exchange at Glienicke Bridge in Berlin, of which the most prominent member was noted dissident Anatoly Shcharansky.

Return Koecher returned to Czechoslovakia to a hero's welcome and was given a house and a Volvo car as a reward for his services. He was also given a job at the Prague Institute for Economic Forecasting, where many future politicians worked; Václav Klaus and Miloš Zeman, the future Czech presidents, were among them. Some U.S. journalists stated they had seen Koecher issuing orders at the Laterna Magika theatre during the early days of the Velvet Revolution (1989). Koecher denied any involvement in the Velvet Revolution, saying that journalists must have mixed him up with the then unknown Václav Klaus, who had a similar appearance.

The fall of communism has seen Koecher fall from prominence, with the exception of his alleged involvement in a scheme run by Oswald LeWinter, a self-professed former CIA operative, to defraud Mohammed Al-Fayed with false documents that would support his conspiracy theories about the death of Princess Diana. He continues to live in the Czech Republic in relative obscurity. His wife, Hana Koecher, made the headlines in the Czech Republic, when she was fired from her new job as a translator for the British Embassy in Prague. The British were completely unaware of her espionage past until a Czech newspaper reporter notified them. A suit she filed against a media organisation for revealing her past as a spy, damaging her business, was rejected.

Film An episode of the 2004 Canadian documentary series Betrayal! and the Czech feature documentary Rino (2015) covere the Koecher case.