Two of my colleagues — Evan Gershkovich in Moscow and Julian Assange in London — languish in prisons for doing their job: keeping you informed. Russia and the U.S., knowingly or not, are following Joseph Stalin’s press playbook. A case in point: the Stalinist persecution of U.S. journalist William (Bill) Nathan Oatis in Cold War Czechoslovakia, which mirrors the contemporary prosecutions of my colleagues.
To Bill Oatis, as to Assange and Gershkovich, journalism was less a job than a vocation. He worked on school newspapers from the age of 12 and dropped out of college in 1933 to take a job at his hometown newspaper, the Marion, Indiana, Leader-Tribune. From there, he moved to the Associated Press (AP) bureau in the state capital, Indianapolis. (His managing editor, Drysdale Brannon, recalled, “He was a factual reporter and probably the most conscientious man who ever worked on the staff.”) Diverted from journalism to the Army for three years during World War II, he returned to the AP, first to its New York news desk, then to London and in 1950 to Prague, Czechoslovakia, as bureau chief.
The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, in common with the Soviet Union’s other satellite states, was consolidating its monopoly on power. The Státní bezpečnost (St.B) secret police, auxiliaries of the Soviet Ministry for State Security (MGB), had expelled the AP’s two previous bureau chiefs for “unobjective reporting.” Remaining Western correspondents were targets of rigorous surveillance.
One of Oatis’s first stories broke the news that Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinsky had come secretly to Czechoslovakia to dictate Stalin’s propaganda guidelines to the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties (Cominform). It was a scoop. His next scoop was a report that former Foreign Minister Vladimir Clementis had not defected but was under arrest.
In 1951, three local AP staffers disappeared. Oatis protested their arrests on April 20. Three days later, he too was dragged to the St.B secret police headquarters. His subsequent ordeal mixed Kafka’s The Trial with Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. The interrogator badgered, starved and humiliated him, demanding to know why Oatis would not reveal his sources. Oatis answered, “It’s against the ethics of journalism.”
Oatis endured eight-hour daily interrogations. One grilling dragged on uninterrupted for 42 hours. Longing to end the nightmare, Oatis signed a “confession” that amounted to nothing more than an admission that he had gathered information not officially issued by the state. It was Journalism 101. To Prague’s Stalinist regime, journalism — i.e. reporting facts the government preferred to conceal — was a crime.
Prosecutors indicted Oatis for revealing “state secrets,” defined under Article 75 of the Czechoslovak Penal Code of July 12, 1950, as “everything that should be kept secret from unauthorized persons in an important interest of the Republic, particularly in political, military or economic interest.” Punishment ranged from 10 years to life.
After 72 days without consular or legal access, Oatis stood trial. State Prosecutor Josef Urvalek declared that Oatis was “particularly dangerous because........