Was former Czech President Václav Havel part of the communist secret service StB? No, that's not true: Havel never willingly cooperated with the StB. The secret service proved him to be an enemy of the communist regime. As a leader of the dissident movement, he was imprisoned on several occasions.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) on TikTok where it was published by @papekarna on December 19, 2023, under a Czech title, translated into English by Lead Stories staff, which reads: "Yesterday marked the 12th anniversary of the death of the first Czech president, Václav Havel. He died on December 18, 2011 at his cottage in Hrádeček in the Trutnov region." The person in the video states, as translated by Lead Stories staff:
Havel was in jail, but not the same jail as Obdržálek. Read his letters to Olga, it's a farce. Caviar and America and all that... he's an asshole who was cultivated by the StB.
This is what the post on TikTok looked like at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Thu Dec 21 14:22:14 2023 UTC)
Lead Stories staff found that Mr. Havel was registered by the secret service in 1965 as a candidate StB agent after searching the archives of the Czech security forces for Václav Havel, who was born on October 5, 1936.
However, Havel appeared there due to mishandling of information by the secret police after he handed in a pro-democracy flyer to the state police that year, fearing that it was a deliberate act of provocation by the StB against him. They added Havel to the list of candidates, only to move his file to the "enemy of the state" category when the secret agents found out that he was actually a member of the dissent.
Moreover, according to the Constitutional Court, a candidate StB agent is not a category of willing cooperation with the StB, as the people put on this list were often not even aware of it.
Havel, who was a key figure in the effort to end the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, was therefore not "cultivated" by the StB. This claim, which also appeared here (archived here), belongs to a group of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories claiming that the Velvet Revolution was a project of the communist secret service or the KGB.
Havel was an enemy of the communist regime, who was spied on by the StB and even imprisoned several times for his dissident activities. If Havel had been a member of the StB, he could never have become president, as that would have been illegal under a law passed after the Velvet Revolution.
