Fact Check: Former Czech Ice Hockey Goalie Dominik Hasek Was NOT Communist-Era Snitch

False Charge

Was former Czech ice hockey goalkeeper Dominik Hasek an informant of the Communist-era Czechoslovak secret police? No, that's not true: An online search of publicly available archival records shows that Hasek did not collaborate with the StB, as the Communist-era secret police in Czechoslovakia was known.

Hockey goalkeeper Dominik Hasek was a snitch for the criminal State Security before the StB putsch on 17th November 1989!!!

This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:

A search of personnel records on the Security Services Archive website conducted on February 11, 2024, shows that the document itself is not fake but misinterpreted. StB handlers stamped acronyms in the agency's registers that indicate whether a person was knowingly cooperating. The legend (archived here) is publicly available on the archive's website.

Hasek was a PO, prověřovaná osoba in Czech, or a "screened person" in English. Secret police either screened people whom the agency wanted to recruit for cooperation or suspected of activity against the Communist regime, the legend on the archive's website explains. In the post, the column with the PO acronym, the second from left in the original, is cropped from the image.

This is what the uncropped image of the relevant pages looks like:

(Source: Security Services Archive search result screenshot taken on Sun Feb 11 22:15:09 2024 UTC)

Hasek is not the only person accused of secret police collaboration in this post on TikTok. It also features, among others, musician and former politician Michael Kocab, psychiatrist Jan Cimicky and television entertainer Petr Novotny.

All of them are classified as either PO or KTS, or a candidate for secret cooperation, a category that does not prove conscious collaboration, according to a 1992 Constitutional Court ruling.