Operace „Lyautey“
Operation “Lyautey”

Summary/Abstract: This study describes a propaganda campaign in Rude pravo, the central daily of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, in June 1969. A series of articles informed on an alleged secret scheme hatched by the British intelligence under the cover name of Lyautey, which aimed at removing Czechoslovakia from the Soviet bloc. The campaign was based on the documents the Soviet KGB’s headquarters sent to Czechoslovakia in 1966. Documents, the authenticity of which cannot be verified, give the impression of being the original material of the British intelligence service. They describe the general plans of the British intelligence service in the first half of 1950’s and some particular operations aimed at impairing Soviet-Chinese relationships. The propaganda campaign intentionally exchanged the target area of the documents which were the basis and claimed they were a British plan to disrupt Czechoslovak-British relationships. The series of articles was prepared by the Press Department of the Ministry of the Interior from the documents provided by the State Security forces. The publication of the alleged plan of the British intelligence was part of a broader campaign to present the 1968 Prague Spring events as a result of the operations of western intelligence services and thus to justify the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact armies in August 1968. The series published in Rude pravo was assessed as very effective, and the Operation Lyautey motif was later often used as one of the arguments in the Czechoslovak state security propaganda. “Operation Lyautey” then became a universal cliché which was used to illustrate the methods and targets of the western intelligence services. The last part of the study presents several cases where Operation Lyautey was used in propaganda documentaries made by Czechoslovak T.V. in the 1970’s.

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