Lawrence Martin-bittman
Communist master of disinformation who defected to West
Lawrence Martin-bittman, artist, author and professor of disinformation. Born: 14 February 1931 in Prague, Czech Republic. Died: 18 September 2018 in Rockport, Massachusetts, aged 87.
Lawrence Martinbittman, who as a Cold War spy for Czechoslovakia specialised in running disinformation schemes against the West, and who, after defecting in 1968 to the United States, taught the perils of propaganda to journalism students, has died.
“I openly admit that I did a lot of damage to the West, particularly to the United States, as a specialist in dirty tricks,” Martin-bittmansaid in 2009.
Martin-bittman – whose original name was Ladislav Bittman – joined the Czech intelligence service out of university in 1954 as tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were rising. The Czech service, which collaborated with others in the Soviet-dominated Eastern bloc, was deeply involved in forgeries, like taking the signatures of US diplomats from Christmas cards and using them on faked documents detailing supposed US conspiracies worldwide, and political sabotage, such as setting up a brothel with the Soviets to trap West German politicians in compromising positions.
As a spy, Martin-bittman operated from Berlin and Vienna, elite espionage postings during the Cold War on both sides. In 1964 he became the deputy commander of the Czech service’s Department for Active Measures and Disinformation. That year, he helped execute a wild plan to discredit West Germany.
In Martin-bittman’s account, a Czech television documentary crew was exploring Black Lake, southwest of Prague, in the hopes of raising mysterious objects – possibly Nazi treasures – they had spotted in earlier dives. Knowing of the crew’s plan, the Czech service dumpedfourgermanmilitary chests filled with blank papers at the bottom of the lake.
Martin-bittman, an experienced diver who posed as a Czech government official, led the crew into the water to retrieve the chests, which were then taken away by intelligence officials claiming they had to be X-rayed for explosives. While the cache was supposedly being examined, intelligence officers replaced the papers with what were billed as Third Reich documents that, when revealed publicly, indicated that former Nazis were working as spies for West Germany.
“It was the start of a two-year campaign to revive the threat of Nazism and to point a finger at West Germany and say, ‘They are still there and West Germany is still in great potential danger’,” Martin-bittman said in an interview in 1984.
In 1967 he was posted to Vienna at the Czech Embassy; he was ostensibly a press attaché, but he was actually directing agents – Western European journalists among them – who had been recruited by the Communists to gather intelligence and disseminate disinformation to undermine relations between Western European countries and the United States.
He remained a dirty trickster until summer 1968, when, angered at the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, he defected to West Germany and sought asylum in the US, where he changed his name to Lawrence Michael Martin. (He later added Bittman to his surname.)
The invasion – which crushed the liberalising reforms that had been instituted by Alexander Dubcek, the Czechoslovak leader – “was the ultimate shock of my life, and this was the moment of truth when it was impossible to fool myself and justify anything I did in the past,” Martinbittman said in 2016.
Martin-bittman’s defection, which led a military court in Czechoslovakia to sentence him to death, was considered a coup for the US. “Bittman was really one of the great experts of the Communist bloc, the Soviet bloc, on disinformation,” F Mark Wyatt, a retired senior CIA official who was an expert in covert action, told the New York Times in 1994. “He is an outstanding defector success story.”
Ladislav Bittman was born in 1931 in Prague. His father, also named Ladislav, was a welder, and his mother, Andela, was a housewife. He was eight in 1939 when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. “I’ll never forget the mass of German soldiers marching through the streets,” he said. “It was a result of the betrayal of Czechoslovakia by the Western powers.” At 15 he joined the Communist Party, as his parents had. He later graduated from Charles University in Prague with degrees in journalism and international law.
When his 14 years of spying, forgeries and fake news ended with his defection, Martinbittman began to write books about espionage and disinformation, among them The Deception Game and The KGB and Soviet Disinformation: An Insider’s View.
In 1972, Martin-bittman’s career took another turn: He started teaching journalism, as well as courses in propaganda, at Boston University. In 1986 he opened the university’s Programme for the Study of Disinformation.
He was pleased that the university took a chance on him.
“Imagine,” he said. “You search for a job and you are asked, ‘What are your credentials?’ and you say, ‘Twentytwo years in the Communist Party and 14 years in intelligence as a Communist spy.’ Not exactly the right experience for this environment, but they were not scared of it.”
Martin-bittman retired in the late 1990s to spend his time painting watercolours.
In addition to his partner Liz Spaulding, he is survived by his son, Michael Talmor; his daughter Dr Katerina Bittmanova; seven grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. He was divorced twice and widowed once.
In 1994 Martin-bittman held a party after a court in the Czech Republic lifted his death sentence. In invitations to friends and colleagues, he asked them to help him celebrate “my re-entering the society of decent human beings on Feb. 24, 1994, from 4-6pm, in the disinformation documentation centre.” He added, “This is not disinformation.”
“This was the moment of truth when it was impossible to justify anything I had done in the past”