Operation NEPTUNE was a 1964 disinformation operation run by the Czechoslovakian security service known as the Státní bezpečnost, or StB. The intent was to target the West German government and hamper their ability to collect intelligence inside of Czechoslovakia.
The operation was led by Ladislav Bittman, now widely known as one of the best disinformation agents of the Cold War. When Bittman learned that a documentary film crew was searching for sunken Nazi treasure in Black Lake, just inside the Czechoslovakian border, he quickly put together a plan to seize the opportunity to plant disinformation, rather than Nazi treasure. Bittman was already an accomplished diver, so he planted four locked boxes in the lake and allowed them to be discovered and retrieved on camera, as seen here. The government then seized the boxes on the pretext that they might contain explosives and promised to soon reveal the contents.
Months later, a press conference was held by the Ministry of the Interior in which they claimed to have found Nazi documents which were deliberately hidden nearly 20 years before, at the end of World War II. The documents were a mix of carefully crafted forgeries mixed in with real Nazi documents provided by the Soviet KGB for Operation NEPTUNE. The forged documents were lists of Czechoslovakian citizens who had collaborated with the Nazi war effort.
The press conference resulted in dozens of international news articles and was seen as a success by the StB. The named Czechoslovakians would now be seen as tainted by West German intelligence and likely not used as potential human intelligence sources. And West Germany subsequently extended the statute of limitations on prosecuting Nazis for another five years, as it had originally been set to expire after 20 years.
For episode 39 of the Spycraft 101 podcast I discuss Operation NEPTUNE and several other of the most important operations of the StB, a highly capable Cold War intelligence organization which is relatively little-known when compared to the CIA, KGB, or East German Stasi.
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