Is UDBA the European Union’s Fate?
More than three decades after Communism collapsed in Europe, there are still Red spies lurking in uncomfortable places
It’s become a trope on the Western Right that the European Union represents an updated, more feminism-and-LGBT-friendly version of the Soviet Union, a Communist super-state ruling over the lives of its subjects undemocratically. Hence the denunciations of “EUSSR” in British tabloids surrounding 2016’s Brexit referendum to take that country out of the EU.
Obviously, this claim isn’t literally true. For all its politicized inanities and bureaucratic imbecilities, Brussels isn’t running some sort of USSR 2.0. There are no GULAGs, no political prisoners, at least not yet. But what if the “EUSSR” meme contains more truth than anybody cares to admit?
I’m not talking about the EU’s dismissive attitude towards freedom of expression, something which most Americans find bewildering. Certainly the EU’s take on suppressing “hate speech” – as defined by EU bureaucrats, naturally – appears expansive to those who worry about press freedom and civil liberties.
I’m referring to the infiltration of EU leadership by Communist spies. This issue has raised its head regarding a new appointment to the European Commission, the 27-member body that serves as the executive arm of the EU. Each member state offers up a candidate who must be confirmed by the European Parliament. The Commission is one of those semi-democratic, somewhat opaque EU entities (it doesn’t help that EC members are termed commissioners, which sounds a tad like Soviet commissars) that few Europeans and almost no Americans pay much attention to.
However, the EC made the news with last week’s announcement that Slovenia nominated Marta Kos to be that country’s commissioner. She wasn’t Slovenia’s first choice. That was Tomaž Vesel, a senior legal official. However, the EC president, Germany’s Ursula von der Leyen, wanted more women commissioners, in a publicized diversity push, so Vesel dropped out and Kos became Slovenia’s choice for the EC. The new slate of members, what Brussels pompously terms the College of Commissioners, should be officially announced this week, while von der Leyen wants them to get to work by November.
That may not happen. Slovenia, a lovely Alpine country of two million people, is one of my favorite places. I’ve spent happy times there: my first book is about westernmost Slovenia. But it’s hardly an exciting place. Slovenia is seldom in the headlines. But it is now because Marta Kos, Slovenia’s EC nominee, may have been a Communist spy.
This has birthed what the Brussels-centric media delicately terms a “political spat” in Slovenia. On paper, the 59-year-old Kos is an ideal nominee, possessing significant political and diplomatic experience. In her youth, Kos was a champion swimmer. She studied journalism and worked in that field for several years, especially in Germany. After serving in Ljubljana, Slovenia’s capital, as a top public affairs official, Kos was her country’s ambassador to Germany (2013-17) then to Switzerland (2017-20). In 2022, she ran for Slovenia’s presidency, representing the center-left Freedom Movement, but that didn’t go very far. Kos ended her candidacy and resigned from that party under nebulous circumstances. She is, however, a certified Eurocrat, possessing the proper Brussels-friendly credentials. She is married to Henri Gétaz, a senior Swiss diplomat who served as secretary general of the European Free Trade Association until the end of last year.
There have been bumps along the way, including whispers that Kos doesn’t play well with others. She resigned her ambassadorship to Bern four years ago amid reports of complaints from embassy staff about the workplace environment. However, fresh allegations that Kos served the secret police during the last years of Communist Yugoslavia represent a more serious problem.
Kos has firmly denied the allegations (more on the details shortly), stating that she at no time was an official or informant for the Communist-era secret police, insisting that this is a politically-motivated smear job. That hasn’t made the scandal disappear, however, while MEP Romana Tomc, who heads Slovenia’s delegation of the European People’s Party in the European Parliament, proclaimed that Kos’ alleged ties to the Communist secret police make her “completely unacceptable” and “problematic” to represent their country on the EC. The center-right EPP isn’t just the biggest party in the European Parliament, its senior members include Ursula von der Leyen herself.
Kos’ defenders retorted that Communist Yugoslavia wasn’t that bad a place, really, Marshal Tito’s regime allowed citizens to move abroad, unlike the Soviet Bloc. How bad was its secret police, commonly called UDBA[i], anyway? As one of them expressed it: “You can’t compare UDBA to the Romanian Securitate, the Czechoslovak secret service (ŠtB) or [East German] Stasi … It is like comparing East Germany to Yugoslavia. Although Communist and ruled by one party, Yugoslavia was a considerably more free [sic] of a society compared to East Germany.”
That statement isn’t merely a lie, it’s the opposite of the truth. While beginning in the early 1960s, significant numbers of Yugoslavs emigrated to the West, above all West Germany, to find work with Belgrade’s permission, this wasn’t an act of Communist beneficence. Yugoslavia’s underperforming “self-managing” socialist economy included structural unemployment, thus hard currency remittances from Yugoslav Gastarbeiter became a significant chunk of the country’s economy.
Yugoslavia was no more tolerant of dissent than any of the Soviet Bloc states of Eastern Europe. Amnesty International reports from the 1980s revealed that Yugoslavia was as repressive towards dissidents as all the Soviet Bloc states, and worse than most of them, while a 1986 study by Human Rights Watch concluded that allegedly more liberal Yugoslavia had more political prisoners than Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary combined.
Moreover, allowing Yugoslavs to move abroad posed a threat to Communist rule. Living in the West, emigres were free to explain just what a repressive dictatorship Yugoslavia was. That was intolerable to Belgrade, thus Marshal Tito and his regime grew obsessed with what they termed the “enemy emigration.” At home, UDBA crushed the supposed Fifth Column that opposed Communism inside the country. Tito then ordered his secret police to destroy what they termed the Sixth Column – that is, dissident Yugoslavs living in the West.
This is one of the Cold War’s most astonishing espionage-terrorism sagas, yet it’s little known outside the former Yugoslavia, which doesn’t much want to discuss this sordid story either. Simply put, Tito’s UDBA became the most murderous intelligence service on earth, embracing aggressive state terrorism to stifle dissent worldwide. Worse, Western countries, including the United States, knew this was happening, and let it keep happening down to the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991.
A bit of historical context is needed to understand what occurred. After his epic break from Stalin’s Soviet Union in 1948, Tito waged and won a bitter counterintelligence war with Moscow. UDBA was the creation of the KGB[ii] – Josip Broz AKA Tito, whoever he really was, was a star Illegal operative for Soviet intelligence with 33 covernames to his credit – and the student ultimately bested the teacher. Stalin’s repeated efforts to assassinate his former protégé Tito failed. The Soviet leader came alarmingly close to starting World War Three in his efforts to crush renegade Yugoslavia.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, ties between Belgrade and Moscow gradually grew more cordial, but the 1948 split left Yugoslavia in the odd position of being a repressive Communist dictatorship that was the recipient of ample NATO (especially U.S.) military and economic aid. The West needed Yugoslavia as a neutral in the Cold War, a strategic thorn in Moscow’s side. Therefore, Western governments granted Tito and his secret police a degree of leeway enjoyed by no other Communist country.
This included looking the other way when Tito’s spies murdered Yugoslavs in the West. Between the mid-1960s and the collapse of Yugoslavia, UDBA’s global killing spree assassinated nearly a hundred people (there were also kidnappings and attempted murders). These killings occurred in more than a dozen countries on five continents. West Germany saw more UDBA killings than any other country. Most of the victims were Croats, but several Serbs and Albanians were murdered as well. While most of the victims were involved in anti-Yugoslav activism, sometimes including terrorism, and once in a while UDBA killed a bona fide war criminal (e.g. Vjekoslav “Maks” Luburić, who ran Croatia’s version of Auschwitz during World War Two, who was felled by an UDBA assassin in Spain in 1969) many of the murdered were merely dissidents. Neither did UDBA concern itself with “collateral damage.” Family members of the target who got in the way were routinely murdered too. We know of two children killed in that fashion.
Contrary to Hollywood mythology, the Soviets got out of the assassination business during the Cold War. After Stalin’s death the KGB’s appetite for what they call “wetwork” abroad dimmed, particularly after the embarrassing arrests of more than one failed Kremlin assassin. The last KGB assassination in the West during the Cold War was the poison-gas killing of the Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera in Munich in 1959. (Ironically, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has embraced wetwork in the West as strongly as Stalin did, much more so than the late Cold War KGB in which Putin served.) Soviet Bloc states were cautious about assassinating their enemies in the West. They didn’t get Tito’s special pass from NATO.
For example, on Sept. 11, 1978, Bulgaria’s secret police assassinated the dissident Georgi Markov in London, using a special KGB-supplied umbrella weapon that fired a ricin-laced pellet. The notorious “umbrella murder” became a media sensation that embarrassed Bulgaria. British police kept the case open for decades (although the prime suspect was never charged and died in Austria in 2021). In contrast, UDBA murdered the Croatian dissident Bruno Bušić in Paris one month later, on Oct. 16, a case which registered little media coverage outside Croatian diaspora circles, and never got much attention from French police. Keeping Tito neutral required that Western governments looked the other way as UDBA murdered dissidents on their soil.
It can’t be said that Western governments did nothing to moderate Belgrade’s global murder spree. On occasion, after a particularly egregious murder or three, a Western government might expel a Yugoslav diplomat who was really an UDBA officer, to indicate displeasure with Belgrade. U.S. intelligence, which knew a great deal about Tito’s Murder, Inc., sometimes attempted to deter assassinations, with mixed success (there were a dozen UDBA assassinations on American soil, including one child victim). Broadly, Western governments tacitly agreed to look the other way regarding Yugoslavia’s murderous ways.
Neither has there really been any justice. After Yugoslavia’s collapse, none of the successor states attempted any serious lustration, to use the proper term. Slovenia has avoided efforts to come to terms with UDBA’s crimes. Indeed, some have portrayed the complete absence of lustration in independent Slovenia in a positive light. The customary explanation for this in Ljubljana is that the country wasn’t deeply involved in the worst UDBA atrocities.
This is simply untrue. In the first place, Tito’s worst crime occurred on Slovenian soil. At the end of the Second World War, Tito’s victorious Partisans slaughtered prisoners of war, including civilians caught up in the chaos. Hundreds of mass graves have been identified across Slovenia, containing more than 100,000 victims. The dead came from all over the former Yugoslavia. Slovenia literally has Communist murder victims under the floorboards. This would be equivalent in population terms to the United States discovering mass graves all over the country with seventeen million victims. Yet, the political impact of such hideous truths about Titoism has been less than hoped for.
After a major reform in 1966 that name-changed UDBA to SDB[iii], each of Yugoslavia’s six republics got its own secret police (called SDV[iv] in Slovenia), overseen by the Federal SDB in Belgrade. Ljubljana’s claim that the SDV had relatively clean hands since the “enemy emigration” didn’t include that many Slovenes doesn’t withstand scrutiny. We know of several cases where the SDV assisted or supported lethal attacks on Yugoslavs in the West. In 1972, the 25-year-old Croatian émigré Stjepan Crnogorac was abducted by UDBA in Salzburg, Austria, then executed by SDV operatives in what may have been a case of mistaken identity.
Like all Communist secret police forces, UDBA relied on networks of informants supplying them with information about their co-workers, friends, even family members. Cooperation with the secret police wasn’t always voluntary. With that caveat, there are credible allegations that a twenty-something Marta Kos was an SDV collaborator, based on secret police files which have come to light. These files appear to be legitimate, but it’s impossible to determine that with complete confidence since in Slovenia, as across Yugoslavia, the secret police destroyed many of their files when Yugoslavia fell apart. Moreover, tarring political opponents with allegations of collaboration with ancien régime secret police is a standard dirty trick in the Balkans.
That said, the notion that Kos collaborated with SDV while she was a student at the University of Ljubljana, where she graduated in 1988, then spied for them when she was in West Germany in the years surrounding the collapse of Yugoslavia, is plausible and matches known UDBA modus operandi. Journalists were often excellent sources for Communist spy agencies. If Kos was spying for the SDV, we don’t know exactly what she was doing. Many collaborators did mundane things. However, the fact that Kos went to West Germany, which was the site of dozens of Cold War UDBA assassinations, raises obvious and troubling questions.
When I noticed media reports about Kos’ nomination to the European Commission amid allegations of her UDBA past, it pinged my memory bank regarding my 1990s work for the National Security Agency tracking down war criminals in the former Yugoslavia. That work got me interested in UDBA’s global murder spree, since several of the bad guys we nabbed had a strangely similar resume – spy meets gangster meets murderer – that was a by-product of Tito’s Murder, Inc. I read lots of classified U.S. Intelligence Community files about UDBA’s activities during the Cold War, including many murders. The IC, like several Western intelligence agencies, tried to track suspected UDBA operatives in the West.
I eventually rose to be technical director of NSA’s Balkans Division, but I hadn’t thought about UDBA collaborators in a long time when the name Marta Kos crossed my screen and jogged a memory. I remembered the name because I had found it amusing given that UDBA’s military equivalent, the counterintelligence arm of the Yugoslav Communist military, was known as KOS[v] (in fairness, Kos, meaning “blackbird,” is a rather common surname in Slovenia).
But I wasn’t sure of my memory, time can play tricks, so I reached out to an old friend, a retired IC spook who shares my interest in UDBA wetwork. He remembered with more clarity than I could. He recalled seeing the name Marta Kos in reports about UDBA collaborators relating to Germany around the period of Yugoslavia’s collapse.
That’s neither proof nor hard evidence, but it’s not nothing either. It could be easily dismissed if not for the alleged SDV citation of her as a collaborator of that service. It cannot be ruled out that there was another Marta Kos reporting to the SDV. Perhaps somewhere in the vast classified archives of American intelligence there are reports which would offer insights here. Or maybe they got burn-bagged to save space. Not that we should expect any U.S. spy agency to let the public see them anyway.
The bottom line is that allegations of collaboration with the Cold War’s most murderous spy service are extremely serious. Let’s give Marta Kos the benefit of the doubt and presume her innocence. Nevertheless, her denial of collaboration with the Communist secret police isn’t evidence either. The sad reality is that, more than 30 years after winning its independence, Slovenia has failed to come to terms with UDBA’s terrible legacy. Yugoslavs of all stripes feared Tito’s secret police, rightly so, and made jokes about it, quietly. As one mordant rhyme had it, UDBA – tvoja sudba (“UDBA – your fate”). Now, Ljubljana faces the consequences of avoiding any lustration since 1991.
UDBA indeed was the fate of many thousands of Yugoslavs it imprisoned, tortured, and killed. Any taint of Tito’s murder machine is something the European Commission must avoid unless it wants to face difficult questions about who is really running the EU.
[i] Uprava državne bezbednosti (State Security Directorate), as it was termed from 1946 to 1966: the acronym is pronounced “OOD-bah.”
[ii] The Soviet secret police went through a bewildering series of name changes, starting with the mouthful All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution (VChK or Cheka) in 1917, until settling on Committee for State Security (KGB) in 1954, which it remained until the Soviet collapse of 1991. I’m using “KGB” for simplicity.
[iii] Služba državne bezbednosti (State Security Service).
[iv] Služba državne varnosti (State Security Service)
[v] Kontraobaveštajna služba (Counterintelligence Service)