Along Fleet Street last week, London's postal inspectors were hunting a new kind of saboteur. Someone was rifling the mails to keep British editors from getting their weekly copies of Features and News from
Behind the Iron Curtain, a Mimeographed bulletin published by Josef Josten, a Czech refugee editor. If, as suspected, Communists were the thieves, they had good cause to fear Editor Josten's tiny bulletin. In three years, his "Free Czech Information" service has proved uncannily accurate on what is happening, and about to happen, behind Russia's curtain.
When President Truman announced the first Russian atomic explosion on Sept. 23, 1949, the daily press was already scooped: Josten had turned out the same news in his bulletin 30 hours before. Again, while Prague's Communist Foreign Minister Vladimir Clementis was safe at the United Nations, Josten's paper warned him of a Red plot to sack him; Clementis disregarded it, returned to Prague, and, three months later, was sacked, and finally disappeared completely.
On the Lam. Editor Josten is now in his second exile from his homeland. He was writing for Eduard Benes' daily Lidove Noviny when the Nazis marched into Prague, escaped to France, where he joined a Czech legion fighting the Germans; he got to England on a British destroyer a month after Dunkirk. In London he edited a small Free Czech Army daily, made BBC broadcasts, married a British girl, served in the Allied invasion of France and became a lieutenant in SHAEF's psychological warfare branch. At war's end, his good friend, the late Jan Masaryk, made him a press officer in Prague's foreign ministry. When the Reds seized power in 1948, Josten got his wife out by plane on a forged passport, then slipped across the border into Western Germany. Reaching London again, he and his wife got a Mimeograph machine and began putting out their bulletins.
Before long, he was getting midnight knocks and telephone calls from informants, many of them Communist officials who were secret enemies of the regime. British papers found his bulletins so reliable that the Manchester Guardian quoted them in one of its famed "leaders," the Times used them as tips for its own correspondents, and the Daily Telegraph began front-paging Josten "beats" with full credit (e.g., news of the Russian's slave-labor Czech uranium mine).