Return
Koecher returned to Czechoslovakia to a hero's welcome and was given a house and a Volvo car as a reward for his services. He was also given a job at the Prague Institute for Economic Forecasting, where he shared an office with Václav Klaus, the future Czech president. It is said that Koecher played an organizing role in the early days of the Velvet Revolution (1989), as he was seen by U.S. journalists issuing orders at the Laterna Magika theatre. Koecher denied any involvement in the Velvet Revolution, stating that U.S. journalists must have mixed him up with the then unknown Václav Klaus, who had a similar appearance.
The fall of communism has seen him fall from prominence, with the exception of his alleged involvement in a scheme run by self-professed former CIA operatives to defraud Mohammed Al-Fayed with false documents that would support his conspiracy theories about the death of Princess Diana. He continues to live in the Czech Republic in relative obscurity. His wife, Hana Koecher, made the headlines in the Czech Republic, when she was fired from her new job as a translator for the British Embassy in Prague. The British were completely unaware of her espionage past until a Czech newspaper reporter notified them. A suit she filed against a media organisation for revealing her past as a spy, damaging her business, was rejected.
An episode of the 2004 Canadian documentary series 'Betrayal!' covered the Koecher case.
Read more about this topic: Karl Koecher
Famous quotes containing the word return:
“I thought to myself that it was still another Sunday gone by, that Mother was now buried, that I was going to return to work and that, after all, nothing had changed.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“... in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquillity will return again.”
—Anne Frank (1929–1945)
“The chickadee and nuthatch are more inspiring society than statesmen and philosophers, and we shall return to these last as to more vulgar companions.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)