Word: barak
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...next strong point-Tel Faqr -the Barak (Lightning) Battalion also lost most of its halftracks and was pinned down by fire. Groups of five and ten Israelis charged up the hill. The torpedo charges for breaching the barbed wire had been lost with the half tracks, and the first troopers threw themselves onto the wire so that their comrades could cross on their bodies. Losses were heavy from mines and machine guns: at least one in ten was killed before the Israelis who made it to the summit plunged into the tunnels to hunt down the defenders. At one point...
...victim was former Interior Minister and Deputy Premier Rudolf Barak, 47, whose climb up the Red rungs of success had been remarkably fast. Although he did not join the party until 1945, nine years later he was Deputy Premier, chief of the secret police and a member of the Politburo. Barak also has an unusual nonpolitical record-as a championship pole vaulter, theater buff, especially of avant-garde plays, and fan of "forbidden" jazz records that his two teen-age sons often brought back from France and Italy...
Last June Barak was fired as Interior Minister, and this month, at a session of the party's Central Committee, he was expelled from the party, stripped of parliamentary immunity, and turned over to the courts for "criminal proceedings.'' Among the charges: illegal use of state funds, "antiparty and illegal activity," "gross violation of socialist legality.'' The accusations suggested that on the basis of Barak's long tenure as boss of the secret police, he would be made the fall guy for "crimes"' committed under Novotny's leadership. After all, Czechoslovakian Communists...
...reason for Barak's downfall may be a recent series, of embarrassments of Czechoslovak espionage activities overseas, for which Barak-as secret police boss-was responsible. These include the defection of Prague's military attache in Washington, a spy scandal in West Germany, and the arrests last year of four Czech agents in Switzerland and Israel...
...more important reason for Barak's ouster is that he enjoyed a personal following inside the party, unlike the friendless and ruthless Novotny. Furthermore, Barak was Czechoslovakia's only ranking Red leader untainted by a Stalinist past, and he probably advocated genuine destalinization. Obviously, if real destalinization had swept Czechoslovakia, Novotny-not Barak-would have been the first to fall...