Riots at a demonstration against government microfiche record-keeping in March 1990.
ASL / Swiss National Museum

Subsequent discussions centred in particular on the legality and potential hazards of P-26. A portion of the left was concerned that the emergency measures could have been directed against them. According to the fundamental concept of the organisation, dating from 1982, one of the scenarios in which P-26 would have gone into action was ‘internal upheaval due to blackmail, infiltration and/or the like’. The defining scenario, however, was that of foreign occupation – that is, a Soviet invasion.

The setting up of the secret organisation began in 1979. The name ‘P-26’ or ‘Projekt 26’ harks back to the drafting of the country’s overall defence plan of 1973. This plan included non-military aspects of national defence, and under Article 426 the plan addressed the issue of ‘Resistance in the enemy-occupied area’. But even before P-26, in the territorial forces and later in the special service there were preparations for resistance, undertaken in the wake of the seizure of power by the communists in Czechoslovakia in 1948, and especially after the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and the Prague Spring in 1968.

Efrem Cattelan, alias ‘Rico’, was in charge of the management and organisation of ‘Projekt 26’. Under terms of strict confidentiality, ‘unremarkable average citizens’, male and female, were recruited, whose task it would be to organise and strengthen resistance in the event of occupation. Members received basic training in pistol shooting and conspiratorial behaviour. This included the setting up of dead letter boxes, and filature, the art of shaking off a pursuer. In special instruction courses, members were trained in more specific activities, which varied depending on the specialist groups involved. For example, while radio operators were introduced to encrypted message transmission, the engineering corps (the ‘Genisten’) practiced shooting and explosives use, and members of the ‘3M’ specialist group worked on the safe transport of people, material and messages (in German, ‘Menschen, Material und Meldungen’).

Claudia Moritzi

Project 26