23 July 1895 General František Moravec was born

He was born in Čáslav as one of ten children of an official bailiff. After grammar school, he studied at the Faculty of Philosophy of Charles University, which he did not complete because he had to enlist in Čáslav in 1915. He graduated from officer's school and then went with the 12th Infantry Regiment to Kanizha in Hungary.

On 13 January 1916, with the rank of lieutenant, he crossed over to the Russian side in Poland and in May of the same year joined the Serbian Legion, after which he was assigned to the 22nd Infantry Regiment of the Czechoslovak Legion in France. "On his return to his homeland he fought first against the Hungarian revolutionaries and decided to remain in the army. From 1925 to 1928, he graduated from the War College, became a member of the military intelligence service at the rank of major and eventually became its head," Milan Kovář writes in his book Diversionaries and Agents in Action Special Operations from World War I to the Present.

During the so-called "Second Republic" he was the head of the Czechoslovak military intelligence. As an intelligence officer, he had a wealth of experience and influential supporters. "Moravec was able to organize an excellent intelligence network that reached out to the best-informed places in Nazi Germany. Thanks to Paul Thümmel, for example, Moravec already knew in detail a week before the fateful 15th of July. March 1939, that Nazi troops would enter across the border of the Second Republic, when and where it would happen, what the pretext would be," says Petr Kettner in his book The End of the Black Killer.

But his information was not taken seriously by government officials at the time. The day before the occupation, a Dutch plane came for Moravec and flew him and his closest staff to London, where a year later he became head of the Second Department of the London MNO and continued his intelligence work throughout the war.

In England, he also carefully planned the Anthropoid operation, the aim of which was the liquidation of Reinhard Heydrich. On his return to his homeland, on 5 June 1945, he was given an insignificant post and later investigated. With the help of British intelligence, General Moravec left the Fatherland on 29 June 1948 and joined the Third Resistance.

In the early 1960s, he moved permanently to the USA, where he worked as a military intelligence advisor for Czechoslovakia. He died in Washington of a heart attack," Kovář writes.

Sources.