Jolyon Naegele

Jolyon Arthur Naegele
Add a Photo Jolyon Naegele "U Budyho", Prague, October 2022
Born	(1955-04-19) April 19, 1955 New York City, New York, U.S.
Education	PS 166 High School of Art & Design City College of New York (B.A.) School of Slavonic and East European Studies University of London School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University in Bologna, Italy and Washington, DC. (M.A.)
Occupation	Foreign correspondent Political analyst Author
Known for	United States Information Agency Superior Honor Award (1988) “for consistently superior achievements in journalism as VOA’s correspondent in Vienna, highlighted by the remarkable coup of obtaining a broadcast interview with Alexander Dubcek Credited by the BBC’s Misha Glenny “For the past four years, the impact of Jolyon Naegele, the VOA’s Eastern Europe Correspondent, on Czechoslovak politics has been greater than most journalists can dream of in a lifetime. A fluent Czech speaker, Naegele has communicated the ironic nuances of Czechoslovak reality to people inside Czechoslovakia more than anyone else before him.” The Listener, November 30, 1989
Children	Eliska Naegele (daughter)
Parents	Thomas Ferdinand Naegele [ (1924*-) (father) Rosemary Cushla Naegele b. Hurst (1925–2012) (mother)
Relatives	Ferdinand Nägele (member of the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848-49) (great great grandfather) Reinhold Naegele (graphic artist) (grandfather) Alice Naegele MD neé Nördlinger (grandmother) among the first women to study medicine in Germany His great-grandmother Helene Nördlinger neé Schlüchterer spent the last five weeks of her life in Theresienstadt/Terezín concentration camp before dying in a transport to the Treblinka extermination camp. Thomas F. Naegele (artist, teacher) Rosemary C. Naegele (artist) - Reinhold, Thomas, Rosemary, Cushla. Drei Generationen: hüben und drüben. Three Generations: over here and over there. Cushla, Rosemary (1997). Drei Generationen: hüben und drüben. Three Generations: over here and over there. by Stuttgart Galerie unterm Turm. </ref>Stuttgart Galerie unterm Turm, 1997 (mother) Sir Arthur Hurst (grandfather) Sir Gerald Hurst (great-uncle) Kaspar D. Naegele (uncle) Philipp O. Naegele (uncle) Christopher Hurst (publisher) (uncle) Amyas Naegele (brother) Cushla Naegele (artist) (sister) Tobias Naegele (brother)
Awards	Pelikán Prize 2019

Jolyon Naegele (born April 19, 1955 in New York, NY) is a former journalist and political analyst based in the Czech Republic. He was Voice of America’s correspondent for Central and Eastern Europe (1984-1994) based in Vienna (1984-89), Bonn (1989-90) and Prague (1990-94). He worked as an editor at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) based in Prague (1996-2003). He was a political affairs officer in the UN peacekeeping mission in Kosovo, UNMIK in Pristina (2003-2017), heading the mission’s Office of Political Affairs for ten years.

Early life, family and education

Jolyon Naegele studied international relations with a focus on the Soviet bloc. In the course of his university studies he learned Czech, German, Russian, Polish and Italian. Among his professors in the US were the political scientists Ivo Ducháček , John Herz and historians Randolph Braham and Vojtech Mastny; in London he studied Czech language and literature with Bohemists Robert Pynsent, David Short and Aleš Svoboda.

Career

He crossed the Iron Curtain for the first time in 1973, the first of scores of visits. After completing his graduate school studies, he visited the Soviet Union for the first time in 1978, travelling alone by train, visiting Uzhhorod, Lviv, Kyiv, Moscow, Petrozavodsk, Leningrad, Tallinn and Vilnius. The journey enabled him to better comprehend Soviet reality on the ground. After working for American International Group in 1979-80, he settled in Vienna at the end of 1980 as an associate editor at Business International Corporation, which enabled him to make frequent visits to Czechoslovakia and elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe, make contacts, and further improve his understanding of the region.

Czechoslovak State Security StB took an interest in Naegele at least from 1981 based on an allegation by Business International’s Prague stringer, that the multi-lingual American reporter was likely an “élève of the CIA”. The StB’s counterintelligence department proceeded to investigate Naegele on suspicion of espionage, placing him under surveillance and developing a network of informants among friends and acquaintances of his in Prague and Bratislava who, over the years reported in detail on Naegele’s contacts and their perceptions of his views and intentions. The StB, in cooperation with the KGB and the intelligence services of other Soviet-bloc states monitored and exchanged information on Naegele until the collapse of communist rule. However, following an audit by the the StB’s investigation’s department in December 1988 - January 1989, the auditors informed counterintelligence that they had found no evidence of Naegele having committed espionage and that either he should be investigated under a different paragraph such as for controlled substances or else his "signal file" should be archived and a new file on him as a "screened person", i.e. a known quanity, should be opened. Following a feview by the Communist Party Central Committee, counterintelligence closed its investigation and archived Naegele's signal file in March 1989. As a result, his file survived the revolution, in contrast to most active files, which were shredded in late 1989 amid the collapse of the Communist ruled police state.

Starting in November 1984, Naegele worked as a Voice of America (VOA)’s correspondent for Central and Eastern Europe and VOA bureau chief in Vienna. In 1985, following the intervention of the US Embassy and a warning about reciprocity with the accreditation of the Czechoslovak Radio correspondent in New York, the Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czechoslovakia granted Naegele long-term journalistic accreditation. He was also subsequently accredited by the Bulgarian and Polish foreign ministries. Hungarian authorities allowed him to travel and report freely as did Romania, which, however, ceased granting him visas in 1988. Naegele was under secret police surveillance in all Soviet-bloc states that he reported from for VOA. Yugoslav authorities allowed Naegele to report and travel freely until 1989 when restrictions were imposed for travel in some areas of Kosovo. Naegele covered the visit to Poland in 1987 by Pope John Paul II and by Vice President George H.W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s visits to Hungary in 1986, Romania in 1987 and to Poland and Yugoslavia in 1988 as well as meetings of the Warsaw Pact in Prague and Sofia shortly after Gorbachev assumed power.

Albania only started granting most non-Communist western reporters visas for the first time in 1990, chiefly to cover a conference of Balkan foreign ministers in Tirana. This marked the first of numerous reporting visits Naegele made to Albania.

Naegele reported in detail in his VOA correspondent reports about the breakdown of communist power throughout the Eastern Bloc in the second half of the 1980s. In Czechoslovakia, he focused on human rights isssues, including the persecution of independent activists of Charter 77, the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted, the Jazz Section, Obroda (Renewal), the Roman Catholic Church, the Greek Catholic Church in Slovakia, and the Jewish Community in Prague. In Slovakia, he focused on air pollution around Bratislava, the consequences of the last wave of collectivization, the regime's approach to the Romani community and Ruthenian identity.

In Hungary, Naegele focused on the development of pluralism in the Hungarian parliament which represented a challenge to one-party Communist rule. In Poland, he focused on the resurgence of the Solidarity free trade union and improving relations between Poland and the US. In Bulgaria, his focus was on the forced assimilation of the country’s large Turkish minority. In Romania, Naegele focused on the impact on everyday life of the harsh regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu. In Yugoslavia, Naegele focused on issues of national identity, nationalism and ethnic intolerance and the subsequent violent break-up of Yugoslavia. He began reporting on the worsening situation in Kosovo 1986; he covered the 600th anniversary rally at Gazimestan in Kosovo in June 1989 at which the President of the Yugoslav constituent republic of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević ominously warned of future farmed battles. Naegele conducted several interviews in the late 1980s with Kosovo Albanian pacifist leader Ibrahim Rugova.

While reporting for VOA, Naegele interviewed the then recently retired UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim in Vienna, prior to his candidacy for president of Austria, the American evangelist Billy Graham, during a visit to Romania in 1985, Serb communist dissident Milovan Djilas, Polish dissident and future defense minister Janusz Onyszkiewicz, and in Czechoslovakia: dissident playwright Václav Havel, Alexander Dubček, Cardinal František Tomášek, writer Bohumil Hrabal, film director Jiří Menzel, dissidents Vlasta Chramostová, Václav Malý, Petr Uhl and his wife Anna Šabatová, Jiří Dienstbier, Ján Čarnogurský. Most of the interviews conducted in Czechoslovakia were recorded on audio cassettes, were digitized by public broadcaster Czech Radio in 2020-22 and are stored in the radio’s archives.

As a VOA reporter, Naegele covered the National Pilgrimage at Velehrad in 1985, when a crowd of believers chanted slogans against an attempt by the regime attempt to rebrand the pilgrimage as a "gathering for peace". He also covered all the major demonstrations for freedom, including the Good Friday candlelight demonstration in Bratislava and commemorative and anti-regime events in Prague on August 20 and 21, 1988, October 28, 1988, December 10, 1988, during the Palach Week in January 1989 marking the twentieth anniversary of Czech student Jan Palach’s self-immolation in protest at growing Czechoslovak indifference to the Soviet military occupation following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and in Prague on August 21 and October 28, 1989. When the Velvet Revolution broke out on November 17, 1989, he was in East Berlin, but from November 19 he was at all the other demonstrations in Wenceslas Square which culminated in the inauguration of Havel of the President of the Czechoslovakia on December 29,1989 in the Vladislav Hall of Prague Castle from where he also reported. As a VOA correspondent, he accompanied President Havel on his first foreign trips to East and West Germany in January 1990, to Iceland, Canada and the USA, and then to the USSR in February 1990.

After the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, his reporting for VOA focused on the breakup of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, and the unstable situation in Albania. In the years 1996-2003 he was an editor in the central newsroom of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) in Prague with his primary focus on Slovakia, the Western Balkans, Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Between 2003 and 2017, he worked as a political analyst in Pristina in the Office of Political Affairs (OPA) of the UN civilian peacekeeping mission in Kosovo, UNMIK, including ten years as the director of the department. He co-authored and edited the UN Secretary-General's quarterly reports to the Security Council on the situation in the mission and in Kosovo. He was UNMIK’s first coordinator for dialogue between Pristina and Belgrade and also served as a representative of the UN mission in the Central Election Commission.

Personal life

His first marriage was in 1991 to architect Ivana Jarolímová, with whom he has a daughter, Eliška. The marriage ended in divorce.

In 2015, he married the Czech ethnologist and writer Pavlína Brzáková.

Work

Co-author of the book: Velvet revolution after 30 years,

Book review: Ioannis Armakolas and James Ker-Lindsay: The Politics of Recognition and Engagement.

Awards

Pelikán Prize 2019

Further Articles in English, Czech and Slovak

• Jak se dělá MBT Jolyon, 20 let, původem z USA, student češtiny v Londýně.
• VOA Goes Inside the Soviet Union
• Behind the Story. Alexander Dubcek. Twenty Years After the Prague Spring
• Spring Fever - Misha Glenny reports on the momentous events in Czechoslovakia
• Hovoříme s korespondentem Hlasu Ameriky Jolyonem Naegelem. Nepíše o naši zemi jen pro posluchače v Československu. Jak se pracovalo v policejním státě.
• Český hlas má americký pas
• Byl to ohromný nesmysl! Rozhovor s americkým novinářem a reportérem rozhlasové stanice Hlas Ameriky, Jolyonem Naegelem,
• S Jolyonom Naegelem spravodajcom Hlasu Ameriky o Česko-Slovensku, Slovensku, o revolúcii, novinách, o politike i politikoch z NADHĹADU
• Očima západu. Jak nás vidí korespondent zahraničních médií "Bez sentimentu a nostalgie"

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