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The spy hunt in Czechoslovakia continued. After arresting former Foreign Minister Vladimir Clementis on charges of espionage and conspiracy against the regime, the Communist police arrested his wife Ludmila. Hundreds of other people, accused of being accomplices of Clementis, were also reported in jail, including ten members of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, four Communist district secretaries and a former ambassador. Said Deputy Party Secretary Gustav Bares: "We are making new discoveries. The Central Committee is determined to exterminate to the last drop this ugly and stinking ulcer." On one day last week, the Communist Party paper Rude Prdvo published four columns of letters demanding "speedy condemnation" for Clementis and his accomplices. It looked as if the Reds were working toward a show trial in Prague.

The long arm of Czechoslovakia's Red police stretched all the way to India, there reached for the Czech ambassador, Bohuslav Kratochvil, who had been appointed to his post a little over a year ago by his good friend Clementis.

A Sanskrit scholar and devotee of Hindu philosophy who frequently spices his brilliant conversation with quotations from Hindu scripture, Ambassador Kratochvil had become one of New Delhi's most popular diplomats. Pinkish Indian intellectuals used him as evidence that Communists were all right. But when Clementis was arrested, the ambassador's pale, haunted face (he had spent five years in Nazi concentration camps) grew a lot more haunted. To an announcer on the New Delhi radio, Kratochvil said: "Will you please announce my death when it takes place shortly?"

Kratochvil was summoned home to Prague for "consultation." Quietly last week he packed his bags (16 of them) and with his wife, two-year-old son and governess took a train for Bombay, traveling under the name of Smith. Later, the Smith family was reported on board a ship bound for Britain. London announced that Kratochvil had asked asylum as a political refugee. In a letter of resignation, Kratochvil denounced his country's Red regime and called on his fellow citizens to rise against it. The Czechoslovak embassy in New Delhi promptly denounced his flight as "a betrayal of his country." Said one of the ambassador's friends in New Delhi: "Maybe the yogi in him did not get along with the commissar."

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