Borvendég Zsuzsanna: Fabulous Spy Games. How international trade networks with the West developed after 1945 - A Magyarságkutató Intézet Kiadványai 24. (Budapest, 2021)
ATTACK ON THE OMFB - Ties running deep
FABULOUS SPY GAMES In 1983, a joint venture called Berma-Wien was established in Vienna. It was 51 percent owned by Mineralkontor and 49 percent by Technoimpex, at least according to a doctoral thesis from 1987.486 The form of the name suggests that Berma-Wien was probably a subsidiary, the Vienna branch of a parent company operating under a similar name. One of the owners, Mineralkontor, was founded in Vienna in 1973 by Mineralimpex and an Austrian firm called Baustoffimportkontor a few months after the decree allowing joint ventures was issued. Mineralkontor was managed by the directors of the founding companies, István Russay and Heinrich Korzil, and Berma-Wien was also managed by Korzil. Mineralkontor was the company used to commit probably the largest fraud during the operation of the foreign trade lobby, when it reexported oil from Iran to the United States right into the 1980s. By selling on the Iranian oil to the concern operating the largest private oil refinery in the USA at a loss of 10 percent, they inflicted damage of hundreds of millions of US dollars on the Hungarian economy, contributing heavily to the country’s high level of debt.487 486 Vajna 1987, p. 98. 487 Borvendég 2017, p. 111-160. 488 ÁBTL 2.7.1 NOIJ 1983-III/II-233, 29 November 1983 489 Ibid. Berma-Wiens main activity consisted of various assembly operations, and it became involved in the work carried out by Austrian firm Voest-Alpin in the Soviet Union, during which it was entrusted with assembling an entire metallurgical plant.488 One of the prerequisites for fulfilling the contract was for Berma to send roughly 100-150 people to the Soviet Union, and counterintelligence noted that this essentially gave Heinrich Korzil, the managing director of the company, a complete overview of the investment.489 This appeared incomprehensible to the Hungarian secret service as it was the Counterintelligence Department of the Southern Group of Forces (DHCS) of the Soviet Army itself, stationed temporarily in Hungary, that requested its Hungarian counterparts to keep the Austrian businessman under surveillance in the late 1960s. This was because Korzil was working in the capital under occupation as an agent of American 176
