Borvendég Zsuzsanna: Fabulous Spy Games. How international trade networks with the West developed after 1945 - A Magyarságkutató Intézet Kiadványai 24. (Budapest, 2021)
‘THE HUNGARIAN MAFIA’ - A chink on the peace front: Frankfurt am Main
FABULOUS SPY GAMES office. Soon enough, he was accused by Hungarian state protection of being in contact with the American secret service. This sounds plausible in the light of previous events as there is evidence that the German business partners of Hungarian traders were also supported by American intelligence. This gave the Americans easy access to the Hungarians. Furthermore, the CIA archives hold several reports showing that the staff of the Hungarian trade office in Frankfurt were regarded as potential informants, and that the organisation made attempts to approach them. An interesting supplement to this is a report on a certain Andreas Brody archived by state protection, the content of which we accessed via the West German Constitution Protection Office. (Unfortunately, I found no mention of how they obtained this information.) According to German counterintelligence, Andreas Brody was managing a Frankfurt-based economic intelligence service on behalf of the Soviets, and his most important business connections were Bickenbach and his business partner, Englert. Hungarian-born Brody was engaged in the grain trade until 1944. He moved to Moscow after the war, where it is said he participated in training courses. He returned to Hungary in 1946 only to be sent off immediately to the western zone of Germany, where he worked as a resident officer of the Soviet secret service. Every single person travelling from Hungary to the western provinces of Germany had to report to him. According to German counterintelligence, his son, István Brody worked for Andreas Brody’s office.184 We know for a fact that István Brody ’s father was Sándor Brody, who also had an older brother called András. András Brody was known as a journalist, worked as a foreign correspondent for a number papers, and was the editor-in-chief of the Ufa Magazin in the 1930s. Could Andreas Brody actually be András Brody? Based on the information currently available, this possibility seems the likeliest. It was no coincidence that the Hungarian translation of the West German report was archived in a dossier containing documents on work at the Frankfurt office: it must have been important for Hungarian intelligence to learn what hostile counterintelligence could possibly have known about the Brody brothers. Based 184 ÁBTL 3.2.3 Mt-425/3, p. 974-976 Report on Dr Andreas Bródy, September 1951 68
