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 Brody’s assignment in Frankfurt would suggest a continuous relationship with Hungarian intelligence. In the absence of sources, this is, however, just one of several plausible explanations. In 1950, István Brody was sent to Cuba. All we know about his activities there is that he tried to penetrate the Cuban market with Hungarian products, without success. (At the time, the island state was reluctant to do business with traders from satellite countries, except for Jose Schachter from Havana.188 ) In 1951, István Brody ‘defected’, but barely any information emerged on this. All we know is that he took all the documentation from the Frankfurt office with him when he was transferred to Cuba. Did he plan a switch to the other side in advance, and chose, therefore, not to leave confidential documents behind? Or was his escape staged, so he took the documents of various agreements with him to ensure plausible deniability and serve as bait for the hostile secret service? It is impossible to rule out either possibility. 188 CIA, FOIA, Current Intelligence Digest, 18 March 1952 https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP79T01146A000800230001-5.pdf (Downloaded on: 21 August 2019) 189 ‘The Last Mohican by György Márer: Amerikai Magyar Népszava, p. 10, 9 October 1981 190 Ibid. Information is provided on István Brody ’s later life in a newspaper article published after his death.189 According to the article, he lived first in Paris, then made a living by working for a big corporation in Cuba, where his job was to “review news in the most prestigious newspapers across the world to compile an economic news report on a regular basis.”190 After Castro took power, he moved to the US to settle in Miami Beach, in a palatial rented property on the bay. “According to our observations, Pista Brody and his family lived well. He continued to receive his salary from the former Cuban company,” a source recalled. István Brody ’s body was laid to rest in his father’s grave in the Rákoskeresztúr public cemetery in 1981. Károly Junger replaced Brody as head of the trade office in Frankfurt in 1950. He nearly ran into trouble due to the missing documents, because he signed the inventory blind upon handover without actually checking the presence of the documents listed. However, he was not held to account as the 70
