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 Cold War Hungaricum
'THE HUNGARIAN MAFIA' in Japan. So, although Hungarian re-exports in 1956 were far more considerable than those of even the Soviet Union, this gap only deepened later on, even though it was the Bolshevik regime that created this technique to support left-wing parties in the West by using party firms as intermediaries, and thus essentially channelling the commissions paid into illegal party funding. The system functioned up until the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and all the satellite states were obligated to use it. From the early 1970s, however, the money flowing from Hungary to sister parties in the West was not substantial,230 even though intermediary trade was only beginning to truly scale up at the time. As it is not possible to ground this phenomenon in clear ideological reasons, noting also that the frequent losses made by the re-exporting business caught the eye even of the Americans, not to mention the fact that the Hungarian foreign trade balance was negative nearly every year from the 1970s onwards, the question arises of what the purpose of the mechanism was in the first place. According to the Americans, the most straightforward explanation lay in the previously mentioned pressure to obtain hard currency, and given how badly the countries of the Eastern Bloc needed hard currency at all times, this cannot be challenged, yet the explanation still seems too thin, particularly when we consider the countries of origin and destination of the re-exported goods. In 1957, three quarters of re-exports were destined for the free world, but what is truly surprising is that this was where 45 percent of this activity originated from, so Hungarian firms were involved in the trade relations between two western countries.231 It is difficult to put ones finger on what interests capitalist firms could possibly have in using a state company behind the Iron Curtain to do business with each other during the Cold War. There may in part have been underlying political motives, just as in the case of the Iranian oil transit mentioned previously, when western countries were not allowed to buy black gold from the Persian country due to the American embargo. But all this 230 Szilágyi 2015, p. 55 231 CIA data suggest that 33 percent of Hungarian re-exports took place between the two western countries, 43 percent of re-export transactions involving eastern goods were sold in the West, re-exporting within the Bloc accounted for 11 percent, and acting as an intermediary to channel western goods into the Eastern Bloc accounted for the rest. 83
