Borvendég Zsuzsanna: Fabulous Spy Games. How international trade networks with the West developed after 1945 - A Magyarságkutató Intézet Kiadványai 24. (Budapest, 2021)
INTRODUCTION
FABULOUS SPY GAMES This story leads us into the world of secret services, without an understanding of which it is almost impossible to grasp the situation in the Cold War.3 A new type of warfare started after 1945, where open, armed conflicts were relegated to the status of mere local skirmishes, and where secret powers, carefully hidden from voters, played grand political games behind the scenes through diplomatic negotiations and the application of economic pressure. More often than not, the true enemy was to be found elsewhere than indicated by the political propaganda, and alliances that might have seemed utterly irrational for outsiders were forged behind closed doors. The Hungarian secret services also had a role to play in these clandestine games. Following the revolution in 1956, Hungary undertook the task of opening up to the capitalist world, welcoming also an influx of Western capital and technologies.4 5 János Kádár depended on this to stay in power, since he needed funds to create goulash communism and the Soviets needed a Trojan horse to wheel over to the other side.5 This book also reveals that Kádár s opening up to the West was not without antecedents. In fact, the economic channels that later proved to function as the 3 A number of studies have explored secret service activities during the Cold War. As a nonexhaustive list cf. Andrew - Mitrohin 2000; Bartosek 2003; Kotek 2005; Macrakis 2008; Schmidt 2005. 4 On Hungary’s western relations and her balancing between great powers, cf. Kalmár 2014; Borhi 2015; Békés 2019 5 János Kenedi pointed out in the mid-2000s that Hungary played a unique role within the Bloc, which gave rise to the world of goulash communism’ a soft dictatorship: ‘Within Comecon and the Warsaw Treaty, the military industry job delegated to Hungary was to transfer funding. Contrary to the popular belief that this was meant to compensate Hungary for the retributions of the revolution in 1956, Hungary evolved into goulash communism’ and became a seemingly laxer dictatorship than the other Soviet satellite countries, because it was supposed to receive credits from NATO and other western countries to acquire forbidden COCOM-listed items, particularly after 1972, through industrial espionage, diplomatic ties and other sources of information for the Soviet Union, have these manufactured mostly in Bulgaria and in East Germany, and bring in the profits from the money thus made in the illegal money markets. Hungary accumulated a national debt of 23 billion US dollars during the acquisition of western loans to fund goulash communism’ but the tremendous profits made from this transfer is numerically incorporated into the current Hungarian economy. These became integrated into the activities of business and political circles. It was impossible to remove both from budgetary organisations and the private economy.’ Kenedi 2006, p 12 10
