Borvendég Zsuzsanna: Fabulous Spy Games. How international trade networks with the West developed after 1945 - A Magyarságkutató Intézet Kiadványai 24. (Budapest, 2021)
‘FABULOUS’ IN HUNGARY - The role of Frankfurt
'FABULOUS' IN HUNGARY to several of his acquaintances that Lantos acquired gold through him for 35 percent less than the market price,311 but the investigation also revealed that Lantos and Sebestyén were also the German businessmans partners in a deal worth 1.5 million deutschmarks that was not further specified by state security.312 According to Nyerges, Hoffman had suspicions that the Hungarian trader was blackmailed and chose to end his life himself for this reason.313 311 ÁBTL 3.1.5. 0-12344/3, p. 53 Report, 12 October 1961 312 ÁBTL 3.1.2. M-23749, p. 101 Report, 13 May 1964 313 ÁBTL 3.1.5. 0-12344/6, p. 192 Report, 1 February 1963 314 For more on the investigation against György Péter and his death, see: Krahulcsán 2019 315 ÁBTL 3.1.5. 0-15829/1, p. 51 Executive report, 23 June 1969 316 Hungarian Red Aid was the Hungarian branch of the Comintern network, and it was officially established to support the families of the arrested or executed leaders of the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic, as well as the families of the imprisoned members of the Communist Party. In actual fact, it operated as one of the most important cover organisations for the international Bolshevik networks. Gábor Péter, for example, arrived in Moscow in 1932 to participate in the congress of Red Aid, where he is likely to have been recruited by the Soviet secret services. Cf. Müller 2017, p. 67-80 The other death linked to Sebestyéns circles is much less well known, and has remained an unsolved mystery to this day. He was György Péter (Pikier), former head of the Central Statistical Office (KSH), who died sometime later, in January 1969, in a hospital ward.314 He allegedly stabbed himself to death, but a lot of circumstances emerged with respect to his death that certainly question the likelihood of suicide. The different documents that tried to come up with an explanation for Péter s death fail to mention an interesting piece of information that could be significant. György Péter s brother, Ferenc Pikier, was a member of the interest group around János Sebestyén. Pikier was a member of the illegal Communist Party in the 1930s, and, following the instructions of the Party, fled to France in 1938 to continue his work at the movement there.315 He had to leave the country after his brother was arrested and sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment, so Ferenc Pikier was likely to be on the radar of the authorities because he was one of the most active agents of Red Aid.316 “He continued the engineering studies he started at the Technical University at the Sorbonne, while his activist work shifted to the actual battlefield, and lasted 117
