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 - End game
FABULOUS SPY GAMES and in this area, but the higher interests of MNVK-2 and Division III/I. I am saying this only to explain that ‘Chamberlain,403 or whoever put him in place, may have been manipulating the operational situation in this way on purpose.”404 According to the operative officer, the fact that Lindner s dossier was deleted from the archives made it possible for him not to be flagged up as potentially unreliable when he was appointed to head the Information Office. Counterintelligence was trying to gather condemning evidence against Lindner, but to no avail. They were unable to prove that he conspired against the people s republic, so they had to close the file with no result from their point of view. Anyway, Ervin Rojkó reported even in 1972 that Lindner and his son, who was a trainee journalist at the time, met Hoffmann in Vienna on a regular basis.405 403 The codename of the target László Lindner with counterintelligence. 404 ÁBTL 3.1.5 0-15409, p. 26 Evaluation report, 13 December 1971 405 ÁBTL 3.1.5 0-15409, p. 194 Report, 21 August 1972 406 ÁBTL 3.1.5 0-12344/7 p. 40 Summary report, 20 March 1963 407 ÁBTL 3.1.5 O-12344/7-a p. 39 Summary report, 17 June 1963 Counterintelligence took a long time to prepare to close the investigation against Hoffmann and to order the expulsion of the German journalist, but they had a hard time actually getting this done. After the book was published in 1961, a number of experts found that classified materials were leaked to Hoffmann, which proved yet again how serious the matter was, so they started conspiring to bring the former Nazi officer and his relations in Hungary down. Given that it was mostly the institutions listed that fell under suspicion for leaking the information, they were also used to set the trap. Within the National Technical Development Committee, a task force was set up to analyse Comecon data, including those of Hoffmanns contacts they found suspicious, and then forwarded them false documents.406 They then watched Hoffmanns writings to see if the disinformation cropped up somewhere. Mátyás Csillag, Hoffmanns great adversary, was also involved in this secret service operation.407 The documents do not reveal why Csillag disliked Hoffmann in the first place. It is quite possible that it was only military intelligence using Csillag to shuffle the cards in Hoffmanns games, the games counterintelligence also participated in before long, and that the journalist misinterpreted these manipulations as 148
