Borvendég Zsuzsanna: Fabulous Spy Games. How international trade networks with the West developed after 1945 - A Magyarságkutató Intézet Kiadványai 24. (Budapest, 2021)
EMIL HOFFMAN AND HIS CIRCLES - The road to the Stasi
EMIL HOFFMAN AND HIS CIRCLES the CIA’s researchable documents, mention is made of Hoffmann travelling to Hungary in 1956, but there is nothing more to discover about his activities here, and, based on Selvages study, it seems that the Stasi did not pay much attention to the businessmans visits to Budapest, either. In the subsequent years, Emil Hoffman, or ‘Fabulous’, as counterintelligence called him, became a frequent visitor to Hungarian foreign trade companies, regularly dropping the hint during private conversations that Hungary was the only country in the Eastern Bloc that was civilised enough to strike significant trade deals with. The real story behind the scenes, however, was that the rising Hungarian foreign trade lobby found in Hoffman, for the time being, the person to open up doors to highly capitalised West German companies using cutting-edge technologies. Hoffmann was once again a key figure in a familiar business world bustling with spies and was able to boost his businesses and gain financial support from the Hungarian government to start his weekly business magazine. It was not a bad move: every western journalist who presented the Hungarian party leadership, embarking on consolidation, in a favourable light was essential to Kádár-era politics. Cooperation, therefore, seemed to be a mutually beneficial business, and, from 1957 to 1964, Hoffmann was a regular guest of Hungarian exportimport companies and some prominent individuals involved in foreign trade administration. The fact that Hoffmanns visits to Hungary started just when the CIA suspended his surveillance is probably no coincidence, as Kiesinger strongly supported the members of the Hungarian foreign trade elite, and, by saving Hoffmann from the CIA’s grip, Kiesinger was actually helping his Hungarian friends become more oriented to the West. Those few years of intense presence in Hungary were probably Hoffmann’s swan song at the end of the adventurous symphony that was his life. He moved back to Vienna in 1964, and after his Hungarian contacts also put him in a corner, he travelled less and less to the other side of the Iron Curtain. A few years later, he ventured into starting yet another magazine, blaming the leadership of the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) when it failed.102 102 Selvage 2014, p. 127 39
