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
FABULOUS SPY GAMES The CIA believed that pushing re-exports may also have been justified by Hungary setting itself the goal of broadening its relations with the third world. We have seen with regard to coffee purchases that the countries liberated from colonial rule were happy to welcome new trading partners, and rewarded them with preferential treatment, while Hungary did indeed use this to its own advantage. In June 1958, the information received by the American intelligence services suggested that Hungarian foreign traders purchased large quantities of raw materials (it is not specified exactly which raw materials these were) from several developing countries, including Guatemala, Mexico, Columbia, Morocco, Tunisia and Venezuela; quantities that exceeded the country’s needs by far, enabling foreign traders to appear in western markets with goods they would have been unable to offer by relying on domestic resources only. Given that they wished to sell these goods below world market prices, there was plenty of demand. Hungarian foreign traders were always using their sensitive antennae to ferret out where they could make yet another re-exporting deal, so when staff at the Frankfurt office found out that a one-million-tonne stockpile of wheat from the previous year was still lying around in West German warehouses even though the next harvest was just around the corner, they realised they could buy a considerable portion of the stock at a favourable price, which could then be delivered to the estuary of the Nile in exchange for Egyptian cotton. The Americans were also aware that goods and raw materials purchased from different countries were often repackaged and their papers forged to allow them to be sold on the market as Hungarian goods. Hungarian traders allegedly did this with Argentinian meat, British coal and Japanese yarns.240 240 CIA, FOIA, Economic Intelligence Report - The Role of Re-exports in Hungarian Foreign Trade. June 1959 https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP79R01141A001400100002-2.pdf (Downloaded on: 28 August 2019) Hungarian foreign trade relationships were therefore highly dynamic, also with western countries, and Hungary’s trained foreign traders were alert in exploiting the global market splitting in two as the world order changed due to the rise of the Iron Curtain. Hungarians were the big winners of the 88
