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 pressure on the party leadership to restore their right to trade but were only partially successful. There were some strategically important companies, such as Videoton, that were granted foreign trading licences on an individual basis, but more often than not the secret service also had its fingers in the pie, and we can attribute such licences not only to economic considerations. In the case of Videoton, for example, the aim was expressly to facilitate embargoed purchases. According to a study from 1983, only 31 of the 450 industrial companies had licences to appear on the international markets in 1982.242 Up until the late 1980s, 70 percent of total foreign trade was carried out by the foreign trade companies.243 Almost immediately following the sovietisation of trade, the interest group that was small in number but wielded all the more power and which directed the re-export-based activity outlined here, began to rise. The members of the lobby included some of the leaders of trade firms and financial institutions, a few officials of the Ministry of Foreign Trade, and members of the secret service who supported them. The latter constituted a small group within MNVK-2.244 242 Berkó 1983, p. 64 243 Tímár 1989, p. 63 244 The former military intelligence officer István Práczki describes the group within MNVK-2 that cooperated with the foreign trade lobby as follows in his memoirs: “A group I will refer to as a lobby for reasons of clarity was in control at the company Its members comprise reliable persons who arrived or were sent from the apparatus and the political arm of the army and whose relationships went far beyond an affinity to communist and Soviet ideologies. Their aim is to appropriate tools of power and gain financial advantage, as well as to manipulate the company employing - given the nature of their activity - often illegal methods to serve its own interests.” Práczki 2014, p. 134 The head of the Foreign Trade Bank, István Salusinszky, who held this position between 1964 and 1980, played a major role in strengthening the lobby and extending its activities. During his term of office, he consistently took the position that the country’s interests and the development of its foreign trade required foreign trade companies to be allowed to establish enterprises in the West, and to do so with the least red tape possible. The introduction of the new economic mechanism placed the supervision of Hungarian interests in the capitalist world with the MKB, but establishing a new company was still subject 90
