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
FABULOUS SPY GAMES he was, Hoffmann was able to draw conclusions that made it look as if he had thorough insight into the most secret data of socialist economies kept under lock and key. Hoffman had ingenious ways to make the most of this knowledge: he always made sure he had some news to feed to the secret services he was in contact with, whether it was the British, the Soviets or another service in the Bloc. The Americans watched his movements suspiciously. Given that he refused to cooperate with them, they attempted to hamper his activities. In 1952, his passport was withdrawn, which prompted him to move out of Berlin, even though the doors to the embassies of the socialist countries in the Eastern Bloc were open to him. The withdrawal of his passport hit him hard, since his livelihood depended on it, but his old fellow officer, Helmut Triska, helped him by convincing his American contacts to return Hoffmans passport to him.98 In Hoffmanns eyes, this was an unforgivable sin that proved Triska worked for the CIA, so he terminated their relationship even though he did accept his returned passport. This was obviously one reason why his ties with Atlas loosened,99 and he large managed his own businesses after 1954. He had relations with Swiss and Lichtenstein companies, travelled to China and India, and lobbied at the Romanian Embassy in Vienna for the establishment of a West German trading office in Bucharest.100 98 ÁBTL 3.1.5. 0-12344/13 p. 64 Report, 15 October 1963 99 CIA, FOIA, Special collection of Emil Hoffmann, 12 April 1960 https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/HOFFMANN%2C%20EMIL_0084.pdf (Downloaded on: 4 August 2019) 100 Ibid. 101 Selvage 2014, p. 120-121 From 1956, information on Hoffmann became hard to come by. His friends in West German government circles, Kiesinger and his associates, convinced the CIA to abandon his close surveillance, his telephone was no longer tapped and his mail was also left unchecked.101 By the sixties, the secret services had lost interest in him, and, as we have seen, the Soviet and the Hungarian military intelligence service also ended its relations with Hoffmann, at least according to the information they passed on to the Ministry of the Interior. In actual fact, the committed sources of MNVK-2 did continue to do business with him. In 38
