Daughters of the KGB (34 page)

Notes

1
.    He was born Erno Singer.

2
.    Sudoplatov,
Special Tasks
, p. 367

3
.    He was born Mátyás Rosenfeld.

4
.    Applebaum,
Iron Curtain
, p. 79

5
.    Ibid, p. 70

6
.    Ibid, pp. 38–9

7
.    No. 60 Andrassy Place is now a museum known as The Terror House.

8
.    Glavnoe Upravlenie NKVD SSSR po delam Voennoplennikh I Internirovannykh (GUPVI)

9
.    Applebaum,
Iron Curtain
, pp. 118–19

10
.  Lowe,
Savage Continent
, p. 201

11
.  Applebaum,
Iron Curtain
, pp. 225–6

12
.  Ibid, pp. 419–20

13
.  Ibid, p. 303

14
.  Brogan,
Eastern Europe
, pp. 121–2

15
.  Ibid, p. 122

16
.  Applebaum,
Iron Curtain
, p. 91

17
.  Ibid, p. 82

18
.  Brogan,
Eastern Europe
, p. 128

19
.  Quoted in Brogan,
Eastern Europe
, pp. 129–30 (abridged)

20
.  L.S. Wittner,
Resisting the Bomb
, Stanford, Stanford University Press 1997, p. 89

21
.  Sudoplatov,
Special Tasks
, p. 367

18

M
AGYARS ON
M
ISSION
A
BROAD

In addition to AVO/AVH responsible for internal security there was the Hungarian Intelligence service Belügyminisztérium Állambiztonsági (BA), which was so little respected by the KGB and other Warsaw Pact services that its officers were nicknamed ‘the cafe Chekists’. This slur perhaps harked back to the days of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, when Central European spies could earn a sort of living by sitting on the terraces of pavement cafes eavesdropping on the latest gossip of indiscreet politicians and military men or the ladies who were privy to their secrets. The BA particularly targeted expatriate Hungarian circles, which were hardly a risk to the new regime, since none of them even dreamed of conquering their former homeland. The aim was, it seems, to coerce expats with family inside Hungary to cooperate in various ways, but also to discredit important figures in the Hungarian diaspora. If it seems logical that neighbouring countries like Yugoslavia, Austria and the Bundesrepublik were targeted – as witness many thousands of files now conserved on the extensive shelving in the Hungarian state intelligence archives Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára (ABLT) – so also was the Catholic Church, and particularly the Vatican.

Before the uprising of 1956, the number of AB staff was nearly 6,000. Immediately afterwards it was down to 1,500 and rose to something like the old strength by the mid-1960s. Of these between 200 and 500 were posted abroad at any one time, more to acquire much-needed Western technology than to collect military secrets. It was believed in the intelligence community that BA officers also assisted several anti-Western terrorist organisations on occasions, for example by shipping equipment and some weapons in the diplomatic bag, exempt from customs examination.

When liberal-thinking people imply that everyone claiming refugee status should be given asylum in a democratic country, alarm bells are ringing in the corridors of national counter-espionage services because, in addition to those arriving because their lives are genuinely at risk in the homelands and others coming for the welfare handouts and a generally easier lifestyle, there will be some purported refugees with very hostile motives for entering their target country. The flood of Hungarians leaving their homeland for Western Europe after the uprising of 1956 certainly included some BA officers.

In addition to BA with its specific tasks, there was also Magyar Néphadsereg Vezérkara 2 Csoportfonöksege (MNVK2), the 2nd Chief Directorate or
deuxième bureau
of Hungarian People’s Army General Staff, i.e. Hungarian military intelligence. The most successful MNVK2 agent in the 1956 refugee stream was Zoltan Szabo. After serving in the US army in Vietnam, he held the rank of Sergeant First Class but also happened to be a colonel in MNVK2. How long he might have continued his undercover activities is an open question, but he was uncovered by a double agent working for the CIA. Sometime in 1979 a GRU officer serving in Budapest named Vladimir Vasilyev passed to his CIA controller the alarming news that the USSR had obtained a shattering amount of NATO hot-war plans from a source in Germany. US Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) began investigating all personnel who had access to these plans and narrowed the list down until they were investigating Clyde Lee Conrad. As so often, one of the damning indicators was his standard of living, far in excess of his official income.

Conrad arrived in Germany in 1974 and was posted to 8th Infantry Division, based in Bad Kreuznach, with the rank of Sergeant First Class. His assignment in G3 War Plans Section was to take custody of the ultimate top-secret plans for deployment of the US Army in Europe in the event of the Cold War turning hot. In his archives were also details of the disposition of American nuclear weapons in Europe. He was to take over from Sergeant Zoltan Szabo, who had been passing classified information to Czech and Hungarian military intelligence for several years, but was about to retire from the army. Seeking to recruit a successor, Szabo, who was a cool professional, took his time sizing up Conrad’s circumstances before approaching him in 1975. Married to a German woman with two children from a previous marriage and who had one child with him, Conrad was short of cash. But he did have a very high security clearance, access to a vault of top-secret documents, and – unbelievably – the use of a secure photocopier which did not record his usage of it! When Szabo made his pitch, the inducement was simple: money and lots of it for handing over documents from the vault to Szabo’s contacts, who would pass them on to Hungarian and Czechoslovakian case officers, who in turn would forward them to Moscow. Under the code-name ‘Charlie’, Conrad took the bait and began delivering files and other information, for which he received cash payments that allegedly totalled several million dollars, some of which was shared with accomplices whom he recruited over the following ten years, during which time more than 30,000 classified documents were passed over.

Two other known members of Szabo’s spy ring were Hungarian-born Swedish citizens, the brothers Imre (code-named ‘Viktor’) and Sandor (code-named ‘Alex’) Kerecsik, but so tight was the group’s internal security that nobody was ever entirely certain how many others were involved. In 1983 Conrad recruited his assistant, Sergeant Roderick Ramsey (code-name ‘Rudolf’), to help copy and pass on classified documents for the following two years. Others known to have been in the ring were Jeffrey Rondeau, Jeffrey Gregory and Sergeant Kelly Theresa Warren. Ramsey would later reveal that there were at least ten others involved, one of whom became an American general, according to him. The ring may have become leaky, with so many people involved. Whether for that reason or simply from Vasilyev’s tip-off, payment of Conrad’s retirement pension was stopped for several months without him apparently noticing, which indicated that he had other sources of income for his very affluent lifestyle.

Conrad was arrested in 1983 by Federal German counter-espionage officers, neither the American military nor the FBI having jurisdiction because he had retired from the army and settled in Germany. Strangely, his service record indicated that he had not been vetted for seven years, during which time his popularity and reputation for hard work had several times led his superiors to request prolonging his work in the top-secret vault until he retired from the army. Possibly, there was some collusion there too.

Some insiders believed that the decision to arrest Conrad came after an acquaintance of his was observed in Vienna with a known Hungarian agent.
¹
Whatever triggered the arrest, one has to ask why it had taken four years from Vasilyev’s tip-off to stop Conrad’s treasonable activities. Was there perhaps a double game being played, with him unknowingly passing to the Hungarians information from files that had been falsified?

Whatever the truth, he was tried and found guilty by the Koblenz State Appellate Court on 6 June 1990. Judged to be the head of the spy ring, Conrad was sentenced to life imprisonment. Judge Ferdinand Schuth said that Conrad’s treachery meant that, if war had broken out between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, NATO HQ would have been forced to choose between capitulation or the use of nuclear weapons on German territory, turning the whole country into a battlefield.

In addition, on 12 February 1999 Jeffrey Rondeau and Jeffrey Gregory were sentenced by a Florida court to 18 years’ imprisonment each; Kelly Theresa Warren, to 25 years. Zoltan Szabo received a 10-month suspended sentence in consideration for testifying against the others and identifying documents that had been passed to his masters in Budapest for forwarding to Moscow. The post-Communist Hungarian government was also apparently helpful in providing some evidence.

For once, a life sentence meant until death. For all the $1.2 million he had been paid – and at the trial it was stated that he had a safe deposit box in a Swiss bank stuffed with gold bullion – Clyde Lee Conrad died from a heart attack at the age of 50 in Koblenz prison on 8 January 1998.

The end of Communism in Hungary came more gently than in other Warsaw Pact states because of prior relaxation under the Kádár regime, which is why the dismantling of the frontier wire and other obstacles enabled so many citizens of other states to escape via Hungary to the West before their governments changed. According to ABLT the greater part of the pre-1956 archives were destroyed in the uprising – whether by the protesters or by officers seeking to protect themselves, is unknown. Public debates were held in 1997 and 2003 about access to the ABLT archives. So far, more than a half-million copies of documents have been supplied to 27,000 researchers. The majority were of general interest, but there have also been scandals involving revelations of past activities of politicians, artists and writers. The most shattering was the record of former Prime Minister Pétér Medgyessy, now known to have been an undercover agent of AVH.
²

Notes

1
.    J. Rusbridger,
The Intelligence Game
, London, Bodley Head 1989, p. 110

2
.    For more information see
www.targetbrussels.be/article/hungary’s-cafe-spies

P
ART
4

S
TATE
T
ERROR IN
E
ASTERN
E
UROPE

19

T
HE
KDS

D
IMITROV
’
S
L
ETHAL
H
OMECOMING
P
RESENT TO
B
ULGARIA

As with the other satellite states, the problem for Bulgaria during and after the Second World War was its geographical position, it having common borders with Romania, Serbia, Macedonia, Greece and Turkey and with Soviet Ukraine only 300 miles to the north and the USSR’s Black Sea fleet a short voyage to the east. Ruled by a constitutional monarchy under Tsar Boris III, it managed to stay neutral until 1941. On 13 December 1941 Tsar Boris’s government was obliged by Berlin to declare war on Britain and the USA, the price of which was the bombing of Sofia and other Bulgarian cities by Allied aircraft. The alliance with the Axis offering the hope of recovering territory in Macedonia and Thrace that had been lost in the First World War, Bulgarian forces occupied areas of Greece and Yugoslavia, fighting partisan forces there in conjunction with German and Italian troops. However, after the launch of Operation Barbarossa the Comintern ordered the Bulgarska Komunisticheska Partia (BKP) to go underground in preparation for anti-Axis guerrilla warfare. To camouflage the lines of command, it merged with other leftist groups and called itself the Fatherland Front.