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Contents

INTRODUCTION

EMIL HOFFMAN AND HIS CIRCLES
In a jungle of secret services
Atlas GmbH
Nazis reloaded
The road to the Stasi

'THE HUNGARIAN MAFIA'
The red octopus
The secret man behind the scenes: János Nyerges
A chink on the peace front: Frankfurt am Main
The key to success
A Cold War Hungaricum

'FABULOUS' IN HUNGARY
Economic diplomacy
The role of Frankfurt
The powerhouse of industrial espionage
Sympathetic journalism
End game

ATTACK ON THE OMFB
Storm clouds
The Siemens lobby
Ties running deep

FINAL THOUGHTS - TRAPPED IN THE NETWORKS

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Archive sources
References

APPENDIX
Abbreviations
List of Photos

INDEX

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Blurb

Spy games during the Cold War belong to the most intriguing episodes of our recent history: in the bipolar wold opposing secret services were competing to obtain political and economic information and state-of-the-art technologies. We might think that frontlines were demarcated by the Iron Curtain but in fact interest often did not coincide with the ideological boundaries. Under the surface there was a hardly understandable cooperation among the parties involved where the logic of capital often prevailed over the political objectives. Hungary was also given a role in this secret cooperation as the country ensured the flow of capital between the East and the West by opening an economic and financial channel.

This book describes the development of the cowboy capitalist network that - from the 1970s - took the initiative from the single-party state hierarchy, contributed to plundering and indebting our country and affected the course of the change in political regime from behind the scenes. The network started to take hold and strengthen due to the peculiar collusion of the different secret services when Nazi and Communist functionaries - with the assistance of the democratic West - established trade relations connecting the two world orders. By introducing concrete persons and events, the book would like to describe the way how this network started to gain ground, the reason why - perhaps even at the cost of a political murder - the derailment of the new economic mechanism was in their interest and the peculiar foreign trade techniques they used to establish their financial-economic power.

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