This character turned suspicious because I sensed that he wanted to interrogate me or worm his way to my trust. I think he was really stupid, but perhaps he just wanted to seem so.
She realized that he wanted to interrogate her because she wanted to interrogate him. But let us read the entire report, which is drowning in vitriolic distrust:
I met a young man, L. Ö., whose father is a reporter for Új Kelet, and he pompously announced that he is visiting Hungary this summer to see his grandfather and that he easily got permission to do so for practically nothing. He claims to be a ‘director’ somewhere; he looks to be around 20-22 years old. I met him at the Italian embassy. He claimed he is first going to the USA, from there back to Italy, and Hungary is next. The Shin Bet is fond of employing such types of characters. I read his name from his Italian visa application: since he didn’t speak English, I played the interpreter. He said he was sorry to say how bad language teaching is in Israel. This character turned suspicious because I sensed that he wanted to quiz me or worm his way to my trust. I think he was really stupid, but perhaps he just wanted to seem so. I sensed no other suspicious circumstances.
And here is one more noteworthy case, that of the female Israeli border guard:
REPORT
Budapest, 24 March 1977
MRS PÁPAI reports:
She returned this year on 18 March from visiting relatives in Israel. At the Tel Aviv airport her documents were checked by border guard J. J. When J. J. learned that MRS PÁPAI was Hungarian, she called her aside and inquired at length about Hungary. Is it true that there is democracy there, that the churches are open, that Jews are not persecuted, and so on? She then explained that she too is of Hungarian descent. She was born there, and when she was eight, in 1948, her parents emigrated to Israel. She is married, has a child, and her husband is the commanding officer at a small garrison. She knows of just one relative in Hungary, whom she hasn’t heard of in a long while. That relative was seriously ill and often hospitalized, and maybe isn’t even alive any more.
She would very much like to see Hungary and meet her relatives, but she is afraid of travelling there. For one thing, she doesn’t know if she would be allowed into Hungary; and for another, she is afraid of how the Israeli authorities would react if they learned that she had been to Hungary. This could cause problems for her husband as well.
She asked MRS PÁPAI to assist her in getting news of her relative. Telephone her or write her a letter and tell her that she’d like to call her, but that she, J. J., can’t discuss this with her in a letter. She also asked MRS PÁPAI that if she does visit Hungary, that MRS PÁPAI should help her in Budapest, since she doesn’t know the customs, and it would be good if someone were to help her out.
MRS PÁPAI promised to help. And she also agreed to travel to Miskolc to find her relative.
An anonymous handwritten note in the margin reveals that in Sub-department III/I the question arose: is this a clever trap set for Mrs Pápai? Has the Tel Aviv border guard initiated the conversation with the aim of ensnaring their agent?
Interesting information that seems perfectly natural – but it is not certain it is in fact something so innocent. All the more so because Mrs P’s political affiliation is well known in Israel. We must inquire through the sub-division in Miskolc at the street in Miskolc, we must find out who this relative is, and whether J. J. has other relatives in Hungary aside from this one. But it seems advisable to suitably prepare MRS PÁPAI and then send her to Miskolc, but by then we must lay down a well-thought-out idea of how to proceed.
Lay it down, go ahead and lay it down!
And my mother, my always busy mother, who never has time for anything, is ready to drop everything and travel halfway across the country, to Miskolc, to ensnare the border guard. The story, at least in Bruria’s dossier, ends there.
What complicated family relationships she has to disentangle in the course of her tip-off-individual research, and while mapping out the weaknesses of the families she visits! There are relatives, friends and friends of friends, confidential information to be gathered during conversations, and she crams everything of use into her reports:
Another family of Hungarian immigrants: W. (. . .)’s brother, I. L., is a retired lieutenant colonel who lives in Budapest. Mrs L. has three sisters who live in Israel. The most interesting is M.’s family: her husband [W.] is a big businessman in the import–export of food products, they are extremely rich. The man had contacts in Hungary in the past, but I learned from L. that W. can be classified as a crooked businessman. The family has two sons, both doing their compulsory military service. The younger one, J., is in his first year and is serving in intelligence. His mother, M., asked me in confidence to tell Mrs L. not to write her a letter at any cost, and if she’d like to visit Israel, she should not mention W. and family at all as relatives on her visa application. She should include only the names of her other two siblings. Her reasoning was that her son had learned that another person of Hungarian descent, a young woman born in Hungary who speaks several languages perfectly – including Hungarian, which she learned from her parents – and who would have been well suited in every respect for intelligence service, was rejected because she has relatives in Hungary. So J. resolved this problem by denying that he had any relatives in socialist countries. His mother also told me that J. would like to stay in military intelligence as a career. At the moment he is completing the first of his required three years of service. When I was visiting with W., J. happened to come home from work – he lives at home – in his military uniform, and he was not at all happy to find me there.
Why would he have been happy?
As a professional, my mother is not bothered a bit when she senses that others find her suspicious or disagreeable, that they are wary of her.
The third Hungarian I spoke to on several occasions but, for lack of time, not in sufficient depth, was S., the secretary of the organization of ‘those who refuse military service for reasons of conscience’. (There are about 10–15 members.) S. was quite wary of me, and never did tell me whom he stayed with in Kispest when he visited Hungary (in summer 1975, as far as I know). He said he didn’t stay with relatives, but rather with a likewise ‘peace-loving’ person, one who objects to military service for reasons of conscience, and whom the Hungarian authorities do not like and for example do not permit to travel abroad.
Bruria nonetheless gets a brownie point from me, a tiny one, when this certain S. asks her advice on resettling in Hungary, and Bruria wisely talks him out of it:
He asked my opinion on whether he should resettle permanently in Hungary. This question is on his mind primarily because he has two daughters whom he is raising in a different spirit than in schools there [in Israel] – e.g. anti-war, completely vegetarian, against biblical education. Rather than provide him with yes or no answers, I posed him several questions from which he could understand that someone who ‘objects to military service for reasons of conscience’ could face problems in Hungary too, in raising his daughters, and could find himself at odds with our educational principles as well.
If only I could ask my mother just what it is she meant by ‘our educational principles’! That all-important question, ‘Which homeland would you be loyal to?’, also arises in the course of her conversations with this tip-off individual, come to think of it, S. reporting that it was a Shin Bet interrogating officer who put it to him – yes, I’d ask my mother this too. The vigilant observer concludes that the officer identified himself by what was ‘probably an assumed name’. Mum is starting to really learn the ropes of spying. This occurred during what was perhaps Mrs Pápai and S.’s third conversation, when S. ‘relaxed a bit’, and she meanwhile seems not to have been bothered by the fact that S. was a leading member of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, whose president at the time, it so happened, was her father, my grandfather. During the conversation S. divides Hungarian communists into two categories, essentially pointing to one of the
key pillars that ensured the stability of the Kádár regime:
S.’s relatives live in Budapest, and in his view some are ‘sincere communists’ and others are ‘insincere communists’. Since he himself is an anti-Zionist, he involuntarily fell into an argument with friends of his relatives when he arrived in Budapest for three days to arrange his Hungarian citizenship. He had a surprisingly positive impression of the Hungarian police, who were ‘kind and obliging’ in their encounters with him. When (perhaps during our third conversation) S. relaxed a bit, he said that on returning to Israel he was immediately summoned to the Tel Aviv office of the Shin Bet [the Interior Ministry], where one M. Z. (probably an assumed name) subjected him to a long interrogation, asking why he had requested citizenship of socialist Hungary, and what if in Budapest he would be interrogated about Israeli military secrets? Whom would he be loyal to then, Israel or Hungary? S. said his reply was unequivocal: he opposes all military service, and neither in Israel nor elsewhere does he speak about this, and what’s more, he doesn’t even know a thing about military secrets, so neither in theory nor in practice can he speak about them. S. had the sense that perhaps this would not be the last such interrogation, but months had passed since then.
My mother, that good girl and eager-to-please pupil, had it in her not only to set up such ostensibly rather inconsequential meetings but also to comply with her employers’ every demand in an exemplary manner. Why she did so, I may now be able to answer, for since first opening that fatal dossier a year and a half ago I have racked my brain and have kept racking my brain until answers came, but this is not the moment to unveil them to the reader. My mother probably thought that this would never come to light, but I’m certain she would have accepted responsibility had it come to light while she was alive. Odd though it may seem, she, as an unrelenting foe of Zionism, must have seen something positive in all this clandestine activity. The same thing is also said, and I tend to agree, of the brilliant film director Gábor Bódy, whom I knew personally and who for a time was a friend of mine, and who killed himself in 1985, the year my mother also died. Some see connections between the circumstances of his death and his being an informant. If there were private or career-related motives that led this scintillatingly intelligent man to accept this role, surely his leftist convictions also played their part – at least this is how it seems, judging from his reports and some assessments by his handlers. True, on his second meeting with a handler, in the conspiratorial flat, like some sort of lamenting, lamentable Faust, he would have liked to take back his signature on the recruitment paper. But his handler, whom he found very sympathetic, reassured him with the promise that all this would never wind up in unauthorized hands. To Bódy’s great surprise, essayist and screenwriter Yvette Bíró was booted out of her position as editor-in-chief of the magazine Filmkultura a couple of weeks after Bódy had recommended the measure. Gábor had somehow imagined that he could say all sorts of things without any consequences. What a mistake. Ironically enough, he was then tasked with getting closer to Yvette Bíró. He sought to carry out the assignment to the best of his abilities.
In Israel, my mother persuaded her younger sister, my aunt, to visit a former suitor and fellow comrade of hers, Zvi Elpeleg, who, as revealed by the thorough report she prepared, had climbed high up the Israeli military and civilian ladder. Now, both my aunt and my mother, the Avi Shaul girls, were legendary beauties during the British Mandate in Palestine, so the retired colonel could hardly say no when they phoned him, and he immediately invited them to his house for dinner:
Among my meetings, a particularly interesting one perhaps worth cultivating is that with Zvi Elpeleg, who climbed to a high rank up the Israeli military ladder: he served as the military governor of the Triangle during the 1950s, of Gaza after the 1956 Sinai campaign, and of Nablus after the Six-Day War. Long ago his name was Zvi Alphalug [sic], and in the early 1940s we were members of the ‘Working Youth’ organization. Later he was a leading member, and his task was to discover and disbar those illegal young communists who had infiltrated the Working Youth. (I escaped this because meanwhile I’d travelled in 1942 to Lebanon.)
El-Peleg is presently in the reserves. He is a graduate of Tel Aviv University and is president of the Israel Oriental Society, which is affiliated with the university.
His articles are sometimes published in New Outlook Middle East Monthly and in the afternoon tabloid Maariv. El-Peleg invited me (at my suggestion) to his home. Our conversation circled around the 1956 counter-revolution and the question of why I had not defected then. Why do I call the events a ‘counter-revolution’? This question especially interested him. That evening television broadcast a debate between Hillel, Minister of Police, and some professors concerning preparations for elections in the occupied Arab territories, and more than once, Elpeleg called Hillel an idiot and criticized the entire Rabin government. Their policies in the occupied territories are bad, he said. The conversation lasted until late at night, and my host asked for my opinion on Solzhenitsyn. I promised that we’d speak about this at our next meeting. Unfortunately, lack of time didn’t allow this to happen. Elpeleg is held to be a wealthy man: he owns sewage treatment plants.
But Elpeleg had been on his guard: he was not impressed by feminine charms, and, just as in other cases, there is no sign that the intelligence service took this any further. And yet Bruria did have a meeting that proved especially useful, as we can read in a so-called ‘data sheet’.
DATA SHEET
on information received by Department 6
26 April 1977
CHANNEL
HANDLER
Mrs Pápai
SC
Unit 4
K. Mercz
name – code name – qualification – name of unit – organ
TITLE: ‘Zev Zaretsky’s Anti-Soviet Activity’
WRITTEN ASSESSMENT, OBSERVATION, RECOMMENDATION, SUPPLEMENTARY INTELLIGENCE NEED
Used for providing intelligence to a friendly organization
I take for granted that my mother would have transubstantiated into Mrs Pápai during this conversation, indeed she couldn’t have even begun chatting with this Zaretsky without taking pains to disguise her feelings.
In a brilliant passage from his previously quoted work, Ottó Szélpál – that enthusiastic disciple of the great actor-pedagogue Stanislavski – draws a firm distinction between living (or experiencing) a role externally and internally. Let’s just say that this was not my mother’s forte. At least not always. But according to Szélpál, who was addressing operations officers handling prospective network individuals, living a role is undoubtedly a learnable skill:
a) Developing the Skill of Living a Role
In carrying out his duties, the network individual follows a pre-determined behavioural line. This line must be presented by living the role externally and internally in a manner acceptable to the hostile environment.
Mrs Pápai met with no little – and well-founded – criticism for her deficiencies in this regard. Yes, she did adhere to the behavioural line, and was in fact as linear as could be, but when it came to Zionism, she just couldn’t contain herself. It was as if someone had pressed a button. Szélpál goes on to say:
Consequently, the network individual’s ability to present the behavioural line well or poorly in hostile circles is no trivial matter. Not even the most meticulously defined, well prepared and thoroughly developed behavioural line will be convincing if the network individual does not represent it in a suitably evocative manner, living the role thoroughly both externally and internally.
My mother certainly wasn’t lacking in evocativeness, that I can attest to. She was the firmament, and still is, even if she’s clouded over.
Living a role externally appears in externals, meaning behaviour that aligns itself deliberately to the content. These externals include, for example: physical appearance, dress, gestures, demeanour. Living a role externally is integrally related to inner content. For example,
a network individual playing the role of someone beset by serious financial troubles must not dress in the latest fashions and must not seem to be in a wonderful mood.
Surely this would not have presented a problem for my mother, who never took much trouble over how she dressed and was often in a bad mood. With the concept of ‘the façade reflecting human traits’ Szélpál really is at the top of his literary game in describing, with stunning precision, how my mother’s handlers – Lieutenant Colonel Beider, Lieutenant Dóra and perhaps Captain Mercz – imagined her.
Living a role internally refers to the skill whereby the network individual can identify with the façade (reflecting, for example, a worldview, a political or moral orientation, or human traits) defined as within his or her behavioural line, and evocatively convey emotions, thoughts and so on in keeping with this façade.
Szélpál goes on to astutely point out that the network individual ‘meets with various persons in various situations’. How nicely put! A whole novel could be written about this! And he sees the consequences right away:
In the course of his work, the network individual meets with various persons in various situations, and so the behavioural line he represents cannot be the same in every situation. It is precisely cultivation of the skill of living a role that guarantees for a network individual that he can adjust with relative ease and speed to roles that require different behaviour.
And let us not forget what peerless acting-teachers the operations officers are:
The skill of living a role is continually developed and refined through both detailed discussions and occasional practice sessions of the represented behaviour under the direction of the operations officer, as well as in the course of the work itself.
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