by Douglas Boyd
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
PART 4
STATE TERROR IN
EASTERN EUROPE
19
THE KDS
DIMITROV’S LETHAL HOMECOMING PRESENT TO BULGARIA
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.
Although there were some minor actions against vessels of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, Bulgaria did not formally declare war on the USSR. Summoned to Rastenburg by Hitler in August 1943, Boris refused to hand over the Bulgarian Jews; nor would he agree to send troops to the increas
ingly hard-pressed eastern front. A few days after returning to Sofia, Boris attended a dinner at the Italian embassy and died the following day, with poisoning suspected. As a result of his refusal to participate in the Final Solution, Bulgaria ended the war with an increased Jewish population.1
On 23 August Romania reversed its pro-German policy and declared war on Germany, allowing the Red Army to cross its territory and reach the Bulgarian frontier. Stalin declared war against Bulgaria on 5 September, the day on which Agrarian Party Prime Minister Konstantin Muraviev abolished all anti-Semitic laws the Germans had imposed. Three days later, Muraviev declared war on Nazi Germany, but it was too late to qualify as a friend of the USSR because the Red Army was already crossing the border.
In a swift and relatively bloodless coup that deposed Muraviev’s seven-day-old government, which was attempting to make peace with the Western Allies, the pro-Soviet Fatherland Front took over the reins of government under Kimon Georgiev. He ordered the Bulgarian armed forces not to resist the Soviet invasion, and signed a treaty of alliance with the USSR on 9 September. All these geopolitical manoeuvres caused considerable strife within Bulgaria, principally between pro- and anti-German factions. Also, the Bulgarian ground troops in Macedonia had to fight their way free from their erstwhile German allies in order to regain their native soil.
After the Red Army’s arrival on Bulgarian soil Georgi Dimitrov, Stalin’s blue-eyed boy who had controlled all the foreign Communist parties for him in his capacity as boss of the Comintern, arrived to commence his very hands-on style of rule. The Fatherland Front was ostensibly a merger of political parties that would run the country with an appearance of democracy. Yet, its first priority was to purge anyone who had a record of thinking independently. In the usual Soviet way, they were declared to be fascists and imprisoned or executed in two purges: in Dimitrov’s own words, ‘the wild one’ and the judicial one. Figures for the victims arbitrarily killed range as high as 138,000.2 Dimitrov’s Minister of Defence, General Ivan Genaro, later boasted to KGB General Sudoplatov, ‘Bulgaria is the only socialist country without dissidents in the West because … we wiped them out before they were able to escape [abroad].’3
That was a euphemism for the massacre of tens of thousands of Bulgarian intellectuals, non-Communist politicians, journalists and academics under a programme supervised by Dimitrov to crush any sense of Bulgarian nationality.4 A notable exception was made for Tsar Boris’s widowed consort and her 8-year-old son, Prince Simeon, who were allowed to take into exile at least some of their personal wealth – which makes one suspect some shady deal behind the scenes.5
A very different sort of woman operated the Fatherland Front’s network of local search-and-kill committees. She was a violent and ruthless ex-partisan named Tsola Dragoicheva, who had spent several years in a concentration camp. Her technique was to compile random ‘black lists’ of possible opponents for trial in ‘people’s courts’. As happened to other activists, she herself eventually fell foul of the system in 1949 and was put out to grass, but not imprisoned or executed.6
Bulgaria after 1945.
Among the early moves of Dimitrov’s regime in Bulgaria was the reform of the Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet by removing letters that did not exist in the Russian alphabet – itself reformed by Lenin in 1917. The argument was that these letters were bourgeois and elitist, therefore not permissible in the new ‘socialist’ Bulgaria. This move was pushed through despite strong opposition from surviving writers, educators and others, who resented this distancing of their orthography from Old Slavonic, simply to fall in line with Soviet practice. As from 27 February 1945 only documents written in the modified alphabet had legal effect in Bulgaria. It was a strange priority when nearly half a million Bulgarian soldiers in three armies were still fighting in Yugoslavia to hamper the withdrawal of German forces in Greece. Also in 1945, with Dimitrov’s aid, the KGB started mining high-grade uranium ore at Bukovo, only forty miles from Sofia. After the ore from Jáchymov was analysed and found to be low in uranium content, Bukovo became the most important source of fissile material for the Soviet A-bomb.7
In whatever alphabet, Kimon Georgiev must have seen the writing on the wall. He was ousted from his party and political functions, which were taken over by Georgi Dimitrov the following year. Stalin’s faithful follower, however, then tried to do a deal with Yugoslavia’s Communist leader, Josip Broz Tito, on the grounds that they were all ‘southern Slavs’, which is the meaning of Yugo-slavia. That failed because Tito was not interested in an equal union, only in absorbing Bulgaria as an additional republic in his Yugoslavian federation.
As in all the other satellite states, the pro-Moscow regime set up a KGB clone: Komitet za Darzhavna Sigurnost (KDS) or Committee of State Security. In line with the organisation of the ‘mother house’, so to speak, the First Chief Directorate was dedicated to foreign intelligence; the Second Chief Directorate was for counter-espionage; of the Sixth Chief Directorate, the first department organised and snooped on intellectuals and artists, the second spied on university staff and students, and the third kept watch on priests and ‘unreliable elements’ like Jews, Armenians and Turks. Early in 1945 a decree of Interior Minister Anton Yugov established the first of what would be a nationwide network of concentration camps for alleged enemies of the regime.
Nikola Petkov, leader of the Agrarian Party, was accused of being an ‘agent of a foreign power’. He replied to the accusation in parliament by pointing out that Dimitrov had been a Soviet citizen until two days before taking office, and was obviously therefore an agent of a foreign power, whose capital was in Moscow. Spared until the peace treaty was signed in Paris in February 1947, he was then arrested in a fight with KDS men on the floor of parliament, given a fake trial and hanged as a traitor.8
Dimitrov was completely out of touch with his fellow Bulgarians, having lived in exile for twenty-two years, but that probably made it easier to turn the country of his birth into a carbon copy of Stalin’s Russia. He brought with him a hard core of comrades who had spent years in the USSR, but they were already old men; the senior in-country politician was Traicho Kostov, who was considered likely to inherit Dimitrov’s power. He showed his loyalty to Dimitrov by managing the Red Terror of 1944–6, but was himself purged in March of 1949 for stubbornly trying to prevent the wholesale post-war looting of Bulgaria to feed Soviet industry.
A visibly very sick man, Dimitrov travelled to Moscow for medical care and died there in July of the same year, prompting rumours that he had been quietly done away with because Stalin considered him too well known in the international Communist movement to be put on trial as a ‘Titoist deviationist’. Dimitrov’s brother-in-law Vulko Chervenkov – who had served in Russia as an agent of NKVD under the code-name ‘Spartak’ and been principal of Moscow’s Marx–Lenin school for indoctrination of the foreign comrades – manoeuvred his way into the dual posts of General Secretary of BKP and prime minister, which gave him total power. He expelled 100,000 of the 460,000 party members to purge BKP of any non-Stalinist or nationalist influences which might impede his crash programme for the collectivisation of agriculture, rising from 12 per cent of the total arable area in 1950 to 61 per cent by 1953, with productivity dropping as a result. International trade was restricted to other members of the Soviet bloc.
By 1952 his repression was at its height, with a network of 100 concentration or forced labour camps in a population of only 8 million people. Run by the Interior Ministry, the Bulgarian Gulag was called Trudovo-Vazpritatelni Obshchezhitiya (TVO), echoing faithfully the deceptive title of the Soviet Gulag camps ispravitelno-trudoviye lagery or corrective labour camps. Tens of thousands of alleged ‘counter-revolutionaries’ were locked up and brutally treated by criminals working for the camp administration, as in the Allgemeine-SS camps. The most infamous Bulgarian camp was Belenè, on Pirin island, which lies in the middle of the Danube.
Starting in 1949 the Bulgarian state waged war on the Evangelical Church with
what was called ‘the Pastors’ Trial’, in which thirteen pastors were convicted of counter-revolutionary activities and received sentences of varying lengths in Belenè for proclaiming Christianity in an atheist state. Pastor Haralan Popov survived thirteen years in the camps and later published his autobiography, translated into English as Tortured for His Faith. At least the pastors knew why they were being punished; most detainees had no idea why they were there because, under Bulgarian law, anyone could be imprisoned for six months without trial. They were then released and immediately rearrested for another six months; in 1962 the period of incarceration without trial was increased to five years. Eventually Belenè held up to 7,000 inmates in grossly inadequate conditions, but while the pastors were there the camp already held seventy-five women and 2,248 male prisoners – which number included Konstantin Muraviev, the last non-Communist prime minister, who had surprisingly not been executed and would survive his incarceration.
The Belenè camp was closed officially after 1959, but used between 1985 and 1989 for Bulgarian Turks who refused to change their names and surnames to Bulgarian ones in a government ‘programme of national unity’. Today Belenè is still a prison, but the other half of Pirin island is a nature reserve. Second for brutality to Belenè was the camp at Skravena, where 1,643 infants and children were held under the Russian system of krugovaya poruka, or collective responsibility, which punished the entire families of ‘criminals’. Other notable concentration camps were at Kutsiyan, Rositsa, Bogdanov Dol and Bobov Dol, Nozharevo, Bosna and Chernevo, where what were called in the USSR byvshye lyudi or ‘former people’ – like army officers, landowners, Agrarian Party members, social democrats, anarchists and also Communist resistance heroes – were removed from the Stalinist society they might otherwise have ‘polluted’. The camp at Lovech in central Bulgaria was infamous throughout the eighteen years of its existence for the brutality of the guards, beating inmates working 18-hour days and hired out as slave labour on nearby collective farms and construction sites until they died of malnutrition and abuse, the corpses piled up by the latrines until there were enough to justify despatching a truckload for burial in mass graves. So terrified were inmates of being reported by a fellow prisoner for saying something that could be misinterpeted that many spoke only when no one else was in earshot, just enough to make sure they had not lost the power of speech.