Their Man in Budapest

James McCargar and the 1947 Road to Freedom

[...]

When did you actually get to Budapest?

I arrived in April 1946. I flew from Paris to the American airbase outside Vienna and they drove me from there to Budapest. That was the first time I'd ever seen Hungary. I got to Budapest at about 5.30 in the afternoon, there was a cocktail party going on at the legation. I met a great many people some of whom are still alive, for example Hanna van Horne, who was born Countess Mikes and then married Géza Teleki, the son of Prime Minister Pál Teleki, who committed suicide in 1941. She and Géza Teleki were there and I'm still in touch with her.

I didn't go to Budapest as an intelligence officer. I went to work in the political section, and helped out as best I could on whatever was going on.

Did you ask for a Budapest posting?

I came back into the Foreign Service from the Navy and I bumped into an old university friend who was stationed in Budapest as a Foreign Service officer. He'd gone in with their first group to establish the Legation in 1945. I suggested that I would like to go to Budapest. So when he went back to Budapest, he told the Minister that he had a friend who was a Russian speaker, an officer who was available. The Minister put in a request for me at the Department of State and I got the Budapest post. But there was no intelligence assignment connected with that at that point. After I had been there about three or four months, this same friend was transferred out of Hungary to South Africa. Back in Washington he mentioned to me the existence of something he called the POND, a term used within the State Department, which was a secret operation run jointly with the War Department. It had been established in 1942 on the orders of General Marshall, who was Chief of Staff of the army. This ran as all these organizations do: one man in each embassy or legation, who had secret communications and funds and authority and didn't have to tell the Chief of Mission what he was doing. When my friend was leaving he asked whether I'd be willing to take over that function. I said yes and that's how I got into all this. About a year later in June 1947 I was called back to Washington and then I met the people who were running this particular operation. I used this occasion to ask for authority to take people out. Ferenc Nagy's6 end came while I was on that trip. We'd known since January 1947 what exactly was going on. Rákosi's famous salami tactics were to gradually undermine the positions of the Communists' competitors. The "great conspiracy", which was built on nothing, was announced in January.

[...]

The purpose of announcing the conspiracy was to destroy the Smallholder majority in Parliament. The November 1945 elections were the only free and fair elections held in Soviet-occupied areas after the war, with the Smallholders caming up with 57 per cent. So the Communist and Soviet-because the Russians backed the Communists every inch of the way-plan was to destroy the Smallholder majority. And this was what Béla Kovács was fighting against. He was the essential man to get rid of if you wanted to go further. When Kovács was arrested, it was perfectly clear that at some point, one did not know when, but at some point Ferenc Nagy would go. With Tildy one wasn't quite sure. I cannot even remember now at what point Tildy did disappear from the scene. After the Smallholders came of course the rest of Zoltán Pfeiffer's Independence Party, which he had put up when the Smallholders started to fall apart. Dezső Sulyok had been persuaded to leave and the tactic was working. The Smallholders' Party fell apart. Pfeiffer formed his Independence Party and he was very badly beaten up by a bunch of thugs, with bicycle chains in a town south of Budapest where he was giving a talk. He was in hospital for a week or more. An important element was the Social Democrats. That is, the Hungarian Socialist Party. Károly Peyer the long-time head of the Hungarian Socialist Party had been sent to Mauthausen by the Germans. He could not get back to Hungary quickly enough and Árpád Szakasits took control of the party in Peyer's absence. The Russians and the Communists just used Szakasits throughout the whole thing. Peyer was in eclipse, he was on the wrong side as a loyal party member. He decided to openly combat the Szakasits wing of the Social Democrats before the elections of August 1947. We shall see how the elections took place following which in November state conspiracy charges were brought against him, but he managed to escape to the West on 14 November. By June 1947, when I had asked for authority to take people out, the conspiracy hysteria was in full swing. I asked for authority for twenty-five people.

I spoke about my plan in the State Department and to the military who were running the POND organization. Then I flew to London to bring back our new minister, and while I was there one of my liaison people gave me the written authority to take twenty-five people out. Fifteen were supposed to be members of Parliament and ten I could choose. That was a step forward. First of all I had to set up a mechanism to do all this. When we were starting on that, things just got worse and worse all along. Eventually, I would get news from various sources that such and such a deputy's parliamentary immunity would be lifted three days from now. They were perfectly open with the signals. Such a signal would mean that the man had to leave within three or four days. But by that time I had a mechanism.

Was there information you were able to send back to the US which you found out sooner than other sources?

In this kind of work every tiny thing is grist for the mill. It's like television today, there's never enough material! I would file regular reports and the difference between my regular political reporting and the special reporting was not very great. The people who were running the secret thing all had the material I was sending back as a diplomat. It was largely a lot of housekeeping things I sent. But I would also get transcripts of Cabinet meetings-I won't tell where from-and I would send them off. They were in Hungarian, so I could not do anything with them myself. If the source was secret or clandestine, then I would use that channel. The daily political report at the end of every day to the State Department was sent by secret cable. This is the distinction between those two kinds of work that I was doing.

[...]

With very few exceptions, these people were not agents, they were not suborned by the United States. These were people who were hostile to the Communist takeover of Hungary and therefore turned to us, for assistance. In exchange for that assistance, they gave us information about what was going on so that we would know what to do. When I took the thing over, the first group was very heavily aristocratic. They were perfectly splendid people. But there was nobody from the labor orientation, from the Social Democrats. Of the people who come to my mind, one was an aristocrat but not from one of the great old families. As many Hungarians of that class were at the time, he was very pro-British, admired the British upper class. Him as a member of the Peasant Party struck one as bizarre. But there was not much of a choice. There were only four parties: the Communist Party, the Smallholders, the Socialists and the Peasant Party. The head of the Peasant Party, Péter Veres was a charming old man. He had a very good man in his party, Imre Kovács, not to be confused with Béla Kovács. That attracted a lot of people because there were some who did not want to be lost in the Smallholder majority. Party membership was really not a large feature of these people's personality or sources of information. One name I recall was Gyula Desewffy, also of an aristocratic family, and Gyula Desewffy was not an agent.

He was one of your helpers?

Yes, but he was not an agent of the Americans. Gyula Desewffy was the editor of Kis Újság. Because of that he was an important figure in the Smallholder Party. He would come around regularly and tell me what was going on in the Smallholder councils and so on. This was not to provide secret information but because they needed our help in order to stave off the Communist attack on them. Which was courageous as the Communists had the whole Russian occupation forces behind them. You have to remember that we at the Legation, quite legitimately, would write to a Hungarian ministry. As we had direct diplomatic relations with the Hungarian government, it was normal that we talked with ministries. If we wrote to the ministry, the person there would forward it to someone planted there and the Russians would tell them if they were to answer our communication or not. This was the kind of thing that we were up against all the time. Secret sources would not have been as necessary as they became if you had the normal contacts that go between governments with standard relationships. Life in Budapest was more complicated.

How many people were willing to give information in your network who were not really agents?

There were a great many people who wanted to be on the good side of the Americans. Or wanted help from the Americans.

But who actually provided information?

There were fourteen or fifteen people who were regularly in touch with me. Of those only two or three were actually part of the mechanism. For example, I communicated with one of the most important members of the group through a barmaid in a bar. After work I would go and have a drink, pass her a piece of paper, she would take it. I'd go back next night and there would be something for me. It made me look like a drunk, but it was how you did things.

Could you tell us something about these two or three people who were part of the mechanism?

The barmaid link that I just mentioned to you, that's a mechanical thing. She was what is called in the parlance of the profession a cut-out. That's the person who establishes a link between two people, the person in the middle who is not seen to be performing that service. This was not a source of information. This was performing a service which was very useful to me and to the operation.

What was the background of those who were in a position to provide information?

A number of them were what you would call professional people. Lawyers were well represented. Lawyers, journalists, that kind of people.

And as to party membership?

Party membership did not have any ideological significance. You could be a believer in I don't know what and be a member of the Smallholders or the Socialists. But none of these people were members of the Communist Party. They were either Smallholders or Peasant Party or Socialist Party.

[...]

I had been told early on to take Pfeiffer out. In fact, that was one of the messages that came along with the authority to take people out. I spoke to Pfeiffer and he said I will tell you when I have to go out. This was before he formed the Independence Party in February 1947, following the arrest of the Smallholders' Party Secretary Béla Kovács, as an attempt to rescue the independent wing of the party. Some days before the 31 August election he was beaten up as I told you. The elections were falsified using those notorious blue cards. By October it was obvious that he had to go. At that particular point, the British had an unfortunate mishap and the Russians and the Communists, I was told, had arrested about a hundred people who were connected with the British. So everyone was lying low, that's no time to do anything. On the other hand, Pfeiffer had to leave with his wife and five-year-old daughter. I was given this instruction with respect to Pfeiffer several months before and I realized the only thing I could do was to do it myself. I told this story in the book. A member of Parliament, and his wife, were in the group too. I used one of the military mission vehicles with cases and a bag. And it worked. We got to Vienna, from there Pfeiffer went on to the United States. And I was never long enough in the United States to see a great deal of him but I kept in touch with them. After his death, his widow came here to say goodbye, as she moved to San Francisco where their daughter was living and working. She died there this last December. Of the other couple, I remember the woman being in tears. She broke down terribly after we got into this house in Vienna at the thought of leaving her country. It was touching. Hungarians have that love of their country. She showed that.

Were you present in person?

I drove the vehicle.

Were there any searches?

No. I was a little bit taken aback, because a part of the peace treaty, which was not yet in effect, was that the Czechs would get what was known as the Bratislava bridgehead, the five villages on the south bank of the Danube across from Bratislava. I had not realized that they had already taken that over, so as I was driving along I expected to get into the Soviet zone of Austria. Instead I found myself in Czechoslovakia. I was taken aback, but nothing happened, I got through, then I got into the Soviet zone, nothing happened. There was a checkpoint halfway between the Austro-Hungarian border and Vienna airport. A sentry at a barrier, I stopped. He wanted to see what was in the back of this vehicle, a station wagon kind of thing. An army one. I was wearing an army parka and I did have my diplomatic passport, and I showed that. But you don't talk with a Russian sentry about the fine points of organization within a diplomatic mission. I said I do not know what's in there, they're boxes belonging to some American general, I cannot let you see them. Well, this went on for a long time. I got out, I walked around the car with him, I pulled out a pack of American cigarettes, and I went on like that with the pack of cigarettes. I did not actually offer them, but he just reached and took one. So I did it again, he took another one, he took about ten or twelve cigarettes. That was the end of it. And so when we got to Vienna, the signal was to slap the boxes twice. This I did and said, "Bécs". I'd learned that much in Hungarian. That's what the Hungarians call Vienna.

On one of your rescue missions you saved the lives of six scientists and their families by taking them out of Hungary.

That was a rather special case. On one visit to the Embassy in Vienna, I was introduced to a Commander in the United States Navy and he gave me the names of six Hungarian scientists. I do not know exactly what their fields were. The problem was to get the six and their wives out, and the US Navy would take care of them. This Commander gave me 5000 dollars in cash, which was a great deal of money. He said that this money was to get them to the United States. So I gave them the 5000 dollars. Then I did not hear about them for two or two and a half months. They finally got in touch with me again, and they had bribed their way out, they all had exit visas. We had our aeroplane going from Budapest to the American airbase outside Vienna. But one of the wives just could not get an exit visa, and the husband was not going to go without his wife, understandably. So I gave them instructions where this lady was to go the evening before their departure. I had a box from the military, and we put her in the box for the whole night. The next day I had the box carried to the airport in Budapest. When our plane came in, the six Hungarian scientists with the five wives got on the plane as the pilot had a manifest for those eleven people. But then we put the box on from the Legation in Budapest with a label that said nothing about the contents. Everybody was pretty nervous, since the Russians usually found out about such things. There had already been a trial in Romania about some people who tried to do that. Anyway, they took off and this lady climbs out of the box while they are in the air. The pilot was horrified. Well, they worked that out. But the most unhappy man was the Commander from the Navy. I saw him some weeks later in Vienna, and he complained that the group came to Vienna without any money! I said, yes, they spent it, they were bribing people to get out. But that money was supposed to get them all to the United States! He was absolutely horrified. I said, that's your problem! I don't know how he ever explained it but all twelve of them came to the United States.

[...]

The "blue card elections" took place on 17 August.

Two leading Communist officials attended a conference held in Poland at which they were instructed how to run a falsified election. That much has been confirmed since from sources that became available after the break-up of the Soviet Union. My understanding of it at the time was that one of the techniques was this blue card of which two hundred thousand were printed. That was the figure given to me. If you had a blue voting slip, it enabled you to vote several times. You simply presented the blue card and you voted and then you could go off to another polling booth and vote again. It was advertised as an option for people to vote who could not get there otherwise, and then they had to find the people who would vote a number of times for them.

What were you doing on the day of the election?

I was in Budapest and I stayed there. Jointly with the British, we sent teams around the country to observe the election. One of our young men who was rather new at the Legation, spoke Hungarian and went to a village about a hundred kilometres south of Budapest along the Danube. He started making announcements, "vote Smallholder". We got a protest almost immediately from the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior! They were right, that should not have been done. The reports that we had from these teams showed that there was a great deal of falsification and intimidation of voters. You have to do more than falsify, you have to get them to do what you want them to do. And you do that by intimidation. The British Minister in Budapest was a careerist, a member of the British Labour Party. He was trying to advance his career with the Labour government then in power. He told us it was one of the finest demonstrations of democracy that he had ever seen. That is what he reported to London. However, we drew up a report about fraud and intimidation and all the rest of it. Then on my Minister's instructions, I telephoned that report to the American Embassy in Paris. I got Douglas MacArthur, the nephew of the General on the phone and said the Minister wants me to transmit this dispatch to you, would you please take it down. Which we did, knowing that they were listening to our line and would understand, you know, what our position was on the elections. We of course sent a cable to Washington too. But the trick was to do it on the open telephone line where the Communists and the Russians could pick up what we were saying. We did that deliberately.

---

This is the edited transcript of a documentary film, directed by Sándor Mihályfy and transmitted on Channel 1 of Hungarian State Television on 16 November 2000. The interviewer was Márta Pellérdi, Associate Professor at the Department of English of the Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Piliscsaba. Margit Földesi, author of the Introduction and the Notes, is Reader in the Department of History at the same university. Her field of research is Central Europe after 1945. Back