András Nagy's book sets before us an obsessed man who experienced every situation in life solely in the highest moral terms. Under the German occupation of Denmark during the Second World War, the country's political élite generally took up a posture of passive acquiescence. Bang- Jensen and a few others en poste in America opposed the directives from Copenhagen, doing everything they could to demonstrate that Denmark (or at least a small part of it) was not prepared to sell out. And they succeeded: Hitler-as a result of the interventions of Bang-Jensen and others-failed to lay his hands on the Danish fleet or on Greenland as a jumping-off point for an attack on the United States. Strangely (or maybe precisely because of that) Bang- Jensen was not decorated at the end of the war: quite the contrary, he was treated more as unmanageable and slightly suspect-a reputation which was reinforced by the "crisis" of Easter 1948, when he was in receipt of intelligence that the Soviet fleet was about to start an action against Denmark. The alarm signals that he put out had both the domestic and foreign press up in arms and played no small part in inducing Denmark to join NATO.
In the autumn of 1956, by then working as a diplomat in the UN bureaucracy, he was again confronted by a matter that touched his most deeply felt values. Why was the United Nations not acting in a case where it was clear as day who was on the side of the values formulated in its charter as regards the freedom of nations, their self-determination, independence and democratic arrangements, and likewise who opposed these? Furthermore, a legitimate prime minister, Imre Nagy, had appealed to the world body, requesting support, both moral and active. During early November, Bang- Jensen could not understand why nothing at all was being done; later on, in 1957, by then working within the machinery of the special committee, he could not understand why nobody was acting in accordance with the dictates of their in-built moral compass. He had received information, informal messages from a variety of sources, that the UN had a number of Soviet agents among its highest officials, who were successfully obstructing enquiries into the Hungarian question. For his own part, he did not consider the special committee's brief to be simply an exercise in writing history. To his way of thinking, the UN, as the supreme arbiter of moral conduct in international relations, was in a position to provide, at least in retrospect, assistance and protection for the vanquished and occupied Hungary, for identifiable groups and individuals there. Human lives were involved: in the autumn of 1956, Hungary became another Denmark for Bang-Jensen, or-much more to the point-his moral Denmark.
A range of approaches might be taken to portray Bang-Jensen's obsession. A psychological portrait, exploring inner paths and verging on fiction, would not have been alien to András Nagy, a noted playwright and author of essays and novels. This, however, he did not choose to do. Bang-Jensen's drama unfolded within a bureaucratic apparatus that, typically for the midpoint of the twentieth century, was hedged about by an ever-growing mountain of paper while decisions on many major matters were reached in the course of largely informal conversations. Nagy accordingly chose to tackle that mountain, but to refashion it with the help of literary devices.
He has an impressive familiarity with and self-assurance in handling his sources -and he has carried out a pioneering piece of detective work that professionals in diplomatic history should take their hats off to. Even historians who have an intimate knowledge of international relations may turn green with envy at the sight of documentary coups such as papers from the Diplomatic Archive of Serbia and Montenegro or from the Information Office in Budapest. (Even after 1989 few living persons can claim that they have managed to pick the locks on these places.)
András Nagy has not chosen to write a diplomatic history and has not been put off by the fact that another kind of discourse about his subject is now in fashion. He does not wish merely to draw attention coolly and politely to the fact that the UN, pace its laudable charter, was a major location for superpower rivalry and propaganda, and that consequently any hopes that the Hungarian public pinned on it were misplaced. The vantage point from which Nagy chooses to draw his picture is that of the occupied post-revolutionary Hungary, to which a fundamental injustice had been done; he does so because he wants to see what the Danish diplomat saw, and what gave him the moral stance from which he attempted to judge events and himself.

It is this commitment which provides the book with its inner tension, but this commitment also somewhat distorts the historical truth. We would all like to suppose that the Hungarian Revolution inspired sympathy everywhere outside the Kremlin and the Politburos of Bucharest, Prague and East Berlin. Sadly, that was far from being so, and the UN provides a telltale case-study. The Hungarian Revolution was more in the way of a highly embarrassing major glitch for a machine that, with Stalin and the Cold War at its iciest now part of the past, was readying itself for a new consensus-one that accepted the post-1945 status quo and was not preparing for war. The international peace movement, and the liberation of enslaved nations worldwide, were two complementary elements of the same rhetoric; within the UN bureaucracy, people were at most a bit more cynical than elsewhere, and a great deal more attentive to the platitudes of international etiquette. In the bloc-aligned, consensus-building climate of the mid-Fifties, there was really no place for a Hungarian Revolution that sought democracy, independence, neutrality on the Austrian model and socialism all at once. The not-quite-precisely formulated request that Imre Nagy made (he asked specifically for a UN guarantee of Hungarian neutrality,

at other times just for its recognition) and the response that it elicited (a deafening silence) spotlighted the embarrassment with which the Hungarian uprising was received in New York and elsewhere. That embarrassment left its mark on the activities of the special committee-oddly enough, hardly on its report, though András Nagy does point out the traces. Ultimately it became clear that in the incipient new consensus there was no more room for an individual like Bang-Jensen, who was anti-fascist and anti- Communist on moral grounds, than there was for the Hungarian revolutionaries. He was an anachronism, not unlike the Minister of State István Bibó, in his overcoat with missing buttons, knocking on the door of the American Legation on the morning of 4 November 1956 to appeal to the great powers to take a moral stance.

András Nagy presents this painfully instructive story in a very clear manner. However, there are places where the writer could have given more room to the historian, at others the historian to the writer. At some points, simply telling the blunt truth would have done no harm. If one of the most important contentions that the book makes is indeed that at least two deputy secretary-generals, Andrew W. Cordier and Dragoslav Protic´, were acting as Soviet agents (whether wittingly or unwittingly), then that should be clearly stated at least once. And if that is the case, the connection ought to be made with the rather startling fact that even today the papers relating to Cordier's term of office as deputy secretary are still classified. The fact is that the bulk of the documents of the Special Committee on the Problem of Hungary had to be (and could be) smuggled out of the UN building and archives, only for the bulk of them to be kept under lock and key in Budapest and at the Hoover Institute. Statements by the refugees-the very people that the enquiry was all about-are in most cases not available for scrutiny to the present day. It ought to have been pointed out that the Freedom of Information Act allows even the confidentiality of Central Intelligence Agency documents to be lifted, and even memoranda of the General Secretariat of the Communist Party of the USSR have seen the light of day (and have been published in full), while access to UN documents remains conspicuously restricted. That being so, the author as historian should have given more weight to analysing a number of key documents, such as the report itself or the papers relating to Bang- Jensen's disciplinary hearing. Instead, as writer-biographer he was satisfied with the odd reference here and there. The reader will never learn whether the fake or genuine farewell letter found on Bang-Jensen consisted merely of the two sentences that are quoted by Nagy or whether it was longer.
It was perhaps not the historian so much as the writer who might have given answers to a few questions regarding the bounds of Bang-Jensen's obsession and his amazing trust in others. As early as November 1956, several Soviet bloc diplomats at the point of defecting paid a visit to him. If I understand correctly, they informed him that the world body was riddled at the highest level with Soviet agents. Six months later, two refugees whom he interviewed in London expressed similar suspicions about the Secretary-General. These two incidents are turning points in Bang-Jensen's obsession, bringing it home to him that he was operating in a hostile environment, awakening "terrible suspicions". András Nagy has followed the same tack as his hero, who at key moments in the story was simply unwilling to disclose to anyone what it was that he was so terribly suspicious about. He did not say anything even to those-and there were some-who were prepared to listen to him. He waited for a higher court of appeal, in the first instance the UN Secretary-General and later the US President, but they were not prepared to give him a hearing. This is where high-minded unwillingness to compromise comes dangerously close to paranoia. Nearly five decades on, it is clearly difficult to produce a psychiatric diagnosis, but it is by no means absurd to make a stab at it. To what extent were Bang-Jensen's suspicions fed by information, no doubt startling in nature, and to what extent were they fed by inner voices that waxed and waned in intensity over the course of his life? The writer in András Nagy, always present in the way the story is told, might have ventured a bit further. The historian, however, cried halt: anything not backed by paper in the archives should remain a question mark in the narrative.
That goes for the story of Bang-Jensen's death as well, which confirms the general opinion. The circumstances being inexplicable, the diplomat must have been murdered by the KGB's men. Bang-Jensen himself was convinced while alive that they were out to get him because he knew too much and might talk. For many years he had repeatedly insisted that he would never take his own life, that possible news of his suicide should not be believed. The evidence on the circumstances of his death was ambiguous and inexplicable: nobody had seen him for days, and when his body was found his clothing was neat and he was freshly shaven. The body had almost certainly been brought from somewhere other than the place it was found. His stomach contained an undetermined brown fluid. Mysterious telephone callers gave the precise name and composition of a psychotropic drug before putting down the receiver. And so on and so forth: Nagy's tale begins and ends with the slapdash investigation and the follow-up several years later which clarified nothing. It does emerge from the evidence in the book, however, that Bang-Jensen never came clean, so his suspicions remained suspicions; by producing no evidence, he effectively cleared Moscow's name and soiled his own. Nagy hints every now and then, that even the KGB murder theory cannot be logically argued in all its aspects, but he steers clear of saying this unambiguously.