Book of Interest: A Frontline of Espionage. Studies in Hungarian Cold War Intelligence in Austria

The book featured below makes a valuable contribution to Cold War histography and is highly recommended:

Magdolna Barath, Dieter Bacher (eds.) A Frontline of Espionage. Studies in Hungarian Cold War Intelligence in Austria, Budapest – Pecs 2021.

“After World War II it was widely known in Europe that the redefined and democratic Austria became a crossroad of the intelligence services of the previously allied forces, now gradually confronting each other, a meeting point for intelligence and counterintelligence networks and a continuous source of recruitment of new agents. The vast number of Hungarian refugees and their political composition provided excellent opportunities to build intelligence network on both sides. In this volume Austrian, Danish and Hungarian outstanding researchers of Cold War espionage present their findings on the activity of the Hungarian communist state security intelligence officers in Austria, Germany and Denmark, the actions of Soviet counterintelligence against Hungarians in Austria, and many more topical issues. On the whole the volume gives an insight into a world, which still has numerous blurred details.”

 

From the introduction:

 

The contributions to the present volume focus on the many diverse aspects of Hungarian Intelligence in Austria, which shows how diverse how this research field really is, for this reason, we have divided the studies into three major categories

 

·      The first major category centers on the structural and organizational issues of the secret services and their agent network, as this forms the basis for all further research, and relevant resources are usually available in abundance.

 

·      The second major category pertains to certain intelligence operations and their goals…these studies give insight into the planning, preparation, and implementation of intelligence practices and also enable us to draw general conclusions on intelligence strategies.

 

·      The third and last category attempts to reconstruct the structures and activities of certain bodies of intelligence. During the early phase of the Cold War, “human intelligence” (HUMINT) or information collected by agents was one of the most important sources of information, and the present volume contains a variety of contributions on this operative method.

Table of Contents: