Were the new parties swarming with former agents?
Claim: The new parties were swarming with former state security agents.
Rebuttal: The claim may be true, but it cannot be proven. There may be political motives behind its dissemination, but in any case, some of the agent files have been destroyed, and the remaining ones have not been made public even after 30 years.
In detail:
On January 5, 1990, the SZDSZ (Alliance of Free Democrats) and Fidesz (Alliance of Young Democrats) parties held a press conference at the Graffiti cinema in Budapest.
The location was chosen because they presented a recording made by the Fekete Doboz audiovisual samizdat studio in the Ministry of the Interior building, where Major József Végvári had smuggled them in. The footage proved that the opposition parties continued to be monitored by state security even after the proclamation of the republic on October 23, 1989, and that these reports were routinely received by socialist party state leaders, in accordance with previous practice. Following the Watergate wiretapping scandal that led to the downfall of US President Richard Nixon, the case was dubbed ’Dunagate’. A parliamentary committee of inquiry was set up to investigate the matter, leading to the resignation of Interior Minister István Horváth and his deputy, Ferenc Pallagi, and within a few weeks, a new law on the operation of the secret services was passed. By then, the Dunagate scandal had spread further with accusations that the Ministry of the Interior was busy destroying state security documents. It was widely reported that almost all documents had been destroyed, which, however, prevented too many people from looking at them, while creating the possibility that files closed to the public could be used as tools for political manipulation.
Another issue is that, as can be seen from the Dunagate scandal, the state security services also watched the political organizations that were formed in 1988 and 1989 with “keen interest,” so it is certain that they tried to infiltrate them as well. Although most of the analyses of this period understandably refrain from mentioning specific names, they essentially treat the success of these actions as a fact. The report of the Kenedi Commission, which was tasked with reviewing the agent files in 2007-2008, emphasizes that it was also in the interest of the state security services to accept the inevitable changes and influence the processes themselves. In order for the pro-government institution to transform itself into a professional office operating under democratic conditions while preserving its existing framework as much as possible, a systematic transformation was needed in which the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (MSZMP) remained the dominant political force and opposition groups exercised restraint.
Later, the issue of document destruction and the public disclosure of documents came to the fore, which was important not only from the perspective of the right to know one’s own past (think of the GDR film Das Leben der Anderen /The Lives of Others/, in which a theater director reads the drama of his own life from the Stasi files), but also from the perspective of cleansing public life and vetting – in legal terms: lustration.
After two failed attempts, a law on the latter was only passed in 1994, so during the Antall/Boross governments, even if the prime minister had his political environment vetted, he did so without a law on the matter. Act XXIII of 1994 stipulated the vetting of key state leaders, members of parliament, heads of state institutions – and, as a non-state exception, editors of newspapers with large circulations – for national security purposes. The law only mentioned the notorious Department III/III – internal counterintelligence – but not counterespionage and intelligence, which played a similar role in many respects. Moreover, it was particularly lenient towards those whom the vetting judges found to have incriminating information in the available state security files: only the individuals concerned had to be informed, and if they resigned from their positions, the evidence was not made public. This means, however, that it is impossible to clarify what actually happened: for example, someone may have signed a recruitment statement under pressure, but ultimately never reported anything, or may have shared sensitive information about their environment with the political police for years. “Involvement” must be proven either by a signed recruitment statement, an existing report, or remuneration received. In most cases, however, such documents were either destroyed or never created.
Only then was the designated archive established, so it is impossible to determine exactly what documents were destroyed before 1994 and when. For example, the files of agents who were “active” in 1989 were most likely destroyed. According to the report of the so-called Kenedi Commission, the destruction of documents began in November-December 1989 among the internal affairs materials. Initially, this concerned files that were now considered illegal under the new multiparty democratic conditions, such as those relating to churches, “dissidents” (to use the terminology of the time), and the surveillance of political prisoners. The uncontrolled, undocumented document destruction campaign lasted from the end of December 1989 to mid-January 1990. As the commission’s report states: “The hasty document destruction probably affected the so-called ’live’ files, i.e., operational files that had not yet been archived, to the greatest extent. There are no even cautious estimates of the volume of state security documents destroyed in this way.”
Act LXVII of 1996, which established the Historical Bureau (the predecessor of today’s Historical Archives of the State Security Services), defined the scope of the documents to be reviewed much more narrowly, so that it affected only about one-twentieth of the total, or just 500 representatives and state officials. Based on the above, Krisztián Ungváry, the best-known Hungarian researcher on the issue of agents, explicitly states that the parties that brought about the change of regime had no interest in making the documents public. As mentioned above, state security had infiltrated opposition organizations, but due to the destruction and withholding of files, we cannot say anything specific about the extent or numbers involved. Iván Szabó, Minister of Industry, Trade, and Tourism in the Antall government, for example, stated that approximately 30 representatives were certainly involved in the National Assembly elected in 1990, and that their possible exclusion would have resulted in the loss of the government majority. Csaba Ilkei, who was keen on exposing such cases, claimed that 25 members of parliament had links to state security, and he even named six of them. In his book published in 2017, Krisztián Ungváry reveals that 36 representatives and government members were mentioned in state security files, which, as we will see from the examples below, did not necessarily mean that they were “informers.”
However, in the chaotic situation following the change of regime, political games led to a series of new (agent) scandals. Between 1990 and 1994, accusations of being agents arose primarily in connection with Antall’s political opponents within his own camp: both József Torgyán and István Csurka received their envelopes from the head of government. However, in both cases it turned out that they had indeed been recruited under duress, but they did not cooperate with the state security services, and neither of them was willing to write reports. In 1994, Gyula Horn became prime minister, even though the law in force excluded from senior government positions those who had served as members of the government militia in 1956-57. In 2002, Prime Minister Péter Medgyessy’s past as a top-secret officer was made public, but he did not have to resign either. Zoltán Pokorni, on the other hand, resigned from his positions as party chairman and faction leader in the same year, even though the politically motivated leak targeted his father, not him. Viktor Orbán has also been repeatedly accused of being an agent, despite the fact that he did not carry out any agent activities during his military service in the early 1980s (he was given the so-called “A” card was issued to him, as it was to many other conscripts), while the 1988 recruitment attempt – by military counterintelligence – ended with complete failure.
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