Istvan Belovai ; Hungarian intelligence officer who exposed a spy-ring passing vital Nato secrets to the Eastern Bloc
Hyfler/Rosner
Istvan Belovai, who died on November 6 aged 71, was a former
Hungarian military intelligence officer who revealed to the
American government the existence of an extensive spy-ring
working within Nato.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/6591507/Istvan-Belovai.html
Born at a small village in eastern Hungary on January 4
1938, Istvan Belovai joined the Hungarian Army in 1958 and
four years later entered the Military Strategic Intelligence
Service based in Budapest. In 1975, when he had reached the
rank of major, he was asked to translate a despatch which
turned out to contain details of the standard operating
procedures of the US Seventh Army.
As later court records reveal, the despatch came from Clyde
Lee Conrad, an American NCO working as an administrator at
secret Nato archives in Bad Kreuznach, Germany. From 1974
until his arrest in 1988, Conrad sold top secret information
to the People's Republic of Hungary and recruited several
other low-paid American Army personnel to help him.
In 1978 Belovai was assigned, full time, to "Operation
Snowdrop" and given the job of translating intelligence
pouring in from the Conrad spy ring. The despatches - some
30,000 documents in all - dealt with Nato Army and Air Force
deployments, Nato strategy, and the location of nuclear
weapons sites on the borders with the Eastern Bloc.
In effect, Conrad supplied the Hungarians (and through them
the Soviet Union) with the General Defence Plan for every
allied unit assigned to Europe, with details of the position
of every unit in case of a war, and how they were to defend
against Warsaw Pact forces. The material was classified
"Cosmic Top Secret".
According to Belovai's account, he decided to alert the
United States to the security leak because he became
convinced that the information gleaned by Operation Snowdrop
could lead to a nuclear showdown. "At the beginning of the
1980s, the Soviet Military Intelligence had all the
essential intelligence data on the US and Nato forces in
Europe. The Red Army had the ability to launch a successful
general attack against Nato forces in Europe. In case of
war, Nato forces would have had two choices: capitulation or
the deployment of nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union,"
he recalled.
He became convinced that the Soviets were preparing to
attack the West: "I decided to prevent the potential Soviet
aggression."
He could not simply walk into the American embassy in
Budapest, as the building was under constant surveillance;
but in 1982 he was assigned to serve as assistant military
and air attach� in London.
Two years later, in 1984, he made contact with an American
agent known as "Richard C" in a CIA safe house in London.
That summer Belovai was transferred back to Budapest, but he
continued to communicate with the Americans under the code
name Scorpion-B.
In 1985, however, Belovai, who had by now been promoted to
the rank of lieutenant-colonel, was arrested by Hungarian
counter-intelligence while on his way to a CIA drop point.
He had been betrayed, it is believed, by the CIA
counter-intelligence officer and Soviet spy Aldrich Ames. At
his trial, the prosecutor demanded the death sentence, but
in the event he was sentenced to life imprisonment for
espionage, stripped of his military rank and had all his
property confiscated.
Three years into his sentence, Belovai learned of the arrest
of Conrad and four accomplices. "The news made my heart
throb. My work had not been in vain," he recalled.
In 1990 a West German court sentenced Conrad to life in
prison for espionage, the presiding judge observing that
because of his treachery: "If war had broken out between
Nato and the Warsaw Pact, the West would have faced certain
defeat. Nato would have quickly been forced to choose
between capitulation or the use of nuclear weapons on German
territory."
After his trial in 1985, Belovai was held as an "anti-state"
(political) prisoner, but he eventually won release on
parole in September 1990, six months after the first free
elections in Hungary. "It was sunny. It was a wonderful
feeling," he recalled.
But that feeling did not last. The Hungarian democratic
authorities refused to grant him a full pardon, despite his
political prisoner status, and he was warned that if he
remained in Hungary his life could be in danger. Towards the
end of 1990 he left for the United States and settled in
Colorado, taking American citizenship in 1992.
In exile Belovai campaigned to be given a full pardon and to
be restored to his former military rank, arguing that he had
acted as he did to save Hungary as well as the West from a
catastrophic nuclear war.
"I was never a traitor. I was Hungary's first Nato soldier,"
he claimed. But even 20 years after the end of Communist
rule, no Hungarian political party has been prepared to
rehabilitate him.