Double-Oh Really??

Mike Bodnar breaks cover to reveal that he's been of interest to the Hungarian intelligence service, and that spying is in the family...

Secret meetings must have taken place
during Hungary's communist era...

Surreptitiously checking our surroundings, I mutter: "The roses attract handbags early this year." To which you respond, "Fish swim backwards when the moon is full." 

And with the security protocol satisfied, we can continue our conversation, comrade. It's good to know who's on your side.

However - and before you swivel the lamp in my face - I have to declare I am not a spy, and never have been. Okay, stick needles under my fingernails if you must, but my story will stay the same. 

I do love spy books and movies though, so when, in 1964 I found myself in the lounge of a posh Hungarian hotel room in Budapest, with my father checking the chandelier for microphones, I was enthralled. Yes, even at the age of double-oh nine-and-three-quarters, I'm fairly certain I had already seen Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and maybe Goldfinger, so I was well-educated in the world of secret agents, foreign powers, and hidden listening devices. 

My father tapped the lamp shade and mimed someone listening with headphones pulling them off their ears in annoyance. I thought it was funny.

Listening to Double-oh-nine and three-quarters
and his parents

Spoiler alert: he didn't find any listening devices, but that's not to say there weren't some in the bedside lamps, or the telephone. Because it turns out my father, André, was of interest to the Hungarian intelligence service - then under communist rule - and three years later he would be recruited by them as a spy.

How do I know this top secret information? Because I have been party to some declassified Hungarian state files. Of which, more later. But first, a bit of context...

My father - André Balint Bodnár (Codename Franz. No seriously...) - was born in Hungary in 1922. Despite Hungary being land-locked, he became a seafarer in the merchant navy, rising eventually to captain. His travels by ship took him to many foreign ports, including Liverpool, England. It was here he met, wooed, and married my mother. I was born after an appropriate interval in 1954, but four years later my parents divorced. Wasn't me, your honour.

Who's that man?

So I grew up without a father most of the time, although he did have legal 'access' to me, and when in port he would come and visit, and treat me well, buying me new clothes, taking us into town in a taxi, and once even building me a train set that was so big it had to be hung on hinges from a wall. But for all that, he was a stranger. I remember whispering to my mum one day during an early visit, 'Who's that man?'

Fast forward to 1964, and suddenly (at least it seemed to me) my mother and I were travelling to Hungary, where we were to meet my father for a two-week holiday, which is how we came to be in the Duna Hotel in Budapest looking for microphones.

1964, in Tiszalök, Hungary.
L to R: my half-brother Endré, my Hungarian
grandmother, me, and
spy-in-waiting, André, my father

Over two weeks we travelled around Hungary's hotspots, including to the village of Tiszalök, where André's mother and her husband lived. My half-brother Endré was there as well, at least for our visit. There were no microphones in Tiszalök either, but who knows who the chickens in the garden were reporting to?

Within the 111 pages of declassified file material, recently received by my Budapest-based nephew Csaba (pronounced 'cha-ba'), I am mentioned multiple times, including, erroneously, that at the age of nine I learned to speak Hungarian. If you use the needles on me, I will confess (quite rapidly) to learning how to say good morning, thank you, and cherry lemonade in Hungarian, but that's about it. I could never have passed on information on troop deployment, tank movements or the daily habits of the local Bolshevik command. But I could have quietly informed you where to find the best thermal baths, and wiener schnitzel - hardly intelligence that MI6 would value. Of more interest is that the majority of the 111-page documents focus much on my father.

Image:  Public Domain, httpscommons.wiki

While I make light of needles under fingernails, for many Hungarians in the 1960s and throughout its communist rule, the prospect of being interrogated was very real. In Budapest today, there is evidence of that, at 60 Andrássy Avenue, the Terror Haza - The House of Terror Museum.

Director-General of the museum, Dr. Mária Scmidt, explains: "The House of Terror Museum is a building which commemorates two tragic eras in Hungarian history. From 1944 to 1990, our nation was robbed of its independence and freedom - first by Arrow Cross thugs supported by German Nazis, and then by communists backed by the Soviet Union. We have since recovered both our independence and freedom, to become free citizens of an independent Hungary. Because we Hungarians are a people of freedom!"

Crest of the
State Protection Authority

The Terror Museum - which is in the old headquarters of the State Protection Authority - celebrates escaping the oppressive fascist and communist regimes, while also reminding Hungarians and other visitors of the cruelty and fear of those two particular eras. In the basement there is a cellar dedicated to the torture of suspects and prisoners, of which there were so many that those in charge - the political police - had to take over the basements of other nearby buildings, creating a terrifying maze of cells and torture rooms. 

About now you're probably keen to attach bits of me to a car battery and interrogate me about how my father became a spy for the communists. Well, put down the electrodes because I will sing like a canary.

Nephew Csaba, who has the declassified files (which are all in Hungarian), tells me that my father was recruited as a spy in 1967. His 'operational area' was the Middle East, and as mentioned, he was codenamed Franz.

A Dilmun tanker being guided by a tug towards
McDermott's Oil Storage on Deiraside of
Dubai Creek. Image: dubaiasitusedtobe.net

I'm not too surprised that he was recruited, because, as a captain, he was commander of a small oil tanker for the Dilmun Navigation shipping company, and was based in Bahrain. 

At that time, despite being oil-rich, the area was devoid of the infrastructure necessary for the transport of oil and fuel locally. Rail and road networks were poor or non-existent, so fuel delivery around the Gulf depended on a fleet of 'small ships', owned and operated by Dilmun Navigation. This included the delivery of aviation fuel to a jetty near Dubai Airport, from where it was pumped via underground pipes to the airport itself. The ships became a familiar sight around Dubai Creek and Port Rashid.

A page from The Franz Files

It was on one of these vessels that my father was captain, and with oil wealth expanding in the Middle East, it is hardly surprising that the Hungarian intelligence authority saw him as an easy and convenient local source of information, an agent already-in-place. Our Man in the Middle East.

However, despite this sounding like a good premise for a John Le Carré novel, Franz, it seems, turned out not to be good covert operative material. Csaba tells me, "I think he wasn’t a good spy, because the file was closed one year later."

Which is a bit disappointing to me as Double-Oh-Seventy-One now. He had plenty of other talents - he was a cartoonist and artist, and spoke multiple languages - but spying seemingly wasn't one of them.

The files show he had been monitored as a potential English spy for years, which is possibly why Hungarian counterintelligence recruited him. Maybe they thought it was better to 'keep your enemies closer.'

Csaba says he doesn't see any big surprises in the files, despite their length. "What I see is that he was very naïve," he concludes, and that he had accepted the role "for money and patriotism." 

Which sounds about right. He was a charmer, probably fancied himself as James Bond, loved to spend money (when he had it), but later in life I always thought of him as what we call in English 'a wide boy.' Wikipedia has it in a nutshell: Wide boy is a British term for a man who lives by his wits, wheeling and dealing. According to the Oxford English Dictionary it is synonymous with spiv.

"Or... he was really an English spy," adds Csaba at the end of one of his messages, given to me on a microdot hidden in a newspaper and surreptitiously handed to me in a brush-pass one foggy night in London. (Actually by Facebook Messenger, but the London bit sounds better).

One day I hope to see copies of the intelligence files on my father, even if they're in Hungarian. I won't understand a word of them, unless there's a reference to cherry lemonade.

So for now, case file closed.