Alexander Radó
Alexander Radó was a Hungarian cartographer who later became a Soviet military intelligence-agent in World War II. Radó was born into a middle class Jewish family in Újpest. He attended school in Budapest, before being drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army in 1917, where he became a radicalised communist. He was involved in communist regime in Hungary until it fell in 1919 and needed to flee to Austria. In 1921, he attended the third congress of the Communist International in Moscow.
In 1922, he married Helene Jansen an ardent communist. In the same year the couple moved to Leipzig. He began working, creating maps for Meyers Lexikon publishers, joined the KPD and in 1923 took part in the failed German October uprising in Leipzig. In 1924, needing to leave the country, the couple moved to the Soviet Union to work at the All-Union Society for Cultural Contacts with Abroad. In 1925, the couple moved back to Berlin where Radó created the Geopress agency, a publisher of maps for newspapers and German companies like Lufthansa. In 1933, after the Reichstag Fire Decree, the KPD party was banned in Germany and the couple again had to flee, this time to Paris, where Radó established Inpress, an anti-Nazi press agency funded by the Soviet Union. At the same time he worked on projects for the Comintern. In 1936, the couple again moved, to Switzerland. From 1936 to 1945, he was devoted to running a Soviet military intelligence organisation known as the Red Three group, as a member of the resistance to Nazi Germany. His codename was "DORA".
After the war, Radó was extradited to the Soviet Union, tried on espionage charges and imprisoned for 10 years. Released in 1955, he returned to Budapest to find that his wife had divorced him. Wishing to move into academia but having no degree, he turned to his friends for political support to begin a new career as a cartographer, first working at the State Office of Land Survey and Cartography, then later a position at Cartographia, the Hungarian state mapping agency. In 1956, he was appointed as a lecturer at the Karl Marx University of Economic Sciences and by 1958 had taken over the Department of Economic Geography. In the 1950's and 1960's, Radó reformed Hungarian geography to suit the Soviet model of cartography. In the 1960's, his wartime role as a spy for the Red Three was discovered, making him a minor celebrity. In the late 1960's and 1970's, he continued to strengthen Hungarian cartography and attempted to purge all Hungarian geographers and cartographers who did not follow the Soviet line. In 1965, he began publishing Cartactual, a cartographic reference journal. During this period, he produced a number of signature maps including the Karta Mira atlas that was began in 1964 and a special edition of Atlas International Larousse Politique et Economique in 1965. He died in 1981.
Life
Radó was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Újpest, at the time an industrial suburb of Budapest. His father was first a clerk at a trading firm and later became a wealthy businessman through the ownership of a small timber works, a scrap dealer and a brewery. His mother was Malvina Rado. He had two siblings, a brother Ferenc Rado and a sister Erzsébet Klein . As a six-year old, Radó was presented with a book about a trip to Japan on the Trans-Siberian Railway. The book contained a page that folded out into a map of the Russian Empire. The vision of the map made an indelible impression on Radó that began an interest in maps and mapmaking that would last his whole life. As a child, Radó attended school at a Budapest gymnasium and would travel to Italy and Austria for his summer holidays. While at school, he became interested in politics due to him witnessing, in 1912, the suppression of an unemployed workers demonstration by the police. During his teenage years, this developed into Radó becoming a devoted communist and he became part of a small socialist group that included Mátyás Rákosi and Ernő Gerő. Rákosi and Gerő would later become leading functionaries in the Hungarian Communist Party.Conscription
In 1917, Radó was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army. His parents managed to use their influence to ensure Radó was posted as a junior staff officer in artillery and stationed at the barracks of Fortress Artillery in Budapest. During this time, he was able to continue his education by studying law as a correspondence student of the University of Budapest. At university, he was exposed to the revolutionary socialists during the revolution of 1918. The hostile debate expounded between the socialist and communists on how to end to war, lead to his increased radicalisation. His commanding officer, the brother of Zsigmond Kunfi who was anti-war, would later introduce Radó to the works of Marx and Lenin. After graduation at the officer candidate school in 1918, he was assigned to an artillery regiment and stationed in Budapest.In December 1918, after the fall of Austro-Hungarian monarchy, Radó joined the Hungarian Communist Party. When the communists came to power in Hungary in March 1919 in Béla Kun's government, he was appointed as cartographer to the staff of 6th division of Hungarian Red Army, to draw maps. Ferenc Münnich, the political commissar of the division, then made him commissar of the 51st infantry regiment. Radó took an active part in fighting against Czechoslovak forces and in fighting against anti-Communist insurgents in Budapest. There is some uncertainty as to his movements at that point. One source states he moved to Germany in the autumn of 1919 to study geography and cartography, while another states he remained in Austria, where he established the ROSTO-Vienna news agency.
Geographer
After the fall of the communist regime in Hungary and the White Terror in full swing with an established anti-Semitic tendency, Radó decided to flee to Austria arriving in Vienna on 1 September 1919. There is some uncertainty as to the movements of Radó after he left Vienna. According to a CIA report created in 1968 by Louis Thomas, Radó left Vienna to travel to Jena in Germany, in the late autumn of 1919, to matriculate at the University of Jena, initially to study law but later moved to study geography and cartography. The CIA report also claims that Radó left Germany at the end of 1919 with the help of his friends Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, to travel to Moscow to volunteer for the Comintern. While there, he got to know Comintern president Grigory Zinoviev. According to the report, the Comintern recruited Radó to take charge of a Soviet intelligence station that was located in the port city of Haparanda, located at the head of the Gulf of Bothnia, long considered a strategic location as the gateway for those needing to enter or leave Soviet Russia. Both Heffernan and Győri states these claims should be treated with caution, as there is no record of Radó matriculating at the University of Jena during 1919. Instead they believe that Radó spent the year of 1919 in Vienna, writing on military matters for a German-language Vienna based journal, Kommunismus: Zeitschrift der Kommunistischen Internationale für die Länder Südosteuropas, published by the Comintern.In early 1920, Radó learned through a contact, that Radio Vienna was receiving dispatches from Moscow Commisariat of Foreign Affairs. The broadcasts consisted of propaganda from Soviet Russia. Radó contacted Maxim Litvinov, the director of the NKID, who supplied 10000 Swedish krona that enabled Radó to buy the dispatches. In July 1920, he used the remaining money to establish a news agency, known as ROSTO-Vienna in Vienna, that he ran until 1922. His colleagues at the agency helped him translate the dispatches into every European language. These included the writer and translator and the Marxist philosopher György Lukács. ROSTO-Vienna became the principal conduit into which Soviet news was channelled into Europe. By mid 1921 it was regularly receiving copies of Pravda, Izvestia, Lenin's speeches, gramophone recordings of speeches and other materials. Radó established contacts with several socialist and communist journalists in the west, that enabled the information bulletins from these materials to be distributed to left-wing newspapers and organizations in various countries. Amongst these was Zsigmond Kunfi from the Vienna newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitung, Konstantin Umansky, Charles Reber of L'Humanité and Frederick Kuh of the Chicago Sun-Times.