Alexander Radó

Alexander Radó a adăugat o fotografie

acum 8 ore

R.I.P
Alexander

Alexander Radó (also Alexander Radolfi, Sándor Kálmán Reich, Alexander Rado; born Sándor Radó, Hungarian: [ˈʃaːndor ˈrɒdoː]; 5 November 1899 – 20 August 1981) 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 (now part of Budapest). 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 ("Comintern") 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…Citește mai mult

Alexander Radó a adăugat o fotografie

acum 8 ore

R.I.P
Alexander

Life Radó was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Újpest, at the time an industrial suburb of Budapest. His father (née Gábor Reich) 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 (Francis Radó) and a sister Erzsébet Klein (Elizabeth 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…Citește mai mult

Alexander Radó a adăugat o fotografie

acum 8 ore

R.I.P
Alexander

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 (MKP). 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…Citește mai mult

Alexander Radó a adăugat o fotografie

acum 8 ore

R.I.P
Alexander

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…Citește mai mult

Alexander Radó a publicat o actualizare

acum 8 ore

Comintern In July 1921, through the influence of his friends that he met in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, he was brought to Moscow as the ROSTO delegate, to attend the third congress of the secretariat of Communist International ("Comintern") during July–July 1921. When he finally reached the Soviet border at Sebezh after the long trip, he described experience of crossing as "a moment of deep emotion. For the first time since the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, he felt at home". While there, Radó spent several nights at the Moscow State Circus with Vladimir Mayakovsky, interviewed "The People's Commissar For Foreign Affairs", Georgy Chicherin and met Comintern president Grigory Zinoviev On one occasion, he was flabbergasted to be sitting close to Vladimir Lenin, describing Lenin's oratory as having an "electrifying effect" on him. Radó later claimed to have a conversation with Lenin during the Congress, when he explained the importance of political cartography. He described how anti-Hungarian lobbyists had used thematic maps to ensure that more than 70% of Hungarary's pre-war territory was ceded to the other nation-states after the Treaty of Trianon. Radó well understood the transformative and propaganda effects of cartography and believed it should…Citește mai mult

Alexander Radó a publicat o actualizare

acum 8 ore

University In 1922, Radó returned to Germany. In the summer, he and Helene moved into together. The couple married the following year. The normalisation of diplomatic ties between Austria and the Soviet Union meant that ROSTO-Vienna was no longer needed and it was closed down in 1922. Radó returned to his studies in the same year, first attending Jena starting in late 1922 and then at Leipzig but never graduated. During his student days, he published his first map on the Polish–Soviet War of 1920-1921, in a Viennese communist journal. As he only partially completed his education, he was lucky to attain a position as a draughtsman with the Leipzig publisher Meyers Lexikon who had been publishing an encyclopedia in various editions since 1839. On 23 October 1923, he took part in the preparation for a Comintern-planned large armed uprising in Germany, known as German October. As a prominent KPD member, he was made military chief of the communist forces in Leipzig. But the badly planned revolution had to be aborted at the last moment. He was briefly arrested for his efforts. By 1924, Radó had sufficient knowledge to able to create his own maps. He created a civilian map…Citește mai mult

Alexander Radó a publicat o actualizare

acum 8 ore

Berlin life When the couple returned to Berlin in 1926, they settled in an apartment located in the Hufeisensiedlung housing scheme. In Berlin, Radó was assigned to a Soviet intelligence network that collected information on German politics and German industrial development.

Alexander Radó a publicat o actualizare

acum 8 ore

Their close friends were Dadist illustrator John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld) and his wife Getrude Fliess who was known as "Tutti". Heartfield was the inventor of photomontage and used the technique to become the demiurge of anti-Nazi propaganda. Fliess was a photographer and portraitist.

Alexander Radó a publicat o actualizare

acum 8 ore

Lena, who was expecting their first child found work producing agitprop for the central committee, in the KPD headquarters at Karl Liebknecht's house, a position she held until the early 1930s. Radó initially worked on the Meyers Konversations-Lexikon before being commissioned to create aviation maps for Lufthansa. During the period, Radó established the Berlin cartographic agency Pressgeography full name Geopress Atlas Permanent, known as Geopress with the help of the Berlin based comintern propagandist Willi Münzenberg and the Workers International Relief. Münzenberg was part of a comintern cadre that produced a large number of communist publications that were vertically influential and covered all activities including political, cultural, financial as well as strategic, military and the police. The Comintern organisation were a highly controlled, direct products of the Soviet state that enabled Soviet security to move and work in the organisation as if they were at home. Geopress produced maps for newspapers which the couple ran from their own apartment. To produce his maps, Radó practiced strategic intelligence collection of open information, which constituted as much as 95% of the material that the network needed. This involved processing of macro and micro economic data along with sociological and political overviews into…Citește mai mult

Alexander Radó a publicat o actualizare

acum 8 ore

Paris life After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, banned the KPD and arrested many communists after the Reichstag fire, the couple along with Münzenberg and most of their associates fled through Austria to Paris. The couple with their two children, Imre and Sándor Jr., along with Lena's mother Oma, settled in an apartment at 24 Rue Du 11 November in Meudon, east of Paris. Radó established the Inpress for Independent Press Agency, an independent anti-Nazi press agency The company was funded by the Soviet Union government, which enabled the couple to lead a lavish lifestyle, in contrast to their hand-to-mouth existence in Berlin. The company, whose editorial board included himself, the translator and writer Vladimir Pozner and the writer Arthur Koestler, had offices located at Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The publishers would eventually employ 16 people, of which four or five were Soviet agents using the firm for cover. To present a veneer of respectability and satisfy genuine intellectual curiosity, Radó began to develop an academic reputation by visiting geographers in the universities in Paris and in 1934, joined the Paris based Société de Géographie and the London based Royal Geographical Society. While Radó gave the…Citește mai mult

Alexander Radó a publicat o actualizare

acum 8 ore

Geneva life In October 1935, during a visit to Moscow, Radó was approached by Artur Artuzov, deputy chief of Soviet military intelligence and by Semyon Uritsky, chief of Soviet military intelligence. Radó agreed to direct and expand a small Red Army intelligence unit in Switzerland with the main task of obtaining intelligence on Nazi Germany. In May 1936, the Radós received permission to live in Switzerland. In May 1936, the whole family moved to Switzerland, part of a Soviet military espionage operation where he became chief rezident. They settled in a comfortable apartment at 113, rue de Lausanne, in central Geneva overlooking Lake Geneva. In August 1936, Radó founded yet another cartographic agency, Geo-presse using the remains of Inpress and again began a conversation with local academics to provide the veneer of respectability needed to remain under cover and to broaden his coverage of his products. Geopress became a much more profitable business for Radó than Inpress as the demand for maps and geographical data increased as the international situation worsened. He initially produced political maps but when the Spanish Civil War began, the business expanded by producing hundreds of detailed maps in multiple languages showing changes in the Republican…Citește mai mult

Alexander Radó a publicat o actualizare

acum 8 ore

Pre-war When Radó was originally sent to Switzerland, he had been instructed by Soviet military intelligence to build an espionage network, but by 1939, he still wasn't fully prepared.

Alexander Radó a publicat o actualizare

acum 8 ore

Since 1936, a small Soviet cell existed in Switzerland, that had been established by Maria Josefovna Poliakova in early 1936 and left to German Ursula Kuczynski to run when Poliakova returned to the Soviet Union in the same year. The network had two principal agents. The first and most important was Polish immigrant Rachel Dübendorfer who worked as a secretary at the League of Nations International Labour Organization (ILO). She joined the network in 1934 to obtain information about production at Swiss army factories. The second agent was Swiss lawyer and journalist Otto Pünter who worked for the anti-fascist news agency International Socialist Agency (INSA). Pünter ran a clandestine network in Germany which generally supplied economic intelligence. When he'd arrived in Switzerland, Radó had assembled 50 separate sources of intelligence but none matched in quality to that supplied by Pünter. In April 1938, Radó made contact with Pünter who formally joined his network.

Alexander Radó a publicat o actualizare

acum 8 ore

Recruitment Through an intermediary, Léon Nicole who was general secretary of the Communist Party of Switzerland, Rado was able to formerly recruit several new people into his network. These included Margrit Bolli who became the third radio operator, who transmitted from her apartment in Lucerne and Edmond Hamel (assisted by his wife Olga Hamel), who would become the group's secondary radio operators. transmitting from their apartment in Geneva. These agents were compartmentalised, i.e. unknown to each other, except when they were man and wife, e.g. Bolli and Hamel and each had a codename which unknown to each other. In his radio communications, Radó used the codename "Dora", which was only known to Moscow Centre.

Alexander Radó a publicat o actualizare

acum 8 ore

Between March and April 1940, Radó was visited by Anatoly Gurevich in a three-week business trip to Switzerland to deliver $3000 to finance the network along with cipher books necessary to encipher/decipher radio messages during transmission. In August 1940, Radó network was joined by Alexander Foote, an English Soviet agent in Switzerland who joined Ursula Kuczynski's network in October 1938. While he was attached to Kuczynski's network, Foote learned how to be a radio operator and by January 1940 was sufficiently competent to reach Moscow Centre. By March 1941, Foote was making regular radio transmissions with Moscow Centre from his apartment in Lausanne. When Kuczynski left for England in February 1941, Foote was assigned to Radó's network. Foote became the main radio operator for Radó's intelligence network and trained both Bolli and Hamel in radio use for less important radio transmissions. After the war, Foote grossly exaggerated his wartime role by claiming in his book Handbook for spies, that both he and Radó had separate networks of equal importance, with separate sub-sources. However the traffic report doesn't bear that claim. In May 1941, Dübendorfer and her network were formerly recruited into Radó's network. In October 1941, Georges Blun was recruited…Citește mai mult