Béla Lapusnyik, the victim, Vienna, May 1962

I love Austria and especially its beautiful capital on the Danube that writer Kid Möchel calls Spionagedrehscheibe Wien (Vienna, an espionage turntable). Kim Philby lived here and was first approached in an agent probe by his own Communist wife Litzi. It actually ended by lovemaking in the snow but later, some time after June 1934, he was fully recruited in London by another talented Austrian, Dr Arnold Deutsch, with the help of Deutsch’s former contact back in Vienna’s OMS named Edith Suschitzki. Known in Britain as Edith Tudor Hart with some of her photographic works proudly displayed in the National Gallery in London to this very day, Edith later helped to handle Anthony Blunt and Robert ‘Bob’ Stewart not to mention Philby himself who until the war was a rather hopeless little spook. Almost all successful pre-war Soviet spy runners in London, several agents and their couriers came there from Vienna. Since April 1945, when the Soviets launched their Vienna Offensive and their troops finally liberated the city – to occupy it for another ten years, longer than the Nazis – the Austrian capital has become the most important place for Russian spies and their spymasters from all over the globe, from the phantom Emerald Island off New Zealand’s coast to Grant Land in the Arctic Ocean to the cold, wet and windy Coronation Island in the South Orkneys near the Falkland archipelago. Here to this wonderful city they have come to meet, dine, get recruited, paid, and sometimes killed. No wonder The Third Man¹ is still being shown in Vienna’s cinemas.

On the night of 8–9 May 1962, a 24-year-old Hungarian AVH² Lieutenant Béla Lapusnyik defected to Austria by riding a motorcycle to a Hungarian border checkpoint near Nickelsdorf. He fired warning shots at two Hungarian border guards, forcing them to seek cover, before leaping over the barrier amid a hail of automatic fire from Hungarian guards.

While the Hungarian was making his dramatic escape, Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko, an officer of the Second Chief Directorate of the KGB (internal security) on a three-month assignment to a Soviet conference delegation in Geneva, was drinking whisky and ogling girls in a downtown nightclub together with a friend named Yuri Guk from the local KGB rezidentura. Several days later, in the marble halls of Geneva’s Palace of Nations, he made his move during a break in the proceedings of an arms-control conference. Nosenko eased himself to the side of an American delegate he knew to have served in Moscow, shook hands, and, after a glance around to be sure he was out of range of fellow Soviet delegates, asked urgently for contact with CIA. Two days later Tennent H. Bagley, known to all his friends as ‘Pete’, greeted Nosenko in a small safe apartment in the Old Town.³

Four decades after the events, Pete told me in Brussels:

Our service learned about Béla Lapusnyik soon after his escape from Hungary and it was agreed that this important defector would be transferred to the USA in June. In the meantime, the Austrian Stapo (state security police) had been interviewing him. I must say that since I served in Vienna in the early 1950s we were well informed that the Austrian police, controlled by the Socialists and previously Communists, was thoroughly penetrated by the Soviet agents. I heard that Lapusnyik brought with him secret documents sewed up in the lining of his leather overcoat in addition to notes and observations that allowed us to identify Hungarian agents and their clandestine operations in Austria. He also threw light on Hungarian security police operations against Western diplomats and businessmen in Budapest. One doesn’t need to say that the Hungarian intelligence and security services worked for their Soviet spymasters.

After the initial questioning by the Burgenland police, Lapusnyik was immediately taken to Vienna where Dr Hejkrlik, the Hungarian affairs specialist of the Stapo, started to interview him.

The young lieutenant appeared to be a very valuable source indeed. He delivered high-grade intelligence about espionage activities, foreign currency smuggling, and rosters of agents in Austria straight from the Hungarian Interior Ministry files. Lapusnyik presented documents about the methods employed by the Hungarian secret service in Austria and revealed obscure channels through which information was smuggled from Austria to Hungary. He told the police about secret ‘loopholes’ in the Iron Curtain, and named agents in Austria and their meeting places.

During the questioning Béla Lapusnyik was held in protective custody in the top-security police prison known as ‘Liesl’ on Vienna’s Rossauerlände. Every day before noon he was taken to Vienna city police headquarters for debriefing and was usually brought back in the evening. Therefore he took his meals at the police building and when it was noticed that he and the police inspector both loved pastry, cakes and other treats, they were often delivered from a nearby bakery.

Before noon on Saturday, 2 June, Lapusnyik in his isolated cell complained that he did not feel well and asked for a doctor. The police physician’s diagnosis suggested tonsillitis. On Sunday he was transferred to the Vienna General Hospital (AKH, Erste Chirurgische Klinik) where he was kept in room 125 under the constant guard of the two members of the state police. After repeatedly losing consciousness during the day, Lapusnyik died of a brain haemorrhage on the Monday morning, 4 June 1962, at 5:45 a.m. Shortly before his death, he tried to say something but no one could understand his Hungarian. By the time an interpreter was sent for, Lapusnyik could no longer speak, but managed to scribble a note: ‘Pump my stomach out’, meaning that he considered himself to be poisoned. But then he lost conscience and soon passed away.

Not surprisingly, Austrian medical experts concluded that this young and strong Hungarian defector had died of natural causes – despite the amazing diagnoses that during the hours of his agony Lapusnyik had gradually suffered not only from tonsillitis but also from an inflammation of the narrow intestine, the beginning of pneumonia, and finally paralysis of the brain. Based upon the conclusions of the Vienna court’s forensic experts, Professor Dr Holczabek and Professor Dr Wölkart, the Austrian socialist Minister of the Interior Josef Afritsch reported to the parliament on 14 June:

The medical, chemical, and bacteriological test results so far provide no basis for the assumption that death could have been caused by outside action. The police investigations also have not revealed any circumstance, which could lead to the conclusion that Lapusnyik was exposed to health-harming influences from any direction. Before the final determination of the cause of death the pending results of the biochemical tests will have to be awaited.

It is hardly surprising that the Austrian Federal Minister for the Interior decided to turn a blind eye on this evident poisoning. Starting with his post-war predecessor, Communist Franz Honner, who was a Russian agent, Austrian state security has always been well penetrated by the KGB and its satellite services. The files noted by Mitrokhin record the recruitment of a series of major agents in the police: EDUARD in 1945, VENTSEYEV in 1946, PETER in 1952, two further recruits in 1955, ZAK in 1974 and NADEZHDIN in 1978.⁴ In the 1990s it was established that the chief of the Vienna Stapo, Gustav Hohenbichler, was himself a Soviet agent who previously worked for the East German Stasi.

The usual reaction followed this evident murder of the defector. After his death was officially pronounced ‘non-violent’, the Austrian Communist paper Volksstimme came out with an article entitled ‘Has the US Secret Service Murdered Lapusnyik?’ Their logic was simple: ‘If it indeed a fact that he had become the victim of a murder, then the culprits are to be sought only in the American secret services, nowhere else.’⁵ Period.

However, this is what Laszlo Szabo, another Hungarian AVH defector, who served under cover as First Secretary of the Hungarian Embassy in London, testified under oath:

I recall after Lapusnyik’s death there was a formal statement or order on Lapusnyik circulated by the chief of the AVH. This order was read to AVH personnel at departmental or section meetings. In the order from the AVH Chief, Lapusnyik was represented as having been an immoral, corrupt person who hung out in bars and brought loose women to the apartment where he lived. He was also accused of misusing official money and not taking an interest in the Communist Party affairs. The facts of his case were outlined briefly: he had escaped from Hungary by misusing his AVH status and in so doing had shot down a border guard [this was a deliberate lie]. Throughout the document he was referred to as ‘the traitor, Bela Lapusnyik’. The report also noted that he died in jail. According to this statement, Lapusnyik had caused very serious damage to the AVH because he had revealed AVH secret locations, identities and surveillance methods …

Then I asked why I hadn’t been shown the whole file. I was told that this was understandable since the case was top secret. I had not been permitted to see the whole file because Lapusnyik had been poisoned by the Czech intelligence service in the Vienna jail.⁶

On 30 January 1967 Allen Welsh Dulles (AWD), the first civilian and the longest-serving director of the CIA, met the editors to discuss his book Great True Spy Stories (1968) that was soon to be published. Regarding the Lapusnyik case, AWD stressed:

Bela Lapusnyik. Again, defection, which ends in elimination of defector, should probably not be used. Press accounts [illegible], but Szabo’s testimony itself should be used. The introduction should say that the Sovs and Sats are the only services which have components working full time on planning, executing, and concealing murders.⁷

Several hours before the funeral, set for 11:15 a.m. on 26 June 1962, Austrian policemen in civilian suits arrived at the Zentral Friedhof (central cemetery) and ‘inconspicuously’ placed themselves at their posts. Four of them stood at Chapel III, a fifth at the open gravesite. The time of the funeral was not made public. Almost unnoticed the funeral procession moved to a recently dug grave. In the lead the cross-bearer, then the clergyman, four undertaker’s employees who pushed the burial cart, and then four men of the police. No wreaths, no flowers.

Several years after lieutenant Lapusnyik’s mysterious death, rumours about a top secret Czech (read Soviet) agent in the Austrian police only known as ‘Mister 7’ started to circulate among counter-intelligence professionals. When Ladislav Bittman, a press attaché at the Czech Embassy in Vienna woke up early in the morning on 21 August 1968, he could hardly get over the shock of the previous night. Soviet tanks were in Prague shooting at his countrymen, women and children, and he was sitting in Vienna unable to do anything. Moreover, as a senior officer of the Czech StB, the country’s state security service monitoring and cutting short any activity that could possibly be considered anti-communist, that is, anti-Soviet, he was expected to be on the side of executioners.

But Bittman was born a painter, not a soldier, and he decided it was time to start a new life. He walked out and in several days was calling the American Embassy in Bonn. After some time he was ‘cleared’ and left Bavaria, where he was in hiding, for Washington. Before he left Munich, he asked his contact at the US Consulate to take care of his dog, a charming poodle named Tommy, and find somebody who could adopt him. On 23 November Bittman was sitting in a comfortable safe house in Virginia briefing the CIA officers of the SB (Soviet Bloc) division about the activities of his service.

Among other things, Bittman revealed that the StB had a highly placed agent in the Austrian police whose name he did not know. He could only recall the codename – ‘Agent 7’ or ‘Mister Seven’. The information was not too valuable at the time, as the Americans knew anyway that the Austrian police was well penetrated.

Bittman’s knowledge about his own agents was much more precise. In 1958 he was transferred to the German-Austrian desk and became the case officer of several assets recruited among the German politicians. Among them were some very prominent individuals like Alfred Frenzel, a member of the German parliament who supplied the Czech intelligence with the most sensitive reports about the West German army and the US contingent stationed in Germany. Frenzel, according to Bittman, was a member of the parliamentary Defence Committee so he was able to provide his communist masters with thousands and thousands of documents to which he had access.⁸

At that time the Czech service had three or four members of the German parliament working for them as agents with more than ten other deputies recruited by Markus Wolf’s operatives.⁹ Both Warsaw Pact services reported directly to Moscow so the Kremlin’s influence on West German legislature was considerable. Apart from providing sensitive information, they could, if necessary, exert influence upon political decisions.

When Bittman’s debriefing session was over on that evening, the officer in charge told the defector that there was something waiting for him in the next room. And there was Tommy, the poodle, who survived not only a flight across the ocean, but another fourteen years making Bittman’s adjustment to a new life much easier.¹⁰ His dream finally came true when after an academic career he became a popular and a very successful painter.

The case of the 24-year-old Second Lieutenant Lapusnyik remains closed and is still considered ‘death from natural causes’. Hence a possible culprit has never been officially identified in Austria. No one in the Alpine republic will dare to reopen it. A small country that gets about 60 per cent of its gas from Russia, it is not only a convenient hub for the Kremlin’s financial affairs, but also for Russian espionage, its most important operational centre. The entire force of Russian intelligence officers based in Vienna and Salzburg outnumbers the US and UK stations combined.

My personal estimate is that a highly toxic and volatile DMS (dimethyl sulphate) was used to murder the defector. First discovered in the early 1800s, it could have easily been turned into a chemical weapon in the 1960s by the Soviet special laboratory. Exposure to DMS, a colourless, odourless, oily liquid that can also be vaporised, produces no immediate effect. There is a latent period of up to ten hours before the onset of symptoms. Exposure to the vapour immediately produces tears, runny nose, swelling of the mouth and throat tissues, sore throat, difficulty breathing, cyanosis and death that may occur within three days.

In spite of the overwhelming evidence, the body was never re-examined. In 1996 a representative of the Vienna Police Directorate, Oberrat Dr Schwabl, in an official letter to a journalist who was researching a book on the case, stated that ‘The Lapusnyik File’ does not exist.

Many years after those events I was walking our intelligent (my mother believes that he understands Russian, German and English equally well) family dog, a kind, friendly, eager-to-please and patient golden retriever named Philby, around ‘Liesl’, the Vienna police fortress quite near our house. It was a wonderful summer morning but my mind was thinking back fifty years to that dark Saturday when the Hungarian lieutenant woke up in his locked cell here preparing to die.

I was thinking that both my favourite writer Frederick Forsyth and the American spy chief Allen Dulles were right. There’s a thing called maskirovka and it is Russian: it is the art of building phoney airfields, hangars, bridges, entire tank divisions out of tinplate and plywood so as to fool the Americans with their satellites and their electronic intelligence. And only the Russians have components working full time on planning, executing, and covering up murders. So, sometimes, you have to go in on the ground, put a mole deep inside the FOREST, recruit a malcontent, employ an agent-in-place. If you do not have good field men, the KGB will have your balls for cocktail olives in two weeks flat.¹¹

Things were changing, all right, but in the first decade of the twenty-first century the world was going their way.