ALEXANDER RADÓ.
Alexander Rado, alias ALBERT, or DORA (WT), or WEBER and Ignaci Koulicher (For travel, Paris to Moscow in 1945).
An R.U. agent whose espionage career may have begun in 1934, when he is known to have visited Moscow and when he had for many years been an ardent Communist. It is likely that his office as co-director of the anti-Fascist news agency "Inpress" in Paris was designed as cover for the clandestine collection of intelligence and that he worked to the Soviet Embassy, Paris, sending his information in the form of microphotographs through the Embassy bag. It is certain that in 1936, when he moved to Geneva, Rado established the "Service Geopress" for the prime purpose of providing cover for espionage. He continued to report in microphotographs via the Paris Embassy and was assisted by his wife. Rado was provided with a transmitter by Pierre Nicole, with whom an unidentified agent had left it for safe-keeping, but he failed to establish a WT-link with Moscow, preferring his existing method of reporting, which he regarded as safer. He may have been subordinated to Poliakova, but was probably entirely independent of Robinson or Jenny's networks. He was also independent of Ursula Beurton until the German occupation of France rendered his link with the Soviet Military Agency insecure.
Radó was visited by agent "MANOLO" in September 1939, probably identical with Gurevich, who may have been concerned with persuading Radó to adopt WT for his communication.
Gurevich is known to have visited Switzerland in March 1940 and may have paid Radó a visit of inspection. Radó expected but did not receive money from him.
On Moscow's orders in June 1940, Ursula Beurton contacted Radó and increased the transmissions of her WT service to include Radó's material; in fact the plan to remove Ursula's group to Romania may have been cancelled because f Radó's need for a new communication link with Moscow. Radó's and Ursula's financial resources were pooled.
Radó received in October 1940 a considerable sum from Portugal, 3500 Dollars of which were for Ursula and her group.
In the spring of 1941 Radó was given an address in Jugoslavia through which micro-photographic material could be forwarded to Moscow, but it is unlikely that use was made of this channel.
By June 1941 Radó had begun to forward Rachel Dübendorfer's material, after establishing relations with her on Moscow's orders. He remained ignorant of the identity of her source, Rössler, throughout the war, although at one time Radó actually provided map illustrations for a book on military strategy written en published by Rössler himself.
In the spring of 1942 Radó recruit Bolli began to operate a transmitter from Basle, to supplement those of Foote and Hamel; in the summer the set was transferred to Geneva.
In the course of 1942, Radó is said to have sent a girl employed by the Swiss Red Cross with valves to Berlin; these may possibly have been intended for one of Schulze-Boysen's transmitters.
By 1943 funds were running very short; the Gestapo began to alarm Radó by some measure of penetration and in July Moscow told Radó of the arrest of MANOLO, who knew him and SISSY (Dübendorfer), and warned him of possible compromise.
In September 1943 the Swiss authorities commenced action against Radó's network. The police by a surprise raid captured both Margarethe Bolli and the Hamels, having located the transmitter by technical means. Radó became extremely alarmed; he was refused permission by Moscow to seek shelter in the British Legation in Berne. and to pass his material to the British; he took refuge in the house of Mario Bianci and thus ceased to be effective head of the network and left Pünter his deputy, with Foote and Dübendorfer to carry on as best they could.
After Foote's arrest in November, Radó remained in hiding in Switzerland until September 1944, when he and his wife escaped into France.
Radó made a poor impression on Foote. It is certain that he was financially unscrupulous, and usurped for his own profit a considerable part of the R.U. funds intended for his agents. He gave substantially false account of his ecperiences to the Soviet Mission in Paris. He was also alleged to have sold information to the British through PAKBO and SALTER.
There is no doubt that these facts became known to the R.U. and that in Moscow Radó found himself in deep disgrace. even if he has escaped execution, it seems improbable that he will again be entrusted with an intelligence mission.
Addresses.
In 1929: Office, Hufeiseinhaus 33, Berlin-Britz.
In 1933, Wambacherstrasse 9, Vienna XIII.
From 1936 - November 1943 Rue de Lausanne 113, Geneva.
In 1943: Geopress office, Rue Gustave Moymier 2, Geneva.
Personal particulars.
Nationality: Hungarian.
Date of Birth: 05-11-1899 in Upjest, Hungary.
Occupation: Expert professional carthgrapher.
Relatives: Wife, Helena nee Jansen. Two sons: Imre, born 06-06-1925 in Berlin. Alexandre (Sandor), born 05-08-1930 in
Berlin. Brother: Francis, in Dohanyntea St. Budapest, during the war may also have been an R.U. agent of
long standing; in 1946 in Paris to direct a film company.
History.
Was educated in Hungary between 1923 and 1925. Studied geography in Leipzig University.
Lived in Berlin in 1929. established a geographical publishing firm "Presse Geographic".
Visited England in 1930, leaving in October for Switzerland.
Entered Vienna on 28-031933, after escaping from the Nazi purge of Communists in Berlin.
Left for Paris on 09-06-1933. Established "Agence Inpresse" in conjunction with Dr. Kurt Rosenfeld.
Was in Moscow in February 1934.
Moved in 1936 from Paris to geneva, where he established the firm "Service Geopress" with co-diector Charles Burki.
Visited London from 7 to 11 November 1937.
By the end of 1943 he left his Geneva house and with his wife sought shelter in the house of Dr. Mario Bianchi.
On 19-09-1944 they escaped from Switzerland into France. Approached the Soviet Embassy in Paris, where he was told to report to Moscow.
On 06-01-1945 he embarked by plane for Moscow, in company with Trepper and Foote. In Cairo, Radó escaped, but was subsequently apprehanded and sent to Moscow by the Soviet authorities.
May have been liquidated; in April 1948 his wife was still without news from him.
Source: KV3/351.
Alexander Radó (5 November 1899, Újpest, near Budapest - 20 August 1981, Budapest), also: Alex, Alexander Radolfi, Sándor Kálmán Reich or Alexander Rado, was a Hungarian cartographer and a Soviet military intelligence agent in World War II.
Radó (codename "DORA") was also a member of the resistance (German: Widerstandskämpfer) to Nazi Germany, devoted to the service of the so-called Red Orchestra, the Soviet espionage and spy network to Western Europe between 1933 and 1945. There he was the head of the Switzerland resistance group Red Three, one of the most efficient residents of the Red Orchestra.
Radó was born into a Jewish family in Újpest, at the time an industrial suburb of Budapest. His father (Gábor Reich) was first a clerk at a trading firm and later a businessman. In 1917, after graduation from gymnasium (high school), Radó was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army and was sent to fortress artillery officer training school. Graduated at the officer candidate school in 1918, he was assigned to an artillery regiment. During this time, he also studied law as a correspondence student of the University of 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, he was appointed as cartographer on the staff of a Hungarian Red Army division. Ferenc Münnich, the political commissar of the division, then made him commissar of the division's artillery. Radó took part in fighting against Czechoslovak forces and in fighting against anti-communist insurgents in Budapest.
On 1 September 1919, after the fall of the communist regime in Hungary, Radó fled to Austria. He studied geography and cartography at Vienna University and wrote on military matters in a German-language Magazine Kommunismus, published by Hungarian political emigrants in Austria. In July 1920 he established the information agency Rosta-Wien, which he used to spread propaganda received in broadcasts from Soviet Russia. To receive these, he had bribed the head of a Vienna radio station. Information bulletins from these materials were distributed to left-wing newspapers and organizations in various countries.
In 1922 Radó moved to Germany and returned to his studies, first at Jena and then at Leipzig. In October 1923 he took part in the preparation for Comintern-planned large armed uprising in Germany and was made military chief of the communist forces in Leipzig. But the badly planned revolution had to be aborted at the last moment. Fearing arrest, Radó left Germany for the Soviet Union in September 1924. In Moscow he worked for the All-Union Society for Cultural Contacts with Abroad (VOKS) and then for the World Economy Institute of the Communist Academy. Radó returned to Germany in 1926 and established the Berlin cartographic agency “Pressgeography”. He gave lectures at the Masch, the Marxist Workers' School, teaching economic geography, the history of the working class movement (Arbeitergeschichte) and imperialism.
After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, Radó and his wife Lena fled through Austria to France. In Paris, Radó established the “Inpress” (an independent anti-Nazi press agency). In 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 be their intelligence agent with the main task of obtaining intelligence on Nazi Germany. Radó failed to obtain a residence permit in Belgium, but in 1939 was permitted residence in Switzerland. He moved to Geneva and founded yet another cartographic agency, Geopress.
In 1937 Radó visited Italy to collect intelligence about the Italian military support of the Francist forces in the Spanish civil war. This intelligence was sent to Moscow through Paris Soviet military intelligence station. In 1938 Radó contacted Swiss journalist and agent Otto Pünter in Bern, who gave him military intelligence on Italy. On Italy's military support of Franco's forces he received material from "Gabel", a Yugoslav serving as Spanish Republican consul in Sushak, Yugoslavia and military intelligence on Germany from "Puasson", a German Social Democratic political emigrant living in Switzerland with sources in Germany.
Report to the GRU by Dora about a meeting of leading German OKW and industry representatives, including Göring (chair), Röchling, and Vögler in Jagdhaus Hubertusstock [de], March 1943.
In 1940, Radó contacted Alexander Foote, an English Soviet agent in Switzerland who joined Ursula Kuczynski's network in 1938. Foote became a radio operator for Radó's intelligence network, and in March 1941 managed to establish radio communication with Moscow Centre from Lausanne. In his radio communications, Radó used the codename "Dora". In the first half of 1941, "Luiza", a Swiss intelligence officer gave Otto Puetner (and Radó) the important information, that many divisions of the German Wehrmacht were being concentrated in the East. This warning of an imminent German attack, like that from Richard Sorge and from other Soviet agents, was dismissed by Joseph Stalin.
After the outbreak of the German-Soviet War on 22 June 1941, Radó's network continued to provide Soviet General Staff with very valuable intelligence on German forces. Some of it was supplied through Puetner by "Zalter", a press officer of the French embassy in Switzerland and by "Long", a French intelligence officer who fled to Switzerland after the capitulation of France. Both had sources in Germany, among them Ernst Lemmer ("Agnessa"), editor of a German foreign policy bulletin.
In March 1942, a most valuable piece of intelligence was sent to Moscow: summer German offensive aimed at the occupation of Caucasian oilfields (Operation Blue) would begin between 31 May and 7 June 1942. Radó's network got this from Georges Blun ("Long"), provided by General Adolf Hamann, at the German OKW. Soviet command did not make proper use of this intelligence.
Through Christian Schneider, a German lawyer who had worked in the International Labour Bureau in Switzerland until 1939, Radó made contact with Rudolf Roessler, a German political emigrant living in Lucerne. Roessler, codenamed “Lucy” apparently had extraordinary sources in Germany who provided valuable military intelligence, the Lucy spy ring. Roessler allegedly was the conduit the British used to transmit the results of their codebreaking of German cipher traffic (operation Ultra) to the Soviets without revealing their ability to read this German code.
At the end of 1942, Abwehr and Gestapo caught up with the “Rote Kapelle”, Leopold Trepper's network. There had been some contacts between both spy rings in 1940, through Anatoly Gurevich (alias "Kent"), a Soviet undercover intelligence officer and so Radó's network became known to the Germans. They even obtained the radio cipher used by Radó's network which enabled them to decrypt some of Radó's radio communications from Switzerland.
Meanwhile, Radó's network continued to supply Moscow Centre with valuable intelligence. In April 1943, Stalin received news about the planned German offensive near Kursk (provided by "Werter", a Roessler source in Germany).
In the second half of 1943, the Germans persuaded Swiss authorities to act against Radó's network. Using mobile radio direction finders Swiss police tracked down one of Radó's radio transmitters operated by Swiss agents Edmond Hamel and Olga Hamel. They were arrested on 14 October 1943. On the same day Margarita Bolli was caught, an Italian emigrant living in Switzerland and a radio operator. Radó went into hiding. On 20 November 1943 they caught Alexander Foote. Christian Schneider and two more contacts in Switzerland were arrested on 19 April 1944. Rudolf Roessler on 19 May 1944.
On 16 September 1944 Radó and his wife Helen, the sister of Hermann Scherchen, a German conductor in whose home they had hidden, illegally crossed the Swiss-French border on a French train with the help of the French Maquis from Upper Savoy. On 24 September they reached Paris. Radó contacted a Soviet military intelligence agent and in January 1945, Radó and Leopold Trepper were evacuated via plane to the Soviet Union. Due to military operations in Germany, a direct flight to the Soviet Union from Paris was impossible, so the plane flew over Northern Africa. Using a stopover in Cairo, Radó, who suspected his arrest on arrival in the Soviet Union, escaped and managed to enter the British embassy under an alias. He applied for political asylum, but this was denied and Radó tried to commit suicide, but was only injured and hospitalized. Radó was extradited by Egypt to the Soviet Union based on a false accusation, in August 1945 he was brought to Moscow under guard. In December 1946, he was sentenced by a Special Council of MGB without trial to 10 years on espionage charges.
Following the death of Stalin, Radó was released in November 1954, and allowed to return to Hungary. In 1956, he was officially rehabilitated by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. In 1955, Radó was appointed chief of the Hungarian cartographic service. In 1958, he was appointed to the chair of cartography in Budapest Karl Marx University of Economic Sciences. In 1971, he published his memoirs in Hungarian. They were translated into several languages. But a first uncensored edition, based on the original manuscript, was only published in 2006, in Budapest. He died in Budapest in 1981.
Source: Wikipedia
An R.U. agent whose espionage career may have begun in 1934, when he is known to have visited Moscow and when he had for many years been an ardent Communist. It is likely that his office as co-director of the anti-Fascist news agency "Inpress" in Paris was designed as cover for the clandestine collection of intelligence and that he worked to the Soviet Embassy, Paris, sending his information in the form of microphotographs through the Embassy bag. It is certain that in 1936, when he moved to Geneva, Rado established the "Service Geopress" for the prime purpose of providing cover for espionage. He continued to report in microphotographs via the Paris Embassy and was assisted by his wife. Rado was provided with a transmitter by Pierre Nicole, with whom an unidentified agent had left it for safe-keeping, but he failed to establish a WT-link with Moscow, preferring his existing method of reporting, which he regarded as safer. He may have been subordinated to Poliakova, but was probably entirely independent of Robinson or Jenny's networks. He was also independent of Ursula Beurton until the German occupation of France rendered his link with the Soviet Military Agency insecure.
Radó was visited by agent "MANOLO" in September 1939, probably identical with Gurevich, who may have been concerned with persuading Radó to adopt WT for his communication.
Gurevich is known to have visited Switzerland in March 1940 and may have paid Radó a visit of inspection. Radó expected but did not receive money from him.
On Moscow's orders in June 1940, Ursula Beurton contacted Radó and increased the transmissions of her WT service to include Radó's material; in fact the plan to remove Ursula's group to Romania may have been cancelled because f Radó's need for a new communication link with Moscow. Radó's and Ursula's financial resources were pooled.
Radó received in October 1940 a considerable sum from Portugal, 3500 Dollars of which were for Ursula and her group.
In the spring of 1941 Radó was given an address in Jugoslavia through which micro-photographic material could be forwarded to Moscow, but it is unlikely that use was made of this channel.
By June 1941 Radó had begun to forward Rachel Dübendorfer's material, after establishing relations with her on Moscow's orders. He remained ignorant of the identity of her source, Rössler, throughout the war, although at one time Radó actually provided map illustrations for a book on military strategy written en published by Rössler himself.
In the spring of 1942 Radó recruit Bolli began to operate a transmitter from Basle, to supplement those of Foote and Hamel; in the summer the set was transferred to Geneva.
In the course of 1942, Radó is said to have sent a girl employed by the Swiss Red Cross with valves to Berlin; these may possibly have been intended for one of Schulze-Boysen's transmitters.
By 1943 funds were running very short; the Gestapo began to alarm Radó by some measure of penetration and in July Moscow told Radó of the arrest of MANOLO, who knew him and SISSY (Dübendorfer), and warned him of possible compromise.
In September 1943 the Swiss authorities commenced action against Radó's network. The police by a surprise raid captured both Margarethe Bolli and the Hamels, having located the transmitter by technical means. Radó became extremely alarmed; he was refused permission by Moscow to seek shelter in the British Legation in Berne. and to pass his material to the British; he took refuge in the house of Mario Bianci and thus ceased to be effective head of the network and left Pünter his deputy, with Foote and Dübendorfer to carry on as best they could.
After Foote's arrest in November, Radó remained in hiding in Switzerland until September 1944, when he and his wife escaped into France.
Radó made a poor impression on Foote. It is certain that he was financially unscrupulous, and usurped for his own profit a considerable part of the R.U. funds intended for his agents. He gave substantially false account of his ecperiences to the Soviet Mission in Paris. He was also alleged to have sold information to the British through PAKBO and SALTER.
There is no doubt that these facts became known to the R.U. and that in Moscow Radó found himself in deep disgrace. even if he has escaped execution, it seems improbable that he will again be entrusted with an intelligence mission.
Addresses.
In 1929: Office, Hufeiseinhaus 33, Berlin-Britz.
In 1933, Wambacherstrasse 9, Vienna XIII.
From 1936 - November 1943 Rue de Lausanne 113, Geneva.
In 1943: Geopress office, Rue Gustave Moymier 2, Geneva.
Personal particulars.
Nationality: Hungarian.
Date of Birth: 05-11-1899 in Upjest, Hungary.
Occupation: Expert professional carthgrapher.
Relatives: Wife, Helena nee Jansen. Two sons: Imre, born 06-06-1925 in Berlin. Alexandre (Sandor), born 05-08-1930 in
Berlin. Brother: Francis, in Dohanyntea St. Budapest, during the war may also have been an R.U. agent of
long standing; in 1946 in Paris to direct a film company.
History.
Was educated in Hungary between 1923 and 1925. Studied geography in Leipzig University.
Lived in Berlin in 1929. established a geographical publishing firm "Presse Geographic".
Visited England in 1930, leaving in October for Switzerland.
Entered Vienna on 28-031933, after escaping from the Nazi purge of Communists in Berlin.
Left for Paris on 09-06-1933. Established "Agence Inpresse" in conjunction with Dr. Kurt Rosenfeld.
Was in Moscow in February 1934.
Moved in 1936 from Paris to geneva, where he established the firm "Service Geopress" with co-diector Charles Burki.
Visited London from 7 to 11 November 1937.
By the end of 1943 he left his Geneva house and with his wife sought shelter in the house of Dr. Mario Bianchi.
On 19-09-1944 they escaped from Switzerland into France. Approached the Soviet Embassy in Paris, where he was told to report to Moscow.
On 06-01-1945 he embarked by plane for Moscow, in company with Trepper and Foote. In Cairo, Radó escaped, but was subsequently apprehanded and sent to Moscow by the Soviet authorities.
May have been liquidated; in April 1948 his wife was still without news from him.
Source: KV3/351.
Alexander Radó (5 November 1899, Újpest, near Budapest - 20 August 1981, Budapest), also: Alex, Alexander Radolfi, Sándor Kálmán Reich or Alexander Rado, was a Hungarian cartographer and a Soviet military intelligence agent in World War II.
Radó (codename "DORA") was also a member of the resistance (German: Widerstandskämpfer) to Nazi Germany, devoted to the service of the so-called Red Orchestra, the Soviet espionage and spy network to Western Europe between 1933 and 1945. There he was the head of the Switzerland resistance group Red Three, one of the most efficient residents of the Red Orchestra.
Radó was born into a Jewish family in Újpest, at the time an industrial suburb of Budapest. His father (Gábor Reich) was first a clerk at a trading firm and later a businessman. In 1917, after graduation from gymnasium (high school), Radó was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army and was sent to fortress artillery officer training school. Graduated at the officer candidate school in 1918, he was assigned to an artillery regiment. During this time, he also studied law as a correspondence student of the University of 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, he was appointed as cartographer on the staff of a Hungarian Red Army division. Ferenc Münnich, the political commissar of the division, then made him commissar of the division's artillery. Radó took part in fighting against Czechoslovak forces and in fighting against anti-communist insurgents in Budapest.
On 1 September 1919, after the fall of the communist regime in Hungary, Radó fled to Austria. He studied geography and cartography at Vienna University and wrote on military matters in a German-language Magazine Kommunismus, published by Hungarian political emigrants in Austria. In July 1920 he established the information agency Rosta-Wien, which he used to spread propaganda received in broadcasts from Soviet Russia. To receive these, he had bribed the head of a Vienna radio station. Information bulletins from these materials were distributed to left-wing newspapers and organizations in various countries.
In 1922 Radó moved to Germany and returned to his studies, first at Jena and then at Leipzig. In October 1923 he took part in the preparation for Comintern-planned large armed uprising in Germany and was made military chief of the communist forces in Leipzig. But the badly planned revolution had to be aborted at the last moment. Fearing arrest, Radó left Germany for the Soviet Union in September 1924. In Moscow he worked for the All-Union Society for Cultural Contacts with Abroad (VOKS) and then for the World Economy Institute of the Communist Academy. Radó returned to Germany in 1926 and established the Berlin cartographic agency “Pressgeography”. He gave lectures at the Masch, the Marxist Workers' School, teaching economic geography, the history of the working class movement (Arbeitergeschichte) and imperialism.
After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, Radó and his wife Lena fled through Austria to France. In Paris, Radó established the “Inpress” (an independent anti-Nazi press agency). In 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 be their intelligence agent with the main task of obtaining intelligence on Nazi Germany. Radó failed to obtain a residence permit in Belgium, but in 1939 was permitted residence in Switzerland. He moved to Geneva and founded yet another cartographic agency, Geopress.
In 1937 Radó visited Italy to collect intelligence about the Italian military support of the Francist forces in the Spanish civil war. This intelligence was sent to Moscow through Paris Soviet military intelligence station. In 1938 Radó contacted Swiss journalist and agent Otto Pünter in Bern, who gave him military intelligence on Italy. On Italy's military support of Franco's forces he received material from "Gabel", a Yugoslav serving as Spanish Republican consul in Sushak, Yugoslavia and military intelligence on Germany from "Puasson", a German Social Democratic political emigrant living in Switzerland with sources in Germany.
Report to the GRU by Dora about a meeting of leading German OKW and industry representatives, including Göring (chair), Röchling, and Vögler in Jagdhaus Hubertusstock [de], March 1943.
In 1940, Radó contacted Alexander Foote, an English Soviet agent in Switzerland who joined Ursula Kuczynski's network in 1938. Foote became a radio operator for Radó's intelligence network, and in March 1941 managed to establish radio communication with Moscow Centre from Lausanne. In his radio communications, Radó used the codename "Dora". In the first half of 1941, "Luiza", a Swiss intelligence officer gave Otto Puetner (and Radó) the important information, that many divisions of the German Wehrmacht were being concentrated in the East. This warning of an imminent German attack, like that from Richard Sorge and from other Soviet agents, was dismissed by Joseph Stalin.
After the outbreak of the German-Soviet War on 22 June 1941, Radó's network continued to provide Soviet General Staff with very valuable intelligence on German forces. Some of it was supplied through Puetner by "Zalter", a press officer of the French embassy in Switzerland and by "Long", a French intelligence officer who fled to Switzerland after the capitulation of France. Both had sources in Germany, among them Ernst Lemmer ("Agnessa"), editor of a German foreign policy bulletin.
In March 1942, a most valuable piece of intelligence was sent to Moscow: summer German offensive aimed at the occupation of Caucasian oilfields (Operation Blue) would begin between 31 May and 7 June 1942. Radó's network got this from Georges Blun ("Long"), provided by General Adolf Hamann, at the German OKW. Soviet command did not make proper use of this intelligence.
Through Christian Schneider, a German lawyer who had worked in the International Labour Bureau in Switzerland until 1939, Radó made contact with Rudolf Roessler, a German political emigrant living in Lucerne. Roessler, codenamed “Lucy” apparently had extraordinary sources in Germany who provided valuable military intelligence, the Lucy spy ring. Roessler allegedly was the conduit the British used to transmit the results of their codebreaking of German cipher traffic (operation Ultra) to the Soviets without revealing their ability to read this German code.
At the end of 1942, Abwehr and Gestapo caught up with the “Rote Kapelle”, Leopold Trepper's network. There had been some contacts between both spy rings in 1940, through Anatoly Gurevich (alias "Kent"), a Soviet undercover intelligence officer and so Radó's network became known to the Germans. They even obtained the radio cipher used by Radó's network which enabled them to decrypt some of Radó's radio communications from Switzerland.
Meanwhile, Radó's network continued to supply Moscow Centre with valuable intelligence. In April 1943, Stalin received news about the planned German offensive near Kursk (provided by "Werter", a Roessler source in Germany).
In the second half of 1943, the Germans persuaded Swiss authorities to act against Radó's network. Using mobile radio direction finders Swiss police tracked down one of Radó's radio transmitters operated by Swiss agents Edmond Hamel and Olga Hamel. They were arrested on 14 October 1943. On the same day Margarita Bolli was caught, an Italian emigrant living in Switzerland and a radio operator. Radó went into hiding. On 20 November 1943 they caught Alexander Foote. Christian Schneider and two more contacts in Switzerland were arrested on 19 April 1944. Rudolf Roessler on 19 May 1944.
On 16 September 1944 Radó and his wife Helen, the sister of Hermann Scherchen, a German conductor in whose home they had hidden, illegally crossed the Swiss-French border on a French train with the help of the French Maquis from Upper Savoy. On 24 September they reached Paris. Radó contacted a Soviet military intelligence agent and in January 1945, Radó and Leopold Trepper were evacuated via plane to the Soviet Union. Due to military operations in Germany, a direct flight to the Soviet Union from Paris was impossible, so the plane flew over Northern Africa. Using a stopover in Cairo, Radó, who suspected his arrest on arrival in the Soviet Union, escaped and managed to enter the British embassy under an alias. He applied for political asylum, but this was denied and Radó tried to commit suicide, but was only injured and hospitalized. Radó was extradited by Egypt to the Soviet Union based on a false accusation, in August 1945 he was brought to Moscow under guard. In December 1946, he was sentenced by a Special Council of MGB without trial to 10 years on espionage charges.
Following the death of Stalin, Radó was released in November 1954, and allowed to return to Hungary. In 1956, he was officially rehabilitated by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. In 1955, Radó was appointed chief of the Hungarian cartographic service. In 1958, he was appointed to the chair of cartography in Budapest Karl Marx University of Economic Sciences. In 1971, he published his memoirs in Hungarian. They were translated into several languages. But a first uncensored edition, based on the original manuscript, was only published in 2006, in Budapest. He died in Budapest in 1981.
Source: Wikipedia
