Revolution!
The Hungarian uprising 50 years later; how it changed the Cold War
The frightened revolutionary hid behind his briefcase in the back seat as the car approached a roadblock of menacing tanks. The car slowed, but the Soviet soldiers waved them through. These guys didn't want to start World War III, Toth remembers thinking. As he had hoped, the Soviets hadn't known about the transmitter. "Run this tape on an endless loop," Toth said, thrusting the reel into a startled technician's hands. He remembers with a mischievous smile that it took the Soviets days to track down the source of the broadcasts and silence them.
But ultimately, of course, the Soviets and their tanks prevailed. The insurrection was fiercer and bloodier than the Soviets had ever imagined. Twelve days after the uprising started, 2,500 revolutionaries and more than 700 Soviet soldiers lay dead. Thousands more were wounded. And 26,000 Hungarians were arrested and 1,200 executed.
Yet it was not an uprising masterminded by the West, as Soviet propagandists would charge. On the contrary, says Victor Sebestyen in Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, "it was the least organized revolution in history. There were no leaders, no plans. Groups of armed men and women [most of them young] spontaneously formed in places that offered a vantage point to strike a swift blow, and then hide. Sometimes a group of a dozen or so would come together for one firefight; when that was over, they would split up and never see each other again."
Spy wars. Foreign observers trying to make sense of the revolt were caught totally unawares. A CIA postmortem on operations in Hungary, released to U.S. News under the Freedom of Information Act, shows that the agency had but one agent fluent in Hungarian at the time and virtually no plans for dealing with outbreaks of violence. "At no time in the period 23 October-4 November, if one looks at the situation realistically, did we have anything that could or should have been mistaken for an intelligence operation," concludes the CIA report. The spy agency concluded that it had done a poor job evaluating revolutionaries like Imre Nagy, who had been loyal to the Kremlin but who became a revolutionary. Once again, the Americans had wrongly perceived that communism was a monolithic evil, when in fact, it was an ideology marked by significant differences within various Communist states.
Just because the United States did not send weapons, however, doesn't mean it wasn't encouraging a softer kind of revolution. Western psychological warfare was pervasive throughout the eastern bloc. "Operation Focus," for instance, used radio programs and leaflet-bearing balloons to keep the "captive populations" simmering with desire for regime change, rather than boiling over into violence. One newly disclosed scheme revealed in classified reports obtained by Gati involved chain letters mailed from Switzerland to Hungary; according to agency documents, they were "designed to encourage young Hungarians to leave the country, undermine confidence in the currency, and encourage peasants to hoard crops by forecasting hunger conditions." Leaflet balloons were also instrumental in carrying the text of Khrushchev's secret speech to the cloistered populations in the east.
advertisement
