The Hungarian Revolution: Spy Games
The Hungarian revolution of 1956 was a source of intense curiosity for western intelligence services, which felt that they had failed to anticipate the outbreak of violence in Budapest. Bill Hardy was recruited into the CIA while a student at Princeton University. By the time the revolt broke out, he was working in the office of Director Allen Dulles. Fluent in Russian, Hardy was one of many agents sent undercover inside the Soviet Union a year later to gather information.
Now a semiretired lawyer who has never before spoken publicly about his spy years, Hardy says that his superiors were especially interested in Soviet public opinion about Hungary. What did they know about the revolt and the causes? How did they get their information?
Working as part of Operation Redskin, Hardy reported that his contacts were surprisingly well informed, having heard much about the uprising from returning Soviet veterans.
"There were rumors of student riots in Russia that may or may not have been connected with Hungary–no one knew," he says. When he asked average Russians about what they thought of the events in Budapest, Hardy says people would often start looking at their feet and mumbling something about "pretty bad things." Others would either regurgitate the Communist Party line or say that the Soviet Army was doing Hungarians a favor by crushing the revolt.
The Redskin operation was part of a larger spy program called Redwood that took advantage of relaxed restrictions on tourist and student visas, Hardy says. There is little declassified documentation from the agency about the specifics of Redwood, but other operations provide some clues. According to historian Charles Gati, another series of operations called RedSox/RedCap was similar to Redwood, though it focused on considerably more dangerous illegal boarder crossings. "Of the eighty-five such [RedSox/RedCap] missions attempted, sixty-two were lost, killed, arrested, or reported missing," Gati writes in his book Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt.
Because the agency was interested in any information it could get, part of Hardy's assignment was rather curious.
"I was given a solid gold Omega wristwatch and told to get some idea of the value of this piece of jewelry in rubles or black market dollars," he says.
Why did Langley want to know the street market value? The CIA, after all, couldn't pay off Soviet informers with certified checks.
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