After Cold-War Spying for the West, Hungarian 007 Seeks Rehabilitation

BUDAPEST, Hungary —  He says he was looking for adventure and excitement, guided by the conviction that spying for the West behind the Iron Curtain was a just cause.

Now, after serving nine years in prison for espionage, Gabor Rimner just wants a clean slate in his native country.

Fed up with being a second-class citizen long after the collapse of communism, the 44-year-old Hungarian is seeking legal rehabilitation for himself and a dozen others accused as Western spies.

“I always felt that what I did deserved a pat on the back rather than punishment,” says Rimner, who claims to have spied on Hungary’s Communist regime for the United States from 1973 to 1981.

American officials in Budapest and Washington declined to comment on Rimner’s story.

A tall, thin man with glasses, Rimner looks more like a schoolteacher than a 007. But in a recent interview, while smoking cigarette after cigarette, he told tales of intrigue and risk from a spy’s career he still hopes will have a happy ending.

It looked that way in 1990, when he and everyone else held in prison by the Communists for spying were released on parole. But under terms of his conviction, he remains deprived of full citizenship rights until 2003, along with the others in similar situations.

Rimner, who claims to have accepted only token pay for his years providing information to the West, is leading a lonely campaign to get authorities--and the Hungarian public--to recognize that espionage isn’t always treason.

“They say we sold our homeland. Those who say this don’t know the difference between homeland and regime,” he says, expressing pride for his small role in the fight against Soviet ideology.

The debate isn’t limited to Hungary. A former Polish army officer who spied for the West before defecting in 1981 visited his homeland in early May and set off contentious discussions about his acts. Some Poles praised him for helping communism’s opponents, but many disdained him as a traitor.

Rimner was reared in Sudan after his father, an architect, got a UNESCO job in the African nation in 1965.

A speaker of Arabic, English and French, he says he was approached after high school graduation by an American diplomat who asked him to work for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. The glamour of spying appealed to him; so did the idea of working against the Communists his family despised.

“When I was a kid I was taught by my parents that whatever goes on in Hungary under the Soviets is colonization,” he says.

After he received secret training at military bases in Greece and elsewhere in Europe while ostensibly living in Sudan, he returned to Hungary in 1973. His task: Infiltrate the defense and interior ministries and provide information about the 70,000 Soviet military personnel in Hungary.

Translating jobs at the ministries were easy to find, useful information not so easy. But one day, by chance, he made what he calls “a huge catch.”

While escorting a foreign military delegation to a high-security Soviet army base, he saw military vehicles that were designed to carry intercontinental ballistic missiles.

“They had always denied the existence of ICBMs in Hungary, but this was clear proof, as those vehicles could not have been used to carry anything else,” Rimner says.

He says he burst with pride when those “nonexistent” missiles were withdrawn after communism ended in Hungary.

He says he communicated with his spymasters by marking lines or circles on a wall or tree. Similar markings left in response meant that he was to go to a prearranged spot to pick up or leave parcels.

His spying career came to an end in 1981 after a police officer acted on suspicions voiced aloud in a bar by Rimner’s bitter ex-girlfriend.

A few days later, he was walking in downtown Budapest in broad daylight when two men grabbed him, pushed him into a car and drove to his home--”exactly like in the spy movies,” he says. There, they tied him to a chair and searched his apartment all night until they found incriminating evidence: a microfilm reader, a camera and maps.

He was convicted and sentenced to 12 years in prison, plus an additional 10 years during which he cannot vote or hold certain jobs.

In jail, he put together a Hungarian-Arabic dictionary containing 17,000 words.

When he was released, he says, he refused an offer of asylum in the United States so he could live under a political system he had long awaited at home. But eight years later, he’s still dissatisfied.

Most of the other ex-Western spies keep a low profile, wary of repercussions for their families.

Not Rimner.

“Despite all the negative aspects, if I could start my life again, I would make the same decisions,” he says. “I’m convinced that what I did was right.”