Will NATO Expand To Include 'Trojan Horses'?

(Washington, D.C.): Tomorrow, three of the Clinton Administration’s biggest guns will
appear
before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on behalf of one of its top foreign policy
priorities: the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to include three of NATO’s
former adversaries — the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary. Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright, Secretary of Defense William Cohen and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen.
Hugh Shelton will argue that the benefits of such a step are high and the costs relatively low.

Left to their own devices, though, these officials will almost certainly ignore one
cost that has
the potential to do incalculable harm to the Nation’s most important security alliance: the
integration of one or more “Trojan Horses” — countries governed by erstwhile
Communist
apparatchiks whose track records of enmity to NATO make them very dubious “partners for
peace.”

A Case in Point: Hungary

In Hungary’s first democratic elections in 1990, a center-right, anti-communist government
was
victorious, setting Hungary unmistakably on the path of democratic and military reform. Four
years later, though, Hungarian voters did an about-face and elected a coalition led by the renamed
Communist Party — now known as the “Socialist” Party. The wisdom of returning their former
jailers to power is a matter for Hungarians to decide.⁽¹⁾
But when it comes to Hungary’s
application for NATO membership, the composition and character of the government in
Budapest is a valid matter for consideration by Alliance members.

Given their backgrounds, there is an ominous irony to the enthusiasm the Hungarian
“Socialists”
have recently shown for their country’s admission into NATO: Hungary’s current leaders
have
spent their entire careers fighting for the “other side” and against the values
NATO was
created to advance and protect.

Taken together, Hungary’s current prime minister, defense minister and foreign minister can
count
more than a century of Communist Party membership. For his part, Prime Minister Gyula Horn
voluntarily took up arms against his own people to assist the Soviet invaders in crushing the
Hungarian freedom fighters in 1956. He subsequently made a very successful career in the
communist government, rising to the position of foreign minister by the end of the 1980s.

The Hungarian Military

Of particular relevance to Hungary’s future role in NATO is the “Socialist” Party’s policy with
respect to military reform. As part of a gradual but steady transformation of the Hungarian
military into a democratic civilian-controlled organization, Hungary’s first democratically elected
government, led by the center-right Hungarian Democratic Forum, named a civilian, historian
Lajos Für, as Defense Minister. In addition, under the Democratic Forum’s coalition, five
of the
six most senior positions in the Ministry of Defense were filled by civilians. What is
more, these
individuals were largely drawn from the ranks of the anti-communist dissident intellectuals. While
their lack of professional experience on military issues was at the time derided by the
then-opposition (now ruling) parties, the fact that these individuals had not been subjected to
communist military indoctrination was hardly a liability in a newly-democratic society. In any
event, extensive training in Western institutions soon created a democratic-minded and
westward-looking corps of civilian military experts.

With the victory of the “Socialists” and their left-liberal allies, the Free Democrats, in 1994,
however, this process of civilianization of the Defense Ministry was reversed.
The former
Communists named a career political commissar, Colonel György Keleti, as Minister
Für’s
successor. Keleti, who retired in 1993, served in the infamous Main Political Administration —
the organization responsible for communist indoctrination of young recruits and for monitoring
the ideological conformity of those in uniform. Keleti and his fellow commissars reported up a
separate chain of command, directly to officials of the Communist Party. They were among the
most faithful and dedicated of communists.

As late as 1988, Keleti gave voice to his antipathy toward NATO and the West with the
publication of a textbook he authored entitled, Defense Study for Secondary School
Pupils. In
this forceful exposition of communist military thought, Keleti wrote that, “The
developed
capitalist countries have created aggressive military organizations to achieve their goals.
Of these, NATO can be regarded as the biggest threat to world peace.” href=”#N_2_”>⁽²⁾

In addition, the former Communists unceremoniously purged the Western-trained civilian
experts
of the 1991-1994 period from the Defense Ministry. Five of the top seven most senior posts went
to military officers.

Unfortunately, the re-militarization of the Ministry was not limited to the senior posts. As
one of
the purgees, former Deputy State Secretary Zoltán Pecze, recently observed href=”#N_3_”>⁽³⁾:

Civilians were also replaced in key Defense Ministry advisory positions with, in the
words
of one former senior Hungarian defense analyst, “some of the worst [military] faces I can
remember in the Ministry.” The analyst explained that these “new” advisors were those officers
who had been the “Old Guard” in the military; many of them had taken Soviet wives and spoke
Russian at home. This analyst recalled a two-point internal directive issued by Minister Keleti
after his appointment. It required that the new advisors refrain from addressing each other by
their military titles and from wearing their uniforms. In other words, they were to be military
personnel masquerading as civilians for the benefit of NATO and the West. “Civilian
control of
the military now is a show for the West, because that is what the West wants to see,“
the
Hungarian expert continued. “The ministry of defense has learned the language of NATO, but
they did not learn the grammar.”

Intelligence in Untrustworthy Hands

The problem with communist retrenchment is not confined to the Hungarian Defense
Ministry.
Last month, the New York Times revealed that the heads of all five
of Hungary’s intelligence
services were holdovers from before 1989, opining that “NATO expansion will result in
such people getting access to NATO secrets and will probably pass these secrets on to an
unstable Yeltsin or to the highest bidder.”

This is not a mere hypothetical concern. Former Hungarian defense officials have informed
the
Center for Security Policy that several known intelligence operatives are now functioning in
high-level positions in the “Socialist” government’s ministries. For example, one of the
ancien
regime‘s negotiators in the Cold War Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty talks was
named by
these sources as a former military intelligence officer. This individual now holds a senior position
in the defense ministry and, yes, is now one of the most outspoken NATO proponents in
Hungary.

When, in 1992, the Democratic Forum-led government made the mistake of appointing Col.
László Botz to the Hungarian liaison mission to NATO, a security clearance
check netted enough
material to scuttle his nomination and send him packing back to Budapest. In 1994, though, the
“Socialists” appointed Mr. Botz to be director of Hungarian military intelligence.

Subverting Democracy

The process by which Hungary is pursuing NATO membership is itself cause for
concern.
For example, the Hungarian press discovered the Ministry of Defense secretly funneled
government money into several popular television and radio programs in exchange for the
introduction of “NATO-friendly characters” into the story lines. This was, according to the highly
respected British Helsinki Human Rights Group,⁽⁴⁾ just part
of a dubious campaign to secure
popular support for a national referendum on joining the Atlantic Alliance:

The fact that the Hungarian government and military would resort to these sorts of
subterfuges and other, undemocratic techniques to secure a popular mandate adds to concerns
about the wisdom of extending NATO membership to Hungary under its present government.
This is particularly true when one considers the nature of the vote on the national referendum.

The outcome of the NATO referendum was hailed by the Hungarian government as an
enormous
success, on the grounds that 85 percent of those who turned out voted in favor of NATO
membership. What was left largely unsaid — and unreported in the almost exclusively
pro-“Socialist” Hungarian media — was that only 49 percent of the population turned out
to vote.
In fact, if the “Socialist” government had not made some eleventh-hour (and controversial)
changes to the Hungarian constitution, the referendum itself would have been invalid. After all,
up to that point, national referenda required the participation of at least half the
voting public.

The Bottom Line

As U.S. Senators consider the wisdom of extending NATO membership to Hungary under its
present government, they would do well to reflect on this question: Why would a majority of
Hungarians, when finally given an opportunity to approve their country’s formal integration into
the West, simply not bother to vote? The answer may lie in the manner in which NATO
membership and Western integration in general has been hijacked by the former
nomenklatura,
who have become the new and nearly exclusive beneficiaries of the transition with the
apparent
blessing of the Clinton Administration.

Indeed, even before the 1994 elections, the center-right parties have been complaining that
the
U.S. Embassy in Budapest had been heavily biased in favor of the Socialists and Free Democrats.
Far from regarding the return of the Communists to power as a matter of concern, the American
government welcomed it. President Clinton himself called the “Socialist” victory in Hungary a
“victory for democracy.” In its wake, Embassy Budapest has gone out of its way to keep the
now-opposition parties at arms length and reduce their interactions with visiting American
officials.⁽⁵⁾

The Atlantic Alliance has long asserted that only governments that met certain criteria would
be
eligible for admission as members. At a minimum, candidate nations should not pose a threat to
the robustness and security of this important defensive alliance. By most reasonable
standards,
it appears that the present government of Hungary fails to meet this test. For this
reason,
Senators should thoroughly explore with the Clinton Administration’s representatives at
tomorrow’s hearing whether the decision to admit Hungary should be postponed until after the
upcoming Hungarian elections in May. At the very least, the criteria against which Hungary’s —
and any other candidate members’ — eligibility will be judged must be laid out before
the Senate
provides its advice and consent to further enlargement of NATO.

– 30 –

1. The actual enthusiasm of the Hungarian people for the former
Communists is not reflected in
the present parliament. Thanks to a Hungarian electoral law enacted before the first multi-party
elections — a product of the so-called “managed” transition to a pluralist democracy that has
plagued the country’s attempts to break with the legacy of Communism. Under this highly
complex system, the victor is awarded a disproportionate number of parliamentary seats. Thus,
with a mere 35 percent of the popular vote the Hungarian Socialist Party was awarded fully 55
percent of parliamentary seats.

2. Csermely, Peter, “The Biggest Threat to World Peace.” Quoted in
The Budapest Week, May
29-June 4, 1997.

3. See Pecze, Zoltán,” Civil-Military Relations in Hungary,
1990-1996.” The Center for
European Security Studies, Groningen, Netherlands, 1998.

4. “Hungary 1997: The NATO Referendum,” statement of the British
Helsinki Human Rights
Group, November 18, 1997.

5. Two of the more glaring examples involved: 1) the Embassy’s
denial last year of access to
visiting New York Governor George Pataki, a Republican of Hungarian background and 2) the
Embassy’s refusal in December 1997 to permit a visiting senior State Department analyst to meet
with certain center-right opposition figures — including some sessions that had already been
scheduled by the Embassy itself! (To his credit, rather than conform to direction that he cancel
these meetings by feigning illness, the official cut short his trip.)

Disturbing as this practice — so reminiscent of supine U.S. behavior during the communist era
—
is, the possibility that it might be motivated by a desire to limit opportunities for revealing the
biases inherent in Embassy Budapest’s own contacts and reporting. It is a potentially tragic irony
that, due to mis-managed relations with the pro-Western anti-communists in Hungary, these
bonafide friends of NATO and the United States are increasingly finding themselves transformed
into critics of the Atlantic Alliance and the West more generally.