George Frederick Cushing és Magyarország a hidegháború korában

The cultural aspect of the Cold War served, supplemented and even overwrote the political maneuvers in many areas. It created such opportunities for the West which made a significant contribution to map the communist countries and make the most effective infiltration possible; of course, this was true in the contrary too, since it was an excellent intelligence field also for the East. In this essay, I am dealing only with a smaller but inevitably important segment of this area through the example of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) and Professor George Frederick Cushing (1923-1996). In this case, education did not conceal mutual, general knowledge, since such contacts are related to the history of intelligence in many ways. The deeper knowledge of the enemy country, the perfect acquisition of that language, was one of the most important and effective solutions to the „target” mapping. One of the best examples of co-operation between education and intelligence might be the School of Slavonic and East European Studies. In the Hungarian context, SSEES is outstanding for the reason also, because within its framework a Hungarian program was also operational. The stories of teachers teaching here and of students here from archive documents help us in the better cognition. Apart from outlining the history of the institute, via examining the example of a teacher from the school, George Frederick Cushing, a British university professor who was well-known in Hungary we can illustrate how the Hungarian authorities and the secret service suspected him with espionage. In Cushing's life there were several Hungarian points of linkage: on one hand, he stayed in the country more than once as a student at the Budapest Eötvös College and then as a researcher. On the other hand, he was the head of the Hungarian Department of SSEES, who, according to the information from the Hungarian secret service, acted as a professional intelligence officer and in that capacity also worked as a trainer for diplomats sent to Hungary.