Frank Snepp's Decent Interval.

Snepp, Frank W. III. Decent Interval, An Insider's Account of Saigon's Indecent End Told by the CIA's Chief Strategy Analyst in Vietnam. New York: Random House, 1977.

Agent Polgar: Soviet CIA mole, or merely the mother of all dupes?

Question: "Is it possible that Frank Snepp's own boss, Tom Polgar, who was Viet Nam's number one CIA agent as Saigon's CIA Station Chief, was actually a double agent or mole working for Soviet Intelligence?"

Adapted from pages 86-89

"Tom Polgar was born of peasant stock in southern Hungary in the early 1920s, and like many others of his vintage, became passionately attached to the land.

"Because of his accent and his past Polgar always considered himself an outsider in the CIA's ivy-covered bureacracy, and as an outsider he felt obliged continually to demonstrate his knowledge and astuteness.

[It soon came to pass that the US Ambassador to Saigon, Martin, ordered Polgar to deal with the Hungarian delegation to Saigon so that he wouldn't have to.]

"The Hungarians [newly arrived in Saigon a year after the cease-fire of 1973] were delighted. They knew Polgar was the CIA Station Chief and were determined to make the most of their unique liason with U.S. intelligence. A year after the cease-fire they brought several special operatives to Saigon [ heh, heh!], led by Anton Tolgyes, to orchestarte the affair. Ostensibly political counselor to the delegation, the fifty-year-old Tolgyes in fact was a brilliant and accomplished intelligence officer, a Hungarian Jew who had been converted to Communism during a stint in a Soviet prison camp in World War II. His prime mission in Saigon was to trick and mislead the CIA's Chief of Station.

"It is an old and trusted axiom of the intelligence business that East European émigrés are the most nostalgic people in the world, particularly vulnerable to the blandishments of heritage and homeland. Tolgyes must have believed this heimself, for he played heavily on Polgar's own nostalgisa, inviting him out from time to time to drink barach and to exhange non-political anecdotes about old Hungary.

"Soviet-bloc specialists at CIA headquarters remained deeply skeptical of Tolgyes and warned Polgar to be on his guard. But Polgar's own skepticism seemingly remained in abeyance. Perhaps he could not beleive a fellow Hungarian would deceive him, or perhaps he felt he could best Tolgyes at his own game. In any case he allowed the Hungarian to draw him ever more deeply into a relationship of openness and intimacy that would ultimately cloud his own vision of what lay ahead."

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Excerpt from: Day of the Ly'in Hos, the University of Texas at El Paso Story.
Copyright: 2005

"In August of 2005 the mail-room of the Embassy of the Slovak Republic, located at 3523 International Court NW Washington, DC, 20008 recieved a large manila envelope post marked El Paso, Texas.

"The manila envelope itself was addressed to one Ms. Miriam Vypalova, classified as the Third Secretary, Political Affairs.

"In the bad old days of the so-called Cold War, this would have been as good as an advertisement saying that she was a specialist in intelligence matters for her country's government.

"In this case, the sender of the manila envelope addressed to her from El Paso doubted that things had really changed all that much in the past fifteen years or so.

"The envelope contained a number of items, some in particular related to the odd coincidence that shortly before a certain professor at UTEP had purchased a home for around half a million dollars, an item had appeared in a German newspaper detailing the rumour that ex- East German STASI, or Communist Secret Police, had taken a leaf from their NAZI forerunners and pooled their resources into an organization modeled on the NAZI's Odessa organization.

"The German newspaper claimed that, again like the NAZI's Odessa organization, the modern STASI equivalent was designed to help its members take care of financial business and find safe avenues for investing their pooled funds.

"Obviously, any American investors, themselves born and raised in former Soviet Bloc countries might well be in a position to give these ex-STASSI personnel most useful advice and counsel, for a cut of the action to be sure!

"Only time would tell, as San Antonio newspapers had published garish accounts in the late 1980s of consistent rumours from the Mexican side of the border of drug convoys heading north from the interior.

"Further, the San Antonio papers claimed that these Mexican drug convoys were reportedly provided with armed escorts composed of both Cuban and East German gunmen, at least up to a point within ten miles or so of the border, at which time local hoods took over the security details.

"Would there ever actually be a provable connection? As it turned out, it wasn't going to take too long to find out.....!"