HUNGARY: Oscar-winner Istvan Szabo, Hungary's best-known film director, admitted yesterday that he spied for the communist-era secret police.
Mr Szabo pre-empted a press report revealing him as an agent codenamed "Endre Kepesi", by telling a newspaper that he had spied on fellow students at film school after Hungary's 1956 uprising against communist rule, which was brutally crushed by Soviet troops.
But instead of begging his people's forgiveness - as have many other prominent figures across the old eastern bloc after being exposed as former agents - Mr Szabo said he was thankful for the work because it allowed him to save a classmate from execution.
"I am grateful to fate and subsequently I can be proud of what happened," Mr Szabo (67) told the popular Nepszabadsag newspaper.
"The work for the secret police was the bravest and most daring endeavour of my life, because we saved one of our classmates after the revolution of 1956 from exposure and certain hanging."
He made his admission as the weekly Life and Literature journal published an article containing extracts from some of dozens of reports allegedly made by agent "Endre Kepesi" between 1957 and 1961, about students at the Budapest Academy of Film.
The article ran alongside copies of supposed secret police files revealing "Endre Kepesi" to be Istvan Szabo, a 19-year-old student.
He would later go on to win an Oscar for Best Foreign Film with his 1981 movie Mephisto, which he has described as being about an actor who sells his soul to the Nazis to gain permission to continue making art.
Mr Szabo claimed he had "talked a lot of nonsense" about other students to distract the attention of the secret police from a student who had taken up arms in the 1956 revolution.
The failed uprising was followed by years of oppression from Hungary's Soviet-backed regime. Historians say some 1.5 million Hungarians were put under surveillance, while 200,000 were jailed or deported to Soviet prison camps.
The current socialist government has pledged to follow Hungary's neighbours by throwing open its security service archives to public access, but a law to govern the process has not yet passed through parliament.
That tardiness has made the old secret police files the hottest property in Hungarian politics, and rumours of their content are regularly circulated to discredit certain politicians.
Confidence in former socialist prime minister Peter Medgyessy was badly undermined in 2003, when a newspaper close to the right-wing opposition revealed that he had worked as a counterintelligence agent from 1978 to 1982.
Mr Medgyessy was replaced in 2004 by the current premier, Ferenc Gyurcsany.
Secret police files from the Czech Republic, Slovakia and East Germany have all been opened to the public, and Poland is gradually giving access to its archive amid frequent leaks and lurid allegations against prominent people.
Leading politicians and activists from the pro-democracy Solidarity movement have been branded as former communist agents, and a Polish priest at the Vatican was accused last year of having spied on compatriot Pope John Paul II.