The Mail from Budapest (1993)

These things are always carefully rewritten to try to soften the essential ugliness of the whole endeavor, but the effort never quite succeeds. Some of it must be to avoid distracting from the drama of the story, but the rest must, I think, be simply the habit of deception. Re-reading, carefully, we can find the chinks where the truth has been sealed off.

The most essential activity of spycraft, always and everywhere, is extortion. It may be in what we think is a good cause, but spycraft doesn't care. In this case, all these people executed or driven to suicide got there in service of protecting what was, in the end, a doomed republic, betrayed not by spies but by its own hope that appeasement might mean peace. They incidentally handed over to Germany all the armament built to defend themselves. Germany used Czech tanks, and probably no small number of Czech soldiery, to invade France.

I predict it will turn out, in the fullness of time, that the coroner who ruled Epstein's death was suicide was compelled to that conclusion, not by the facts, but by some threat, from somebody served by his death. No republic is defended by the compulsion, but the overwhelming majority of people taught the practice were taught in service of government. Once taught, they go on to a career of it, somewhere.

Tripped over the CSR acronym in the second paragraph ("Austria was weak, Poland cool toward the CSR, and Hungary antagonistic.")

From the context, must be Czecho-Slovak Republic. Wiki agrees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czechoslovakia

That was a great read. Thanks for sharing.

"His conduct was so circumspect that the rueful Czechs concluded that, unlike Ujszaszy, he had never been trained by the Hungarian intelligence service"

Sick burn on the Hungarians there

Nice story, would make a good history movie, they are running out of those in there. So far the topics of cz historical movies are:

- Hussites - early protestant church (based in Prague) turned mercenary army after Vatican burned their leader at stake

- How trendy it was to be "Czech" before WWI, when part of the Austrian empire

- How silly was WWI from the czech point of view (Svejk)

- Legions in the White army in WWI

- How great it was during the first republic (1918-WWII)

- How bad it was during WWII, the Munich betrayal

- How bad/silly it was just after WWII

- How bad it was during the communist rule (1948-1989)

- How silly it was during the communist rule

- Another betrayal, by the Warsaw pact armies in August 1968

- How wild it was during the 90s

.. and most of those are pretty drained.

I googled the topic in czech and not much popped up.

Thanks for the link, it was a good read!

Anyone have the TL;DR?