The interrogation of Sándor Radó: geography, communism and espionage between World War Two and the Cold War

This essay uses recently released intelligence files to consider a pivotal episode in the long and eventful career of Alexander (Sándor) Radó (1899-1981), geographer, journalist and Soviet intelligence agent who lived and worked in various European cities before and during World War Two and later became an internationally renowned cartographer during the 1960s and 1970s in his native Hungary. In January 1945, Radó arrived unexpectedly at the British Embassy in Cairo, having apparently escaped from Soviet officials escorting him against his wishes from Paris to Moscow. For the next six months he was detained in Egypt while British intelligence officers investigated his claim to be an innocent geographer drawn unwittingly into the dangerous world of Soviet espionage. This investigation drew attention to a previously unexamined, intensely political form of geographical practice constructed outside the academy in the worlds of publishing and journalism and shaped by the needs of communist propaganda and Soviet espionage. The decision to return Radó to the Soviet Union, following a characteristically ambiguous intervention by MI6 double agent H. A. R. 'Kim' Philby, suggests that this style of radical geography, rooted in the cosmopolitan culture of the European inter-war left, was a casualty of the brief transition from the wartime alliance against Nazi Germany to the Cold War division of Europe.