Alexander Radó

Alexander Radó (also Alexander Radolfi, Sándor Kálmán Reich, Alexander Rado; born Sándor Radó, Hungarian: [ˈʃaːndor ˈrɒdoː]; 5 November 1899 – 20 August 1981) was a Hungarian cartographer who later became a Soviet military intelligence-agent in World War II. Radó was born into a middle class Jewish family in Újpest (now part of Budapest). He attended school in Budapest, before being drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army in 1917, where he became a radicalised communist. He was involved in communist regime in Hungary until it fell in 1919 and needed to flee to Austria. In 1921, he attended the third congress of the Communist International ("Comintern") in Moscow.

In 1922, he married Helene Jansen an ardent communist. In the same year the couple moved to Leipzig. He began working, creating maps for Meyers Lexikon publishers, joined the KPD and in 1923 took part in the failed German October uprising in Leipzig. In 1924, needing to leave the country, the couple moved to the Soviet Union to work at the All-Union Society for Cultural Contacts with Abroad. In 1925, the couple moved back to Berlin where Radó created the Geopress agency, a publisher of maps for newspapers and German companies like Lufthansa. In 1933, after the Reichstag Fire Decree, the KPD party was banned in Germany and the couple again had to flee, this time to Paris, where Radó established Inpress, an anti-Nazi press agency funded by the Soviet Union. At the same time he worked on projects for the Comintern. In 1936, the couple again moved, to Switzerland. From 1936 to 1945, he was devoted to running a Soviet military intelligence organisation known as the Red Three (German: Rote Drei) group, as a member of the resistance (German: Widerstandskämpfer) to Nazi Germany. His codename was "DORA".

After the war, Radó was extradited to the Soviet Union, tried on espionage charges and imprisoned for 10 years. Released in 1955, he returned to Budapest to find that his wife had divorced him. Wishing to move into academia but having no degree, he turned to his friends for political support to begin a new career as a cartographer, first working at the State Office of Land Survey and Cartography, then later a position at Cartographia, the Hungarian state mapping agency. In 1956, he was appointed as a lecturer at the Karl Marx University of Economic Sciences and by 1958 had taken over the Department of Economic Geography. In the 1950s and 1960s, Radó reformed Hungarian geography to suit the Soviet model of cartography. In the 1960s, his wartime role as a spy for the Red Three was discovered, making him a minor celebrity. In the late 1960s and 1970s, he continued to strengthen Hungarian cartography and attempted to purge all Hungarian geographers and cartographers who did not follow the Soviet line. In 1965, he began publishing Cartactual, a cartographic reference journal. During this period, he produced a number of signature maps including the Karta Mira atlas that was began in 1964 and a special edition of Atlas International Larousse Politique et Economique in 1965. He died in 1981.