the Evidenzbüro through the reports sent by enemy troops, military
attachés, embassy staff, and intelligence agents. As head of the Kriegs-
chiffregruppe (War Cipher Group), Pokorny succeeded in breaking
nearly all of the Russian code keys from September 1914 to March
1916, helping Austro-Hungarian forces to counter several major of-
fensives of the Russian army. He emerged from the war as the army’s
most decorated intelligence officer.
Following the dismemberment of the Habsburg Empire in 1918,
Pokorny chose to become a Hungarian citizen despite his Moravian
origins. The army readily put his exceptional talents to use, begin-
ning with an assignment in 1920 to the Crimea as a nonofficial
observer. Afterward, he continued to translate and evaluate Soviet
military and political literature. In 1945, the office within the Min-
istry of Foreign Affairs that negotiated reparations issues with the
victorious powers came under his direction. In 1955, his pension
was revoked by the communist regime. Pokorny died in Budapest
in 1960. His autobiography—Emlékeim (Memories)—appeared
posthumously in 2000.PONGER, KURT (1914– ). A Soviet double agent, Kurt Ponger was
born in Vienna but immigrated to the United States in 1938 and be-
came a naturalized citizen in 1943. At that time, he joined the U.S.
Army and, because of his language skills, the Office of Strategic
Services (OSS). A position as a civilian interrogator for the Interna-
tional Military Tribunal in Nuremberg followed after the war. Ponger
and his younger brother-in-law Otto Verber, likewise a Jewish-born
native of Vienna and OSS veteran, resettled in the Soviet sector of
the Austrian capital and established the Central European Press as a
cover for their espionage activity.
Ponger’s Soviet affiliation, dating from 1936, only slowly came
to light following several years of surveillance by the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency. Arrested in January 1953 along with Verber, he
confessed to conspiring to collect and deliver U.S. defense secrets to
Moscow and was sentenced to 5–10 years in prison in Georgia; Ver-
ber was given 3–10 years. Ponger further conceded his cultivation
of Wilhelm Höttl and Wilhelm Krichbaum as penetration agents
against the Organisation Gehlen. Ponger and Verber were later pa-
roled and allowed to return to Vienna.
352 • PONGER, KURT