[1] Radó (codename "DORA") was also a member of the resistance (German: Widerstandskämpfer) to Nazi Germany, devoted to the service of the so-called Red Orchestra, the Soviet espionage and spy network in Western Europe between 1933 and 1945.

[1] His father (née Gábor Reich) was first a clerk at a trading firm and later became a wealthy businessman[3] through the ownership of a small timber works, a scrap dealer and a brewery.

[7] When the communists came to power in Hungary in March 1919 in Béla Kun's government, he was appointed as cartographer to the staff of 6th division of Hungarian Red Army, to draw maps.

[1] After the fall of the communist regime in Hungary and the White Terror in full swing with an established anti-Semitic tendency,[4] Radó decided to flee to Austria arriving in Vienna on 1 September 1919.

[7][12] The CIA report also claims that Radó left Germany at the end of 1919 with the help of his friends Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, to travel to Moscow to volunteer for the Comintern.

[10] Radó established contacts with several socialist and communist journalists in the west, that enabled the information bulletins from these materials to be distributed to left-wing newspapers and organizations in various countries.

[19] In July 1921, through the influence of his friends that he met in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht,[3] he was brought to Moscow as the ROSTO delegate, to attend the third congress of the secretariat of Communist International ("Comintern") during July–July 1921.

[28] Lena, who was expecting their first child found work producing agitprop for the central committee, in the KPD headquarters at Karl Liebknecht's house, a position she held until the early 1930s.

[27] Münzenberg was part of a comintern cadre that produced a large number of communist publications that were vertically influential and covered all activities including political, cultural, financial as well as strategic, military and the police.

[28] This involved processing of macro and micro economic data along with sociological and political overviews into a format that was acceptable in dispatches suitable for Soviet intelligence.

[30] To supplement their income, Radó gave lectures at the Marxist Workers' School (MASCH), teaching economic geography, the history of the working class movement in Germany (Arbeitergeschichte [de]) and imperialism.

[31] In 1928, Radó published the 2nd edition of the USSR guidebook in German, English and French languages, that contained many advertisements for restaurants, hotels and other tourist attractions in Soviet Russia.

[35] In 1937, Radó visited Italy to collect intelligence about the Italian military support of the Francist forces in the Spanish civil war (sources vary).

[53] Between March and April 1940, Radó was visited by Anatoly Gurevich in a three-week business trip to Switzerland to deliver $3000 to finance the network[54] along with cipher books necessary to encipher/decipher radio messages during transmission.

[63] In the first half of 1941, a Swiss intelligence officer with the codename "Luiza", gave important information to Pünter (and Radó) that many divisions of the German Wehrmacht were being concentrated in the East.

After the outbreak of the German-Soviet War on 22 June 1941, Radó's network continued to provide Soviet General Staff with very valuable intelligence on German forces.

[80] On 19 April 1944, Christian Schneider along with Rachel Dübendorfer and her partner Paul Böttcher were arrested[81] which resulted into Roessler's connection to Soviet intelligence being terminated.

[84] At some point in November Radó was ordered to contact Soviet Red Army intelligence and it was suggested he return to Moscow as soon as possible, to explain what occurred with the Swiss organisation.

In 1955, he was officially rehabilitated by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, and was able to return to Hungary in July 1955 with the help of Ferenc Münnich and his old school friend Ernő Gerő.

[94][92] Radó was initially employed for a short time at the Ministry of Foreign Trade, then by 15 September 1955 was appointed as the head of division with the cartographic group established at the State Office of Land Survey and Cartography (ÁFTH), a position he held, until he retired in 1978.

[92] On 20 April 1956, Radó was elected an honorary fellow of the resurrected and ideologically compliant Hungarian Geographical Society, less than one year after he arrived back in Budapest.

[97] As he had the political support, any conflict that occurred in relation to Cartographia or indeed even with the Academy of Sciences, he invariably won, resulting in many academic colleagues being purged, with some staff forced to retire, others having their funding removed.

Their experience of Radó's successful espionage career during the interwar period led them to believe that he would use his position in cartography to collect GIS information that would be important to the Soviet Union.

[101] Over the next several years, speculation of the wartime career of Radó, along with the operations of the Rote Drei continued to appear and in particularly in 1963, when Kim Philby was exposed as a Soviet spy.

[108] Radó took a particular dislike to Teleki's geography, calling it a "backward, obsolete scientific construction designed by its very essentials to propagate the ideology, ambitions, and bourgeois conceptions of the outdated socioeconomic system in which it was produced".

[108] This was followed in 1979, by Radó blocking the Hungarian Geographical Society attempt to hold a conference to re-evaluate Teleki's work, that was to be held on the 100th anniversary of his birth.

[109] In 1980, a year before his death an unnamed CIA attaché asked Radó at a celebration of Bastille Day at the French ambassadors residence in Budapest, if they would ever know the real story of the Swiss Rote Kapelle network.

[e] He was described by Márton Pécsi [hu], the next president of the geographical society, as "I knew him as someone for whom work, revolutionism, the striving for innovation, Marxist internationalism, and socialist patriotism together formed the essence of his life".

[110] In a review in the International Affairs, the journal of Chatham House, the volume was described as "Marxist propaganda, anti-capitalist in aim...the author indulges in one wild extreme of fantasy depicting the Soviet Union as encircled".

[116] In a review in the International Affairs, the atlas was described as: The compiler has set out to demonstrate how much information about the world today can be conveyed in maps and diagrams, eked out by a liberal amount of letterpress.