Andrassy Gyula es a kozos kulugyminiszterium hirszolgalatanak valtozasai 1867-1872.

The study discusses the changes of governmental intelligence services after the birth of the Austro-Hungarian constitutional dualist monarchy following the Compromise of 1867. When the Empire's Police Ministry ceased to operate, the task of protecting law and order was passed on to two national governments -- that of Hungary and Austria -- but majority of its special competence was reassigned to the new common Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This means that the supervision over activities involving both national policy and international intelligence was integrated in the hand of one institution, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and this unit was named "informationsburo" in 1872. as head of this newly established state security unit at the ministry, Joseph Prottmann von Ostenegg was appointed. The police officer with wide first-hand experience from Hungary took over and reemployed most of the former Hungarian state police informants. This one-sided political interest, however, was less in line with requirements posed by foreign affairs and diplomatic relations of the time, and therefore Prottmann was replaced by a specialized foreign officer in 1871. the president's unit, directly supervised by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, was granted new powers; it supervised all state security activities in the whole of the Monarchy, and controlled the press bureau that managed the disposition funds spent on influencing both national and international written media. The common Minister of Foreign Affairs and Reichskanzler, Friedrich Ferdinand Beust, revealed intelligence information rather haphazardly following the Compromise of 1867; being rather biased towards the Hungarian cabinet. This is plainly illustrated by the fact that he only let the Hungarian cabinet learn about a particular proportion of the disposition funds, a confidential budget estimate allocated to cover intelligence purposes. Despite all this, the Hungarian cabinet's intelligence activities during the premiership of Gyula Andrassy (1867-1871) can be regarded as somewhat rudimentary and impromptu. The new Hungarian parliamentary government had an aversion to obtaining information secretly, mainly because the public opinion still had unpleasant memories of such practice during the former absolutist regime. For this reason, cabinet's methods were restricted to regular information exchange and confidential enquiries when contacting official authorities. This political conviction also played a crucial role when the cabinet set up the Hungarian Government's press bureau whose staff was housed at the Prime Minister's Office. Due to the fact that activities were dived between two press bureaus, the one in Vienna and the other one in Buda, Serbian press matters were "influenced" from the disposition funds of the Hungarian PM's Office up until 1875 under the guidance of Austro-Hungarian consul-general Benjamin von Kailay. The Hungarian press bureau started to review Slovak and Romanian papers in 1869 and the reports were forwarded to cabinet bodies and large papers in the capital issued in form of lithographic print. However, the Vienna-based press bureau did not rely on these press reviews until the beginning of 1872, when Gyula Andrassy was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs. Furthermore, from 1870 onwards, the police department of Hungary's Ministry of the Interior prepared briefings for the Prime Minister on the country's state of affairs based on the information obtained every three months. In the early 1870s, these two reports served as the basis of Hungary's domestic political intelligence. Having been appointed as common minister of foreign affairs, Gyula Andrassy made considerable changes to the ministry's intelligence services. He curbed the importance of the press bureau; its role was to merely inform the PM, while he also limited the extensive subventions given to the national and international press. From the activities of the state security information department, he banished all bad practices they had inherited from the time of absolutism, and also stopped the shadowing of the Hungarian political elite done by the Viennese state police. These changes could be enforced by reallocating the foreign resources available in the budget of 1873; the secret disposition fund was used for diplomatic and military intelligence purposes in areas significant for the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy such as Russia, the Ottoman Empire or Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]