Hungarian Oscar winning film director Istvan Szabo said today he was an informant for Hungary's communist-era secret police while a film student in the 1950s.
But he said he had done it to save a classmate's life. "The state security job was the bravest and most daring endeavour of my life, because we saved one of our classmates after the revolution of 1956 from exposure and certain hanging," Szabo told national daily Nepszabadsag.
It was not immediately clear how exactly he had saved the classmate's life, but he told the paper: "I talked nonsense to distract attention from the person we had to protect."
Szabo had been named as in another weekly publication today as someone who had spied on his fellow Hungarians for the communist authorities.
In the wake of the brutal Soviet suppression of Hungary's 1956 revolution, about 1.5 million Hungarians were being watched, while 200,000 were either imprisoned or were in forced labour camps, according to Hungarian historians.
Szabo, born in 1938, studied at the Budapest Academy of Film, and won an Oscar for Mephistoin 1981, a film described by Szabo as being about an actor who sold his soul to the Nazis in order to continue his art.
Szabo's is the latest name in a steady drip of well-known to be named as a spy, the most famous being Hungary's former prime minister Peter Medgyessy and Olympic soccer star Dezso Novak.
Unlike other ex-communist countries such as Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Hungary has not revealed the names of secret police collaborators from the communist era.
Szabo said his confession would "give a clearer view of the period between 1957 and 1960".