“I call on President Zelensky to immediately recall his agents and to respect the will of the Hungarian people,” Viktor Orbán said in a Facebook video on Thursday. According to the Hungarian Prime Minister, as the April election approaches, the Ukrainian president has activated his agents embedded in Hungarian politics; “Ukrainian spies and IT specialists paid by Ukrainians keep coming and going” in the Tisza Party.
He also said that Hungary has never before seen an election in which foreign intelligence services had interfered so deeply. “The Hungarian authorities are constantly working to thwart foreign interference and are doing everything they can to ensure that Hungarians can vote on their future without manipulation from abroad.”
Two days after the Washington Post published its article, the Prime Minister announced that he had instructed the Minister of Justice to investigate reports related to the wiretapping of Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó. The American paper reported that the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade has been briefing the Russians on negotiations in the European Union. They article never claimed that Szijjártó had been wiretapped – this was later spread in the Hungarian pro-government press, along with including investigative journalist Szabolcs Panyi in the story.
On Monday morning, the pro-government news site Mandiner published an audio recording intended to expose the journalist. The recording features Szabolcs Panyi and an unidentified female voice. Among other things, the journalist discusses having contact with a government agency of an EU country, but the government-aligned press soon framed the story as Panyi having given Péter Szijjártó’s phone number to a foreign intelligence service. Panyi told Telex that he had nothing to do with the wiretapping of Szijjártó, and that the foreign minister’s number is “known to practically everyone, including the director of the smallest foreign company in Hungary.” Incidentally, at Thursday’s government briefing, Minister Gergely Gulyás announced that the government had filed a complaint against Szabolcs Panyi on suspicion of espionage.
It is also worth noting that on Tuesday, the investigative journalism center Direkt36 published an investigative article reporting that, according to documents obtained by the outlet, a well-organized operation took place last summer with the intention of bringing down the opposition Tisza Party’s IT system. The article also reveals that when people affiliated with the party tried to expose this, police proceedings were initiated against them under pressure from the secret service, with several indications that the charges were fabricated.
According to the article, in the middle of last summer, by which time a long-standing political struggle had been raging between Fidesz and the Tisza Party, the National Bureau of Investigation (NNI) received a report alleging that two Hungarian men were suspected of being involved in child pornography. One of the intelligence agencies, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (AH), specifically called their attention to the report and pressured the police to conduct house searches of the two individuals as quickly as possible. It was during the search thatinvestigators discovered they had arrived at the homes of two IT specialists linked to the Tisza Party, thus finding themselves in the midst of a politics-related case.
On Tuesday, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution responded to the Direkt36 article with a spy story. Gergely Gulyás said at Thursday’s government briefing: the two spies, about whom the head of the Constitution Protection Office wrote to the National Security Committee, frequented the Ukrainian embassy, acquired prohibited equipment requiring a license, and also attempted to purchase illegal spyware.
For more quick, accurate and impartial news from and about Hungary, subscribe to the Telex English newsletter!