Kati Marton, an American writer of Hungarian descent, thought she was talking to a friend of General Wesley Clark, former NATO commander in Europe. The man, who had sent her a CV describing himself as a “results-driven wealth and investment manager” living in Switzerland, said he was exploring green energy opportunities in Eastern Europe.
Ms. Marton didn’t mind turning the conversation to Hungary, something she knew about, having written three books about the country, including “Enemies of the People,” an account of her parents’ imprisonment in 1955, and subsequent flight from Budapest. .
Today, more than half a year after what she believed to be a private Zoom call, Ms Marton believes she has figured out what was really going on: an elaborate operation of dirty tricks to frame and discredit critics of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor . Orban.
On January 31, excerpts from a secretly recorded video of Ms Marton’s conversation with the alleged investor surfaced on social media platform X, on an account called MagaBabe.
The account, which also released secret tapes of General Clark and others hoodwinked by the operation, says it’s run by “A good Christian Southern Girl looking for a good Christian man.” MagaBabe’s post, which mostly reposts material cheering former President Donald J. Trump, was quickly trumpeted by Mr. Orban’s media machine in Hungary.
Hours after excerpts of the video emerged, Mandiner, a news website owned by a media establishment controlled by loyalists of Mr. Orban, cited them as evidence that Ms. Marton and others it called “black belt” agents » of the financier of Hungarian origin. George Soros was conspiring to overthrow the Hungarian government.
“MagaBabe dropped an atomic bomb,” Mandiner said of the recordings, a jumble of disjointed clips.
In some of the clips, the alleged investor – whose voice has been electronically distorted to avoid identification – can be heard pressing Ms Marton and General Clark to say that Mr Soros is funding Mr Orban’s opponents. “Yeah. Don’t even say that,” Ms. Marton says in one clip. In another, when General Clark talks about Mr. Soros’s work in Ukraine instead of Hungary, the video pauses and continues with the investor prompts him to talk about Americans giving money to support the Hungarian opposition.“No one like George,” says the general.
Origo, another outlet owned by the same foundation, claimed the videos had “exposed the lies of the opposition” and exposed its links to foreign money.
“It’s totally like the Kremlin. We’re back in the 1950s,” said Ms. Marton, who chairs the advisory board of Action for Democracy, based in New York, which supports activists in Hungary and elsewhere. “I have been put in the same role as my parents, as an enemy of the people.”
The MagaBabe account that posted the videos “is not authentic at all,” said Brian Liston, an analyst at Recorded Future, a cybersecurity firm. A post that claimed to be a photo of the user behind it, she said, actually was a photograph of a Swedish model.
The first point of contact for the person who deceived Ms. Marton was General Clark. They have exchanged emails since last April and then met for dinners in Prague and Amsterdam to talk about Eastern Europe. MagaBabe posted a partial recording of what General Clark said.
“He was very, very thin,” the general recalled. “He seemed genuine.”
A phone number in Switzerland and an email address used by the alleged investor no longer work.
Excerpts of conversations with Ms Marton and General Clark released on Platform X revealed nothing more than what had long been known – that Mr Soros, beginning in the late 1980s, was funding groups promoting democracy in former communist Eastern and Central Europe.
Hungary has also supported conservative causes abroad, including sponsoring an annual gathering in Budapest of CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Committee, a US political group linked to Mr Trump’s MAGA movement. Mr Orban flies to the United States this week to visit Mr Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
However, in the account of the Center for Fundamental Rights, a Hungarian government-sponsored group that sponsors Hungary’s CPAC events, the MagaBabe videos proved that “the express goal of the American left is to overthrow the Hungarian national government and Viktor Orban”. The center’s director declined to be interviewed.
Also, a new Hungarian government agency called the Office for the Defense of Sovereignty was quickly jumping on the recordings. The office was established under recently passed legislation aimed at punishing interactions deemed subversive between foreigners and Hungarians. The European Union’s executive arm says the legislation violates democratic values and fundamental rights such as freedom of association.
Tamas Lanczi, the head of the office, told Mandiner that the videos indicated possible crimes that needed to be investigated. Mr. Lanczi declined to be interviewed.
“We are not in Russia yet. We don’t fall out of windows,” said Lukacs Csamba, chief executive of Magyar Hang, a conservative weekly critical of Mr. Orban, referring to the mysterious accidents that have befallen critics of President Vladimir V. Putin in Russia. “But we’re moving step by step closer to it.”
Agoston Mraz, director of the Nezopont Institute, a group that polls Mr Orban’s government, scoffed at such allegations.
“Hungarians do not live in a dictatorship,” Mr Mraz said.
He noted that the government still faces media scrutiny, which in February forced the resignation of Hungary’s president, an ally of Mr. Orban, after revelations that she had pardoned a man convicted of covering up child abuse at a state-run children’s home. .
The Hungarian government’s Office of International Communications did not respond to a request for comment.
Ms Marton said the operation against her and others involved in Action for Democracy, such as General Clark, who is also on its advisory board, bore the hallmarks of Black Cube, an Israeli private intelligence firm that the networking platform LinkedIn says it has used its services. to imprison Hungarian activists.
LinkedIn said it has taken down a number of accounts linked to the company and misused them to target activists in Hungary.
Microsoft, which owns LinkedIn, said Black Cube had “leveraged honeypot profiles, fake jobs and fake companies to engage in reconnaissance or human intelligence operations” against “targets with access to organizations of interest and/or concern” to customers her.
A researcher for LinkedIn, Mona Damian, said in November that those targets included people selected “as part of a campaign to discredit NGOs in Hungary.”
Black Cube did not respond to a request for comment.
Eric Koch, an American communications consultant, said he had been contacted on LinkedIn last summer by a man claiming to be looking for advice on Polish law firms.
Given an all-expenses-paid trip to the Netherlands in August to discuss potential partnerships, Mr Koch met the man in a hotel conference room in Amsterdam and was then taken to dinner and wine.
Mr Koch said the man had “blackmailed” him for information about Action for Democracy’s funding. Mr Koch worked for the group for a few weeks in New York in 2022 but said he knew nothing about its finances.
After returning home, he put the meeting behind him – until MagaBabe published heavily redacted parts of a video secretly recorded in Amsterdam in which, after repeated prodding, he suggested that Mr Soros was funding the organisation.
“Action for Democracy admitted that George Soros is its main backer,” claimed a headline a few days later in Magyar Nemzet, a pro-government Hungarian media outlet.
A spokesman for Mr. Soros’ organization said: “Action for Democracy is not and has never been a sponsor of the Open Society Foundations, nor does the Open Society Foundations fund political parties in Hungary.”
The main purpose of the operation targeting Mr Koch appears to have been to add substance to a conspiracy theory outlined in a declassified November 2022 report on foreign interference by Hungary’s National Intelligence Centre, an arm of its intelligence apparatus.
The report included an alleged web of subversive intrigue to Mr. Soros, Action for Democracy, the National Endowment for Democracy — described as “the CIA’s soft power arm abroad” — and a number of other, mostly American, actors, including General Clark and Mrs. Marton.
David Pressman, the US ambassador to Hungary, said: “We have raised concerns about Hungary’s use of an element of its intelligence services to target American citizens,” adding that he “could not comment on the origin” of the recent videos. The MagaBabe recordings, he said, represented “the first time we’ve seen this type of activity take place on American soil” in relation to Hungary’s “perceived adversaries.”
In the summer of 2021, Jeney Orsolya, the former head of Amnesty International’s Budapest office, was contacted via LinkedIn by a woman who claimed to be recruiting for a leadership position in Budapest with a new organization.
But there was no job and no new team, Ms. Orsolya realized months later when, just before Hungary’s April 2022 elections, Magyar Nemzet published an edited video of her “job interviews” and misstated what he had said under the headline “Former Amnesty Director: Human Rights Organization Acting as Part of the Opposition”.
“This is not just my deception, but a meticulously planned operation to entrap me and other people for government propaganda against non-governmental organizations and civil society,” Ms Orsolia said.
It was just a taste of what was to come with MagaBabe.
The main target of this operation appears to have been David Koranyi, a dual Hungarian and American citizen who is the executive director of Action for Democracy in New York.
He said a man contacted him last year claiming to be an investor named George Koufis, the same name used by the person who had ensnared General Clark and Ms Marton.
“I had a bad feeling about this guy,” Mr. Koranyi recalled in a telephone interview. But he agreed to a Zoom call and offered an innocuous account of Action for Democracy’s US status as a legally registered charity that is not required to release the names of donors.
Their call took place on August 28, but short video clips, edited to show she was hiding funding from Mr Soros, appeared on MagaBabe’s X account only in late January — precisely as Hungary’s new Defense Office Dominion was starting her work.
“The timing is not accidental. They wanted to wait until it was operational because they wanted something to investigate,” Mr Koranyi said.
Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from San Francisco.
